Workshops

His play, The Power Behind the Palette, won the David Mark Cohen Award and received a stage reading at ATHE in Los Angeles. His The Balloon Handler Makes Good was performed at the New Plays Festival in California, the ATHE development process at ATHE in Washington, DC, at the Ten for Tenn Festival and the Warner International Festival in 2012. Clayton Tells a Fib, was performed in Tennessee and California, and his most recent, Pogrom in Pelzer, travelled around the country with a series of short plays in 2014. His 61-page chapter on "The Entertainment Marketplace from 2000-2014" was published in Screenwriting by Rutgers Press August of 2014. His new version of Antigone, Dangling Modifiers, premiered at the New Works Festival summer of 2016, and his play Shooting Blanks was featured at the Prague Fringe Festival in June of 2016. Dr. Charney was invited to be a critical respondent to the IASAS Festival in Jakarta, and will be traveling to Dubai to head the first international playwriting festival this February.

Mark was recently invited guest to the Actors Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles, where he received an award for his work in criticism and dramaturgy nationwide (and made an honorary inductee), and recently returned from Indonesia last Spring where he was a guest critic and workshop leader for the Southeastern Asian International Theatre Festival. His Incline/Decline was performed in Austin during the fall of 2014, and was made Playwright-in-Residence at Two Beards Theatre in Austin, Texas soon thereafter.

Recent awards and accolades include: the Williams Kerns Award for Achievement in Performing Arts; induction into the Actors Hall of Fame; two gold medallions from the Kennedy Center; 15 Awards for Faculty Excellence from the Clemson University Board of Trustees; Seven Meritorious Achievement Awards from the Kennedy Center for Directing; Winner of the David Mark Cohen Award for Playwriting; Phil and Mary Bradley Award for Mentoring in Creative Inquiry; and The Thomas Green Clemson Award for Excellence.

Mark Charney came to Lubbock in 2012, immediately setting goals for the Department of Theatre and Dance to rise to new levels of academic success by arranging for students to attend the Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown and creating experiential education programs such as WildWind Performance Lab and the Marfa Intensives. Working with fellow faculty members and students, Dr. Charney has cultivated community outreach programs, a theatre program for autistic students through the Burkhart Center known as the BurkTech Players, and helped the department become the TTU School of Theatre & Dance for the 2015-2016 school year.

All artists need to learn not only to accept criticism, but to offer it as well, understanding that developing a strong critical acumen is instrumental in growing as an artist and in responding to the art we see. In this workshop, we will look at professional critics, not only to pick up important vocabulary to assess artistic works, but also to develop an aesthetic that we will use as actors, playwrights, and designers. And we will begin to write as well, transforming our observations into a method to critique the art we produce, both internally and externally. We all have a voice; this workshop will help you develop yours. - Dr. Mark Charney

Playwriting can be seen as a lonely, laborious event, sure, but it can also be a spontaneous act, begun with 20 minutes of improvised writing, and then developed quickly in response to cultural norms and community collaboration. In this workshop, you will respond to a prompt called “Did You Bring It?” and from there, write your own short play. Not only will we share these in our time together, but we will also use techniques associated with acting improvisation exercises to best fuel our creative juices. And best of all, you will leave with a short play! - Dr. Mark Charney

In performance, individual and collective movement tells a story in addition to language. As directors and performers, we want to harness the full range of possibilities for movement on the stage to create compositional images that reveal, excite, shock, and clarify. In this workshop, we will draw on techniques from Viewpoints and Image Theater to establish a vocabulary for creating dynamic physical performances, both from within and without. - Michael Leibenluft

Much of the power in theater comes from a dynamic dialogue between the individual and the universal: we mine specific stories so that they can speak to a broader global audience. But how can we build this amplifying chain of expression? In this workshop drawing on Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed techniques, we will use several devising techniques to establish a framework for capturing our personal stories in the service of larger political and societal change. - Michael Leibenluft