Marin Theatre Company Taps New Playwright

The Marin Theatre Company said Friday that emerging playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has taken a post at the Mill Valley theater as part of the National New Play Network Playwright Residencies program.

Cowhig will serve a one-year stint at the Miller Ave. theater company in several capacities. Her award-winning play Lidless will receive a reading through the New Works staged reading series and her new play Sunspots will receive a workshop during the 2010-11 season.

Cowhig also will read scripts submitted for the 2011 Sky Cooper New American Play Prize and David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, as well as plays under consideration for the theater company's subscription season and play development series. Cowhig also will teach drama classes in Marin in-school and after-school programs and conduct student matinee workshops.

Marin Theatre Company Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis called Cowhig "one of the most exciting new voices in the American theater and we are delighted to introduce her to Bay Area audiences."

Cowhig has garnered a heap of acclaim for her play Lidless, which tells the tale of a former Guantanamo detainee dying of liver disease who confronts the woman who interrogated him 15 years earlier and demands half her liver as restitution for the physical and psychological trauma he suffered.

Lidless won the Marin Theatre Company's 2010 David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright prize. Lidless will be published by Yale University Press, and will be produced in the UK's High Tide Festival and West Virginia's Contemporary American Theatre Festival.

Lidless also won the 2009 David C. Horn Prize in the Yale Drama Series competition for emerging playwrights, which was judged by famed playwright David Hare who told the New York Times that of the 650 applicants, "Lidless was the clear winner, an extraordinary and original attempt to show the enduring strain on the victims of the U.S.'s deployment of torture at Guantanamo."