FREE! Part of The Show Must Go On(line) Pittsburgh Series.

Each year the Momentum Festival features a work by an alumni of the company’s Young Playwrights Festival, showcasing new plays in different stages of development.
Streamed on The Show Must Go On(line) Pittsburgh channel. (run-time 90 minutes)

Galileo’s Daughter by Jessica Dickey Directed by Kel Haney: A writer travels to Italy in search of letters written between Galileo Galilei and his oldest daughter. She discovers a great deal more in this time-bending meditation on faith, love, and the power of truth.

Kel Haney is an NYC-based theater director who specializes in new work. NYC credits include: Kel Haney/Gardiner Comfort’s The Elephant in Every Room I Enter (Next Door at New York Theater Workshop & La MaMa); Gardiner Comfort’s You’re Not Tough (HERE, Dixon Place); Neil LaBute’s What Happens in Vegas, Chris Cragin-Day’s A Woman, Vickie Ramirez’s Glenburn 12WP (all at 59E59); Jordan Jaffe’s Crude (Theater 511 @ Ars Nova – featuring Nico Tortorella); Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation (The Flea). Regional (select): Julia Doolittle’s Tell Them I’m Still Young (featuring Andre Braugher and Michele Pawk), Sharyn Rothstein’s A Good Farmer, Neil LaBute’s The Way We Get By (American Theater Group); Deborah Brevoort’s My Lord, What A Night (Orlando Shakes; Premiere Stages); Chris Cragin-Day’s Foster Mom, Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water By The Spoonful (Premiere Stages); Laura Maria Censabella’s Paradise (featuring Grant Shaud – Luna Stage; Passage Theatre), Kyle Jarrow & Nathan Leigh’s The Consequences (Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater); Christopher Wall’s The Inherent Sadness… (New World Symphony, Miami). She has directed/developed new work with Abingdon Theatre Company, The Amoralists, Ars Nova, Atlantic Theater Company, Bay Street Theatre, Cherry Lane, Keen Company, Labyrinth, The Lark, Ma-Yi, Manhattan Theatre Club, Naked Angels, New Dramatists, New Georges, Partial Comfort, Playwrights Realm, Rattlestick, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, Westport Country Playhouse, Williamstown & Working Theater. Also: MTC Directing Fellow, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Mabou Mines Residency, Old Vic/New Voices Exchange and member of Ensemble Studio Theatre. Kel also directed the critically acclaimed short films, I AM THEM and STAY CLOSE. Faculty Member: NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. Proud member of SDC. www.kelhaney.com

Jessica Dickey is an award-winning playwright whose writing was hailed by New York Times as having “freshness, economy, cheeky vulgarity, with a fine measure of poetic insight”, and the New Yorker magazine as “funny, smart, deep and sad”. Her most recent play, The Convent, a dark comedy about a group of women who try to live like nuns in the middle ages, premiered Off-Broadway this year in a sold-out co-production with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix and WeatherVane, and is now being developed into a series for Sarah Jessica Parker’s company Pretty Matches. Jessie’s play The Rembrandt (about a museum guard who decides to deliberately touch a Rembrandt painting) had a sold out run at Steppenwolf starring John Mahoney. Other plays have been premiered Off-Broadway in New York and produced around the country — The Amish Project, about the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting in an Amish community; then Charles Ives Take Me Home, about a violinist father and his basketball star daughter; and Row After Row, a dark comedy about Civil War re-enactors. In television, Jessie is writing for Apple TV’s comedy “Physical”, starring Rose Byrne. She is also developing a show with Tom McCarthy’s company, Slow Pony, about young female clergy. Her next world premiere is coming up this season on the west coast: Nan and the Lower Body is a dark comedy about the creation of the Pap Smear and her maternal grandmother (commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and the Sloan Foundation). Jessie is a member of the exclusive New Dramatists and a recipient of the prestigious Stavis Award. www.jessicadickey.com

City Theatre closes each season with the Momentum Festival: New Plays at Different Stages, which brings some of the most exciting playwrights in the country to Pittsburgh for a weekend of workshops, readings, and artist panels. Momentum is an annual event that showcases new plays in different stages of development.