We're now accepting submissions for the 2008 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
Festival submission guidelines are on the web site www.playwrightsfoundation.org
And while you're there check out the great fall classes at the New Play Institute - D.W. Jacobs, Annie Smart and Marcus Gardley are all teaching!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
The Festival Turns 30!
Friday, May 4, 2007
Announcing the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival!
I know we promised it sooner - but better late than never.
We're got a really fantastic group of playwrights assembled for this year's Festival.
Here's the lineup:
2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival
Magic Theater, San Francisco
August 3rd - 12th
Zakiyyah Alexander SWEET MALADIES
Annie Baker BODY AWARENESS WEEK
Christopher Chen INTO THE NUMBERS
Samuel D. Hunter I AM MONTANA
Julie Hebert TREE
Kevin Oakes MR. FUJIYAMA's ELECTRIC BEACH
(scroll down for bios)
Detailed Festival schedule will be posted soon.
Zakiyyah Alexander is a writer and performer whose plays include SICK? (Summer Play Festival), THE ETYMOLOGY OF BIRD (Hip Hop Theater Festival), BLURRING SHINE (Market Theater, Johannesburg), SWEET MALADIES (Rucker Theatre), AFTER THE SHOW: A PLAY IN MASK, PRALYA, ELECTED, ghost, and (900). She has received developmental support from The Rattlestick Theater, Hartford Stage, The Providence Black Repertory Company, 24/7 Theater Company, the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Vineyard Theater, the Women's Project, GAle GAtes et. al, La Mama Theatre, Greenwich Street Theater, etc. Awards include: the Theodore Ward Prize, Jackson Phelan Award, Drama League New Directors/New Works, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Young Playwrights Inc., etc. Her work is included in the current New Monologues for Women by Women and in the upcoming book of essays, Girls who like Boys who like Boys. She is a resident member of New Dramatists and the Dramatists Guild. Past residencies and fellowships include: EST's Youngblood, the Women's Project Writer's Lab, the Women's Work Project, the Drama League, and New Dramatists. Current commissions include: The Philadelphia Theater Company, Second Stage Theater Time Warner grant, a Playground commission from the Children's Theater Company, and the University of Wisconsin. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama (MFA in playwriting) Zakiyyah is a native New Yorker and was raised in Brooklyn.
Annie Baker's plays have been developed and performed at the Soho R
epertory, Atlantic Stage 2, the Ontological-Hysteric, Ensemble Studio Theater, the Kraine, and the Brick Theater in Williamsburg. She is the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Grant for Screenwriting and a Michener Playwriting Fellowship. She has a B.F.A. from the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and is a member of EST's Youngblood Playwrights Group and the 06/07 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab.
Christopher Chen
was born and raised in San Francisco. His first full-length play, Maya, was developed at the Asian American Theater Company’s New Works Incubator program, mentored by Philip Kan Gotanda. Additionally, many of his shorter works and one-acts have been produced at venues such as the Jon Sims Center, S.F. Fringe Festival, Theatre Rice, Brown Bag Theater, S.F. State One-Act Fringe, and Brooklyn College/Harrogate Theater Company. He was a member of Playground’s 2005-2006 Writer’s Pool. Chris is also a director and actor, and at U.C. Berkeley, from which he graduated in 2004, he led Theatre Rice’s playwriting workshop for one year. He is currently pursing an M.F.A. in playwriting at S.F. State.
Julie Hebert is a writer/director working in theater, film and television
. Her first play, TRUE BEAUTIES, premiered at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1987, winning the Critics Circle Best Play Award and going on to other productions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Canada and several universities. Her other plays including The Knee Desires The Dirt, Ruby’s Bucket of Blood, St. Joan of the Dancing Sickness and Abe Lincoln’s Dog have been developed and produced at theaters around the country and won numerous awards. Julie has directed new plays with Steppenwolf, Seven Stages, Provincetown Playhouse, LaMaMa, Eureka Theater, Magic Theater, Los Angeles Theater Center, San Diego Rep, and many others. In 2002, Julie received a Georrge Foster Peabody Award for co-directing “In Their Own Words” a documentary of interviews with survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York. She has received grants from the NEA, TCG, California Arts Council, Marin Arts Council and others for writing, directing, and inter-disciplinary arts.
