Meet the Playwrights of THE SEVEN 2023
FUSION Theatre Company is proud to announce the playwrights of our 17th annual short works festival, The Seven: The Elephant in the Room!
TARA MEDDAUGH is the 2022 Bradford Gromelski Jury Award winning playwright. Bradford was a past juror of The Seven, a past FUSION main stage director, and a Professor Emeritus/playwright at Iona College in New York. Now deceased, he was the father of company co-founder Dennis Gromelski.
TARA MEDDAUGH is thrilled to be participating in The Seven at FUSION! Her plays and monologues have been performed around the world, from New York City to Alaska, from Dubai to Bangkok, and her work has been published by YouthPLAYS, Smith & Kraus, Oxford Press South Africa, LAMDA, Limelight Editions/Applause Acting Series, and Meriweather. Additionally, she has script consulted on several animation and VR projects. Tara has taught playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University, Westport Country Playhouse, Pittsburgh Public Theater, and has taught theater workshops to children and teens in environments from an art studio to a housing authority. She’s a recipient of the Shubert Fellowship in Dramatic Writing, the Sloan Screenwriting Fellowship, the Arts Alive Recovery NY Regrant Award and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Tara holds her MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and lives near NYC with her creative kids, husband, and fluffy cat. You can explore her work at www.tarameddaugh.com. Huge thanks to this amazing team bringing new work to life!
RICHARD PEREZ works nationally as an actor, director, and teacher. He is the recipient of the Theatre Communications Group’s New Generations/Future Leaders Fellowship, which took him to Chicago Dramatists as its first Associate Artistic Director in 2009. Prior to that, he was the Producing Artistic Director of the Bloomington Playwrights Project in Indiana for seven seasons. In that time, he oversaw the production of over thirty new plays. He has acted in and directed productions in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. On television he was the recurring character, Councilman Ortiz, on Boss (with Kelsey Grammer) as well as having played guest roles on Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Electric Dreams. Richard is humbled and honored to be one of the illustrious seven this year. Thank you, FUSION.
KIMBERLY HOLLIDAY is a playwright, actor, director, and producer based on the North Shore of Boston. Her plays have been featured in the Boston Theatre Marathon, Firehouse Center for The Arts New Works Festival (Newburyport, MA), The Actor’s Studio Holiday Meshugas, An Evening of Short Plays (Andover, MA), and The Our Voices Festival at Wellesley College. As an actor, she performs regularly at various theatres throughout New England, most recently, with Fresh Ink Theatre in Boston. She serves on the Central Square Theatre Board in Cambridge, MA, and as an Adjudicator for the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild. She is also the co-founder of YasPlz, LLC., a production company who brought a show to the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is deeply honored to be part of FUSION’s The Seven
ABS WILSON hails from Minnesota and is now based in NYC. She is a playwright, lyricist, screenwriter, and poet. Graduating from NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing MFA program in 2023, she got her English/Theater BA at St. Olaf College and her passion for theater at the National Theater Institute’s 2020 Summer Intensive theatermaking program. Some of her significant works including her short musical All We Know of Love & Fire performed at the Brick ?!: New Works festival (2023) and the Paper Kraine Theater (2023); and her play / descent-into-the-earth / Crave the Heat published in Some Scripts Literary Magazine (2022). A selection of songs from her and Veronica Mansour's pop-country musical, Lighthouse, were performed with the Illuminating New Voices initiative at Vanguard Theater. Lighthouse is also featured as a finalist for the New Music Theater Conference 2023. Other works include her autobiographical play she directed and produced, Pyre/Proximity (2020); her original song cycle As Long as the Light developed at NTI and St. Olaf College (2020); He Did It. performed at the Quade One Act Festival (2022); and Dutch Kassidy & the Skydance Guy performed at the Country Players (2022). Her play, Space Oven, was a finalist for the David Einhorn prize and her original song cycle written with Veronica Mansour, Dead Any Way, was a finalist for SheNYC. abs is a member of the Playwrights Center, Dramatists Guild, and ASCAP.
CHRIS GIERYMSKI is a composer, actor, writer, music director, and sound designer originally from Northwest Indiana. His recent musicals, Impact and Illumination, had selections featured at Joe’s Pub in NYC. Additionally, he co-conceived, composed, and music directed A Very Bloody Christmas Carol, which premiered in 2019 at the Greenhouse Theater Center in Chicago, IL. He served as composer & sound designer for The Wood (2018), Caged: An Allegory (2019), and Footholds (2019), all premiered by The Impostors Theatre Co., of which he is an Associate Member. He received his MFA from NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in May 2023.
PAUL LEWIS—Seattle-based playwright and composer—is thrilled to be part of The Seven once again. His newest musical Lost in the Hills, freely adapted from a novel by Zane Grey, was workshopped and staged by Theatre 33 (Salem) in 2022. Other work includes musical adaptations of two iconic children’s books, The Runaway Bunny and Caps for Sale, both of which premiered at Boston Children’s Theatre; The Crossing, A Musical, winner of a Seattle Times Footlights Award for Promising New Work, and nominated by Seattle Theater Writers for outstanding musical composition (Theater Schmeater and Jewel Box Theatre); Jill Trent Science Sleuth (Cayuga Community College); Oblivion (Driftwood); The Bright Days of Our Youth (Bainbridge Performing Arts podcast); and The Hours of Life, A Musical (Theatre22). His musical underscoring for The Pride (Theatre22) picked up an additional music nomination from Seattle Theater Writers. Paul’s one-act plays have been staged at play festivals across the country and in Canada, Mexico and the UK, winning Best of Festival awards in a number of these, and have been published in Best Ten-Minute Play and Best Stage Monologue anthologies. His full-length play The Names, which has had seven staged readings around the U.S., including one at FUSION in 2017, will be fully produced by Theatre 33 later this summer. Paul is a member of BMI and The Dramatists Guild of America.
CYNTHIA VEAL HOLM completed her M.F.A in Creative Writing for Stage & Screen at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and designed her own major in Playwriting (an Individually Designed Interdepartmental Major) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities for her undergraduate work. Her awards include The Mildred & Albert Panowski Playwriting Award-Northern Michigan University for her play A Rembrandt's Eyes and The Gary Garrison Ten Minute Playwriting Award-Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in Washington, DC, for her play The Nice View. Raised in the Midwest, Cynthia is delighted to have her work produced all over the United States and is a proud member of The Dramatist Guild.
EMMA K. CLEARY hails from Northwest Arkansas and is a recent graduate of the University of Arkansas with a BA in English: Creative Writing and a minor in Theater. She recently worked on staff at UA for the campus's literary magazine, The Diamond Line. She has written nine novels, several scripts, and many short stories, and she plans to pursue acting and writing professionally. Many thanks to God, Karen Harris, Jane Blunschi, The Playground team, and of course, FUSION. Happy Pride!