What Then Bios

  • Rinne Groff (Playwright) Rinne's plays, including The Ruby Sunrise, Jimmy Carter was a Democrat, Moliere Impromptu, Orange Lemon Egg Canary, Inky, Seven Supermans, and The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, have been produced by the Public Theater, Trinity Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Women's Project, PS122, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and Andy's Summer Playhouse, among others. Rinne has been a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award, a NYSCA Individual Artist grant, and Vortex Theater Prize. She has been a multi-year finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Australian National Playwrights Conference, the Perry Mansfield New Noises Festival, and The Chautauqua Theater Company; and has been commissioned by PS122 (Jerome Foundation grant), Trinity Rep, the Guthrie, and Playwrights Horizons. Rinne is a founding member of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company, and has been a part of the writing, staging, and performing of their shows (both in the States and on European tour) since the company's inception in 1991. Affiliations: New Dramatists, the Dramatists Guild, New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she teaches in the Department of Dramatic Writing. Yale B.A. '91. NYU M.F.A. '99.

  • Hal Brooks (Director) directed the acclaimed Off Broadway hit and Pulitzer Finalist Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Soho Theatre, London, and the DR2 in NYC. He is the Artistic Director of the Rude Mechanicals Theater Company of New York where he directed the Off Broadway premieres of Don DeLillo's Valparaiso and Will Eno's The Flu Season (Oppy winner). Recent credits: Intimate Apparel (Southern Rep), Benefactors (Pennsylvania Center Stage), Big Wyoming (NY Stage and Film). He has worked at NYTW, New Dramatists, Naked Angels, INTAR, Magic Theater, McCarter Theater, Berkeley Rep, American Conservatory Theater, Syracuse Stage, Southern Rep and the Virginia Stage Company. Other New York credits: Keith Reddin's Almost Blue, Beckett's Rough for Theatre #1, Caught (Don Quixote Project). Hal was a Drama League Fall Directing Fellow in 2003 and is a proud member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and SSDC.