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 Repertory, 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 his 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 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.

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.

A Big Wonderful Weekend

It's been a pretty crazy fews days here at PF.

On Sunday, we had a huge fundraiser "Brunch with a Playwright". Almost three hundred people attended, including 30 playwrights spread out at tables among the masses. It was a really lovely event, on a much larger scale than anything we'd done in the past and thanks to an incredible amount of hard work from the board and army of volunteers, it went off without a hitch.

My four personal highlights:

1) Prince Gomolvilas saying that he wished Playwrights Foundation was a person so that he could make sweet love to it in every imaginable position.

2) Philip Kan Gotanda's story about trying to talk to Sam Shepard at one of the first festivals. He followed him into the bathroom, sidled up next to him at a urinal and told him how much he liked his work. He was ignored.

3) Marcus Gardley's beautiful story which I can't really do justice to here, but the gist of this: When he had a play in the festival, a bunch of people from his old West Oakland neighborhood showed up at the reading, even though he hadn't invited them. After the first reading, an old wise black woman walked up to him and said "I'll be back". After the second reading, she walked back up to him, this time with a young boy in tow. "You see", she said to the boy "you can be anything you want to be, you can be a playwright."

4) A friend of my girlfriend's parents, who sat next to Peter Nachtreib at the brunch, asking me if he was seeing anybody, because she knew this nice Jewish girl who would be perfect for him.

The next day we kicked off our In The Rough Series, with Jason Grote's play- Box Americana, which had a fabulous cast and went really well.

Now back to the grind - we're trying to narrow our twenty-five finalists down to ten or twelve tomorrow. More on that later...

An Interview With Jason Grote

Jason Grote's play BOX AMERICANA:A WAL-MART FANTASIA will kick off the 2007 In The Rough Reading Series, with a pair of readings Stanford and San Francisco on March 26th and 27th.

He will also be teaching a three-day playwrighting intensive at PF. Full details for both can be found on the main site www.playwrightsfoundation.org

This will be the first in a series of e-interviews with the writers in our ITR series.

Jonathan Spector: For BOX AMERICANA, you were commissioned to write a play on a specific topic. How did that process differ from other plays you've written?

Jason Grote: I actually pitched the show to the Working Theater, to my ongoing - well, regret is far too strong a word, but it's proven to be one of the more difficult things I've ever written. My original idea was to adapt one of the many recent books about neoliberal economics, like
FAST FOOD NATION or NO LOGO. Perhaps thankfully, the rights for those books proved unavailable, and I had just read Liza Featherstone's SELLING WOMEN SHORT, about the class-action suit against Wal-Mart for systematic discrimination against female employees. The research became voluminous, far beyond that original book, one of the reasons
why the play has been so hard to write.

There are ironies here - I worked in retail for years, and have been working-class most of my life, but as a playwright I'm interested in what I used to call "lifers" - that is, people both in and out of management who had no other options than their retail jobs. So partially, the play is psychically difficult because it's forcing me to return to a place I'd really rather forget; it's also difficult because, even though retail as a job category is ascendant, especially for women, it doesn't pack the dramatic punch that, say, an organizing campaign in a coal mine might. In fact, boredom and stillness are intrinsic parts of the retail experience. This might be an interesting way into an avant-garde performance piece, but I am after all a playwright.

The other challenge has been "writing the Other." The characters that most reflect my upbringing are Danae and Janelle; my formative years were spent on welfare, in a ghetto in New Jersey, while my mom worked a crappy retail job. Of course, there are fundamental differences, one of them being race, another being opportunity; we got out of that situation, mostly because of education, but also because whiteness is worth something in our society, it has a price-tag. And, of course, race in our society, particularly blackness/whiteness, is a fundamental taboo.

JS: You've said that with each play you write, you consciously go in a different direction than the previous play you've written. How does BOX AMERICANA fit into this pattern?

JG: It doesn't, at least not consciously. I tend to look to other plays for structural ideas, but none seemed to apply to BOX. Also, there is the aforementioned racial dynamic. In 1001, I was writing Arab characters, but because the play was about identity and the creation of the "Other," it came more easily, plus the fact that - despite the years of history and the current geopolitical situation - that particular divide is not as loaded as the black/white one is. Of
course, in both cases, I have had really constructive dialogues with actors of color, but in a sort of quiet, non-public way, once trust has been established.

A funny sidebar; I have noticed that sometimes well-intentioned people will try to "protect" me when someone calls me on the self-evident fact that I am a white guy writing non-white characters, as if I'm suddenly under attack by the PC police. I believe that sometimes this
discussion is constructive and sometimes it's just knee-jerk, but it's a conversation I'm actually eager to have, and one that can only help the play. I am far more aggravated by the "dramaturgy police," who want my work to fit into the neat little well-made play box.

