About the Play:

Taking the Plunge is an uplifting (and down-falling) piece about two people who ascend Big Ben for purposes of death.  Hilarity ensues. RUNNING TIME: 10 minutes and 30 seconds.

Taking the Plunge will be presented Saturday, July 23 at 4:30 PM.

Taking the Plunge was originally created for 8Minute Musicals, a program of AWOL Theatre Project, and presented at the 2010 New York Musical Theatre Festival.

Watch the Trailer:

About the Authors:

Amanda Louise Miller is a composer, writer, teacher, and performer from Omaha, NE.  Her most recent projects involved writing and recording original music for stage productions Bitch (Witching Hour) and The Year of Magical Thinking (Circle Theatre).  Her original musical, Fat Girlfriend: the Musical was produced at the Shelterbelt Theatre in 2009 and won that year’s TAG Award for Best Original Script.  Her original choral, cabaret, and theatre songs have been performed at venues as diverse as Boston Conservatory and the Laurel High School gymnasium.  Other Musicals/Cabarets:  The Last Song of Summer (PS Collective),  The Singing Shepherd (St. Boniface Schools).  Plays:  No Saint (Great Plains Theatre Conference), The Sonnetist (Shelterbelt), Alligators (Shelterbelt).  She will begin an MM in Music Composition at Oklahoma City University this fall.  www.amandalouisemiller.com

 

Greg Edwards. Book and Lyrics: The Rivals (BMI, Lively Productions), Episcus and Edendus (BMI, Artistic New Directions), The Discontented Grasshopper (Center Theatre), Office Space (Yale), Nero (Yale, JE Arts Prize), several songs with Marvin Hamlisch (White House, Mr. Hamlisch’s holiday tour), Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theatre Songwriting (2010, 2nd place).  Plays: A Crowded House (State Theatre of Chicago), Diplomatic Relations (Lively Productions), Everaftering (78^th St. Theatre Lab, Acting Out), resident playwright for Lively Productions.  Games: Jessica Plunkenstein and the Dusseldorf Conspiracy (PC Gamer UK , New York Times Best Adventure Game), The Judgment of Quintus (in development).  Education: Yale (Phi Beta Kappa), BMI (advanced), UCB (remedial).  www.greged.com

OOB Festival: Where do you come from (home state, state of mind, or both)?

Greg: One of us is from a soy bean farm in Nebraska, where she frolicked amongst alfalfa.  The other, from a Catholic school in California, where he frolicked amongst nuns.

OOB Festival: Give us five words that describe who you are as a playwright.

Amanda: Likely to burst into song.

Greg: Inexpensive, producible, synergetic, easily-merchandised, appealing-to-the-key-demographic-of-adults-18-to-49.

OOB Festival:  Talk about your entry to this year’s Festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation?

Amanda: We wrote Taking the Plunge for 8Minute Musicals, where writers are paired randomly; given a theme (a ticking clock), writing requirements (must include a foreign phrase and the line “What are you waiting for?”), and two actors; and set loose to write an eight-minute show in three days.  Audiences are then subjected to the results.

OOB Festival: What is one thing you hope audiences will take away from your Festival piece? Is there any information you would like them to know before they watch your work performed?

Greg: Suicide is a viable solution for dealing with one’s in-laws.

OOB Festival: What/who are some of the major influences on your writing? What’s the most unconventional place/thing that you’ve taken inspiration from?

Amanda: Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, guys named Stephen in general, the Suzuki violin series, the relative cultural isolation of small town America.

Greg: The intractable logic of 1990s adventure games, cf. Day of the Tentacle.  Characters want what they want, however unreasonable, and nothing short of a DOS memory error will dissuade them from their goals.

OOB Festival: What is your “dream play”–that is, if the more restrictive elements of production (budget, space, casting, and technical elements) were not a consideration, what type of theatre piece would you create?

Amanda: The Book of Batman: Turn On the Light, starring Angela Lansbury and Charlie Sheen as Batman and the Light, respectively.

OOB Festival: If someone saw you on the street, what’s one fact that they would never guess about you?

Greg: That Amanda’s social security number is 203-64-5987.

Amanda: That I have a tendency to fall hard for anyone who can guess my social security number.

About the Producer:

Lively Productions is a not-for-profit organization run by co-Artistic Directors Allison Goldberg and Jen Jamula and was founded in 2007 by Lisa Siciliano and Allison Goldberg with its inaugural performance, “Everaftering and Other Tales”, an evening of short new plays. Past projects include “The Panda Is Not My Friend,” a cabaret of new musical theater works; “Paper Dolls” (Patrick Huguenin, 2008 NY Fringe Festival, Winner: Best Ensemble Award); “Episcus and Edendus” (Lyrics: Greg Edwards, Music: Ron Barnett); “Apples” (Greg Edwards); “Diplomatic Relations” (Greg Edwards); and more recently a developmental reading of the new musical The Rivals (Book & Lyrics: Greg Edwards, Music: Jonathan Breit). Currently, Lively Productions is a finalist for a major arts grant that would enable the company to develop a new piece based on first-hand interviews conducted across the country. The company is also continuing to facilitate the development of new work by company playwright Greg Edwards, and maintains a vlog, WhyAreYouOnMyTrain.com, which features weekly interviews with New Yorkers.

Lively Productions’ work has been featured in The New York Times, NY1, Broadwayworld.com, The New York Daily News, and The New Yorker, among others.