MEDIA
New Play Alliance Newsletter 332 Featured Playwrights
Karla Sorenson
She/Her/Hers
Massachusetts
Featured Play: Sanctuary
NPA: Is there a play or theatre experience that shaped you as a playwright?
KS: I've been most influenced by the plays of Henrik Ibsen. I first read some of his standard works, like Hedda Gabler and The Dollhouse, and appreciated the strong, complex female characters. But in plays like Ghosts and The Master Builder, I was attracted to the recurring theme of the inescapable influence of the past on the present . . . Continued
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Pop-Up Plays to debut during First Thursdays . . .
Image actor carves out busy career in character roles . . .
By Nancye Tuttle, Sun Correspondent
10/28/2014 12:30:31 PM
David Sullivan is an Image Theater Company success story. He stars as Manny, the bar owner, in Karla Sorenson's Tapped Out, having its world-premiere Nov. 6-14 at the Old Court in Lowell.
Earlier this year, he played Amos in Greater Lowell Music Theatre's Chicago and was Nathan Detroit in the company's Guys and Dolls in 2013. He's made his film debut, too, in Memories for Sale, a critically-acclaimed short film.
Landing the part of Manny, the nice-guy barkeep with a past, is another feather in his cap. "He's a life-long Lowellian with a checkered past. A Golden Gloves winner, he's been in the military, and now he's bought a bar and wants to make a go of it," said Sullivan. The play, he said, reveals the conflict that was rampant in Lowell in the 1980s, when changes were afoot, but diehards, like Manny's pal, Tucker, balked at it.
"Karla's hit it out of the park with this script," said Sullivan. "She knows who these guys are, she's been in these bars with them and she's talked with them."
Drama, comedies highlight the 22nd annual playwright contest . . .