The Lark Play Development Center and the Indo-American Arts Council are proud to announce the selections for Playwrights' Week 2009. Eight plays were chosen from over 600 submissions. The playwrights will spend a weeklong residency at the Lark developing their work with professional actors, a director, and Lark staff; they will then present that work in a public reading during the Festival which runs September 30 - October 4.

This year's selections include:

THAT MEN DO by Chad Beckim, a modern-day ghost story involving whispering Scrabble boards, the Giant Buddha of Leshan, earthquakes, and Martin Lawrence.

MISS LILY GETS BONED by Bekah Brunstetter, in which a virginal Sunday school teacher is forced to re-examine her faith.

THE ATLAS OF MUD by Jennifer Fawcett concerns a flooding city, a boat full of birds, and a mother and child trying to find each other in a world of water.

FUTURE ANXIETY by Laurel Haines, about the future America plagued by Tsunamis, strawberry riots, and China calling in its debt, while everyone wants to board a homemade spaceship.

LUTHER, by Ethan Lipton, supposes a world in which abandoned veterans of war are adopted in the fashion that we now adopt abandoned animals. (And Walter and Marjorie are not exactly the best of parents).

THE OLD SHIP OF ZION by Natalia Naman in which a dying deaconess, a troubled church boy, and a college girl all in the midst of tragedy must join a congregation to move on.

NILA by Jen Silverman concerns an ancient bog queen pursued by the men who discovered her, the bog-man who loved her, and a musician in search of a muse.

SWEET NOTHING: A GRIM (FAIRY) TALE by Stephanie Timm takes us to a pillaged land once upon a time where a girl is offered a promise of living happily ever after by marrying a stranger across the sea, and discovers that hope might just be her worst enemy.

Plays developed at the Lark regularly go on to full productions at theaters across the globe. This past year Katori Hall's THE MOUNTAINTOP played London's West End, Tracey Scott Wilson's THE GOOD NEGRO was produced by the Public Theater in New York, and Rajiv Joseph's BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO premiered at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.

A laboratory for new voices and new ideas, the LARK PLAY DEVELOPMENT CENTER provides playwrights with indispensable resources to develop their work. The Lark brings together actors, directors, playwrights and the community to allow writers to learn about their own work by seeing and hearing it, and by receiving feedback from a dedicated and supportive community. The company reaches into untapped local populations and across international boundaries to seek out and embrace unheard voices and diverse perspectives, celebrating differences in language and worldviews. The Lark also plays a leading role in advancing unknown writers and their works to audiences through carefully stewarded partnerships with a host of theaters, universities, community-based organizations, and NGOs, locally, nationally and globally. The Lark is led by Producing Director, John Clinton Eisner and Managing Director, Michael Robertson, and Artistic Program Megan Monaghan. For more information, www.larktheatre.org.

INDO-AMERICAN Arts Council is a registered 501(c) 3 not-for-profit, secular service and resource arts organization charged with the mission of promoting and building the awareness, creation, production, exhibition, publication and performance of Indian and cross-cultural art forms in North America. The IAAC supports all artistic disciplines in the classical, fusion, folk and innovative forms influenced by the arts of India. IAAC works cooperatively with colleagues around the United States to broaden our collective audiences and to create a network for shared information, resources and funding. IAAC's focus is to work with artists and arts organizations in North America as well as to facilitate artists and arts organizations from India to exhibit, perform and produce their works here. For more information, .

For more information on Playwrights' Week, visit www.larktheatre.org.