D.W. Gregory’s award-winning comedy,  A Thing of Beauty, will be be featured in CreateTheater’s 2025 New Works Festival May 15 – 25.

“Very real, and unexpectedly funny! I laughed out loud just reading it,” says Cate Cammarata, Founder of CreateTheater.

A Thing of Beauty will be presented in  an invitation-only reading format,  directed by James Glossman. It is one of eight plays that will receive readings as part of the festival.

“I’m thrilled to be part of the festival for a second time,” Gregory says.

Previously, her musical The Yellow Stocking Play, written with composer Steven M. Alper and lyricist Sarah Knapp,  garnered awards for  best musical and best book of musical in CreateTheater’s 2023 New Works Fest.

Oscar Wilde Meets the Marx Brothers.

A Thing of Beauty is a screwball comedy about art, greed, and censorship in 1950s New England.

“Think Oscar Wilde meets the Marx Brothers,” Gregory says.

“It’s about a small-town society grande dame who decides to sponsor an art competition. But when the judges award first prize  to an anonymous nude, she completely wigs out,” Gregory says. “So she embarks on a mad campaign to find a more “appropriate’ winner.” Meanwhile, she is completely unaware that her own secretary is the muse who inspired the offending work.

“Things only get worse when she discovers the unnamed artist is the mailman who keeps losing her deliveries. But just as her campaign for public decency gets off the ground,  an influential New York art critic arrives on the scene, hell-bent on championing the work of this formerly unknown ‘artist of the people.'”

A Comedy About Serious Themes.

A Thing of Beauty  won the Southeastern Theater Conference’s Charles Getchell New Play Prize in 2023. SETC presented the play in a staged reading at its conference that year.  Also, Barter Theater presented a staged reading of the play in its Festival of Appalachian Plays and Playwrights. (Gregory, a Pennsylvania native, is based in Shepherdstown, WV.)

Though the play is a comedy, it wrestles with serious themes. In an interview with Southern Theater, Gregory said conversations happening about representation in art were on her mind as she was writing the script.

“All of this sort of rolls into this story, but this is really about class,”  she told the magazine. “Thus, the issue of access to art, and who can really break into these rarified worlds, and who the gatekeepers are, and the barriers to somebody who’s just trying to get by in the world.”

The full interview can be found here.

For more information about the play, contact the author through the contact page on this website. Or, send an email to mrsbouffant@gmail.com.