Cygnet Theatre Presents The Finish Line Commission
Playwright Aurin Squire will workshop his play “Run/Fire,” which will be directed by Lamar Perry. The reading will be streamed online from Monday, February 8 through Sunday, February 14, 2021. A third commission will take place in the spring of 2021 and will be announced in the near future.
When a college student is implicated in a crime spree, his attempt to seek justice sets off a chain reaction that ripples across the entire town. What is real and what is not gets called into question in this timely play that forces us to ask, “Who are we to ourselves and to each other?”
Aurin Squire is an award-winning playwright, reporter, and multimedia artist. He is a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center and has received residencies at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Ars Nova, Lincoln Center Lab, National Black Theatre, the Dramatists Guild of America, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange.
In the 2018-2019 season, Squire had six productions in Chicago, North Carolina, Seattle, Dallas, and Miami. including world premieres of “Fire Season” and “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy” (which he co-authored with documentary filmmaker Billy Corben). He won the 2017 Helen Merrill Prize for Emerging Playwrights and the Emerald Prize from Seattle Public Theatre for his new drama.
As an independent reporter he has written for The Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, ESPN, Talking Points Memo, FUSION, and many other publications around the country. As a multimedia artist, Squire wrote “Dreams of Freedom,” the multimedia installation video about Jewish immigrants in the 20th century for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. “Dreams of Freedom” won three national museum awards and is in the permanent exhibit at NMAJH.
In TV, Squire has been a writer for the CBS political satire “BrainDead,” and the NBC family drama “This is Us.” He is a producer/writer for the CBS show “The Good Fight” as well as the supernatural drama “Evil.”
In his spare time, he’s a theatre podcast co-host of Maxamoo, writes reviews of new plays, meditates, studies religion. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School, New School University, and Northwestern University.
Led by Associate Artistic Director Rob Lutfy, The Finish Line Commission supports the theatre’s commitment to new theatrical works, written by groundbreaking local playwrights as well as nationally recognized playwrights. Rare for a national new play program, all of the plays selected each year have never before been produced.
Director Rob Lutfy states, “Bill and Judy Garrett understand that the biggest thing that we can do as a theatre community is to continue to find ways to support the theatre makers. While we cannot gather in person, we must still find ways to adequately compensate artists for their work and continue to find ways to amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices. We have stayed true to the mission of the program: to provide the time, flexibility, energy and resources to enable playwright’s to push their play to the final draft.”
Plays awarded The Finish Line Commission are given a week-long workshop culminating in a public reading, a financial reward, and an assurance that the play will have a shot at a world premier production at Cygnet.
The Finish Line Commission is made possible thanks to the contribution of long-time donors Bill and Judy Garrett. “Playwrights are masters of helping us see the world through new and different eyes. 2020 has been an extraordinary year for all of us — with a pandemic, thousands of deaths, school and social upheavals, fear and occasional acts of overwhelming generosity — and it will be refreshing to view it all through the perceptive eyes of some of our most observant playwrights,” explained Judy Garrett.
Category: Authors, Local News, Theatre
