OHIO Playwright Inna Tsyrlin selected as finalist for the 16th Alliance/Kendeda National Competition

The Alliance Theatre announced that School of Theater playwright Inna Tsyrlin’s “Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer” is among the finalists selected for the 16th Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival has created a Virtual Play Club Series where the public is invited to read and discuss the scripts online with the playwrights, directors and associate producers.

Readers will have the opportunity to discuss “Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer” with Tsyrlin, director Lauren Morris and associate producer Amanda Watkins on Friday, April 24, at 4 p.m. through a livestream conversation.

The play follows Aleksandra, a political prisoner at a Gulag camp and part of the camp’s theater troupe, who is forced to help Soviet authorities disguise the existence of the camp in front of a visiting American delegation.

The series will culminate with an artists’ roundtable discussion moderated by Rachel Karpf, former artistic producer with the WP Theater in New York, and featuring all four finalists, as well as Atlanta playwrights Will Power, Steve Coulter, Kimberly Belflower, Mary Lynn Owen and Mark Kendall.

All finalists’ scripts are available to the public until April 24, 2020.