Chuck Cummings

  Chuck has had productions in L.A., London, and a few places in between. His  play “The Negro Building” is a past winner of the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. And “Scarecrow” won the National Archives One-Act Playwriting  Competition. Other productions have included "Tappahannock Blues" at the Mark Taper Forum's Blacksmyths Juneteenth festival, “Edmonia’s Marble,” about black sculptor Edmonia Lewis, at Houston’s Fade to Black theater festival, and “Daddy,” an interracial gay comedy, staged in L.A. and Tucson. 

   Always interested in how technology can be leveraged for storytelling (translation: because he’s kind of a geek), Chuck has also created virtual reality experiences to tackle serious subject matter; or just to make people laugh. His VR piece about the Confederate statues of Richmond, Virginia’s, Monument Avenue, “ReConstruct,” won the VR award at A Show for a Change. Other VR experiences have been featured at the Harlem International Film  Festival, the Georgia Documentary Film Festival, and Sci-On! 

 During the height of the pandemic, Chuck and his LA-based playwrighting group - Playwrights Ink - created a project for the City of West Hollywood allowing restaurants to use socially-distanced stickers with scannable QR codes which linked to short "virtual plays," to entertain customers on their cellphones while they waited in line for to-go orders.

  Sprinkle in a web series acted by gloves (yes, gloves), a short film about a tree being turned into a table, a couple of TV credits (movie-for-television “Intimate Betrayal,” and sitcom,  “Homeboys in Outer Space” – not a typo; it really existed and was a great writing experience), writing fellowships (Disney),  and organizations (Blacksmyths – Mark Taper Forum; Playwrights Ink; WGA; Organization  of Black Screenwriters), and you get the sense that Chuck isn't quite finished creating.