Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, & Gordon Farrell

JEREMY KAREKEN (playwright, LIFESPAN OF A FACT) is a playwright living in New York and Baltimore. His short plays HOT ROD, BIG TRAIN, and 80 CARDS have been performed around the country and internationally. He served as a speech writer and policy analyst for two presidential campaigns. His awards include the Sewanee Conference’s Dakin Fellowship for FARBLONDJET, and Guthrie/Playwrights Center’s Two-Headed Challenge for THE SWEET SWEET MOTHERHOOD. The Hamptons Film Festival Screenwriters Conference selected Kareken and David Murrell for their horror-comedy script about haunted breast implants—“THESE! Conquered the Earth!” In 2018, PlayPenn shortlisted Jeremy’s new political satire about an illiterate king, THE RED WOOL. Born and raised in Rochester, New York, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, he has taught at NYU, NYIT, the Actors Studio Drama School, and currently teaches at the Acting Studio—New York. A lifetime member of The Actors Studio, Jeremy occasionally acts and for 18 years served as the researcher for Bravo TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio.”

DAVID MURRELL (playwright, LIFESPAN OF A FACT)was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the University of Chicago, currently lives in Queens, and has written a sea chest’s worth of TV and film treatments and spec scripts. Access Theater (NYC) and the Cleveland Public Theatre each produced his play DUCTWORK and the Hamptons Film Festival Screenwriters Conference selected his and Jeremy Kareken’s feature screenplay about haunted breast implants, “THESE! Conquered the Earth.” In 2019, the Outer Critics Circle co-awarded David its John Gassner Playwriting Award for THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT.

GORDON FARRELL (playwright, LIFESPAN OF A FACT) Trained as a playwright at the Yale School of Drama, Gordon received an MFA in 1986 and went from there to work with major Hollywood studios, initially as a story analyst for Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, and eventually as a screenwriter. He has written for hire and sold screenplays to Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, MGM, and ITC. He has worked with Robert Simonds (producer of “The Wedding Singer,” “Molly’s Game,” “Mile 22”); Neal Moritz (producer of “XXX,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “Fast and Furious”) and Bruce Berman (producer of “The Matrix,” “Three Kings,” “Mad Max: Fury Road”). Working in independent film, Gordon has written for and sold projects to NYC indie producer Norman Twain (producer, “Lean on Me,” “Boycott,” “My Dog Tulip”). Gordon’s first independent screenplay, “Girls Who Smoke,” premiered in 2011. It went on to be an official selection at over a dozen film festivals, ultimately winning the Audience Choice Award in Seattle at the Post Alley Film Festival. As a playwright, from 2009 to 2013, Gordon worked with dozens of women on New York’s Lower East Side who wanted to tell their personal stories on stage. The series of monologue plays that grew out of it was called IN THE RED ROOM/EVERY WOMAN DANCES FOR SOMEONE. In May 2019 the fully dramatized version, GIRLS WHO WALKED ON GLASS, played to SRO houses and rave reviews in Buffalo and is scheduled to transfer to New York City in 2020. His other plays have been produced in San Francisco, at the Alleyway Theatre, at the Yale School of Drama, and at Primary Stages in New York. He is the author of “The Power of the Playwright’s Vision,” published by Heinemann Press in 2001. It has been translated internationally and become a standard playwriting text at colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia.