Music Monday: Chris Chen ROUND 2

From the premiere of Chris' show The Hundred Flowers Project
Photo by Pak Han

For today's Music Monday we return to a real lybusy playwright here in the Bay Area: Christopher Chen. Some of you may remember that when Music Monday was in its infancy during the 2012 BAPF, Chris compiled a playlist for The Hundred Flowers Project for us [Chris' first Music Monday].

Since then, Chris' Hundred Flowers Project received it's world premiere with Crowded Fire Theatre, and recently was featured in the very successful 3rd Annual SF One-Minute Play Festival.

Chris had such fun creating a playlist for us before, he jumped at the chance to create a second.

Here's what he had to say about this playlist: "I think there's a lot of theatricality and drama, and a lot of interesting structures running through these. Enjoy!"

Wait for it

Picture provided by oneminuteplays.wordpress.com

By Patricia Milton

As a playwright, I’m very interested in structure. I find that using an explicit structure creates ease in my playwriting. I have used a very conventional two-act play structure for my own full-length plays, although, as an audience member, often I enjoy alternative structures.

As I sat down to write one-minute plays for this year’s #1MPF, I decided I wanted to try applying a common structure.

But trying to create a two-act one-minute play felt daunting. So I considered the structure of a joke. To be more specific, I considered the idea of working toward a “punchline.”

Blazing a New Trail

Picture provided from oneminuteplays.wordpress.com

By Marisela Treviño Orta

This is the third year that the One Minute Play Festival has come to the San Francisco Bay Area. And I’m sure each year festival producer Dominic D’Andrea returns the process of organizing the festival here becomes easier. But it’s important to remember that easy has its own pitfalls.

It would be very easy for the festival producers to simply repeat themselves—call up the same list of actors, directors and playwrights who previously participated and be done with it. That would be easy. But sometimes the easy route means we aren’t seeking out new talent and voices.

Happily, this scenario isn’t what’s happening with the San Francisco One Minute Play Festival (SF OMPF).  Check it out:

• the upcoming festival is the biggest SF OMPF ever
• it’s the most diverse festival yet with more women and people of color participating
• and while many of the artists are returning, there are plenty of new voices and talent added to the mix
• all the artists—playwrights, directors and actors—are local!

Music Monday: Magan Biggs

For today's Music Monday, we give you the playlist of the Playwrights Foundation glue: Magan Biggs our wonderful administrative director. Magan has really taken the helm of many of our projects here at Playwrights Foundation and helped us propel them to success this year. From BAPF to the Rough Reading Series to our most recent endeavor, Play After Dark (more on that soon).

Whenever you walk into the Playwrights Foundation office and everyone's at work, you can be guaranteed at some point seeing Magan hard a work at her desk listening to music as she keeps this thing going. So who better to be our Music Monday subject today than Magan.

Enjoy!

The Are Moments When Time Stops

By Aimee Suzara
Playwright, 3rd Annual One Minute Play Festival

There are moments when time stops.

Those split-seconds seem to last eternity –  marking time like little notches of memory along a measuring tape.  In looking back to those moments, all others seem to dissipate – or even, stretch to meet the others, as though they are planets orbiting towards those suns.

Those moments –an insult said in sixth grade that changed everything, the first time you opened a love letter and the smell of notebook paper, the scathing words of an elder on her deathbed, the moment you met eyes with a soul-mate, a particular perfect sunset – may verge on cliché, but then again, clichés are repeated for a reason. Those moments when everything falls away into silence, time stands still– the stuff romantic dramas thrives upon – are real, and everyone has had at least a handful.  In those few seconds, you realize, as the Buddha said, “there’s only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment.” And often, those moments are turning points, be they big or small – the moment we realized we were becoming women, the moment we understood that to be brown-skinned was less-than, the moment we realized we were going to be in love (for x amount of years); or those tough-love moments where reality slaps you across the face.