Contours
The Gallery Players of Columbus awarded Rose Ann Kalister the Playwriting Prize for Contours.
Contours is a two-act drama that literally and metaphorically focuses on a cancer that is destroying a family. The heroine Grace has undergone a mastectomy. She wants to be like the heroine in the movies who rises above it all. Instead the once beautiful and ebullient painter lashes out, revealing her family members’ weaknesses and sins. The play was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. I updated the play years later and changed the title to Winter’s Sun.
Bittersweet
The National League of American Pen Women chose Bittersweet as a recipient of their Letters Award.
Bittersweet is a comedy/drama focusing on the travails of a Syrian-American family coping with their mother’s early Alzheimer’s disease. Under that title it was a finalist in the Margo Jones Playwriting Competition, the First National Reader’s Theatre Competition and the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. After revisions I titled it The Grape Arbor. Again it became a finalist. Seems to be my always a bridesmaid, never a bride play.
Silk Pongee
Rose Ann Kalister was awarded a Playwright Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her play Silk Pongee, which was produced by the School of Theater at Ohio University.
This is a piece of the Silk Pongee program that shows the cast. The 9th person down is Dr. Seabury Quinn, my beloved mentor and Professor of Theatre at Ohio University. Seabury asked me if I could beef up the role of Mr. Simpson, the funeral director. He wanted to play the part, explaining that his father had been a funeral director. At the funeral home and during the funeral Mass, his exchanges with Millie, the niece who decides to save money on her uncle’s funeral, were among the most hilarious in the play. So many of us remember and treasured his wit and understated humor.