Meet the Playwrights

playwright /plā′rīt″/ (noun)
A playwright is a person who writes plays, which are dramatic works intended for theatrical performance. The term combines “play,” from Old English meaning recreation or drama, and “wright,” an archaic term for a craftsman or builder, indicating someone who constructs plays from words and themes.

Barbara Anderson (An Empowered Woman)
Barbara Vanosky Anderson writes plays, short fiction, and books, including Letters from the Way about long-distance walking. Find the YouTube channel of her online plays under “Barbara Vanosky Anderson”. She has been fortunate to have had her plays, The Tree and Fugitive Colors, previously read by Valley Players.

Jack Bushnell (When We Ceased to Be?)
The world premiere of my play Seal Skin will be produced by First Run Theatre in St. Louis in November 2026. My plays have also been selected for a number of festivals, including most recently Heartland Theatre Company’s New Plays from the Heartland Festival in Normal, IL, First Run Theatre’s Reading Festival in St. Louis, the Road Theatre Company Summer Playwrights Festival in Los Angeles and the Chameleon Theatre Circle New Plays Festival in Minneapolis. In addition to my playwriting, I have won awards for my earlier books for young readers, and my short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted, twice, for Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Essays series. I’ve just finished writing a novella entitled The Obituarist.

Nate Currier (Waldorf School)
Nate Currier was born and raised in the Bay Area. He directed an extremely successful original adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh last year. His fiction has been printed in several literary journals and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has nonfiction published in The Journal of Anthropology of Oxford. On the acting side, he has been fortunate to play many of the great roles in Shakespeare, including Romeo, Iachimo, Macbeth, and Hamlet. He indeed attended a Waldorf School, and still knits occasionally.

(Gary A. Davis (Madam Director)
At 67, I consider myself an emerging playwright. However, I’ve been involved in theater since high school. Currently, I’m the director of a theater company called Silver Lining Players, which is a group dedicated to actors 50 and over. I am also an operatic tenor who has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Akron Symphony Chorus, and Cleveland Opera (including an original work by Police drummer Stewart Copeland). In the ‘90s, I produced an album for a classical label in tribute to John Cage featuring 22 artists, including Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and many more. In the past few years, I’ve written 15 plays running the gamut from comedies to political dramas and even a dark musical satire based on the songs of Tom Lehrer. When not busy with these pursuits, I most enjoy spending time with my grandson Benny (whom I wrote into one of these plays!).

Kirk Johnson (At Midspan on the Andy Warhol)
In the 1980’s, Kirk Johnson took his college rock band from Utah, where he was born and raised, to New York City with the goal of becoming rich and famous in the then-burgeoning New Wave punk scene. When that didn’t happen, he found his way into the New York Times, where he worked for the next three decades as a reporter and national correspondent. He’s the author or co-author of three books and shared a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 with a team of Times journalists. He has written more than a dozen plays, including two full-length. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Fran.

Rex McGregor (Table in the Air)
Rex McGregor is a New Zealand playwright. His short comedies have been produced on four continents, from New York and London to Sydney and Chennai.
Website: https://www.rexmcgregor.com/

Lorraine Midanik (Deadly Pursuits)
Lorraine is a playwright who was born in Toronto, raised in Los Angeles and lives in the Bay Area. Productions include: Double Plotz (Valley Players, 2021); Stay with Me (Fuse/Dragon Theater; PCSF Playoffs; Taphouse, 2020); Ordinary Day (Valley Players, 2018); Call Forwarding (PCSF, 2018); Recalculating (Grateful Deadly, Playland Productions, 2018); Shock Value (PCSF Playoffs, 2017, nominated for TBA’s 2017 Best Anthology); Cycled (ReproRights, 3Girls Theatre, 2017), Up The Wall (SF Fringe Festival, Swampland Productions, 2017); Reciprocity (Unknown Players, 2017); Boy Imagined (ReproRights, 3Girls Theatre, 2016); Benched (PCSF Playoffs, 2016, nominated for TBA’s 2016 Best Anthology); Freedom of Speech (PianoFight’s Short-Lived Festival, 2016); and, Sparse Pubic Hair (PCSF’s Sheherezade’s Last Tales, 2015, winner of TBA’s 2015 award for Best Anthology). Lorraine is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Playwrights’ Center, Minneapolis, MN, The International Centre for Women Playwrights, and the New Play Exchange. (LorraineMidanik.com)

Barbara A. Silverstone (Mother, I Could Kill You, Date Night)
Continuing the long and overrated tradition of Americans in Paris, Barbara A. Silverstone left L.A. to move to the City of Lights, where she works as a freelance translator and an English professor at the Sorbonne University. Her two-act play Mother, I Could Kill You placed in the semi-finals of the 2021 ScreenCraft Stage Play Competition, and the finals in the 2025 Stanley Drama Award, before winning 3rd place in the 2025 Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Playwriting Competition. Her short play The Cat-Sitter was a finalist in the 2025 Spectacular Tournament of Playwrights and was produced as a staged reading at The Acorn in Three Oaks, Michigan in November 2025.
Ms. Silverstone has a B.A. in French from Occidental College (Los Angeles), where she minored in Theater and Art, and a Master’s in English from Université de Rennes II, France.

Mack Wright (Night Shift)
Mack Wright is an early-career playwright who finds herself interested in examining the human balance between running from the truth and needing to face it. Her first staged readings of this script were in April/May 2025 at Baylor University, where she also had a performance of her immersive script, “A Grief Observed”. She is extremely grateful to The Valley Players for this opportunity, and would like to thank Stan Denman and Logan Allen for all of their support, guidance, and many Zoom calls that went into creating this newest version of the script.