Jennie Webb
phone 323/255-5520   e-mail jenniewebb@earthlink.net

BIOGRAPHY

Jennie Webb is an independent playwright whose works including The Big Red Naugahyde Booth (Or, Would-be Elks), Remodeling Plans, The Complete Story of the War, Men & Boxes, Buying a House, Unclaimed Assets, Tilting, GreenHouse and Killing Miss America (co-author) have been presented on stages and in/at/around alternative venues throughout the U.S. and internationally, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  She is currently playwright-in-residence at The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum—one of LA’s few mid-sized Equity theaters which houses a Summer Repertory Season—where she created and runs the theatre's new "Botanicum Seedlings: A Development Series for Playwrights." 

A graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Drama, Jennie Webb started her career as an actress and comedienne. She wrote material as half of the female stand-up duo "Frisk and Webb," and later performed sketch and improvisational comedy in night-clubs and theaters as the only woman in the politically-inspired trio "Rabble Without a Cause." She also co-created, co-produced, wrote and performed in two cable television series, and developed and voiced comedic drop-in series for syndicated radio.                                                                                                                       

In 1987 Jennie co-founded The Rough Theater, a non-profit theater company which actively produced new works through the mid-nineties. She updated and adapted the company's first production, LA Book of the Dead, and co-wrote its successful follow-up, Killing Miss America. Killing Miss America has subsequently been produced a number of times at theaters in and around Los Angeles. For the LA Open Festival in 1990, the company joined other Los Angeles artists to form the performance collective "Urbanites Evolve!," workshopping a street-theater one-act version of her play GreenHouse at an abandoned mortar shell bunker in San Pedro, estate ruins in Hollywood, and late-night off-Hollywood Boulevard. Subsequent readings of GreenHouse were sponsored by the Theatricum Botanicum and A.S.K. Theater Projects.

Her works The Complete Story of the War, Men & Boxes and Buying a House were chosen as winners in the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights (ALAP) new play competitions, and staged in ALAP's Annual Playreading Festivals by Pilgrimage Theatre, New Works Company and Moving Arts, respectively.  Buying a House was premiered at the Stella Adler Theatre in 2003, and The Complete Story of the War was selected by The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis for development in their 2001 PlayLabs.     

Receiving a commission from the Theatricum Botanicum, Jennie wrote the one-act Tilting, which received a staged reading to end the 2001 Summer Repertory Season; she developed this work into a full-length during a series of readings presented throughout the 2002 Season.  Pieces of Jennie’s Unclaimed Assets have been performed as part of various Los Angeles Arts Festivals, including the Fringe Production's popular "24 Hours of Art," were televised by Chicago's Video Writers Workshop, and published in New Monologues for Women by Women (Heinemann Press, 2004).  In its entirety, Unclaimed Assets received its world premiere at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  Her absurdist domestic comedy Remodeling Plans received its world premiere at North Hollywood's historic El Portal Theatre in April, 2004, and The Big Red Naugahyde Booth (Or, Would-be Elks) was workshopped at the Theatricum Botanicum in November, 2005.  

Jennie also reviews theater—most recently for  Backstage West and on air for KCRW-FM, Southern California’s premier NPR affiliate and—and is also the author of articles, essays and criticism appearing in the Los Angeles Times, United Parenting Publications, TheaterMania.com and other publications, as well as serving as the LA correspondent for a NY-based stage trade, TheatreScope.  A frequent guest columnist for an alternative Southern California weekly, for over a year she wrote a popular humor column "The Jennie Webb Site"—she's in negotiations to publish a collection of these columns.

Jennie has appeared as a guest on public radio programs to discuss local arts events and issues, and regularly lectures at California State University, Los Angeles as part of the school's Theater Arts and Arts Management programs. Jennie has taught Shakespeare text courses, playwriting workshops for children, teens and college students, and improvisational comedy with The Harvey Lembeck Professional Comedy Workshop. From 1996-1997 she worked with a group of women writer/performers under the title "Skirts" to develop original material as part of a development deal with Paramount Studios.

Now at work on a new play titled Yard Sale Signs, she lives in Los Angeles with her musician husband and house cat, Monk.

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