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Hate Mail is an epistolary play something like Love Letters, with two actors reading letters and other correspondence, but it's a little wilder and more hysterically funny. It tells the story of Preston, a spoiled rich kid who meets his match in Dahlia, an angst-filled artist. Their worlds collide when Preston sends a complaint letter that gets Dahlia fired from her job, and then there's no turning back. The play stays with their increasingly crazed correspondence as they move from hate to love, and then right back again.
"Corbett and Obolensky drip sardonic, hilarious acid from their pens, picking apart their characters with enviously articulate and explosively funny letter-grenades."
--Twin Cities Reader
Bill Corbett is a playwright, television writer, screenwriter, and performer.
He was a writer on the cult TV comedy Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), where he also played the voice of the wisecracking robot Crow T. Robot during the show's run on the Sci Fi Channel, as well as the strange alien Observer (also known as "Brain Guy") as well as a host of other minor parts. He was also writer for the miniseries The Adventures of Edward the Less in 2001, along with several other former MST3K cast members.
His other plays include Heckler; Ridiculous Dreaming (an adaptation of Heinrich Boll's The Clown, commissioned and produced by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis); Down the Pike, winner of the Actors Theater of Louisville National One-Act Contest; short plays Manifesto and Hunters, produced by the HBO Writers Project in Los Angeles; Cash Karma, first produced by the Organic Theater in Chicago; and Motorcade, produced at theaters in the U.S., Canada, and Japan.
Mr. Corbett has been a contributing writer to National Public Radio's Prairie Home Companion and All Things Considered, and was co-creator of the animated web series Poker Night on Icebox.com. He has also been a member of the acting companies at the Guthrie Theater and the Berkshire Theater Festival, and has taught playwriting at Kenyon College in Ohio, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and numerous other universities and schools.
He is a Core Member of The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, and a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, where he earned an MFA in playwriting and screenwriting. Before that, he received a BA from Yale College. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Mr. Corbett currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Katelyn Stack and Jeff English as Dahlia and Preston
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