Teacher of the Year is a film script for a theatrical video designed specifically to address the production and performance constraints that theater companies, performers, artists, and audiences have to adopt to ensure health and safety during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
It was filmed in the Spring of 2021 and has been honored with awards by the London International Film Festival (Best Actress in a Leading Role,) The New York Neorealism Awards (Best Film,) The New York International Film Festival (Official Selection.)

More about/view the film: https://teacher-of-the-year.com/

Blurb:
The Minnehaha Montessori School of South Minneapolis has gone totally online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Annie - a finalist for the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award three times running - should have no problem getting her 6th graders to the end of the school year. Easy. Right? 
Trojan Woman tells the story of a woman, a family, a teacher, a school, a hospital, and a neighborhood in the city of Minneapolis during the Spring of 2020.

Production Concept:
The entire production can be accommodated by using screen-grab video recording applications available for computers and phones. The applications would record live interactions the actors are performing on their computers and phones.

The phones and computers would use applications that take advantage of their built-in video cameras. The actors will be visible while they are using their computers and phones to interact with each other.

The output of this script is a video - broken into 12 episodes - that documents these interactions. The video recording relies on video screen-grab technologies designed for computers and phones.

As a mid-winter blizzard blankets Manhattan under three feet of snow, a troubled young man with nowhere to go crashes his widowed stepmother's 40th birthday party. His arrival triggers a flurry of memories - fond, painful, and frightening - and unwittingly exposes his family to the danger that haunts him on the abandoned streets below.

"Unsafe is powerful, relentless, and unsettling... As for (Anna) Botsford, it is impossible to take your eyes of her as Lisa struggles to act as if life could ever be normal again. Her long, slow, slide into decompensation is done gradually and masterfully, until she explodes with one of the most raw catharses I have witnessed. Her performance is painful to experience, and entirely authentic."
- Nancy Grossman, Broadway World

“…raw and lovely and exquisitely written and acted… Jim Dalglish directs his play with relentless efficiency, bringing his vision to riveting life… a powerful evening of theater. Be brave. Check it out.”
- Kilian Melloy, Edge Media Boston

"The play’s structure is brilliantly conceived, with fantastical sequences and elements blending in with the action... It is rich with metaphor, drama, high action and pathos. This is an ambitious, intelligent and intriguing evening of theater.... A word about the acting: superb."
- Carol Panasci, Cape Cod Times

After her husband dies, Maxie discovers she’s spent most of her adult life living in a house of cards. Now she's destitute in a down economy. Her practical daughter – who has her own set of problems with an unemployed husband and hellion daughter – insists that Maxie begin a new life of austerity and sacrifice. Maxie shops at Daffys instead of Bergdorfs. She takes the bus instead of a car service. She’s given up the Met, MOMA, BAM, and even Botox. Nothing seems to help. If only someone… anyone… would recognize all the talent Maxie has to offer.

A blizzard, a pregnancy, and an emotionally fragile high school quarterback take a small North Dakota town by storm.

"It was like something wild came over me and made me strong, and brave, and invincible. I was wild and couldn't be stopped... not by anyone." - Billy

Mark and Tom live alone on a remote farm on the windswept plains of North Dakota. Then one day a rapacious traveling saleswoman drives up the gravel road in a pink Continental.

“Honey, if this isn’t the edge of the world, bet sure as hell you can see it from here... Bet sure as hell.” - Abbey

Mary is on her way to her impossibly thin step-sister’s engagement party, when she has a shoe emergency. Where the hell will she be able to find a pair of 12 Double E pumps at this time of night?

"Feel the power? The thrill of 3-inch spikes. There’s a reason they’re called spikes, Mary. Because they’re weapons. Like two 45 Caliber pistols strapped to each ankle. Power, Mary. Power." - Nigel

A widow and a clerk working the grave-yard shift discover the secret to life might be as obvious as a box hanging on a rack at the local Wallgreen’s.

"I want something that … Oh, God… this is embarrassing… that someone will, you know, like… like. Do you have a personal favorite?" - Helen

The telling of an Indian legend helps two men express their love for each other as they face a terminal illness.

"The brave was the only one in the hunting party who saw the white buffalo." - Jack

Three former college roommates are re-united in this romantic comedy about a museum tour gone terribly and hilariously astray.

"Each year at za stroke von midnight on za anniversary of St. Isabellas death... You can hear za moans and groans from deep within zeez werry valls..." - Alex