ABIGAIL KILLEEN* (Director) is a theatre artist based in Portland, Maine. As an actor, she has worked Off-Broadway, regionally, and in film and television. Portland Stage: Our Town (Mrs. Gibbs), What the Constitution Means to Me (Heidi), The Clean House (Lane), Babette's Feast (Martine), Brighton Beach Memoirs (Blanche), Love/Sick (Meg/Celia/Sam), and A Christmas Carol twice (Ghosts/Mrs. Cratchit). For PSC's Studio Series she co-produced and performed in the solo show The Amish Project and has participated in numerous Little Fests. Other Portland-based work: The Lion in Winter (Eleanor, Portland Shakespeare Company); Doll's House Part 2 (Nora, Broadway World Best Actress Nomination), The May Queen (Jennifer), Death by Design (Sorel) and Next Fall (Holly), all at Good Theater; The Mother (The Mother Before) and Sofonisba (Sofonisba) at Dramatic Repertory Company, Uncle Vanya (Yelena) and Nina (Helen) at The Theater Project; and Macbeth (Lady Macbeth) with Fenix. New York credits: King Lear (Goneril), The Merchant of Venice (Nerissa) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, all with Compagnia de' Colombari, and the Off-Broadway transfer of PSC's Babette's Feast. Film: shorts, commercials and limited series television, including America's Hidden Stories and Invitation to a Bonfire. Abigail is a Professor of Theater at Bowdoin College.


LYNNE CONNER (Playwright) The Mother was a 2023 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semi-finalist and a 2018 and 2019 Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center National Playwright's Conference Semi-finalist. In 2019 Lynne devised and directed Unsex Me Here, a 45-minute ballet based on four Shakespeare plays commissioned by the Charlotte Ballet's Innovative Works series. Her play about Rachel Carson, In the Garden of Live Flowers (co-written with Attilio Favorini), won the 2002 Kennedy Center National Playwriting Award and an honorable mention prize in the 2002 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award contest and is published by Dramatic Publishing Company. Nina won the Gemini Theater New Play Festival competition and the Smith College New Play Reading Series and was named a finalist in the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Award and the Oglebay Institute Towngate Theatre Playwriting Contest. American Humbug—a political satire based on P.T. Barnum, George W. Bush and the "New American Century" ideology—received a Creative Heights grant award from the Heinz Endowments in 2007 and was produced by the Three Rivers Arts Festival (AEA special contract). In January 2013 Conner was awarded the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region I award for Excellence for her original adaptation of Lysistrata at Colby College. She served as the resident playwright for Carnegie Mellon University's Interactive Theatre Company, a professional troupe performing scripts on workplace and campus life issues, for which she received a Pennsylvania Economy League Learning and Development Award and a College and University Professional Association Innovation Award. As the founding director and resident playwright of the Heinz History Center's Stages in History professional theatre company from 1996 to 1999, she wrote over fifty one-act plays, monologues and short scenes and received the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums Award of Merit/Outstanding Museum Programs in May 2000. Lynne's plays and adaptations have been produced and/or presented by: Dramatic Repertory Company (Portland), Charlotte Ballet, Chautauqua Institute, Main Street Theatre (Houston), Theatre-Hikes (Chicago), the Actors’ Guild of Lexington (Kentucky), Gemini Theatre (Pittsburgh), Prime Stage (Pittsburgh), First Flight Theatre Company (New Jersey), Theatre Project (Brunswick, Maine), Carnegie Mellon University, Smith College, William and Mary College, Loyola Marymount, Slippery Rock University, Point Park University and the University of Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre (among others). Lynne chaired the Theatre Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Theatre and Dance Department at Colby College.