Laura is a playwright and actor. Her writing, including the plays Eminent Domain, Worms, Terminal, and her new work, Buried Phoenix, will always be a search to illuminate the intersections between our real-world struggles and the hope we conjure within ourselves to get us through. Eminent Domain premiered at the Omaha Community Playhouse in 2017 and is part of Lincoln’s Angels Theatre Company 2025 season. Her plays Worms and Terminal were workshopped at the Great Plains Theater Conference in 2017 and 2019. She wrote and directed the film The Phantom of Knockmourne Hall in 2020. Literary awards include: O’Neill Playwriting Conference (Finalist, 2015), Henley Rose Playwriting Competition (Runner-up, 2022), Great Plains Theater Conference (Playlab Playwright, 2017 and 2019), and the Omaha Entertainment Awards (Best Play and Best Original Script, 2018).

Daena Schweiger began writing plays in the late ‘90s for the Mystery Capers Dinner Playhouse as part of their “Redrum Writers” consortium, penning such classics as She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain…In a Hearse, Alma Mater Murder, and KAPR Will Be Back – After This Death! Soon after she took a stab at writing for Shelterskelter and From Shelterbelt with Love, with over a dozen scripts produced. She has also written two full length plays – Love is Strange (Shelterbelt) and Voices From the Closet (SNAP! Productions). She looks forward to getting behind the keyboard again for the monologue showcase.

Joe Basque has been writing monologues for friends and soon-to-be friends for over twenty years. He has had around two dozen one acts and three full length plays produced at the Shelterbelt. Professionally, he writes and argues fiction as an attorney.

Kim is a native of Omaha who believes the best stories are the ones that change us. She earned an MFA in Stage and Screen from UNO, and her writing mission is to tell Omaha stories through the wit, sagacity, and wisdom of women “of a splendid age.” Her theatre work received a staged reading tour of MCC, verbal ofrenda performances during the Day of Dead Celebrations, and public readings at Yates Illuminates, the Union for Contemporary Art, and The Rose Theatre. The production of her one-act “Umurage” was part of an ensemble theatre work nominated for an Omaha Arts and Entertainment award. Kim can often be found writing in coffee shops drawing inspiration from the works of Hurston, Kennedy, Beardon, and Wilson. She’s looking forward to the upcoming performances of her new play “By A Thread” produced by Anastasis Theatre Co.

Peggy Jones, she/her/hers, is an award-winning playwright/visual artist and theatre professor at the UNO. She was in the inaugural cohort of GPTC’s Commoners playwright program. She wrote the book for the dance/arts performance Omaha’s Forgotten Century for Omaha Performing Arts Voices Amplified 2021-22. Her most recent play is Tales from the AfroCosmos, a full-length piece with themes including Afro-Futurist elements. She received a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship for her play, The Journey, about the father of modern Black American art, Aaron Douglas. She’s working on its follow-up, 409 Edgecombe Avenue, which will explore routes of Black agency and liberation.

Kevin is a poet, playwright, director, designer, actor and producer. He is the Director of The Great Plains Theatre Commons, a co-founder of the award-winning Blue Barn Theatre, the founder/director of the National Institute for The Lost, and a Dad.

Ellen Struve’s plays include Recommended Reading for Girls published by PlayScripts Inc. (O'Neill National Playwrights Conference Semi-Finalist, GPTC Stage Write Award), Prince Max’s Trewly Awful Trip to the Desolat Interior (selected for the 2015 PlayPenn Playwrights’ Conference, Great Plains Theatre Conference PlayFest Production), EPIC (GPTC PlayFest Production), The Octopus Play (EST/Sloan Commission), The Dairy Maid-Right (Mid-America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Grant), Untitled Series #7 (Theatre Arts Guild Best Comedy), among others. She is a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and WhyArts Resident Artist. She has degrees from University of Iowa and School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Marie Schuett is a Brazilian American playwright with a passion for storytelling and the arts both on and off the stage as a writer and the General Manager of Marketing and Communications at Film Streams. Awards and recognition include Stuck with Lemons (2019 O’Neill National Playwright Conference semi-finalist), Neighbors, Lovers and All the Others (OEAA Award), The Other Sewing Circle (TAG Outstanding New Script Award), and L’Chaim co-written with Laura Leininger Campbell (TAG Outstanding New Script Award). Other work includes Coming Up for Air (William Inge Festival, GPTC Playlab), and The Break (Amplify Arts grant recipient). Her plays The Suburban Set and About Time: A Love Story Between Three People and Sometimes a Goose were featured in the Omaha Community Playhouse’s Alternative Programming series.

Ben is an Omaha-based playwright and performer. His one-act, "Chekhov’s Gun," received a TAG Award for Best New Script, and he was awarded an OEA Award for Best Premier of a New Original Script for his play, "Crash! Boom! Pow!" He was also nominated for a Best New Script OEA Award for his adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He is the recipient of Omaha Community Playhouse’s inaugural NOW PlayLab Residency and the Great Plains Theatre Commoners Cohort Residency. In January 2025, his work was published in Venus Theater’s “Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts” monologue anthology (available on Amazon).

Scott is an Omaha-based actor, writer, director, and producer. In 1993, he co-founded The Shelterbelt Theatre with his play V of Geese. He has an MFA in Theatre from the University of Iowa and MA in English from the University of Nebraska Omaha, and for 17 years, Scott has been an English and Theatre instructor at MCC. Recently, he’s focused on dramatizing and directing works of the literary canon for The Joslyn Castle Art & Literary Festival.

Murphy Scott Wulfgar is half of one of the most prolific partnerships in the city (Brigit Saint Brigit Theatre). As an actor/writer/director, he has spent three decades stretching traditional boundaries to immerse audiences and reimagine classics. Most recently, adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula into a 360-degree, multimedia production set in 1977 NYC (Dracula 77, 2023); transforming a local diner into Arthur Miller’s Nazi stranglehold (Incident at Vichy, 2019); converting a church hall into Auschwitz’s prison barracks (God on Trial, 2022); and animating the oldest synagogue in Nebraska and Iowa as the set for Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man (2023).

Brian Guehring is the award-winning Playwright in Residence at the Rose. Brian’s recent scripts include Secret Kindness Agents, Sherlock Holmes and the First Baker Street Irregular, and Popularity Coach. Brian has worked the Rose for over 25 years as an actor, youth director, and educator. Brian is the co-director and co-founder of queer youth theater troupe Pride Players. While he can’t always get his youth actors to project, he easily has the two loudest dogs in South Omaha. Recently a kindergartener saw him and said, “Oh, Mr. Brian, I can’t. You are too funny.”