Peter Coy

Peter Coy's 30-year career in the theatre includes work as a director, a producer, a playwright, and a stage manager. He has directed more than thirty productions, everything from American realism to an opera/drama adaptation of Sophocles to improvisational evenings to experimental musicals to Shakespeare. He was for several years the director of new play development at the Phoenix Theatre in New York where he worked with playwrights Romulus Linney, Tom Topor, and Conrad Bromberg, among others, directing workshops/stage readings of their new plays. Since 1987 he has written several one-acts, two screenplays, and 18 full-length plays and adaptations including Break In (New York off-off Broadway at the Windowpane Theater), Songs & Sonnets and Dreams No Mortal Ever Dared (Jefferson Studio Theater, Charlottesville, Virginia), an opera/drama adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone (St. Clements Church, New York), and a three-actor adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard II (Central Virginia Theater Project and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts). He has recently completed two plays, Destiny Bay and The Wind Bloweth, adapted from the novels of Irishmanm B.O.D. Byrne. His play, A House In The Country, produced by Charter Theater, won the 2000 Helen Hayes Award for the Outstanding New Play produced in Washington, DC. His plays, Carrie Rose and Walking Into Darkness and his screen play, Barstow (co-written with his son Morgan Coy), were all chosen for development and stage readings at the Shenandoah International Playwrights Retreat. His focus in recent years has been on the theatricality of the narrative voice on stage and on how language and the act of telling a story create a dramatic intensity of their own. When not engaged in theater, Coy has worked farming cotton and peanuts in southwest Georgia, also as a legal assistant in adoption cases, a high school and college instructor, a fund raiser, a newsletter publisher, an organizer of international conferences on aviation economics and maritime law, a real estate manager, and a deck hand on sailboats. He has for as long as he can remember loved trees and Irish music and watching the constellations. He now lives in Nelson County, Virginia with Mary Coy and their two sons, Eamon and Liam. His older children, Oona and Morgan, are off on their own.

Boomie Pedersen was born and raised in NYC and was for many years a professional-track scholarship student with the Joffrey Ballet. She gave up the dance to attend Princeton University where she eventually majored in English and Theater and won the Frances LeMoyne Paige Prize at graduation, for both theater and dance. She spent 10 years on and off in Tokyo, Japan where she did professional voiceover work, ran Tokyo Theater for Children, was actor, director and board member for Tokyo International Players and wrote several commissioned pieces for Earth Day and other special events. She spent a brief 18 months in Los Angeles where she was involved in the Asian Theater Lab and acted in the premiere performance of Widescreen Version of the World by Han Ong.

When she relocated to Charlottesville in 1995, she became involved at Live Arts and acted (Scrooge, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Assassins, Edward the II, Copenhagen, Noises Off) and directed (Three Tall Women, Buried Child, Play About the Baby, The Underpants) there. She also worked with the Nelson County Drama Foundation and mounted an outdoor production of Earl Hamner's The Conflict at Mountain Cove Vineyard in 1998 and 1999. She has worked with Offstage Theater, 4 County Players and PVCC, and taught theater at Renaissance School in Charlottesville for 4 years as well. Boomie lives in Crozet with her family, which includes one daughter and five sons, a husband/theater collaborator, several cats and dogs and a mouse.