Doug DeVita’s dark comedy Upper Division, a Semi-Finalist for Normal Avenue’s 2019 New Play Series, has been named a Finalist for B Street Theatre’s New Comedy Festival. B Street is in Sacramento, and was founded by Timothy Busfield. His brother Buck is the Producing Artistic Director.
A member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Doug’s play Phillie’s Trilogy (AKA The Phillie Trilogy,) was recently named a Semi-Finalist in Barrington Stage Company’s first ever competition for the Burman New Play Award, placing in the top 60 out of over 450 submissions. It also won Scrap Mettle Arts Inaugural Emerging Playwrights Program competition, was chosen to inaugurate Great Griffon’s “Seeking The Queer Voice” reading series in January 2017, and was produced as part of the 2017 Fresh Fruit Festival, where it recieved a Fresh Fruit Award of Distinction for Outstanding Production. Other work includes The Fierce Urgency Of Now, also produced at the 2016 Fresh Fruit festival, where it won four Fresh Fruit Awards of Distinction, including Outstanding Play, and Outstanding Production; Upper Division, recently named a Semi-Finalist for Normal Avenue’s New American Play Series; NELL DASH, The Gruesomely Merry Adventures Of An Irrepressibly Sensible Capitalist With A Vengeance; and Just A Rumor (co-written with Gary Lyons) which was a Semi-Finalist at the Eugene O’Neill Playwright’s Conference and has had readings at New York’s Abingdon Theatre Company and London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. His ten-minute play, Checking The Basement for Leaks (the first play in Phillie’s Trilogy) has been performed at the Gallery Players Black Box Festival in New York, The Driftwood Players Short Works Festival in Seattle, Ramapo College in New Jersey, and The Warner International Playwrights Festival in Connecticut. He has also collaborated with actress Lane Bradbury (the original Dainty June in Gypsy, starring Ethel Merman) on her one-woman show Let Me Entertain You, Again, which was performed at the Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles, as well as Feinstein’s/54 Below, and Don’t Tell Mama in New York.
Doug belongs to both Rogelio’s Rogues, and The 36th Street Writers Block (formerly Abingdon Theatre Playwrights Group 1) in Manhattan, and has studied with Karen Hartman, Rogelio Martinez, and Eric Webb.
He has also worked as an Art director/Copywriter for such advertising agencies as Grey Global Group, J. Walter Thompson, and N.W. Ayer, and was the marketing director for Abingdon Theatre Company for four years. He was also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Advertising Design Department at F.I.T. in New York. All of the above, along with a Catholic school education and his mother, have given him an unbelievable amount of material.
