Essential Theatre Festival opens Aug. 9 with world premiere

The 25th annual Essential Theatre Festival will kick off Aug. 9 at 7Stages in Little Five Points with the world premiere of Peter Hardy’s The Other Part of the Picture , directed by Ellen McQueen.

“I feel especially blessed to be directing a Peter Hardy play for the Essential Theatre festival’s silver anniversary season,” McQueen said in a press release. “This is the fourth of Hardy’s plays that I have directed,” she says, “and each time is a joy.”

The Other Part of the Picture has already won several prizes, including the Best Script Awards in London and the New York Script Awards. The play was chosen for the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival where it received a staged reading in 2022, but this will be the play’s world premiere production.

The Other Part of the Picture is a comic drama telling the story of two grad students who find a mysterious batch of old letters in the house where they live, and the group of friends who gather around them to try to uncover the secret of the letters’ origin.

“But that’s only the plot,” said Hardy. “What it’s really about is the way that friendships grow and the central importance of storytelling in how we come to know other people and understand the world.”

“When Essential Theatre produced my play Sally and Glen at the Palace in 2010,” Hardy recalls, “the response from audiences, and critics and everybody, was so positive that it reignited my enthusiasm for being a playwright — something which had, for a while, been taking a back seat to my work with Essential to create production opportunities for other Georgia writers.”

Due to that experience, Hardy began to work on the play that would become The Other Part of the Picture , which he completed a few years ago. “I’m excited to see it finally given a full production, directed by my dear friend and colleague Ellen McQueen, as part of the 25th Anniversary season of the Essential Theatre Play Festival,” he said, “I’m happy and proud of everything that we’ve accomplished with Essential over the past quarter century!”

The Essential Theatre Play Festival runs August 9 to September 1 at 7 Stages in Little Five Points. Tickets are on sale now from EssentialTheatre.Tix.com or by calling 404-212-0815. The performance schedule and other details are available at www.EssentialTheatre.com .

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