Playwrights

Jake Jeppson
NTI Fall '06 Intern and NTI ' alum
Playwright: The Clearing

Jake Jeppson (Washington, DC)  is a playwright and director. Past work experience includes gigs at American Repertory Theatre, The Flea, and The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where he developed the Theatermakers apprentice program. Currently, Jake is the co-director of Core Company at the Orchard Project. Past plays: Done/Undone, Memorial, Getting There, Tracking.


Meridith Friedman
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: Ars Memorativa/Legal Consultant

Meridith Friedman (Hawaii, Chicago) recently graduated from Connecticut College with a B.A. in theatre. During her time there, she acted in numerous productions, as well as wrote and staged original work. She has devoted her summers to theatre, apprenticing the New York Stage and Film Company, interning at the Pearl Theatre Company, and most recently apprenticing the Orchard Project., a retreat in the Catskills for theatre companies to develop new work. She is now starting her M.F.A. at Northwestern University in their Writing for the Screen and Stage Program.


Brian Kettler
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: Qualified

Brian Kettler (Portland and Sarasota, FL) recently graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in Drama.  He is also a graduate of the National Theater Institute and has worked with the Penumbra Theatre Company and the Playwright’s Center in Minnesota.  Recently, Brian played Laertes in the film Kitchen Hamlet, directed by Kenyon drama professor Daniel Kramer.  He is currently working in development at the Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, Florida.


Joey Boren
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: Retarded/Atlanta Fundraising

Joey Boren (Atlanta) has been playwriting since since he was 15. He has participated in the New South Young Playwrights Festival, The Sondheim New York Young Playwrights Festival, and is an alumni of  the Eugene O' Neill National Theatre Institute and The National Theatre Institute's Advanced playwriting program. He is currently working on a screen play.


Will Goldberg
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: We Three and Ida et al

Will Goldberg (Chicago) is a graduate of the National Theater Institute, where his play Cleanup: A Ghost Story for Daylight was featured in the Fall 2006 Playwrights’ Week.  He is a three-time winner of the Denis Johnston Prize for Playwriting at Smith College.  We Three is his fourth play and has been performed at both Capital Fringe and New York International Fringe 2008.


Ben Fisher
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: Spark

Ben Fisher (San Francisco) graduated from Connecticut College in May of 2008 with a B.A. in theater and English. The same year he directed the final main stage production of the college’s season, Václav Havel’s The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (for which he received a student research grant to travel to Prague to meet Havel), and has acted in numerous departmental productions. Ben’s fiction and poetry have won the college’s Abram’s Prize, Palmer Prize, and Marshall Prize. Has worked as an intern at Intersection for the Arts, the Magic Theatre, TheatreWorks in his native San Francisco Bay Area and has studied at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Ben’s first play, Leviathan, was broadcast on WCNI radio in New London in 2007.


Pat Donahue
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: Vulnerable

Pat Donahue (Waterbury, CT) began writing as a child, stumbled into the theatre as a teenager, and has been pursuing both in fits and starts ever since. After an ugly separation from Marist College, Pat graduated from Connecticut College in 2006 with a BA in theatre & film, and went on to an illustrious semester at the Eugene O'Neill Center's National Theater Institute that Fall. Since then, Pat has been working as a freelance writer, bringing VULNERABLE to life, and plotting a rise to the top of any artistic medium that will have him -- be it the theatre, film, television, competitive karaoke, or, ideally, some combination of all four.


Molly Englund
NTI Fall '06
Playwright: 7 Short Pieces

Molly Englund (Boston) graduated this past spring with a BA in theater studies from Emerson College. She is currently figuring out a life plan, and acting and writing as much as she can. Past productions of her work include a one act, The Heavy Air That Holds You, at the National Theater Institute, and The Santa Forest, as part of a 10 minute play festival at Emerson College.


Lindsey Austen
NTI Fall '06
Fundraising/Playwright: One Stockinged Foot

Lindsey Austen (Brooklyn) is excited to reunite with the city of Chicago and with the National Theater Institute, class of Fall ‘06.  Beginning in arts administration, Lindsey worked for the Goodman Theater and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Development.  Both theaters enriched her passion for American Theater.  She currently lives in Brooklyn and is a founding member of the Misfit Toys Repertory Company in Manhattan which recently produced a reading of her one-act play, Meal Times Averted.  Other productions include Exchange (director) written by Ben Fisher ’06 and Chemosynthesis (director).  Lindsey writes short stories and essays for her blog, starsniffersgalaxy.blogspot.com.