ENDSTATION PROFILES: Joshua Mikel

:to be read in the dialect of a dixie man:

Born January 27th in the year of 1984 in the small Georgian township of Dekalb. A true-to-nature, water-carryin' Aquarius. A man still recoverin' from the 'baseball bat to the face' incident of 1991. A dreamer, (sometimes, with my help) a doer, a grandparent enthusiast, and an all-american vagabond. Internets... come round and meet Joshua Lee Mikel.

As Resident Playwright for the Playwrights' Initiative in conjunction with the Endstation Theatre Company, Joshua is usually glued to my side parts for the lion's share of the summer. It can be a real pain in my neck, but typically, we are joyful in each other's company. Ever read On The Road? He wrote it. And he brags to high heaven about it in the little smirk on his face and sag in his step. Whilst mooching off the generosity of our founders, Mister Geoffrey Kershner and Missus Krista Franco, he typically creates some astoundin' work (for a back-woods Georgian boy) and we all is proud to have him on our staff.

F'example, in the summer last, he wrote the southern gothic stunner, My Brother's Knife: A Madison Heights Odyssey for the Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival. You may have seen it (or you maybe you didn't.) But it was a spectacle and true-to-form of the talent and capability squeezed into his strange, gangly, slender frame like a fat marmut in a prairie dog hole. He really has a stranglehold on what some Yankee elites like to call an 'aesthetic'. He knows the story he wants to be tellin', and he knows how to scribble it down like a regular Dorothy Allison. He somehow convinced Playscripts Publishers to pick up three of his plays and print 'em on the press (Quentin G; Good Good Trouble On Bad Bad Island; Monster Hunters). He's even been accepted into the New York International Fringe Festival with the second one. I'm producin' that one and the two of us are journeying into the eye of the devil himself (Manhattan) in the latter days of this comin' August . Don't go tellin' him I told you, but... well, he's a gem. A gem, you listenin'?

On top of all them trophies, he acts the socks off of people who should know better than to wear socks around him and he's a graphic/fine artist, to boot. He has so much goin' on in his little world, it makes a small boy like myself want to cry because I'll never be President of the Confederacy but he'll probably be the next Ralph Nader. If I were more progressive, I'd take him as my spouse, but since I'm a Dixie man through and through, I settle for the glue that keeps our side parts cemented to the other.

And, as every man who's drunk a bottle of small-batch, kentucky bourbon alongside him has said, 'Glory to God, that boy is fine and may the Lord above, keep him mine.'

m.

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Michael Stablein, Jr.

Head of Playwrights' Initiative