The Hunger Cycle Plays
Slated for Fall 2013, our fourth Hunger Cycle play, Love on San Pedro, is a collaboration with New Dramatists, one of the country’s leading playwright centers and a nationally recognized new play laboratory.
New Dramatists playwright James McManus was selected by the Cornerstone to write an original play inspired by the theme of hunger. Love on San Pedro focuses on the people who live, love and work in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. Our community partners include: Los Angeles Community Action Network, Los Angeles Mission, Operation Facelift Skid Row, and Skid Row Housing Trust.
This project is commissioned and developed in partnership with Full Stage USA at New Dramatists, a program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
James McManus
Playwright
James McManus is the author of six plays: Dorothy 6, Bulldog Whiskey, Underground, Cherry Smoke, Over/Under and Blood Potato. His plays have been developed and performed at Labyrinth Theater Company, Apothecary Theatre Company, The Clockwork Theatre, Glass Umbrella Creative (Sydney), Gurnet Theatre Project, The Kennedy Center, The BE Company, Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company, The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Barebones Productions, Irish Repertory Theatre, Son of Semele, The Side Project Theatre Company, The Lark Play Development Center, The Inkwell, Diverse City Theater Company, and the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. James was the recipient of the 2006 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting for Cherry Smoke, which is published by Samuel French. He received an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
Shishir Kurup
Director
Over the past few years Shishir directed Michael Garces' first play for Cornerstone, Los Illegals, wrote and directed On Caring for the Beast, was the lyricist for Cornerstone's Making Paradise: The West Hollywood Musical and in Spring '11 directed Lynn Manning's The Unrequited in the community of Watts. He will be writing the Hunger of Addiction play which goes up in '14. Shishir has acted in numerous Cornerstone shows, currently in Lisa Loomer's "Cafe Vida and has written over a 150 songs for various Cornerstone productions. The songs he wrote for the Medea portion of MedeaMacbethCinderella (MMC), a production originally created as a collaboration between Cornerstone Theater and The Actor's Gang in 1998, will be part of the 2012 Oregon Shakespeare Festival's season running from late April to late November 2012. He is also a solo performer and a founding faculty member of the new Applied Theatre Arts MA program in the School of Theatre at USC. Shishir’s play Merchant on Venice premiered in Chicago and appears in the anthology Beyond Bollywood and Broadway. He recieved the TIME (Time for Inspiration, Motivation and Exploration) Grant from the Audrey Skirball Foundation for his body of work. He's a Princess Grace Fellow, TCG/Alan Schneider directing finalist, two-time Herb Alpert nominee and MAP grantee. His feature film Sharif Don’t Like It (writer/director) is about the loss of Habeas Corpus and most recently the short documentary Amu's Kitchen about his mother which was created for Cornerstone's "Creative Seeds," both of which will soon be seen on Vimeo. Shishir's TV and film credits include: Bones, Lost, Sleeper Cell, Alias, Monk, Surface, Heroes, various pilots and most recently the Disney Channel movie musical, Lemonade Mouth. His most profound, instructive and daily inspiration, however, is his daughter Tala Claye Ananya Perl Kurup.
Our community partners for Love on San Pedro include:
