Wendy MacLeod’s play Schoolgirl Figure, currently under option to Jean Doumanian, premiered at The Goodman Theater in 2000, where her play Sin also premiered before opening Off-Broadway at Second Stage.  She is the author of The Water Children which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York as a co-production with The Women’s Project and was subsequently done at L.A.’s Matrix Theater where it was cited as “the most challenging political play of 1998" by the L.A. Weekly and earned six L.A. Drama Critics Circle nominations.  The House of Yes, which became an award-winning film, won the Bay Area Critics Award for Best New Play 1990 and became the second longest running show in Magic Theatre’s history.  The play has since been done in L.A., at Soho Rep, at The Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and at The Gate Theater in London, where it was selected to be published in Plays International. Her children’s musical, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, based on Marjorie Priceman’s book, premiered at The Kennedy Center in 1999.  Her play Things Being What They Are was produced at Seattle Rep and Steppenwolf.  Most recently her play Juvenilia premiered at Playwrights Horizons and Steppenwolf commissioned and developed her play Phantom Limbs. She is creating a new intergenerational theatre piece about skateboarders, Thrash, with director Wendy Goldberg which has been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Center. She has been commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, The Kennedy Center and the Contemporary American Theater Festival and was a recipient of a MacDowell residency. Wendy was a staff writer for the TV series Popular during the 1999-2000 season. She has been twice published by The Chicago Tribune with two short comic pieces. She is the playwright-in-residence at her alma mater, Kenyon College, where she is the Drama Editor of The Kenyon Review. She is a New Dramatists alumna and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Chris Smith is entering his fifth season as Artistic Director of Magic Theatre. Previously, in New York City, Chris was the Artistic Director of Youngblood, the Associate Artistic Director of The Ensemble Studio Theatre, and the Founding Program Director for the acclaimed EST/Sloan Project.  His work as a director includes Magic Theatre world premieres of C. Michéle Kaplan’s ‘Bot, Mat Smart’s The Hopper Collection (Dean Goodman Award), John Belluso’s The Rules of Charity (Dean Goodman Award), and Charles Grodin’s The Right Kind of People, which he subsequently directed Off-Broadway for Primary Stages.  In NYC, he directed more than two dozen world premieres; four by Pulitzer Prize-winner Frank Gilroy (including Drama Desk Best Play-nominated Contact With The Enemy) and plays by Romulus Linney, David Ives, Joyce Carol Oates, Gen LeRoy, Paul Selig, John Belluso, Lloyd Suh and Arthur Giron, among others.  Regional credits include Joe Pintauro’s Men’s Lives (the inaugural production of the Bay Street Theatre Festival) and at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Provincetown Rep, Beverly Hills Playhouse and the Showboat Theatre (Iowa).  For television, he directed for As the World Turns.  Chris has been a producer/artistic administrator for Manhattan Class Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Manhattan Punch Line and he has taught or lectured at NYU, The New School and Lexington Center for the Arts, among others.  He is the author of the musical book for A Sense of Freedom, with composer/ lyricist Domenick Allen, and Signs & Wonders, with composer Tom Boros and lyricist Herschel Garfein. Chris is a graduate of Brown University, and the proud father of Micaela and Anderson with his wife Sheri Matteo.  He dedicates his work this season to the memory of Curt Dempster.