JOSEPH P. KRAWCZYK ~ PLAYWRIGHT

Joe had a staged reading of Release 35.6 at The International Theater Arts Institute (IATI), located in the East Village, one of nine plays selected for Cimientos 2016. The Treatment was selected to be part of Cimientos 2017 with a staged reading in March. Last year, The Treatment, formerly titled Disconnect, was produced at the Sargent Theater in NYC. 

 

In 2014 he had a staged reading of Year’s End, a play about teachers in crisis, at Cape May Stage, a regional, Equity Theater in Cape May, NJ.  The play was selected from playwrights who participated in 2013’s National Playwrights Symposium (in attendance were Lee Blessing, John Pielmeier, Stephen Adly Guirgis, and William Mastrosimone) and who were invited to submit a play for their 2014 Symposium. Year’s End was also selected as one of the top three plays at Ohio State University’s 2012 New Play Contest. Subsequently, Year’s End was also produced at the Manhattan Repertory Theater.

 

He has written many ten-minute plays that have been produced on both the East and West Coast. For awards, he has received the 2016 Gil Ancowitz Award for Divinity, a trilogy of one-act plays. He was nominated as Outstanding Writer for Macho Moments at NYC’s 2013 Midwinter Madness Festival, and was a semi-finalist at NYC’s Avant-Garde Theater Festival for his one-act play, The Tasting. He has been awarded with two Jean Dalrymple awards: Best Comedy for Inconceivable and Best Playwright for Family Bound. His one act, The Understudy, was the first place winner in the Short Play Lab at the Little Times Square Theater in NYC. The play was subsequently produced at NYC’s Thespian Productions.

 

Over the years NYC’s American Theatre of Actors (ATA) has produced Fog, Divinity and Release 35.6. His critically acclaimed Who Killed Johnny Hansen took on corporate greed, race relations, and right-wing talk radio. His other New York productions include Family Bound, Inconceivable (also produced in Los Angeles), and Latin Retreat at Playwrights Horizons Theater School. 

 

His play Gender Wars was produced Off Broadway by Power Play Enterprises at the Samuel Beckett Theater. Recently, he had a short story, The Dreamer, published in London, and a monologue from It’s All About Lorrie, has been included in The Best Women's Stage Monologues of 2016, published by Smith and Kraus. A monologue from Year’s End will be part of The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 2017.

 

As a documentary film maker, he has worked with talents such as William Shatner, Eli Wallach, and James Whitmore. He is also a recipient of an Emmy as co-producer of Dreams of Distant Shores, a documentary on immigration.

 

He is especially proud of writing and producing The Gift of Time, a documentary on volunteerism, which had a showing at the White House. He has won awards from the New York Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival, and a Tri-State award for the Best United Way video. 

 

In addition, he has written and produced more than a dozen TV and radio commercials and has directed a number of advertising campaigns for a Fortune 200 company.

 

He has studied playwrighting at the National Playwrights Symposium, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Ensemble Studio Theater, and the Public Theater.

 

He is also a member of the Dramatists Guild.

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Currently living in New York City and West Dover, Vermont, Joe is an avid skier and a former marathon runner. Joe has a  wife and son, adopted from Korea when he was three months old. Joe grew up in the New York area while surviving a Catholic upbringing and schooling system.  Ironically, after graduating from college, he taught seniors at an all-girls Catholic high school. Go figure!

 

At 17, he was the other half of a comedy team, which he particularly enjoyed with his best friend from high school and college, performing in New York City at various comedy venues.

 

Writing in earnest since he was 23, he also took violin lessons at the same time, which he had studied for 12 years.  Whenever Joe traveled, a passion of his, he wrote articles on Greece, Canada, Mexico, and the New England area for various travel publications.