The Screenwriters Lab, a five-day workshop for independent artists to work intensively on feature film scripts with the support of established screenwriters, is part of the Sundance Feature Film Program, which has played a part in developing such works as John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," Moisés Kaufman's "The Laramie Project" among many others. Guirgis will be at work on an untitled project about a bike messenger who gathers his old neighborhood friends in an attempt to apprehend one of them who has joined a religious cult. The playwright is known for his collaborations with director-actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, including Jesus Hopped the A Train, Our Lady of 121st Street and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings. The duo also reteamed for another developing work The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which just received a reading as part of the LAByrinth Theatre Company's Barn Theatre Series.
Orlandersmith will team with co-writer/director Blanka Zizka to adapt her stage play Yellowman, the Pulitzer Prize Award finalist that played at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2002. Zizka, the co-artistic director of Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, helped develop the first draft of Yellowman at the Sundance Theatre Lab in 1999. The story centers on the issues of a light-skinned boy and a dark-skinned girl whose relationship is met with prejudice within a black community in South Carolina.
For more information on the Sundance Institute and its programs, visit http://institute.sundance.org.