Booking and details
Tickets $50 General, $45 Folger Members/Subscribers
In this workshop, playwright Caleen Sinnette Jennings will guide you in creating short story scenes and/or monologues to bring your story to life. Following the workshop, you will have an opportunity to perform your piece at an in-person presentation on Sunday, January 29 at the Hill Center, but participation in the presentation is not required.
This workshop is offered in-person at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital on Wednesday, January 25 at 6:30pm (ET).
Workshops are open to all, but recommended for those at the beginning of their creative journeys. To guide our teaching artists, participants will be asked for information regarding their experience level upon registration. Suitable for adults and mature teenagers (16+).
About Works in Progress
What’s your story? Folger’s Works in Progress program – hosted in partnership with and at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital – is a series of workshops and a panel conversation that invite aspiring creatives in the fields of playwriting, poetry, and songwriting to create new works under the mentorship of teaching artists. Workshop registration is open to the public. Works in Progress takes place following Folger’s weekend festival of new theatrical works inspired by Shakespeare.
Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Caleen Sinnetee Jennings is an actor, director, playwright, and a founding member of The Welders, a D.C. Playwrights’ Collective. Dramatic Publishing Company has published eight of her plays, and her work has appeared in seven play anthologies. Caleen has received play writing awards from the Kennedy Center and The Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. In April 2022, her play Queens Girl in the World had an off-Broadway run. The other two plays in her Queens Girl Trilogy (Queens Girl in Africa and Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains) have been performed at Mosaic Theatre in Washington D.C. and at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, M.D. Arena Stage commissioned her to write monologues for two pandemic-related Zoom plays: May 22, 2020 and The 51st State. She wrote the final episode for Round House Theatre’s zoom series, Homebound. She was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write a stage adaptation of Walter Dean Myers’ novel, Darius & Twig, which was produced at the Kennedy Center Family Theatre and did a national tour. She is currently writing the book for a new musical on the life of famous black contralto Marian Anderson and working on a commission from Arena Stage. Caleen is Professor Emerita of Theatre in the Department of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, D.C. where she taught playwriting, among many other theatre courses, for 31 years. She has been a workshop teacher for Kennedy Center’s Playwright’s Intensive for over 20 years, and she has been a faculty member for the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute for 28 years. Jennings has her B.A. in Drama from Bennington College, and her M.F.A. in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
COVID policy
We look forward to welcoming you to in-person performances. Please note: All attendees are required to wear a mask, and proof of vaccination is not required for audiences. Fully vaccinated artists will not be wearing masks while speaking. Folger staff will remain masked at all times. The Folger is committed to maintaining the highest level of health and safety precautions around COVID-19. Click here for more information on how we are keeping our audience and artists safe.
