LouJ Stalsworth is a theatre denizen who’s worn many hats ~ playwright, director, producer, critic and general theater junkie. In addition, he taught Theater History, Introduction to Story, Screenwriting and Playwriting at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. With his wife, designer Kate Pinner, they guided PinnWorth Productions to statewide awards and popularity with shows as small and intimate asThe Fantasticks and Talley’s Folly and as large and sprawling as Miss Saigon andDisney’s Newsies. Their idea of the perfect vacation is the annual trip to Canada for the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford.
He was awarded a New Jersey Fellowship for his play Family Recipes which was largely created at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a grant recipient from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation several years before relocating to Virginia Beach. His plays often deal with men and women ~ how they love, live with and sometimes leave one another. His screenplays, on the other hand, run the gamut from historical figures such as John Brown and Charlotte Cushman to an examination of professional wrestling gone violently bad in The Reality Show.
A member of the Dramatist Guild, he holds an MFA in playwriting from Mason Gross School of the Arts/Rutgers University and views the stage as a world of opportunities where everyone can see themselves. He is a two-time winner of the Z’s annual Proteus New Play Festival with Boxes of Someday and Coming to Terms.
He is currently exploring the world of parenting in a new work tentatively titled Legacies wherein our children outlive us ~ as they should ~ but what we teach them lives on after us. In the meantime, every day is a great day to search for new venues where he can share new words, new characters and all their stories with new audiences.
Theater is not a hobby. It’s not a job. It’s a passion.