Vince Gatton, Actor and Playwright

Vince Gatton is a New York-based award-winning playwright and Drama Desk-nominated actor. His full-length play ALEXANDRIA won Sanguine Theatre Company’s Project Playwright Festival, and his short BETTER was one of the winners of the 2018 Samuel French OOB Festival. Other shorts have had readings in Motolla Theatre Project’s annual Cherry Picking new-play-generating event at the Wild Project in NYC; IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF HI-Q, BETTER, and HEY were all finalists for the National Playwriting Award at City Theatre in Miami; and another short, JAM, won Best Play in the 2015 LIC Short Play Festival at the Secret Theatre in Long Island City. WAKE, his first full-length play, was a semifinalist for PlayPenn, and a finalist with readings at Dayton Playhouse’s FutureFest, Boomerang Theatre’s First Flight Festival, and Vintage Theatre Productions’ Mystery/Thriller New Works Festival, and was recently published by Next Stage Press. He received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Play for David Johnston's Candy and Dorothy. Other notable acting credits include Leigh Fondakowski’s SPILL at Ensemble Studio Theatre; I Am My Own Wife and Fully Committed at Barrington Stage Company; I Am My Own Wife again at Coachella Valley Rep (Desert Star Award Nomination) and Two Turns Theatre Company; and The Temperamentals at New World Stages, standing by for Michael Urie. He’s appeared on TV in BLUE BLOODS and LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, and you can also catch him being himself on a certain rerun of Jeopardy, in the documentary Married & Counting, and in the Pippin episode of Encore! on Disney+. His short play THE OKTAVIST was recently named the winner of the inaugural Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for Ten Minute Plays, and will be published by The Tusculum Review in November 2023.

On FULLY COMMITTED at Barrington Stage Company:

"I found myself simply in awe of Gatton's accomplishment. Not only does he whisk through the complex material with startling fluidity, he also makes each character come alive in ways that surmount mere caricature...it's the subtle strokes and nuances of character that ultimately put us under Gatton's spell...the effect is a performance that is at once dazzling, engaging, and exhilarating."

-- Ralph Hamman, Metroland Online

On I AM MY OWN WIFE at Coachella Valley Rep:

“Any actor or student of theater must see this performance. It is epic. There are moments which are beyond description…This is beyond brilliant—it’s a feat of memory and acting techniques that will leave any of us gasping. Occasionally, we might think we will actually glimpse the actor underneath it all … but then the chameleon changes again, and slips away from us.”

-- VJ Hume, CV Independent

WAKE is now available from Next Stage Press!

4M, 1 W

90-minutes, no intermission

Ghost Story/Thriller/Domestic Drama

Dan and Eric have a new marriage license, a new baby, and a new house in the country. As they settle into this new life, Dan is having what seem to be sleepwalking episodes. A ghost story told by a young visitor leads Eric to suspect that Dan's sleepwalking incidents are actually something far more sinister -- but are they what he thinks they are? Or are there other forces at work?

WAKE is a ghost story for the post-AIDS generation, a play about marriage, expectations, and the power of narrative to both heal and harm.

Get it here: https://www.nextstagepress.com/wake/

Smith & Kraus Best Men's Stage Monologues 2022: The Oktavist

Dimitri, male, late teens/early-to-mid-20s

In a small church in Imperial Russia, Father Kirill is approached by Dimitri, the scion of a prominent local family, to ask a favor: the eager young man is convinced it's his divine calling to be an oktavist, one of the legendary ultra-deep-voiced singers in Russian liturgical music. That calling, and much else, must now be put to the test.

Get it here.

YOU HAVE EARNED BONUS STARS

Madlab Theatre, Columbus

Directed by Katie Palczak

With Jessica Gibson, Susie McGarry, Tyreese Bowman, Kasey Meiniger, and Dallas Ray

"You Have Earned Bonus Stars kicks off with one of the most exciting half hours I’ve seen on a stage in a while...It strikes a perfect, thorny tone – leavening an understanding of these characters with the tonic of some acidic humor – that embraces the fact that our petty complaints with one another, our craven jealousies, our arbitrary social hierarchies don’t change when something terrible happens. That gratitude at being alive, and the guilt of being alive, still swims in the sea of who we are, for better or worse."

-- Richard Sandford, Columbus Underground