In television, Julie has written and directed for THIRD WATCH and ER, directed multiple episodes of THE WEST WING, and currently works as Co-Executive Producer for NUMB3RS, serving as both writer and director. Julie is a member of New Dramatists as well as several Guilds-- Dramatists; Writers; Directors. She was an early member of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and taught in the MFA Theater Program at UCLA.
Samuel D. Hunter is originally from Moscow, Idaho, Samuel D. Hunter received hi
s BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 where he was the recipient of a John Golden Playwriting Prize. In May 2007, he received his MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop where he was the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship and the 2007 Richard Maibaum Award. His plays include: NORMAN ROCKWELL KILLED MY FATHER at the 2005 O'Neill Playwrights Conference, ABRAHAM (A SHOT IN THE HEAD) at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, ABRAHAM (I AM AN ISLAND) in Studio 42's Scattered Festival at Collective: Unconscious, PIGHEART at the 2006 Iowa Playwrights' Workshop New Play Festival and a 2007 PlayLabs semi-finalist, and RADIOPLAY and AMERICAN TRIPTYCH at the HomoGenius Festival at Manhattan Theater Source. He has taught playwriting courses at the University of Iowa and, over the last two summers, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at Ayyam al-Musrah in Hebron and Ashtar Theater in Ramallah. At Ashtar, he co-wrote THE ERA OF WHALES, which was produced in the West Bank and at the International Istanbul Theater Festival.
Kevin Oakes’ plays include The Vomit Talk of Ghosts, The High Priest of Bad Math, and All Spoken By A Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy. The Vomit Talk of Ghosts was developed as part of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab (Soho Repertory Theatre, NYC) and was produced by The Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco for a successful six week run in the summer of 2003 and subsequently by the Flea Theater in New York City in June-July 2004. His play The High Priest of Bad Math was produced by Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and All Spoken By A Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy, was produced by The Perishable Theatre of Providence, RI and by Todo Con Nada in New York City. Oakes’ productions also include text for The World part IV: a game in 26 parts produced by GAle GAtes et al. at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as text for GAle GAtes’ So Long Ago I Can't Remember: a divine comedy, a thirteen scene performance installation based on Dante's Inferno. Oakes’ text for So Long Ago… was published in TheatreForum Magazine Summer/Fall 2002 issue. The Vomit Talk of Ghosts is published in Theater Magazine 35:2 and is included an anthology of new plays, New Downtown Now, published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by playwright Mac Wellman. His play the evolutionist’s club, developed with support from Soho Rep, was recently in Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Plays Festival.
We're got a really fantastic group of playwrights assembled for this year's Festival.
Here's the lineup:
2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival
Magic Theater, San Francisco
August 3rd - 12th
Zakiyyah Alexander SWEET MALADIES
Annie Baker BODY AWARENESS WEEK
Christopher Chen INTO THE NUMBERS
Samuel D. Hunter I AM MONTANA
Julie Hebert TREE
Kevin Oakes MR. FUJIYAMA's ELECTRIC BEACH
(scroll down for bios)
Detailed Festival schedule will be posted soon.
Zakiyyah Alexander is a writer and performer whose plays include SICK? (Summer Play Festival), THE ETYMOLOGY OF BIRD (Hip Hop Theater Festival), BLURRING SHINE (Market Theater, Johannesburg), SWEET MALADIES (Rucker Theatre), AFTER THE SHOW: A PLAY IN MASK, PRALYA, ELECTED, ghost, and (900). She has received developmental support from The Rattlestick Theater, Hartford Stage, The Providence Black Repertory Company, 24/7 Theater Company, the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Vineyard Theater, the Women's Project, GAle GAtes et. al, La Mama Theatre, Greenwich Street Theater, etc. Awards include: the Theodore Ward Prize, Jackson Phelan Award, Drama League New Directors/New Works, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Young Playwrights Inc., etc. Her work is included in the current New Monologues for Women by Women and in the upcoming book of essays, Girls who like Boys who like Boys. She is a resident member of New Dramatists and the Dramatists Guild. Past residencies and fellowships include: EST's Youngblood, the Women's Project Writer's Lab, the Women's Work Project, the Drama League, and New Dramatists. Current commissions include: The Philadelphia Theater Company, Second Stage Theater Time Warner grant, a Playground commission from the Children's Theater Company, and the University of Wisconsin. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama (MFA in playwriting) Zakiyyah is a native New Yorker and was raised in Brooklyn.
