ACTC professor's plays keep garnering success

Lee Ward, The Daily Independent, Ashland, Ky.
Updated ·3 min read

Jun. 1—ASHLAND — Success continues growing for Jonathan Joy, a playwright and an associate professor of English at Ashland Community and Technical College.

Joy's play, "Ice to Meet You," was accepted into Gi60: The International One Minute Theatre Festival. It's the sixth play in 19 years he's written that has been accepted into the festival. It will be performed July 6, 7, 8 and 9 at The Tank Theater in New York.

"'Ice To Meet You' is a short, superhero-laden comedy for children, an offshoot of my newspaper column of stories for kids and the 'Professor Theo's Mystery Lab' podcast," Joy said.

First Stage Theatre Company in Huntington workshopped the play in March, and he said he was pleased with the result.

"I was really impressed with the work the kids did on it," he said. "They showed me what a fun and funny play it could be and, as a result, I submitted it to Gi60."

Another one of his plays, "Don't Drink the Jet Fuel," was accepted into "The Sixth Fest" and will be presented today at The Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan and June 8 and 9 at St. John's Lutheran Church in Brooklyn.

"'Don't Drink The Jet Fuel,' winner of the University of Illinois 2018 Inner Voices Social Issues Theatre national writing contest, is a play about clean water, family relationships and the past, present, future of West Virginia," Joy said. The play premiered in West Virginia with the Greenbrier Valley Theatre in Lewisburg in 2019.

Joy is the author of 50 plays that have been staged in 18 states, including a four-week run in 2018 of "Darlene's Resistance Monologue" with The Open Fist Theatre in Los Angeles. He has won nine West Virginia Writers awards and his farce, "Little Donkeys and Elephants," was named one of eight winners (out of 150 entries) of the Chappaqua Library's 2016 Political Comedy Play Festival in New York. One of his plays, "Down on Sandusky Road," was made into a film directed by Josh Baldwin of Lewisburg, W.Va. Joy also plays the fictional part of Professor Theo on "Professor Theo's Mystery Lab," a podcast of children's stories he writes, records and edits with his wife and son.

While Joy said it's unlikely he'll have the chance to see either "Ice to Meet You" or "Don't Drink the Jet Fuel" in person, they eventually will be available on YouTube and will be live streamed. His most produced play, "The News Done Spread," is a comedy for teens with a lesson about spreading fake news. It was produced in Sacramento, California, and will be used at an Iowa summer camp.

"With over two dozen productions in the last two years, it is far and away my most produced play," he said. "I don't get to see many of these, either, but they're usually used in middle school and high school classrooms and the teachers are usually great about keeping in touch, asking questions, sending pics and letting me know how it all goes."

(606) 326-2661 — lward@dailyindependent.com