Linda Manning is an award winning screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Her solo show “Perfect Love” directed by Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award winner Gretchen Cryer completed a run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC in 2022. In March, 2022 she directed her play “Bite the Apple” (2019 Finalist for the Kentucky Women Writers Prize) which was produced in NYC with the assistance of a generous grant from Café Royal Cultural Foundation. She has written five full length plays: Bite the Apple; There Is No You and Me (Finalist - New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest - 2017); GUY (semi-finalist for the O'Neill National Playwriting Conference 2007); DO SOMETHING WITH YOURSELF! The Life of Charlotte Brontë produced by The Invisible Theatre, NYC and published by Smith and Kraus; adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher produced by The Invisible Theatre, NYC.
Linda has written three full length screenplays: Learning to Drive (Grand Prize in the 2013 StoryPros Awards Screenplay Contest), Charlotte (Best Feature Screenplay at the 2021 City of Angels Women’s Film Festival, second round of competition for the 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab), and Divine Food. She has written a pilot for a streaming series based on her own experience producing and hosting a jazz series in the Bronx for ten years title, Linda's Jazz Nights. She has co-wrote and acted in two short films. Wake Up premiered at the 48 Hour Film Project, New Haven and Linda won Best Actress at the festival. It was also a Finalist for Best Dark Comedy at the 2019 Los Angeles Int'l Indie Short Fest. Her short film, Ghost Ride, premiered at the 2016 New York Short Film Festival and the 2017 Manhattan Film Festival. Linda also wrote, acted and shot a web series during Covid, The Desire Series, now on youtube.
She was a founding member of The Invisible Theatre in New York City. Linda received a Ledig House International Writers' Colony Fellowship, won Third Prize in the Center Theatre International Playwriting Contest, Chicago, IL, and Third Prize in the Great Platte River Playwrights' Festival, Univ. of Nebraska. Her work was a finalist in the Robert J. Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence, Coldwater, MI, and a finalist in the South Carolina Playwrights' Festival, Trustus Theatre, Columbia, SC. She also won the Jane Chambers Playwriting Graduate Student Award.
Linda has had featured roles on television and in independent feature films (IMDB). Linda has worked as a teaching artist for Red Bull Theatre, Hour Children, Horace Mann School, and in NYC public schools. She has also taught master classes in playwriting and screenwriting through the Bronx Council on the Arts. Linda has a Masters Degree from Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Bachelors from the University of Colorado. LindaSManning.com
Plays
Cinderella, in the middle of a full blown mid-life crisis, comes face to face with the lies she has told herself and is thrust into the stories of Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Rapunzel exposing their emotionally treacherous stories of sexual abuse, abandonment, and betrayal, unearthing her own past she has tried to forget, and discovering the possibility of a new story, of her own making.
Produced March 10-13, 2022 at 224 Waverly Place Theater, NYC
with help of a generous grant from Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation
Directed by Linda Manning
Original Music by Jono Hill
2019 Finalist for the Kentucky Women Writers Prize
Reviews from an earlier version produced as part of the New York Int'l Fringe Festival:
"The ensemble of actresses are remarkable, particularly the evocative and nuanced performance by Manning. Bite the Apple is a smart script with intricate dialogue and beautiful language...."
Joseph Samuel Wright, Theatre Is Easy, New York, NY
“Part adaptation, part re-telling, and part re-imagining, Linda Manning’s new play Bite the Apple persuades the audience members to reconnect with their stories, identify where their journeys have derailed, and reaffirm that each of them is ‘worth saving.’ And although this appeal is made through the lives of fictional women to ‘non-fictional’ women, its urgent entreaty is for all who have ears to hear and eyes to see.... Yes, Linda Manning can make this stuff up and indeed it does not get much better than this well-constructed play.... See Bite the Apple. Watch it, listen to it, see it, hear it, savor it, and continue to chew on its core until you know ‘which version of you is the right one.’”
David Roberts, Chief Critic, Theatre Reviews Limited, New York, NY
Finalist - New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest - 2017
Staged Reading - 2018 Produced by The Drawing Board
A married woman walks into a bar...to reclaim a piece of her past. Can she put an old lover to rest and reinvent herself, or is this a ghost story destined to be repeated?
Semi-Finalist - Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference 2007
Guy, a successful truck salesman in his mid sixties, is dying. Haunted by painful memories of his past: his unforgiving mother, the wife and family that he deserted, and the career that he torpedoed, Guy retreats into the fantasy world of The Cowboy, his alter ego, the ultimate self-made man, who embodies the magnificence of the lost American Frontier where a man with no past, no burdens, and no home is still capable of greatness. But when Guy's estranged, middle-aged daughter, Diane, arrives full of self-doubt having followed in his footsteps and become a wandering, rootless cowboy herself, Guy must face the real-world consequences of his actions. Is Diane there to make peace or to exact revenge? And will Guy be able to help her before it's too late?
This is the story of Charlotte Brontë’s emergence as a world class novelist as she carves out her own path between the provincial constrained existence of her Victorian reality and the fantasy world of her novels where so much more is possible.
Produced by The Invisible Theatre in NYC
Published by Smith & Kraus Publishers
"Writer-performer Linda Manning gives us a fiercely intelligent and sexual Charlotte Brontë.... The writing delicately renders the conflict between family responsibility and the artist's calling, between romantic yearning and the realities of married love."
The Village Voice, New York, NY
An adaptation of Poe's mysterious and fantastic short story -- mad, reclusive Roderick Usher, obsessed with this twin sister Madeline, lures his oldest friend, William, to visit him in his haunted mansion (played by four dancers). William falls in love with Madeline and attempts to free both brother and sister from their tortuous bond.
Produced by The Invisible Theatre in NYC
"The Invisible Theatre Company’s adaptation of the classic tale is strikingly fresh, thanks to playwright Linda Manning’s bold vision.... Manning had a dynamic presence .... Deftly handling the madness that lies at the heart of Poe’s tale, Manning oscillated from a petulant little girl, to a proper young lady, to a disturbing sexual force.... The amount of humor that Manning has incorporated into the script, without compromising its horror, is one of its greatest accomplishments.”
The Off-Off-Broadway Review
New York, NY
Successes
2020 ARTemis Arts Wisdom Anthology Finalist
2020 Semi-Finalist - Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship
2019 Finalist - Kentucky Women Writers Prize
2019 Finalist - Best Dark Comedy - Los Angeles Int'l Indie Short Fest
2017 Finalist - New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest, NYC
2013 Grand Prize StoryPros Awards Screenplay Contest
2011 BRIO Award for Screenplay (Bronx Council on the Arts)
2007 Semi-Finalist, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference
Ledig House International Writers' Colony Fellowship
Third Prize, Center Theatre International Playwrighting Contest, Chicago, IL
Third Prize, Great Platte River Playwrights' Festival, Univ. of Nebraska
Finalist, Robert J. Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence, Coldwater, MI
Finalist, South Carolina Playwrights' Festival, Trustus Theatre, Columbia, SC