Annie Baker's plays have been developed and performed at the Soho R
epertory, Atlantic Stage 2, the Ontological-Hysteric, Ensemble Studio Theater, the Kraine, and the Brick Theater in Williamsburg. She is the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Grant for Screenwriting and a Michener Playwriting Fellowship. She has a B.F.A. from the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and is a member of EST's Youngblood Playwrights Group and the 06/07 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab.Christopher Chen
was born and raised in San Francisco. His first full-length play, Maya, was developed at the Asian American Theater Company’s New Works Incubator program, mentored by Philip Kan Gotanda. Additionally, many of his shorter works and one-acts have been produced at venues such as the Jon Sims Center, S.F. Fringe Festival, Theatre Rice, Brown Bag Theater, S.F. State One-Act Fringe, and Brooklyn College/Harrogate Theater Company. He was a member of Playground’s 2005-2006 Writer’s Pool. Chris is also a director and actor, and at U.C. Berkeley, from which he graduated in 2004, he led Theatre Rice’s playwriting workshop for one year. He is currently pursing an M.F.A. in playwriting at S.F. State.Julie Hebert is a writer/director working in theater, film and television
. Her first play, TRUE BEAUTIES, premiered at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1987, winning the Critics Circle Best Play Award and going on to other productions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Canada and several universities. Her other plays including The Knee Desires The Dirt, Ruby’s Bucket of Blood, St. Joan of the Dancing Sickness and Abe Lincoln’s Dog have been developed and produced at theaters around the country and won numerous awards. Julie has directed new plays with Steppenwolf, Seven Stages, Provincetown Playhouse, LaMaMa, Eureka Theater, Magic Theater, Los Angeles Theater Center, San Diego Rep, and many others. In 2002, Julie received a Georrge Foster Peabody Award for co-directing “In Their Own Words” a documentary of interviews with survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York. She has received grants from the NEA, TCG, California Arts Council, Marin Arts Council and others for writing, directing, and inter-disciplinary arts.In television, Julie has written and directed for THIRD WATCH and ER, directed multiple episodes of THE WEST WING, and currently works as Co-Executive Producer for NUMB3RS, serving as both writer and director. Julie is a member of New Dramatists as well as several Guilds-- Dramatists; Writers; Directors. She was an early member of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and taught in the MFA Theater Program at UCLA.
Samuel D. Hunter is originally from Moscow, Idaho, Samuel D. Hunter received hi
s BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 where he was the recipient of a John Golden Playwriting Prize. In May 2007, he received his MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop where he was the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship and the 2007 Richard Maibaum Award. His plays include: NORMAN ROCKWELL KILLED MY FATHER at the 2005 O'Neill Playwrights Conference, ABRAHAM (A SHOT IN THE HEAD) at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, ABRAHAM (I AM AN ISLAND) in Studio 42's Scattered Festival at Collective: Unconscious, PIGHEART at the 2006 Iowa Playwrights' Workshop New Play Festival and a 2007 PlayLabs semi-finalist, and RADIOPLAY and AMERICAN TRIPTYCH at the HomoGenius Festival at Manhattan Theater Source. He has taught playwriting courses at the University of Iowa and, over the last two summers, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at Ayyam al-Musrah in Hebron and Ashtar Theater in Ramallah. At Ashtar, he co-wrote THE ERA OF WHALES, which was produced in the West Bank and at the International Istanbul Theater Festival.Kevin Oakes’ plays include The Vomit Talk of Ghosts, The High Priest of Bad Math, and All Spoken By A Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy. The Vomit Talk of Ghosts was developed as part of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab (Soho Repertory Theatre, NYC) and was produced by The Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco for a successful six week run in the summer of 2003 and subsequently by the Flea Theater in New York City in June-July 2004. His play The High Priest of Bad Math was produced by Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and All Spoken By A Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy, was produced by The Perishable Theatre of Providence, RI and by Todo Con Nada in New York City. Oakes’ productions also include text for The World part IV: a game in 26 parts produced by GAle GAtes et al. at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as text for GAle GAtes’ So Long Ago I Can't Remember: a divine comedy, a thirteen scene performance installation based on Dante's Inferno. Oakes’ text for So Long Ago… was published in TheatreForum Magazine Summer/Fall 2002 issue. The Vomit Talk of Ghosts is published in Theater Magazine 35:2 and is included an anthology of new plays, New Downtown Now, published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by playwright Mac Wellman. His play the evolutionist’s club, developed with support from Soho Rep, was recently in Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Plays Festival.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
We're Very Very Close
To being able to announce this year's Festival.
