Mark Jensen is an award-winning playwright, lyricist, and author. His plays and musicals include Runestone! A Rock Musical (History Theatre) Young Lindy, History Detectives: Landmark Center, Tom Sawyer (Steppingstone Theatre for Youth Development), Atomic Summer (Theatre in the Square), The Benevolent Women’s Craft Society (Rochester Repertory Theatre), Weldings (Prairie Wind Players), and Hoffman: Journey Through Time (Lake Region Arts Council). Mark co-wrote a drama for Deaf and hearing youth, The Finger Dance: A Deaf Girl’s Journey Through Music. The National Theatre for the Deaf recognized this piece as an “Outstanding Play for Young People”. He is an Affiliated Artist and a Core Alumnus of the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis. He received his BA in Theatre Arts/English Writing from Concordia College (Moorhead, MN) and his MFA in playwriting from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
A performer and composer, Gary Rue has been playing music for audiences throughout the western hemisphere since the mid-’60s, beginning with various town halls in the upper Midwest and graduating to East Coast “tent” tours that included the Big Apple (Carnegie Hall as music director and duet partner for Gene Pitney) and on to far-flung points in Canada and the Caribbean. Early along the way, Rue began writing music of his own and was rewarded with some of his songs being recorded by (among others) Nick Lowe and Helen Reddy, as well as many prominent regional artists. He is the author of nearly 80 scores for music theatre, including The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fair(l)y (Stoopid) Tales, which toured the U.S. and China with Dallas Children’s Theater. Rue is also a 2010 Minnesota Music Hall of Fame inductee and an active touring musician and educator.
