The Eugene O’Neill Foundation welcomes six Fellows to the 2024 Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program.

Six outstanding Fellows have been chosen from 45 applicants for the 2024 Travis Bogard Artist in Residence program at Tao House.  Two historians, three playwrights and, for the first time in the program’s nine years, a poet, were approved by the Foundation’s Board from the recommendations of the select evaluation panel.

Coming in July:

Parade Stone, a bi-racial New-York based writer for stage and screen, earned an MFA from the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  A winner of the 2023 Graduate Screenwriting Award at the NYU Fusion Festival, Parade has written plays,  films  and had a 29-hour reading of her musical, Work, supported by the Schubert Organization. At Tao House, she will write a new draft of her play,  An Invitation to Anna’s Wedding based on familial problems with drugs and alcohol  She refers to the theme as being like O’Neill’s Long Days Journey into Night. 

Lee Osorio, MFA, Brown College, MO, is an acclaimed actor and director on stage and screen who is moving his emphasis to playwriting. He is the recipient of the Carey Perloff Fellowship which is awarded to an established theatre artist who desires to transition into a writer.  At Tao House, he will work on his play Public Wickedness, based on  Laud Humphreys’ 1968 expose regarding public sex between men in Saint Louis’s Forest Park, and an  abridged version Tearoom Trade: Impersonal sex in Public Places: a little-known chapter of queer history. His play will include dance. 

In August:

Deborah Yarchun, MFA, University of Iowa, is a 2021-24 Core writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and recipient of many awards for her plays. During her residency, she will work on a new play Variations on Crossing the Alps, which she describes as “a personal quest to illuminate my family’s long-obscured Holocaust survival.” It will focus on a modern-day woman grappling with her own displacement during Covid-19 while attempting to understand her grandparents’ WWII experiences.  After a workshop of a draft at the Playwright’s Center in May, she will revise the play at Tao House.  

Jodie Hollander, MFAs Boston & Bath Spa, UK Universities, created a first-in-the-nation program, Poetry in the Parks, for the National Park Service and National Monuments in Arizona. She has led workshops in eight parks, and plans for one at Tao House during her residency An English and writing instructor, she recently developed curriculum through The Writer’s Center, and is teaching online for students around the world.  At Tao House she will work on her Third Collection of Poems, exploring nature as a place of refuge in the aftermath of trauma and the impact of climate change. 

In September:

Dassia Possner Ph.D, an Associate Professor of Theatre History, Literature and Criticism, Northwestern University, returns to Tao House to work on her book Theatre Unchained: the Moscow Kamerny Theatre Revolution. Three chapters are currently under review by Northwestern University Press.  During her 2022 residency she found a “treasure trove” of information and photographs in the Foundation’s library to enable her to complete Chapter 5: Kamerny Productions of O’Neill and Sophie Treadwell plays. This residency she plans to complete the final Chapter (6) focusing on the political persecution of the Kamerny.

Henry Schvey, Ph.D, a theatre historian and Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, is a leading specialist in Tennessee Williams’ works, having written several books and many publications on the playwright.  In his three weeks at Tao House he plans to write an essay, Realism vs. Expressionism in the work of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, a subject he believes has never been adequately observed or examined. He has completed his research on Williams at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and will use the Foundation’s archival materials to delve into the composition and manuscripts of O’Neill’s late plays.