The Raleigh paper has the story:
What would you get if you crossed “The Golden Girls” with “Fried Green Tomatoes” and put it on stage?
For an Asheville-based trio of playwrights, the answer is simple: applause.In three years, Los Angeles refugees Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten have written four plays that have been staged more than 200 times across the United States and Canada. Their brand of Southern-fried comedy will be presented this year in at least nine North Carolina communities, including Raleigh, Garner and Wilson, where “The Dixie Swim Club” is part of this month’s Theater of the American South.
All three writers are Southerners — Wooten grew up in Wayne County; Jones and Hope are from Texas. Wooten was a writer and producer on “The Golden Girls” and other TV shows. Jones acted and co-wrote the 1992 play “Dearly Departed,” which was adapted into the Whoopi Goldberg movie “Kingdom Come.” Hope has been a playwright, television writer and casting director.
They found one another in that foreign land of Hollywood, bonded over their theater roots and Southern humor, and fell into a kind of tag-team repartee.
After working together as a comedy collective for about five years, they bumped up against the age barrier in television — there’s little interest in stories for adults older then 34, they said. The trio bailed out together and moved to Asheville.
“We were sick and tired of laughing at ourselves and not getting paid for it,” Hope said in a recent speakerphone call from their office. All three of them cracked up like a sitcom laugh track.
“L.A. was very good to us,” Wooten said “We had a wonderful run. There was more we wanted to do.”
After moving to North Carolina, they came up with “Dearly Beloved,” set in fictional Fayro, Texas, and featuring the Futrelle sisters, Frankie, Honey Raye and Twink. The show was so successful that the writers turned it into a trilogy with “Christmas Belles” and “Southern Hospitality.”
You get the picture. Be on the lookout for “The Hallelujah Girls” and “‘Til Beth Do Us Part” coming to a community theater near you.