Kamarie Chapman is thrilled to be teaching her ninth year with Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Having received her M.F.A. from The University of New Mexico in 2009 with dissertation work in gender and playwriting, her personal research focuses on underrepresented voices in playwriting. Kamarie has been teaching playwriting, theatre theory and dramaturgy, as well as criticism and introduction to cinema for the Department of Theatre and Dance since 2010. She has also worked with Texas Tech working as the inhouse Dramaturg for WildWind 2015/16. She has taught and directed theatre and outreach to many diverse populations to include working as Artistic Director of a mixed-ability company in Albuquerque, NM called Equilibrium Theatre Company (ETC) through VSA in 2009. She is a member of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance, The Dramatists Guild, The Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and Artists Trust. Her play Deception Pass: An American Story was the winner of two national awards from The Kennedy Center (The David Mark Cohen and co-winner of the Paula Vogel playwriting awards) and received its Washington State premiere in January of 2013 at WWU. This play was also the national winner of The ATHE playwriting award. In 2010 her short play, Dijon Love, was a finalist for the Humana Heidman Award and she was a top five finalist for the NPA/Seattle Rep/SAG Screenwriting contest in June of 2010 for her screenplay Avenue D. She has had her work published by NPA and numerous zines and smaller publications and Western Washington University’s Jeopardy Magazine. Most recently she premiered her first musical (co-written with Spencer Willows) at The iDiOM Theater in 2015; Ded Reckoning: A Space Adventure in Two Acts.
Plays
Ded Reckoning” is a musical-theater production told in song and dialogue with five quirky characters, all set on a spaceship. Three sisters and their mentor-mechanic have been barreling aimlessly through space for almost seven years with a broken navigational system.
On the day the audience joins them, a mysterious surge of power collides with the ship and their navigational system comes back on line. The system, an android named N.O.R.T.T.H. (Navigational Operations Run Through Titanium Humanoid), presents them with an important question they must now face.
Three forgotten goddesses are exiled to the New Mexico desert for discovering the subtle art of masturbation. (And you thought you could just go blind!) Forced to deal with the trials of becoming human, these three goddesses (and two helpful, if bumbling, muses) banter, bitch, and break down, and (of course, of course) discover a little bit about themselves in the process.
Set against the backdrop of the Southwest, Peaking explores people’s natural ability to deal with a fall from on high, (literally, in this case), the power of choice making, and how a little bit of self-actualization can cause a lot of trouble along the way.