Pete Barry is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, director and musician. His short play, Drop (co-written with Michael DeAngelis), was a winner of the 2009 Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival. His plays Nine Point Eight Meters Per Second Per Second and The Banderscott were also official selections. His screenplay 10 Crimes in 2 Hours was a finalist in the 13th Annual Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition.
He is a cofounder of the Porch Room and has produced and directed several collections of short plays, including Five Cornered Thinking at the New York Comedy Club and Burt Reynolds Amazing Napalm Powered Oven and Other Paid Programming in the 2001 New York Fringe Festival. He shared the 2009 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play for Accidents Happen.
Pete lives in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania with his wife Jean and his daughter Lia.
J. Michael DeAngelis is a writer, actor and director. His short play, Drop (co-written with Pete Barry), was a winner of the 2009 Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival. He has written or co-written the plays Reunion Special, Reverie and Signs from God. He starred in and co-wrote the short film Tails Between Their Legs, which was a winner of the National Film Challenge. And God Spoke..., a comedy pilot he wrote and directed, aired on SETV in Pennsylvania. He shared the 2009 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play for Accidents Happen.
He is the Managing Director of the Porch Room, where he has written and performed in An Evening on the Porch, Accidents Happen and the short film Early Morning in the Tenement. A proud graduate of Muhlenberg College, Michael is an active performer-director with The Underground Shakespeare Company in Philadelphia, where he currently resides.
John P. Dowgin is a playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He has been involved in theater since the age of 13, and sees no sign of the condition improving anytime soon. His one-act plays The Fruppum, Alabama Chamber of Commerce and Some Colors on a Wall have both been official selections of the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and have since been produced by numerous theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and New Jersey. A number of his screenplays are also in a place called ‘development’, which he suspects to be a purely theoretical dimension somewhere between Purgatory and Oz.
John is a cofounder of The Porch Room and has co-produced and/or co-directed productions including Five Cornered Thinking at the New York Comedy Club and Burt Reynolds Amazing Napalm Powered Oven and Other Paid Programming in the 2001 New York Fringe Festival. He shared the 2009 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play for Accidents Happen. John lives in New Jersey with his wife Faith and his son Caden.
Adam B. Kaufman was the first male in the history of Muhlenberg College to minor in dance. Prominent stage roles include the Gravedigger in Hamlet, Ali Hakim in Oklahoma!, and Mark Anthony in A Chorus Line. Since college he has choreographed his own modern dance show and relocated to NYC, where he has appeared as an extra on Oz, Law and Order, Ed, Death to Smoochy, and The Guru. He's been involved in nearly every Porch Room project, and was seen in Five-Cornered Thinking, Burt Reynolds' Amazing..., and The White Knight, as well as cowrote and directed At the SAG Registry. He also recently choreographed a dance piece for the first Alumni Choreographed Dance Show at Muhlenberg College, and can be seen annually during the holiday season as an elf at the famous FAO Schwarz on New York City's 5th Avenue.
Our point of origin - The late, lamented Bernheim House at Muhlenberg College.
Oscar Bernheim served as one of the most devoted employees in the history of Muhlenberg College. 'Bernie', as he was known, held down various positions as Secretary to the Board of Trustees, Secretary to the President of the College, Secretary and Treasurer of the College, Bursar, Registrar, bookkeeper, printer, purchasing agent, Manager of Athletics, rental and real estate agent, Alumni Secretary, Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, and Manager of the Commons during his tenure. Before his untimely demise, Bernheim willed his home to the college under the proviso it be used as a residence hall for students of foreign languages until such time as that became impractical.
The Bernheim House stood at 2500 Chew Street, directly across the road from the college's student union and next to the Dorothy and Dexter Baker Center for the Performing Arts. It was a three-story structure of no discernible era, a result of more architectural influences than are worth mentioning here. Two rooms, one of good size and one clearly intended for habitation by pygmies, stood on the first floor across from a spacious living room. The second floor contained four rooms of a more standard size while the third floor contained two rooms of such vast expanse that physical experiments regarding the nature of light were often conducted there. One primary feature of the Bernheim house was an elevated porch which extended beyond one of the second floor bedrooms. This room became known as the Porch Room.
The house remained a home for foreign language students until the early 1990s, at which point not enough students of German expressed interest in living there to warrant its allocation to them. The college determined that the new residents of the Bernheim House would be students of the performing arts. Theater students being theater students, Bernheim quickly gained a reputation as a haven for the bizarre, funny, weird, psychotic, schizophrenic, creative and generally fun.
Certain alleged incidents during the period of theatrical occupation include:
The graduating class of 1997 was the final senior class to reside in the Bernheim House. In the fall of 1997, Bernheim House was put to rubble to clear the way for a new multi-million dollar performing arts center.
Two years later, a number of former Bernheim regulars decided to form a theatrical and cinematic production company with the goal of recording and performing their own original works. A number of names were thrown out for the group but after about three weeks of hardy name-hunting, 'The Porch Room' was settled on.
Since our first production, FIVE CORNERED THINKING premiered at the New York Comedy Club, our stage works have been seen at the New York International Fringe Festival, The Actors Playground, The BRUNCH One Act Festival and The Circle Players Theater. Five of our stage works have been honored with recognition by The Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival -The Fruppum Alabama Chamber of Commerce and Some Colors on a Wall (both in 2006), The Banderscott (2007), Drop and Nine Point Eight Meters Per Second Per Second (both in 2009). At the conclusion of the 2009 festival, Drop was selected as a winning play and will soon be available for licence and in print from Samuel French.
In 2009, The Porch Room's Accidents Happen, produced by the Circle Players Theater, won three NJACT Perry Awards, from a total of five nominations - including OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A NEW PLAY. In 2010, the collection of short plays will be published and licensed by Sameul French.
The Porch Room's first outing in the film world, EARLY MORNING IN THE TENEMENT, was an official entry in the first ever Trigger Street Film Festival. THE ADVENTURES OF BAJA ALAJUAN followed with the same honor. Our latest comedy short ,THE WHITE KNIGHT, has been seen at film festivals around the East Coast.
Our members have won awards for their plays and screenplays. Pete's TIME CRIMES IN TWO HOURS won The Screenplay Magazine award. John's FIRESTEEL was entered into the Triggerstreet.com Hall of Fame. Michael developed and co-wrote the short film TAILS BETWEEN THEIR LEGS, which won the National Film Challenge in 2006.
The Porch Room's creative core currently consists of Pete Barry, J. Michael DeAngelis, John Dowgin and Adam Kaufman.
Copyright @2009 The Porch Room LLC