In Memory of Matthew J. Wells

Photo by Emily Hewitt

Matthew Wells’s plays have been received readings and production Off Broadway and across the country. “Oscar and Adonis” won the 2000 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival One Act Play Award, and was performed as part of the 2001 Festival in New Orleans. Barabbas was a 2017 O'Neill Semi-finalist.  “Schrödinger’s Girlfriend,” a Sloan Grant commission which had staged readings by Ensemble Studio Theatre at both the 1999 and 2000 First Light Festivals, opened the Magic Theatre’s 2001-2002 season in November 2001, and was produced in the spring of 2003 at the Act II Playhouse in Ambler, PA. “Donna Paradise” was produced in 2002 in New York by Double Helix Theatre Company, which also produced a one-act entitled "Water Over The Bridge” in June of 2004. “Monkey’s Uncle” was commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2005 as part of their Sloan Project, and was given readings at EST’s First Light Festival in 2005 and 2006. Most recently, “Scarlet Woman” was performed during the 2011 Frigid Festival in New York, where it won an Audience Best Award, and was subsequently performed in Edmonton and Winnipeg as part of the Canadian Fringe Festival, and at the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul. “Beautiful Day” was a finalist at both the 2013 National Playwrights Conference and the 2013 Lark Playwrights Week, and was chosen to be part of Actors' Theatre of Charlotte's nuVoices Festival in January 2016. “Countrie Matters” was part of the PlayLab series at the 2015 Great Plains Theatre Conference; his ten-minute play “Romeo and Rosaline” was read at the Red Bull Theater Short Play Festival in July 2015; and “Elvis at Auschwitz” was done by Nylon Fusion in August 2015.

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