Check back very soon... You'll hear it here first.
Over the past couple weeks I've been in touch with our colleagues at the O'Neill, PlayPenn etc... comparing our finalist lists, to see if there was overlap and potential conflicts. In the past we've selected the same plays as other festivals and because of timing issues the writer has had to chose which to attend. This year everyone I spoke to had an almost completely different list of finalists from each other. I'm not sure exactly what to make of this, but I think it means it's been a really great year for playwrighting, with so many fantastic plays out there to chose from.
Check back very soon... You'll hear it here first.
Over the past couple weeks I've been in touch with our colleagues at the O'Neill, PlayPenn etc... comparing our finalist lists, to see if there was overlap and potential conflicts. In the past we've selected the same plays as other festivals and because of timing issues the writer has had to chose which to attend. This year everyone I spoke to had an almost completely different list of finalists from each other. I'm not sure exactly what to make of this, but I think it means it's been a really great year for playwrighting, with so many fantastic plays out there to chose from.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
An Interview With Geetha Reddy
Our In The Rough Reading Series picks back up this week with Geetha Reddy's ME GIVEN YOU. Readings are Monday April 9th at Ceras Hall in Stanford, and Tuesday April 10th at Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco. Full details here.
This is the second in our series of e-interviews with the writers in the series.
Jonathan Spector: What was your initial impulse to write ME GIVEN YOU?
GEETHA REDDY: I wrote ME GIVEN YOU as a reaction against what I think of
as the 'Mistresses of Spices' era of Indian stereotypes. Since the
multi-culturalism of the '90s Indians have been portrayed as spiritually
enlightened, magical and nonthreatening. These concepts have been propagated
by both Indian and Western authors, yet when I bumped into them I never
identified them with my personal experience.
Hypocritically, I have always enjoyed the benefits of this kindly version of
my cultural stereotype, acting as the demure Indian girl when it is useful
and discarding it as necessary. So when PlayGround asked me to pitch them
ideas for my commission I wondered if it would be possible to write a play
that was a send-up of these new Indian stereotypes by portraying an Indian
women who is manipulative, willful, and even ruthless. All the while I
wanted to rely on the friendly stereotypes to keep my crazy Indian character
likeable.
JS: You originally wrote this play as a commission for PlayGround. What was
that development experience like?
GR: ME GIVEN YOU is my first full length play, and without PlayGround it never
would have gotten written. PlayGround provided deadlines, a supportive
dramturg (the playwright Garret Groenveld), a table reading, and a staged
reading. More importantly Jim Kleinmann, the artistic director, encouraged
me to work on this play instead of other ideas I pitched. He assured me that
finding Indian actors and an audience was possible and that I had to stop
fretting and write the damn play.
The table reading followed by the staged reading was a good evolutionary
process for me as new playwright. After the table reading I was able to do
revisions focusing mostly on the themes and characters. It wasn't until the
staged reading that I was confronted with the staging difficulties in the
play. Having the issues unfold in this order made the whole process of
rewriting less overwhelming.
JS: Which older writers have most influenced your work, and who among your
contemporaries are you most excited about at the moment?
GR: What a question. It is funny, for me there are writers I love, like
Robertson Davies and Jane Austen, but I don't think I am influenced by them.
As a writer I suppose I have been most influenced by the humorists I read as
teenager: Woody Allen's writing, Jon Waters, Mad Magazine, and P.G.
Wodehouse.
As a native of Pittsburgh I was drawn to August Wilson's life and work. But
really, if I am being honest, I am a child of television. I grew up in Mr.
Roger's neighborhood (he really was my neighbor), but I hated the slowness
of the program- I was more of Electric Company kind of kid. Similarly as an
adult I like '30 Rock' more than 'Studio 60', although I admire Aaron
Sorkin's writing on 'Sports Night' and 'West Wing'.
I just read an amazing book called "The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin
Brockmeier and I am looking forward to the new White Stripes album. It's a
mixed bag.
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