About Fish

Fish, by emerging Austin, Texas playwright Cyndi Williams is about a middle-aged woman, Laura, who accidentally kills a 20ish girl in a car accident.  Her life turned upside down, she goes on a quest to find balance. It's a dark and sometimes eerie comedy about people trying to move on after bad things have happened.

Ms. Williams unique voice wrings comedy out of tragedy.  All of us at one time or another are searching for meaning in this life. We rush from one comittment to the next, rarely stopping to contemplate life's mysteries. In Fish teenage convenience store clerks, odd-ball bartenders, and a schizophrenic pot smoking mother get all philosophical.  Fish questions notions of fate, predestination, alternate realities, and parallel universes.  As Oscar Wilde so elegantly put it, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." 

Dallas Morning News Critic Tom Sime listed the Core Performance Manufactory production of Fish in his list of Top 10 Plays writing, “This gem by Austin playwright Cyndi Williams ... stood out with a moving, funny and haunting script about a collision of souls in the aftermath of a collision of lives in a car accident."

About the Playwright

Cyndi Williams is Managing Director of Refraction Arts, and a Founding Core Member of Austin Script Works.  Her plays include A Name for a Ghost to Mutter (1999 Best New American Play Award, Larry L. King Award in the Harvest Festival of New Plays, Equity productions in the 2000-2001 season at the State Theater Company in Austin and summer 2004 by the Spectral Sisters in Alexandria, Louisiana, Tyler Junior College in December 2006), Fish (CorePerformance production in the Dallas Festival of Independent Theaters named in the Top Ten Plays of 2002 by Tom Stine of the Dallas Morning News),  American Arcana (Public Domain/Austin Script Works production 1997, New York's Genesius Guild staged reading 2003, Refraction Arts production 2004), and Getting Across Town (Manhattan Theatre Club reading October 2003, Salvage Vanguard Theater workshop 2006).  Her short plays Flawed and Hey Cow! were produced in New York by the Looking Glass Forum.  She was a member of the Orange Writers Collective, and collaborated on RAP’s Philomel Project, Spin, Up In the Old Hotel, and The Assumption.  She also collaborated with Ariel Dance Company on text for Gyre, and with St. Idiot’s Collection on text for I Heart You.  Her most recent play, Where Are They Now?, was originally commissioned by Austin Script Works and Shrewd Productions.  Its full production in 2006 garnered six Critics Table Nominations, including Cyndi for Best Director of a Drama, and was awarded Best Drama.
 
An actor in Austin for over 20 years, she starred in the independent feature film, Room, which played at numerous festivals in 2005 and 2006, including Sundance and Cannes.  Her work in that film garnered her a nomination for Best Lead Actress in the Independent Spirit Awards, and the Women Film Critics Table awarded her the Karen Morley Award.   Other recent film and television projects include roles in The Cassidy Kids, Gretchen,  Chickenfut, and Johnny Goes To Texas.   The Austin American Statesman included Cyndi and her husband David Jones in the Fortunate 500, a list of prominent Austinites, and she was named one of Austin’s Top Ten Creatives by Austin Monthly Magazine. 

She is currently working on another commission, a three-person play called Dug Up, as well as a new version of Gyre.

Also see these other great FringeNYC shows: