by Doris Maricle | Apr 11, 2021
photo credit: Ryan Bourque Photography
JENNINGS – Jennings native Chelsea Marcantel has received the 2021 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her collaboration on “The Monster.”
Marcantel, who has made Los Angeles her home for the past three years, has been collaborating with Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler since 2018 on “The Monster” which she describes as a modern-day musical adaptation of “Frankenstein.”
The musical delves into the original’s theme of creation and responsibility while following Victoria, who launches software to bring communities into harmony online: the very first social network. But as the scope of the technology expands, she finds her moral center tested. Deep inside the recesses of the internet, there remains a trace of what makes us human – if only we can find it before our time runs out.
“When we started writing this nobody was comparing social media to Frankenstein and now it’s a very common comparison,” she said. “I think a lot more people have gotten wise to what social media actually does and how its users are actually the product and not the customer. Your data is not secure and you get targeted ads because every single move you make online is being tracked.”
The next step for the production will be a workshop and world premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater followed by a presentation in New York City.
“It’s very exciting and nice to be recognized” Marcantel said of the award. “The whole point of the award is to help musicals get a presentation in New York City, so that producers, directors and actors can become acquainted with it.”
As a writer, director and collaborator, Marcantel has written over 30 plays. Her resume includes nearly a dozen one-act and full length plays including “Airness,” “Everything Is Wonderful”, “Ladyish,” “Devour,” and “Tiny Houses.”
“The Monster” is her first musical, but she is currently working on four other musicals, mostly adaptations from films or books.
When not writing an array of other projects, Marcantel is busy behind the scenes researching projects, editing scripts and conducting theater workshops.
Marcantel says she finds ideas for her works in all sorts of places, but most come from non-fiction.
“I listen to a lot of podcasts, watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of news articles and non-fiction books,” she said. “A lot of times I read something that I find really interesting and will spend a whole day on a research worm hole. I also do a lot of adaptations, especially with music and comedy.”
Her works have been showcased in professional theaters in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Delaware, Cleveland and Cincinnati, as eel as smaller theaters across the country.
She has also won the American Theatre Critics Association’s M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018 for her play Airness. She also won the Emerging Playwright Award from the Chicago Union League Civic and Arts Foundation and the Roe Green Award.
Marcantel has always wanted to be in the arts.
“I started writing plays officially in college at LSU in the early 2000s, but my parents will probably tell you I was forcing my brother and sister to be actors in my little creations as far back as they can remember,” she said. “I remember getting a lot of resistance from them, but I’d make them memorize lines and make my parents sit down and watch them do these little plays in our living room.”
As a young girl she started off as an actor doing community theater for CHIPs and A Block Off Broadway at the Strand Theatre in Jennings. Her love for the theater continued through college where she majored in acting and creative writing.
“After my sophomore year of taking a bunch of acting classes I realized whatever was happening for other people when they were acting was not happening for me,” she said. ”I wanted to play all the characters and wanted to re-write all the scenes, so I went to the faculty and said ‘I think I’m a playwright, but there isn’t a playwriting concentration, so the faculty at the theater department worked with me to create a track for myself with some independent study classes and an overlap with my English degree so I graduated with an acting concentration from the theater department although I had carved out this playwriting track for myself.”
She graduated from Louisiana State University in 2005 with a double major in English and Theatre and earned a master’s degree in English Education in 2006. She later taught English and playwriting at Emory and Henry College and taught English and theater at Virginia Intermont College. In 2016, she completed a Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Fellowship at the Juilliard School.
She is married to Miles Polaski, a theatrical sound designer and composer, who is her favorite collaborator.
