Thursday, August 7, 2014

Bernie Yanelli wins Sarasota Players Theatre playwriting competition

   Bernie Yanelli has been named the winner of this year's Players New Play Festival.
Yanelli
   Yanelli, a history teacher at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Bradenton, is a regular contributor to -- and a regular winner of -- playwriting competitions in this area. He won Theatre Odyssey's 10- minute play festival just last year.
  For the Players New Play Festival, which has been presented for 13 years by the Players Theatre in Sarasota, Yanelli's full-length play "Not Our Time" was chosen as one of five finalists out of more than 30 submissions. The finalists all received readings -- one a night for five consecutive nights -- and a panel of theater experts selected Yanelli's play as the winner.
   It will get a full production as part of the Players Summer Sizzler Series at the end of the August 2015.
   "Not Our Time" is a coming-of-age story set in the rural south of 1969. A young African-American football star must choose between what he wants for himself and what his best friend and mentor want for him.
   Jeffery Kin, the artistic director of Players Theatre, called "Not Our Time" a powerful, telling and yet, at times, an amusing look back at how far we have come in the last 50 years." 
    
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