Greg Jones Ellis

About the Artist

Greg Jones Ellis is an award winning playwright, actor and singer. He received a 2017 Julie Harris Playwriting Award for his comedy-drama All Save One, set in Hollywood in the 1950s.  The play was first performed as a staged reading at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of its 2017 Page-to-Stage New Plays Festival.  All Save One was then chosen by the Washington Stage Guild in Washington, DC, as a World Premiere production in its 2018-19 season.  His previous plays include Divinity Place, which received its World Premiere in 2017 at the North Street Playhouse in Onancock, Virginia.  Based on the playwright’s parents’ wedding, the comedy, set during WWII, is published by Stage Rights (www.stagerights.com). Ellis collaborated with the late Michael Lee Stockler on a musical version of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear titled Lying Together, as well as an industrial musical commissioned by Robert Moss, co-founder of Playwrights Horizons in New York City, for the Meriwether’s restaurant chain. His most recent works are a double bill of one-act plays: the first act is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s short story Roman Fever; this is followed by an original comedy entitled Culver City Fever. His contemporary drama about the tragic consequences of a daytime talk show, Dead Air, will be performed as a reading at the 2019 Page-to-Stage Festival. .  Greg has also published theatre-related articles, including a peer-reviewed analysis of Langston Hughes’s monologue poems entitled “The Lifelong Dinner Guest of the Negro Vogue” and profiles of playwrights Marsha Norman and Paul Zindel for Biography magazine. He created a 10-week course, “10 Plays Everyone Should Know,” for the Osher Institute for Lifetime Learning that proved so popular that two “sequel” courses followed.  His onstage credits include Mr. Bumble in the musical Oliver! (Annapolis Shakespeare Company), Mr. Lundie in Brigadoon (Compass Rose Theater), the doomed English shipbuilder Thomas Andrews in Titanic (Theatre Lab), Ludwig Von Beethoven in 33 Variations (Colonial Players) and the snobbish butler Horace Lane in the musical adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest, entitled Ernest in Love (Colonial Players). Other recent acting credits include Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd (Opera AACC), Man in Samuel Beckett’s Play (Arcturus Theatre Company) and Sempronius in a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens called Timon 2016 (DC Fringe). He has more than fifty theatre roles to his credit in off-off Broadway, stock, and workshop productions from Missouri to Manhattan, Wisconsin to Washington, DC. His musical credits include an international tour with legendary jazz musician Max Roach as part of his vocal ensemble (and on the recording To the Max!). His own jazz and American songbook compositions and arrangement have been heard by New York performance groups Vocal Ease and the John Motley Singers as well as in his own performances in New York venues such as Reno Sweeney’s and the Ballroom. Under the direction of maestro John Motley, Greg has performed at Carnegie Hall, the 2000 year-old Arena di Verona in Italy and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. His teachers have included Broadway veterans Shawn Elliot (Jacques Brel is Alive and Well…) and Arabella Hong (Flower Drum Song). He earned his B.A. (magna cum laude) in Drama at Catholic University and an M.A. (with high honors) in English Literature from Salisbury University.  He also studied cinema with renowned film historian William K. Everson at New York University and playwriting with Lucas Hnath (A Doll’s House Part 2) at Stony Brook University.

Artist's Statement

Whether through writing or performing, my intention and focus is always on communicating to the audience. Self-expression is a by-product, not a primary goal. I always want to see and hear the audience in my head as I create.