The Jasper Project presents the staged reading of a brand-new play, Moon Swallower by novice playwright, Colby Quick.
Quick is the winner of Jasper’s second Play Right Series competition in which he competed with other unpublished playwrights for an opportunity to have his play workshopped and developed by a team of seasoned theatre artists with the end result being a staged reading and the option of further development toward a fully realized stage production.
Moon Swallower will be presented at CMFA on Sunday August 28th at 4 pm with a talk back session and reception following the reading.
Moon Swallower is directed by Chad Henderson with a cast that includes Lonetta Thompson, Stann Gwynn, Becky Hunter, Richard Edwards, and Michael Hazin. Katie Leitner is the stage manager. Veteran playwright Jon Tuttle is the project manager for the 2022 Play Right Series.
The 2022 Jasper Play Right Series is made possible by the contributions of a team of Community Producers, all of whom will have contributed financially to the development of the project and have, reciprocally, been involved in the process from an educational perspective.
They are Bert Easter, Ed Madden, James Smith, Kirkland Smith, Bill Schmidt, Paul Leo, Eric Tucker, Cindi Boiter, Wade Sellers, and Jon Tuttle.
The purpose of the Play Right Series is to empower and enlighten Community Producers by allowing them insider views of the steps and processes of creating theatre art. In exchange for a minimal financial contribution, Community Producers are invited to attend designated open readings and rehearsals, informal presentations by cast and crew, and opening night performances with producer credits. The result is that Community Producers learn about the extensive process of producing a play and become invested personally in the production and success of the play and its cast and crew, thereby become diplomats of theatre arts.
Community Producers’ names, and that of the Jasper Project, will also be permanently attached to the play and will appear in the published manuscript which will be registered with the Library of Congress and for sale via a number of standard outlets under the auspices of Muddy Ford Press and the imprint of the Jasper Project.
The Jasper Project produced their first Play Right Series in 2017, producing a staged reading of Randall David Cook’s Sharks and Other Lovers under the direction of Larry Hembree.
About the playwright: Colby Quick is a thirty-one-year-old writer, singer, musician, actor, husband, and father of two. He is the lead singer and guitarist of a Stoner Doom band known as Juggergnome and in the development phase of a rap duo project called Ski & Beige. Colby played Ebenezer Scrooge in Northeastern Technical College’s stage production of A Christmas Carol in 2019 and is currently in his final semester at Francis Marion University as an English Major and Creative Writing Minor. “I have mostly written poems, songs, and short stories, as well as an unpublished novel.: Quick says. “When I was young, I would make stop-motion videos and I wrote scripts for all of them. I think this helped a lot with writing the Moon Swallower.”
About the project manager: Jon Tuttle is Professor of English and Director of University Honors at Francis Marion University, author of THE TRUSTUS COLLECTION (Muddy Ford Press, 2019), which includes six of his plays that premiered at Columbia’s Trustus Theatre, and a recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities.
