Joy Gregory

JOY GREGORY is a writer for stage and television. She is a founding member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, where her most recently produced works were The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World and Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, a co-adaptation with David Schwimmer of the book by Studs Terkel (Jefferson nomination, adaptation). Her television writing credits include “Felicity,” “Swingtown,” “Jericho,” “Joan of Arcadia” and the new series “Switched at Birth” on ABC Family. She is a member of the Los Angeles Dogear Playwrights Collective and once appeared as a corpse in the feature film Blink with Peter Friedman. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Denis and their daughter Lucie.

Gunnar Madsen

Grammy-nominated composer GUNNAR MADSEN has written for the Minnesota Opera, Lincoln Center, NPR and the National Beef Council; he has performed on PBS, the BBC, “The Tonight Show,” the “Smothers Brothers Show” and on every “Good Morning!” show in the US. He co- founded the internationally acclaimed a cappella group The Bobs; provided the singing voice of Sammy Davis Jr. in the HBO film The Rat Pack; licensed his ravishing waltzes to HBO’s hit series “Sex and the City”; released three CDs for families which have won virtually every top children’s music honor; designed sound and music for the hit video game San Francisco Rush; and appeared in and wrote music for the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston film The Break Up. (As of May 2011)

John Langs

JOHN LANGS has directed productions at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, the Lookingglass Theatre Company (Chicago), Circle X Theatre Co. (Los Angeles) Ensemble Studio Theatre (NY), Delaware R.E.P. Co., American Players Theatre (WI) and The Seattle Shakespeare Company, where he is an Associate Artist. Some favorite productions include King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet (Seattle Footlight Award, Best Production of the Year), The Brothers Karamazov (LADCC Award, Best Direction) and The Adding Machine, for which he received the first ever Gregory Falls Award for direction. John is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts. John’s most recent co-production with his wife, Klea Scott, is their son, Captain, who was born in January 2010. (As of May 2011)

• “FOUR STARS – CRITICS’ PICK! A captivating and bravely weird new musical that elicits sweet harmonies from the world’s worst rock band. There are deep, disturbing joys to be had in this oddball-underdog odyssey. "The Shaggs" deserves a serious listen.”

  — David Cote, Time Out New York

• “Remarkably – insistently – memorable. Peter Friedman is astonishing. ”

  — Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg News

• “Sweetly Shaggs-adelic and genuinely heartbreaking. ”

  — Elisabeth Vincentelli, NY Post