Every year we interview our winning playwrights, and this year is no exception! Join us over the coming weeks as we post more interviews with playwrights, along with information about each play’s director and cast!
Anne Flanagan is a two time ONSTAGE Playwright 
(2016 and 2017) and fabulously funny to boot! Last year’s play, THROWN FOR A CURVE, was one of my favorites, and absolutely bonkers. This year’s winning play, THREE GHOSTS OF ELIZABETH BATHORY, is another wild ride told in three scenes sprinkled through the second act. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but let me just say that it is most definitely a hot mess and I love it! This writer has a flare for fun (don’t miss her bio at the end – what a wild and interesting human being!) and we are so glad she’s part of the ONSTAGE posse.
If you could have one super power, what would it be and why?
TIME TRAVEL! I’d dip in and out of eras I romanticize (like the 1920s for clothing/decor or the 30s for music) as well as scenes from my own past, for pure enjoyment and/or to see loved ones I miss terribly. I’d also welcome the chance to re-visit one or two pivotal turning points in my life and choose a different path. Who knows if the other direction would turn out any better, but I’d like the chance to try. (Of course I’d also try to un-do some catastrophic world events, but if all the Sci Fi tropes are to be believed, I’d only end up making it worse.)
Describe your writing space…
A shabby chic-esque office in the middle of a f*cking construction zone. (The house next door is being demolished/rebuilt. I know I said that last year, but THAT was the house to the right – this year, it’s the one to the left. I am soon to be surrounded by tacky, oversized McMansions like the little house in Pixar’s “UP.”
What is the title of your play?
Three Ghosts of Elizabeth Bathory
How did this year’s ONSTAGE theme inspire you to write/share this play?
Elizabeth Bathory was a sixteenth century Hungarian Countess who (allegedly) killed 600 virgins and bathed in their blood to preserve her own youth and beauty. Fairly hot & messy, no?
What play (by another playwright) have you read a gazillion times, and what about that play keeps you coming back to it?
I don’t tend to re-read a play several times (unless I’m acting in it) but one that recently knocked my socks off was Ironbound by Martyna Majok. The idea that random chance greatly affects one’s “success” in life; that effort does not necessarily triumph over circumstance is a common theme in my own work and this deceptively simple character study, insightful and unsentimental, will ultimately break your heart.
Do you have any upcoming productions elsewhere that our readers should know about?
Adulthood Nightmares just closed a run at the InspiraTO festival in Toronto, Canada and Three Ghosts of Elizabeth Bathory will, for the second year in a row, be featured in Roebuck Theatre’s Thalia festival in NYC. I’ve also got a piece in the anthology 222 Comedy Monologues from Smith and Kraus that’s expected to hit book stores in July.
Please share a brief synopsis for a full-length of yours that our readers should know about.
In my comedy/farce Artifice (www.DramaticPublishing.com), visual artist Payne Showers finally gets his Big Break. He dies. At a subsequent auction of his work, we learn one guest may be a murderous gangster, another a gun toting psychopath, that Gandhi and Goebbels were, in fact, not the same man, and rumors of Payne’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Anne’s Bio:
Anne Flanagan is a playwright, teacher and woman’s health advocate based in Los Angeles, CA.
Flanagan’s plays include Lineage, Artifice, First Chill, Skirts, and Death, Sex & Elves. Her work has been produced throughout the US and internationally. Anne is the recipient of several writing awards and zero sports trophies. In 2016, Anne was a top 12 finalist for Project Greenlight’s “New Normal” contest and in 2017 she won five dollars from the Super Lotto.
Publications include her comedy Artifice (Dramatic) as well as many short play and monologue anthologies from Applause, Smith & Kraus and the like.
Anne has taught public school in New York’s South Bronx and LA’s South Central. She’s worked as a Private Investigator on the mean streets of Los Angeles (and the not so mean streets of Sherman Oaks). She’s climbed Machu Picchu, used hot coffee as a defensive weapon, had a gun pressed to her forehead, spied on thieving bartenders, built a house alongside Jimmy Carter, got lost in Watts holding a giant pineapple, and never mastered the metric system.
If you want to learn more about Anne you can do so at www.anneflanagan.net or follow her on Twitter @angrytimmyprod
And don’t forget to grab your tickets to the 2017 Female Playwrights ONSTAGE Festival: Hot Mess running July 6-8 at the First Congregational Church in Prescott, AZ.
