Cyber Sampler – Real Theater Virtually
Have you ever been put on hold and wanted to strangle the person who selected that terrible music you must listen to; have you ever been up at four am and wondered what the rest of the world is doing at that hour; have you secretly or not so secretly wished that idiot of a husband of yours would just disappear……?
Well these are just some of the thoughts that cross the minds of the characters in the Mt San Jacinto College, Menifee Valley Campus, Theater Arts Department Production, Cyber Sampler – Real Theater Virtually. You can’t come to us, so we are bringing theater to you. Our selection of quirky and touching short theater pieces will be streaming on your devices from Thursday, November 5 at 12am to Sunday, November 8 at midnight. So, grab some popcorn and come to the virtual theater.
Click here to watch Cyber Sampler, streaming 11/5 through 11/8
Meet the Cast
Playwrights
Gabriel Davis (playwright) writes for stage and screen. He holds his MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. A two time recipient of the Shubert Fellowship for Studies in Dramatic Writing, his playwriting has been featured at theatres including Theater for the New City, Primary Stages, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Piney Fork Theatre, Manhattan Arts Center, Forward Theatre, Court Street Theater, It’s Complicated Theatre Company at Stephanie Feury Studio Theater, Darkhorse Dramatists at Robert Eckert Theater, Hudson Warehouse Theatre at Bernie Wohl Center. He has taught playwriting for Westport Country Playhouse Playmaking and Joanne Woodward Apprentice Programs and for City Theatre Company. His theatre criticism is published in Westport Country Playhouse's "Insiders Insight," City Theatre Company's "City Talk," Indiana Printing and Publishing Co's "PULP." His short plays and audition monologues are featured in "105 Five-Minute Plays for Study and Performance" (Smith and Kraus), "222 More Comedy Monologues" (Smith and Kraus), "Audition Monologues for Young Women" (Meriwether Publishing), “Best Contemporary Monologues For Kids Ages 7-15” (Applause Books), the NBCsponsored "Star Project" (American Black Film Festival) and in “The Best Men’s Monologues of 2019” (Smith & Krauss), “LAMDA Acting Anthology Volume 4” (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts), “WAPAA 2019 Commencement: Audition Pieces for Men” (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts). His screenplay "Between Beats" was a finalist for the Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Award and semifinalist NY Writers Summit. His full length play "Dreams in Captivity" was a finalist for Cherry Lane Theatre's Mentor Project and Princess Grace Award.
Eugene Pack is the creator of the long running hit comedy sensation “Celebrity Autobiography” which ran on Broadway this past year. This is the critically acclaimed comedy show where celebrities act out other celebrity memoirs on stage. Pack won the Drama Desk Award for “Unique Theatrical Event." The show tours the United States and abroad, including London’s West End, Australia’s Sydney Opera House, and the Edinburgh Festival.
This past summer, Pack's original play "Stan the Man” was workshopped at the Guild Hall with Alec Baldwin, Blair Underwood and Rob Morrow.
Pack is also an Emmy Award-nominated writer and producer. He was nominated for Outstanding Writing for Variety, Comedy or Music for the special “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” which won the Emmy for Outstanding Special. Pack is the creator and executive producer of CMT's longest running series, “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team." He has written and performed the critically acclaimed one man comedy shows “Something Flexible With Meaning,” and “Undisputed: My Night with the Queen of Soul.”
Full length works include “Columbus and Amsterdam,” "Sharpies," "Night With Oscar" and "The Poets of Amityville." Pack collaborated with Motown founder Berry Gordy on the autobiographical musical “To Be Loved.” Pack is a graduate of NYU where he studied with David Mamet, the Atlantic Theatre Company and Playwrights Horizons.
Playwright Lynn Nottage was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1964. At age eight, she had already written her first play. Her inspiration came from the women in her family. Her grandmother, mother, and other women were the nurses, teachers, activists and artists in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up. Nottage is a graduate of New York’s High School of Music and Art in Harlem where she earned her high school diploma in 1982. That same year, she enrolled at Brown University where she received her B.A. degree in 1986. She continued her studies and received her M.F.A. degree in playwriting at Yale School of Drama in 1989.
Nottage became a full-time playwright in the 1990s after spending four years at Amnesty International as national press officer. Her first break came as a commissioned monologue for a musical entitled, A...My Name is Still Alice. In 1993, her short play, Poof!, about a woman whose husband spontaneously combusts premiered at the Actors Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, where it won the Heideman Award. In 1996, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois, produced one of her most known plays, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, in its family outreach series.
