Popping the Question

By George Brant

George Brant

Playwright, Grounded 

Oh, you can fool yourself. 

Perhaps it doesn’t come up the first rehearsal, or even the second.  Perhaps you’ve distracted them with the research images you’ve brought in, or the joke on page 12, or the debate over the proper pronunciation of a word you’ve made up. But don’t kid yourself; you’ve written a one-person show, sooner or later the dreaded question will rear its head.  Maybe it’ll be the director who poses it, maybe the dramaturge, most likely the actor.  Yes, let’s say the actor playing The Pilot*. Sooner or later, she will ask it:

“So.  Who am I talking to?”

Sigh. 

Your gut/defensive/true answer: the audience.

Meta-Blog

Christopher Chen

By Christopher Chen
Playwright, The Hundred Flowers Project

The central story of The Hundred Flowers Project involves a group of Asian actors making a play about Mao Tse-Tung called The Hundred Flowers Project, and, in a surrealistic twist, the play they are working on morphs into a play about the making of the play itself. Because of this play-within-a-play structure, I’m often met- when I describe the premise to people- with responses like: “Ooo, very meta.” It’s a response tinged with benevolent irony, as if the person is saying: “Good for you, trying something out. You must be aware this play-within-a-play thing’s been done ad nauseam, and I already feel above it and won’t think it’s clever... but good for you!”

Womb For Rent

An Interview with BAPF 35 Playwright Lauren Yee

Lauren Yee

The 35th Bay Area Playwrights Festival will feature six amazing plays from the unthinkably funny to the unbelievably real. Samsara by Lauren Yee, a Bay Area native, is both. Samsara is a hilarious and heart-wrenching four-hander that collapses 25 years, two continents and one Zygote, who finally has his day in court. I recently sat down with Lauren to ask her about her new play for the BAPF. 


Click through the jump to read Lauren's interview

What We Might Want Is Not Enough

by Gordon Dahlquist                                                                               

Playwright, Tea Party

2012 Bay Area Playwrights Festival

My play Tea Party is a pretty straight-forward story of insurrection, civil unrest, sectarian violence, divided government, and foreign interference – which just happens to be set in Colorado.  I like plays that ask questions more than plays that provide answers (I guess I feel that if you’re that confident about answers, you ought to be doing something other than writing a play), and so the work I’ll be doing is aimed at making the questions in the play seem grounded and necessary, and as inevitable as possible.

The BAPF of My Life; or how the Bay Area Playwrights Festival changed my life for the good

By Kevin Scofield
Playwrights Foundation
Social Media Associate

Take a trip with me, will you, with Doc Brown in the DeLorean to the Summer of 2011. The Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

Of the seven plays on the festival, one of them had longest title of a play I’ve ever seen or heard of. As marketing intern, I was required to read every play. Something I wanted to do anyway. Most of the plays had short titles like Hong Kong Dinosaur, Home Below Zero, or even Rock Creek: Southern Gothic.

But the full official title of this play?