Pamela Monk (Dialing for Donna and Bella Sicilia librettist) is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA) playwright and a member of the Dramatist's Guild. Her work has been staged in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and she teaches writing at Penn State University. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Enquirer, and Newsday.
In October of 2008, her ten-minute play Buy and Buy was produced in
Week 3 of the 2008 Estrogenius Festival, sponsored by the Manhattan Theatre
Source. In June of 2003, Buy and Buy was also the winner of the audience
favorite award at the Short Attention Span Play Festival in Billerica MA, sponsored
by Atlantis Playmakers Theatre Company. In 1998, her work Hoax, a retelling
of the Cardiff Giant scam, was developed through the new plays program of the
Metropolitan Theatre Company of NYC, David Zarko, artistic director (now of
the Northeast Theatre Company). It was subsequently produced in the summer of
1999 by the Open Eye Theatre, Amie Brockway Henson, artistic director. Hoax
was most recently performed at the State College Community Theatre in the fall
of 2000.
Two plays for young audiences, The Ogress of Onkerville and Elikapeka,
were produced at Dreamwrights Theatre in York PA (Diane Crews, artistic director)
in the summer of 2001. La Verna, an adult comedy, was presented in February
2004 at the University Club, State College PA, to positive local reviews. Since
2000, Pam has been the head writer for the annual Forbidden Valley cabaret
revue of events in and around State College, PA.
Other productions of Ms. Monk 's work include the winter 1997 run of Jennie's
Will, a musical commemorating the bicentennial of Dryden, NY, sponsored
by the Dryden Bicentennial Committee; the 1990 production of The Harlequin
Hag, written and produced for the town of Virgil, NY through a New York
State Decentralization Grant; and the 1984 production of Life on the Wing
by the Hangar Theatre, Ithaca, NY.
Ms. Monk also devotes her time to creating opportunities for others to develop
original work. She was the co-founder, with actor/writer/director Charles Dumas,
of Fourth Tuesday Playwrights, a series of monthly readings of new works by
local playwrights, and she has organized a twenty-four-hour theatre, PlayMakers,
in which original ten-minute plays are created with collaboration between theatre
artists and community members. She also conducts playwriting residencies in
area public schools.
Most recently, Pam's newest full-length play Terranova, was read in
April 2009 at Manhattan Theatre Source with Irene Carroll directing.
Contact: pxm33@psu.edu, (814) 865-1006, or 417 Adams Ave., State College, PA
16801.