Forensics Duo Series Volume 4: Duo Practice and Competition Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Dramatic Plays for Two Females

This series is specifically crafted to meet the needs of more than 200,000 middle school, high school, and college students competing in Forensics duo speech events yearly. These exciting short plays offer challenging new material for pairs of female actors. Forensics coaches, acting teachers, judges, and students alike will find dozens of comedic and dramatic plays that meet their criteria and tastes.

Barbara Lhota is an award-winning playwright as well as a screenwriter. The Studio’s production of her play Third Person was selected by the Boston Herald as one of the top ten plays of the 1993–94 season. She was awarded the Harold and Mimi Steinberg for Hanging by a Thread at the Crawford Theater at Brandeis University. Green Skin, her most recent collaboration, was staged at the Producers’ Club with Theatre Asylum in New York. Her plays have been produced at various theaters across the country including the Ritz Theater in New Jersey, the American Stage Festival in New Hampshire, the New England Theater Conference, and the Wang Center in Boston. In addition, her shows have been performed at several off-off Broadway Theaters including Tribeca Lab, Madison Avenue Theater, Love Creek Productions at the Nat Horne Theatre and the Phil Bosakowski Theater.She received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Brandeis University, where she was an artist-in-residence and taught playwriting. Barbara now lives in Chicago, where she has had the opportunity to see Strangers and Romance at the Athenaeum Theatre with Jupiter Theater Company, Family Portrait performed at the Bailiwick’s Directors’ Festival, Third Person through Symposium at National Pastime, and Morbid Curiosity with Women’s Theater Alliance at Chicago Dramatists and with Writers’ Block at The Theater Building. Recent productions include Flyin’ High at The Artistic Home, Personal Penchants at Stockyards Theater Festival, Boston and Provincetown PlaySlam and with Camenae Theater Ensemble. The Mating Habits of Frogs was also produced at the Boston PlaySlam and at the Et Cetera Festival produced by the Experimental Theater of Chicago. A Good Solid Home, Acceptance Letter and Without You were all performed at the Circle Theater. Barbara’s plays, Strangers and Romance, can be found in Smith and Kraus’ Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2001 and two of her monologues are in The Best Male Monologues of 2001. Many of her monologues can also be found in The Audition Arsenal series. She is the co-author of Forensics Series Volume 1, Duo Practice and Competition: 35 8-10 Minute Original Comedic Plays; Forensics Series Volume 2, Duo Practice and Performance: 35 8-10 Minute Original Dramatic Scenes; and Forensics Series Volume 3, Duo Practice and Competition: Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Comedic Plays for Two Females. If you would like to contact Barbara, you can e-mail her at Blhota@aol.com or visit her Web site at http://www.BarbaraLhota.com. Barbara is lucky to have the opportunity to work with her long-time collaborator Ira N. Brodsky.Ira Brodsky is a writer and English teacher in New York City. He was awarded a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council for his play The Little Planet of the Heart is Vast, which was later produced at the American Theatre of Actors in New York. His play Places like Home, written while a graduate student at Brandeis University was later developed at Playwrights Horizons Theater under the direction of David Warren and with a cast that included Barbara Barrie and Jane Adams. While completing his M.F.A. at Brandeis, Brodsky served as writer-in-residence and instructor of undergraduate playwriting. He has frequently collaborated with Barbara Lhota on plays and screenplays. Their one-act Pretty Crazy in Detroit was produced by the Madison Theater Company in NYC, and a full-length comedy Green Skin was staged by Theatre Asylum at the Producers Club. Their film script Long Shot is under option by E. Klaviter Productions. Brodsky earned a second master’s degree from New York University in English education, with a focus on using drama in the classroom. As a teacher on the English faculty at Horace Mann Middle School, he serves as the faculty advisor to Muse, the school literary journal, and coordinates the annual beat poetry café, where students perform original poetry in a coffeehouse setting.He is the co-author, with Barbara Lhota, of Volume 3 of the Forensics series, a collection of comic plays for female pairs. He has also contributed monologues to The Audition Arsenal series, from Smith and Kraus, and two chapters to Words and Music: An Introduction to American Musical Theater, published by the National Council on Aging.