The Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission

The Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission was created to encourage the writing of plays that in addition to our other guidelines consider the relationships between truth, power, history, and personal responsibility. For each commission, Clubbed Thumb will ask a question or pose a theme to serve as a jumping-off point for this examination. The theme for the 2009-10 is “The Crisis of Confidence Speech.” From over 150 applicants, the panel chose to award the commission to Libby Emmons and her play Zeropia.

At the heart of Zeropia is Marta, an urban planner who’s ready to take action, to make a stand, to get it done. Unwilling to settle for half-way, she sets out with her trusted assistant Amy to realize her vision of a net-zero town a town that leaves an absolutely zero carbon footprint. Yet, as more and more people fill Zeropia, and Marta tries to take her vision to the national level, obstacles begin to mount both inside and without.

Libby Emmons, playwright. Producing Director: Blue Box Productions, curator: Sticky series, presented at Bowery Poetry Club & Galapagos Art Space, among others. Publications: “The Worm Turns at the Fort Peck Hotel,” 2009 New York Theatre Review (upcoming); “Little Angel,” InterACT Theatre Co., Philadelphia, PA, 2000. Film credits are: I Miss You with Acorn Films, Los Angeles, 2009; upcoming: Malcolm & Margerie, Blue Guns Blue Tobacco, 2010. Full-lengths include: The Little Room, short listed: BBC’s 2009 International Radio Play Competition; The Girls From Afar, reading with Desipina & Co.; The Sustainable Future, Blue Box at Galapagos Art Space; Decomposition in Blue and White, Blue Box & Theatre Double Rep., Phila., PA; Eyes of the Prophet, winner of John Golden Award; and Dirty & Leo in Tokyo, work shopped with Angelica Torn and the Geraldine Page Academy Sanctuary Playwrights. Selected shorts: seen with Junta Juliel and RKP, Desipina & Co., Crown Point Festival, Sticky, Manhattan Theatre Source, Working Man’s Clothes, Atlantic Theatre School, LaMaMa Etc., all NYC; Acorn Pictures, LA, Subversive Theatre Co., Buffalo, NY. International showings in Sheffield, U.K. and New Zealand. Collaborator: MacBeth Project with RAT Conference, Rosario, Argentina, 2004; The Charlotte Salomon Project and A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things both Polybe + Seats. BA: Sarah Lawrence College, MFA: Columbia University School of the Arts, where she received the Liberace Fellowship and Miller Scholarship, among others. She was commissioned by the Williamstown Theater Festival to write a play for the Act 1 Company, 2006, and was nominated for the Dramatists’ Guild’s inaugural Wasserstein Prize.