JS: Your play 1001 just ended a tremendously successful run at the Denver Center Theater Company, after a series of developmental workshops. How did the play benefit from it's development process? Were there times you were concerned all that development was going to damage the play?

JG: I was never really concerned about it, though I was often annoyed by it. I'm pretty good and sussing out bad advice and refusing it. I would rather lose out on an opportunity and keep my play intact than overdevelop it and put yet another predictable, mediocre play out there (which is not to say that I am infallible, just that I would rather fail on my own terms). But the fact is - and I say this with great respect and appreciation for the places which helped me develop the piece - most of the work was done by the time it emerged from the Soho Rep Lab in 2005. The irony of "play development" is that, the more a play needs work, the fewer places want to develop it; success has a thousand fathers and all that.

Most of the development was very pragmatic and related to production - for example, the first reading was three hours with no intermission, so I had to find places to make internal cuts without altering the structure. I also wanted to find places to introduce visual and textual cues to link the various stories Scheherezade tells (many of which are anachronistic and related by association rather than cause-effect linearity).

In the end, though, there was relatively little interference. Most artistic directors I've encountered will reject a play rather than try to change it, especially at the LORT level. If they took any interest at all in 1001, it means they understood it on some fundamental level.

JS: Prior to 1001, most of your work had produced in small downtown venues. What was the difference in working in an environment with so many resources?

JG: It was great. Contrary to the horror stories one hears about LORT theaters, they were generous, they understood the play, and they knew when to get out of the way but they also made themselves available when needed. I was worried that the play might get overproduced, but certain realities of the space (it was in the round), the set budget, and the play itself prevented this (though much credit is due to the director, Ethan McSweeny). I feel uniquely lucky, as I got to work in a well-funded institution that is in the process of reinventing
itself. I feel like these are the places where the exciting work is happening, as many of our more storied institutions are becoming ossified and predictable. Of course, it can be frustrating - many New Yorkers don't give Denver enough credit (or the rest of America for
that matter), when so much of New York theater has become deadly dull, in part due to the suburbanization of New York, which its own separate discussion.

JS: In addition to being a playwright, you also co-chair the writer the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. Has delving into the processes of so many other writers affected the way you work? What do you gain out of writing a play in this environment?

JG: Communities of writers are invaluable, when they're really communities. The Soho Rep Lab has been a huge part of my development as a writer, largely due to the opportunity to watch how other writers work. I've also found community at places like the O'Neill and New
Dramatists. In a nutshell, my approach is what Jonathan Lethem recently called "The Ecstacy of Influence;" rather than try to try and be totally original, I try to have as many, varied influences as possible.

JS: Which older writers have most influenced your work, and who among your contemporaries are you most excited about at the moment?

JG: At the moment, I think we're living in a comedy renaissance - ours might be the funniest generation to come down the pike in a while. The names I give won't surprise anyone; Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, The Onion, The Office, Mr. Show. I like this group Kaspar Hauser a
lot. I've been really into short stories lately, mostly George Saunders and Deborah Eisenberg. I just read a book called DREAM by Stephen Duncombe, which is all about how progressive movements have, mostly in reaction to consumerism and co-optation, become staid and
medicinal and need to embrace laughter, joy, and fantasy. I think this applies to theater as well. I tend to like philosophers on the margins, like Slavoj Zizek, Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Subcommandante Marcos. The French Marxist and post-Marxist
thinkers like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Guy Debord are out of vogue at the moment, but I still adore them, ditto for Edward Said. I like Hannah Arendt a lot, even though she's sort of neo-classical, and of course Walter Benjamin is great.

I tend to look outside of theater for influences, mostly to film, fiction, and contemporary art, though I am influenced by a lot of my peers' work. I really like Sheila Callaghan, Anne Washburn, Lisa D'Amour, Erin Courtney, Thomas Bradshaw, Young Jean Lee, Stephen Adly Guirgis. Then there is the recent avant-garde: Mac Wellman, Chuck Mee, Erik Ehn. I like a lot of what the Wooster Group does, as well as their progeny, like Elevator Repair Service, Radiohole, and the National Theater of the USA. I think Maria Irene Fornes is one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century and I think her legacy deserves to be remembered.
Then, the classics, of course: Euripides, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, though every playwright should know them as a matter of course. I also like Arthur Miller, in part because he's so uncool.

You can visit Jason online at www.jasongrote.com

(This Spring in the Bay Area you can see work by these writers mentioned above: a reading Sheila Callaghan's brand new play, That Pretty Pretty, also in Playwright Foundation's ITR Series; Anne Washburn's I Have Loved Strangers at Just Theater; Lisa D'Amour's Anna Bella Eema at Crowded Fire; and Stephen Adly Guirgis's Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train, currently running at the SF Playhouse.)