The Theater Project's Kaleidoscope Kabaret Festival to Kick Off 3/1

Baby boomer and Millennial, senior and teen playwrights are represented in The Theater Project's Kaleidoscope Kabaret, an annual festival of one act plays by New Jersey playwrights. The Festival runs March 1-3 at the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts in Maplewood, NJ.

Representing the Millennials is Emma Hathaway, whose one-act play THE MYSTERY MADAME OF 110th AND BROADWAY was a prize winner in The Theater Project's annual Young Playwrights Competition last March. Each year, The Theater Project selects one of the three winning plays from the contest to be performed in the Kabaret as an incentive for young writers. THE MYSTERY MADAME ... concerns a young woman who has planned the perfect wedding down to the last detail, and is now hanging around outside her favorite taco stand hoping to find an appropriate fiancé. Emma attends the Bergen County Academy in Hackensack.

Fisher of Highland Park, NJ, is a past winner of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. In this year's Kabaret, her ten-minute play YOU CAN'T LEAVE is a comic exploration of the sticky family ties that bind.

A distant relative of the famous Will, Ed Shakespeare lives in Lavallette. He is also a former recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and the author of the book When Baseball Returned to Brooklyn, His play CHEAP THERAPY is about a therapist who practices on the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore - his treatments are quick, wet, and very affordable.

Other playwrights participating in this year's Kabaret are Mike McGoldrick of Jersey City, Ed Lataro of Tom's River and Paula Freed of Sea Bright.

KALEIDOSCOPE KABARET runs at the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts, 10 Durand Road, Maplewood, NJ, March 1-3, Friday and Saturday at 8 PM, Sunday at 2 PM. Tickets, $20 for adults and $10 for students, can be purchased by calling 973 763-4029 or online at TheTheaterProject.org.

The Theater Project, an award-winning New Jersey theater company at the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts in Maplewood, is known for presenting outrageous comedy as well as drama with social commentary. Last November, the company tackled marriage equality, presenting a one-night-only reading of "8" by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, the play chronicling the historic California challenge to same-sex marriage.

Pictured: Emma Hathaway (third from left) with the other winners of the 2012 Young Playwrights Competition.