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I come from a family of storytellers.

My siblings, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins like nothing better than to regale each other with childhood memories, contemporary observations and sometimes just plain bullshit.  

Listening to these marvelous stories as a child at family gatherings or in the car during one of our frequent cross-country trips helped forge my ear for distinctive narrative voices, strong story structures and resonant themes.  Exactly what a playwright needs to hone his craft. 

Biography

Jim Dalglish is the author of more than 25 plays – shorts, one acts and full lengths. These have been produced across the United States as well as in Ireland and Great Britain. Many have won awards and two have been anthologized. He is also an award-winning filmmaker – his films have appeared in festivals in the US as well as in Great Britain.  

His play Lines in the Sand was a finalist for two awards – including Best Play - at the 2017 International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. The play won acting awards for its two actors. 

His one-act play Double D was published in “The Best 10 Minute Plays for 2 Actors,” Smith & Kraus, 2007. His short, The Black Eye, was published in the 2013 edition of “The Amsterdam Quarterly." 

A Talented Woman – Jim’s collaboration with the multitalented Lynda Sturner – was the winner of the 2013 Jeremiah Kaplan New Play Prize and was a semifinalist at the 2013 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. It received a public reading at the McCarter Theater Lab in Princeton, New Jersey, during the summer of 2014. It was also read at the Summer Theater Festival at The Actors Studio in New York. The play received its world premiere at Cotuit Center for the Arts in 2019. 

His play Unsafe was a semifinalist at the 2008 National Playwrights Conference and was produced in Cotuit, Massachusetts, and Boston in a co-production between Cotuit Center for the Arts and Boston Public Works. The play was a Best New Play finalist for the 2016 Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Awards as well as a finalist for two acting awards.

His plays have also won awards at the Last Frontier Theatre Festival in Valdez, Alaska (The Black Eye and Daughter of the Regiment) and at the Tulip Theatre Festival in New York (Double D). He has received two runner up awards from the Kaplan New Play Prize for his plays Starkweather and The Playground. 

Plays written by Jim and receiving world premieres at Cotuit Center for the Arts include: Bark Park, Unsave, Lines in the Sand, A Talented Woman, Dark Tales Told on a Cold Autumn Eve, and The Playground. 

Jim was an Accomplice member of Interim Writers – a playwright lab in Boston. He was a member of Boston Public Works, a collaborative of writers who adopted the 13P approach to self production. BPW disbanded in 2017 after the last collaborating playwright’s work was produced. Jim has also been a member of Chuck Maryan’s playwright lab at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Jim is a Life Member of the Provincetown Theater’s Playwright’s Lab. Ten of Jim’s short plays received their world premieres as part of the Provincetown Playwright Festivals from 2001 to 2007 (Provincetown Theatre Company.)

Two of Jim’s works have been featured as official selections for the O’Neill Festival of New Works – an annual event sponsored by Provincetown Dramatic Arts. These were White Gays (2024) and the play and screenplay versions of Lines in the Sand (2023). Jim’s play White Gays was an official reading selection for the 2023 season of the Truro Playwright Collective.  

Jim’s films include the feature-length Teacher of the Year, which was selected for the 2022 FFI London film festival (Winner of the Best Actress Award), the Hot Springs International Women’s Film Festival (2022), International New York Film Festival (2022), and won the Best Experimental Feature Film award at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival (2023) and Best Indie Narrative Feature at the New York Neorealism Film Awards (2021.) His short film Pilgrim Girl was an official selection for The Shawna Shea Memorial Film Festival (2022). His short film screenplay The Babysitter won the Best Dramatic Short Film Screenplay at the Woods Hole Film Festival (2022.)

In 2023 Jim founded Helltown Players, a playwright collaborative dedicated to the production of plays written by Cape Cod playwrights. Their inaugural production was Little Devils – a collection of six short plays written by some of the organization’s trustees that played at the Provincetown Theater and the Academy Playhouse in Orleans. The organization’s second production, The Playground, is Jim’s one-woman full-length play produced in collaboration with Cotuit Center for the Arts and Wellfleet Preservation Hall. 

In the fall of 2024 Jim will be leading a playwriting workshop sponsored by Helltown Players. Discovering Structure: Uniting Vision and Form in Playwriting is an online course designed to help playwrights delve into the deeper motivations behind their stories and discover the dramatic structure that will best serve their unique creative visions.

Jim holds a masters degree from Brown University, where his thesis advisor was Paula Vogel. You can discover more about Jim, read about his awards and productions, and download his plays at: http://www.jimdalglish.com 

Playwright Bio→
Playwright Resume→

Rob Phelps

Another great source of inspiration comes from my partner, Rob Phelps.  Rob came into my life almost a quarter of a century ago and I can't imagine life without him.  He's twelve times more talented, creative and intelligent than I am.  I'm hoping that somehow a shred of his gifts will someday rub off on me.  I know that he made me a much more compassionate person.  The heart and soul of my writing is because of him.  

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Lynda Sturner

After I graduated from Brown University with an MA in Creative Writing, I stopped writing plays for almost ten years.  I’m not sure exactly why this happened.  Perhaps I was a little burnt out.  Maybe I was just waiting to grow up enough to have something meaningful to say.

I didn’t seriously pick up the pen again until I around the time I met the woman you see on the right.  Her name is Lynda Sturner and she is a piece of work.  In the best of all possible ways.  

Not only is Lynda a wonderful actress, director, teacher, and theater administrator, but she is one helluva fine playwright.  She has the most magically intuitive approach to writing.  Without her support and encouragement, I would not have written the nearly two dozen plays included on this site.  Nor would I have collaborated on the two plays we wrote together: A Talented Woman and Super-Lubricated.

Education

Both these schools are quite wonderful. But the good people of my home state will always be in my heart.

My Playwright Resume→

Banner photo credit:  Natasha D’Schommer-Grant