Nottage took a break from writing for nearly seven years, but in 2003, her drama Intimate Apparel, a play about an African American seamstress in turn of the century New York, won major awards including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Francesca Primus Prize and the Steinberg Award. In 2004, actress Viola Davis won a Drama Desk Award for her outstanding performance in Intimate Apparel at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City.
Nottage’s plays are being produced the world wide. She continues to write in her Brooklyn home where she resides with her husband and daughter.
I have been writing plays since high school and acting since junior high. In 1988, my first play "Nicolas Brooks" had instant success by winning the Youth Division at the Spokane Civic Theatre Forum Festival in Washington State. The writing bug infected me and I decided to form my own little theatre group in 1989 called Tailors of the Imagination. At 17, I produced and directed an extended version of "Nicolas Brooks" called "Who Loves a Writer" as well as a retelling of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. In 1990, my play "A Man and His Plant" was produced at the Spokane Civic Theatre Forum Festival in the adult division. The play went on to win third place in a national contest and then was published by the Dramatic Publishing Company as a part of an anthology "Short Stuff for Mature Actors."
In New Mexico, I started a theatre group called the Poco Loco Players which have successfully produced four seasons including several plays that I co-wrote with the other Poco Loco Players. I also started the successful website called freedrama.com which has provided free plays to schools and community groups around the world.
My 2002 victory as a writer was being included in the Love Creek Production's play festival in New York City. My monologue "Pearls of Wisdom" is the true story of the struggles young women face growing up in rural Idaho.
Another success was a 2004 midwest tour of my play "The Redneck" (renamed Operation Redneck) by the professional theatre group Retroact Productions. During this time, freedrama.com became very popular receiving thousands of visitors. My plays on freedrama.com (now freedrama.net) have been performed on every continent including Antarctica.
I'm now involved in developing film projects as a writer and producer. In 2008, I started a new series about War Veterans. The series has been featured by Apple iTunes and YouTube. The most successful episode has been "Saving Lives in World War II" which won an Emmy Award in 2009 for best Advanced Media Historical Documentary (Rocky Mountain Region).
In 2010, I won a Telly Award for my full length documentary about a wildlife park in Arizona. And in 2011, I won a second Emmy Award for my short documentary about an organization called Paws and Stripes that helps veterans with PTSD using service dogs.
Playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Dorf has had more than 2000 play productions, including productions in every US state, as well as in Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand. He has been a finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, the Hyperion One Act Award, the Weinberger Playwright Residency and the Interact and Charlotte Rep New Play festivals, and he has worked with such companies as the Walnut Street Theatre, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Ensemble Studio Theatre - LA, Moving Arts and the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. He co-founded YouthPLAYS, a growing publisher of plays and musicals for young actors and audiences at over two dozen of his plays reside, with more than 25 other works published by such companies as Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, Heuer and Original Works, and monologues published in collections published by Meriwether, Playscripts and Smith & Kraus. He has been instrumental in the development of ProduceaPlay.com, the internet's top "how to produce a play" resource site for prospective producers of theatre at all levels - schools, colleges, community and professional theatres.
He chairs the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, is the former managing director of the Philadelphia Dramatists Center and was a longtime playwriting advisor to Final Draft (for whom he created the playwriting "Ask the Expert") and The Writers Store (creator of Playwriting101.com, for many years Google's top-ranked playwriting website, and playwriting instructor at Script University). He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America's Education Committee, as well as a longtime Guild member. For screen, he has written a trio of produced shorts, two of which he also directed. He is the author of Young Playwrights 101, a book for young playwrights and those who teach them, and conducts workshops at schools and festivals across the US and as far away as Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. He served as Visiting Associate Professor in the M.F.A. playwriting and children's literature programs at Hollins University, and as United States Cultural Envoy to Barbados. He holds a B.A. in Dramatic Writing and Literature from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from UCLA.
Joe is an MSJC alumni and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a degree in Theater Arts. He lives in Los Angeles where he works as a lighting and technical theater specialist.
Production running time is approximately 2 hours.
"Cyber Sampler" is presented by special arrangement with Playscripts, Inc., Eugene Pack, Gabriel Davis & Joe Caldwell.