Announcing Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2009!
July 17 – 26 at the Magic Theatre
Single tickets and Festival Passes will be available June 1st.
Full schedule coming soon to playwrightsfoundation.org
Now in its 32nd year, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival is the heart of Playwrights Foundation’s wide array of programs. Its focus is to discover and support a diverse group of exceptional new and rising playwrights who work together with professional directors, dramaturgs and actors, influence and support one another to advance the development of a new work and present that work to the public in a festival atmosphere.
The Bay Area Playwrights Festival is one of the country’s foremost new play festivals: it serves as the entry point of discovery for playwrights to PF’s year-round play development services. Over the course of its 30-year history, BAPF has discovered the work of dozens of regional writers early in their careers and introduced them to national networks, including artists such as Sam Shepard, Nilo Cruz, Claire Chafee, Marcus Gardley and others who go on to re-shape the American Theater of each generation.
We are proud to announce the selection of five diverse full-length plays, chosen from over 400 submissions, and two one-act commissions that will make up the festival offerings this year:
Christopher Chen: Anomienaulis
Julia Jarcho: American Treasure
Robert Henry Johnson: The Othello Papers
Sharyn Rothstein: March
Deborah Stein: Natasha and the Coat
Commissioned Bay Area Shorts (BASH!) Writers
Martha Jane Kaufman
Lauren Yee
Christopher Chen was born and raised in San Francisco. His play Into the Numbers was first featured at the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, receiving further readings at The Lark, hotINK Festival, Theatre Mu, and Silk Road Theatre Project. Most recently, his play The Window Age was commissioned and produced by Central Works Theatre Ensemble in Berkeley. Other plays include Maya (Asian American Theater Company New Works Incubator, 2004) and Mishima Speaks To Beauty (One4All Theater Company). Chris is the winner of a Ford Foundation Emerging Writers of Color Grant, and was a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award and the O’Neill Conference. He is currently the co-coordinator of the Asian American Theater Company’s New Works Incubator Program, and is a member of the Magic Theatre Artist’s Lab. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from S.F. State.
Julia Jarcho is a playwright, director, and performer. Her plays include The Whole Tree (Electric) (In The Rough Reading Series 2008), Take Me Away (Il faut brûler pour briller festival, Paris, 2007), A Small Hole (Performance Lab 115, FringeNYC, 2006), All I Do Is Dream of You (Sophiensaele and English Theatre Berlin, 2006), The Highwayman (NTUSA performance space, Brooklyn, 2004; published in The Best American Short Plays of 2005-2006, Applause Books), and Nursery (Young Playwrights Festival, Cherry Lane Theater, New York, 2001). She was a writer-in-residence at the 2002 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and won a Berrilla Kerr award the same year. She is now a 2008-2009 Resident Playwright at the Playwrights Foundation, a board member of Young Playwrights Inc., and a member of the New York-based playwrights’ collective 13P. Her new play American Treasure will be produced by 13P in Fall 2009, with the support of Creative Capital.
Robert Henry Johnson, a native San Franciscan, made his debut as a playwright in the 1993 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which featured his full-length drama Poison Ground. He returned to BAPF in 2001 with his one act radio play Remyth: The Horse Project. His plays have been work shopped as professionally staged readings by Hartford Stage Company, Robey Theater Company, Buriel Clay Playwrights Festival and Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience. Mr. Johnson is the recipient of the 1992 Levi’s & Strauss Certificate of Literary Appreciation. He has written as a live performance critic for San Francisco Bay View and The Western Edition. He is currently working on his second full-length work The Othello Papers, commissioned by the African American Shakespeare Company to premiere in its 2010 season. In addition to his writing, Mr. Johnson is an accomplished dancer and choreographer. In 1993, he formed his own dance troupe, the Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company, which performed to critical acclaim locally and nationally. Many of his one-acts have been produced by his company such as A Nappyred Summer: Vesper, The Nutmeg Project and DJ Cell 30.
Sharyn Rothstein is a New York City-based playwright, whose full-length and one acts plays have been workshopped and/or produced off and off-off Broadway by the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges, 3Graces Theater Company, The Vital Theatre, Soho Think Tank, and at numerous theaters around the country. Sharyn is a member of Youngblood, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s collective for emerging playwrights under the age of thirty. She is the winner of the Samuel French Short Play Contest, and four of her short plays have been published in Smith & Kraus’ “The Best Ten Minute Plays” anthologies. Sharyn’s ten minute play How To Speak Man will be re-anthologized next year by Playscripts. Sharyn recently completed her MFA in dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently being commissioned by 3Graces Theater Company to write a musical adaptation of the Biblical story of Esther, and is the recipient of a 2008 Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan commission.
Deborah Stein‘s plays have been produced and developed nationally at Seattle Rep, the Guthrie, Women’s Project, Stages Rep, the Wilma, Live Girls, Dance Theatre Workshop, and Theatre Artaud; and internationally in Poland, Ireland, Edinburgh (the Traverse) and Prague. Between 2000 and 2006, she collaborated with Pig Iron on six new works, for which she was twice nominated for the Barrymore for Best New Play. Her writing is published in Theatre Forum, Play: A Journal of Plays, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. Current commissions include Children’s Theatre Company and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Deborah received her MFA from Brown University, two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights’ Center, and is a member of New Dramatists.
Martha Jane Kaufman is a writer, dancer and activist. She grew up in Portland, OR and recently graduated from Wesleyan University. Her plays have been read at Stark Raving Theater in Portland, OR (2002), the Cherry Lane Theater in New York (2003), and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She was a winner of the National Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition in 2003 for Instead of Children, for which she also received an award in scriptwriting from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Her play Shatter won the Stark Raving Theater New Wave Y Festival and the Green Theatre Prize in 2002. At Wesleyan she studied playwriting with Catherine Filloux and Marsha Norman, her play Greenhouse was read in 2004 and an excerpt from Shades was read in 2006. Her play The Same House was produced at Wesleyan in 2006. She has also choreographed four dances and created several performance pieces in non-traditional spaces including a stairwell and an elevator.
Lauren Yee is an award-winning playwright and a native San Franciscan. Her plays include Ching Chong Chinaman, Highrise, Over the Asian Airwaves, and Zachary Zwllinger Eats People. She is the recipient of the 2008/09 Dramatists Guild Fellowship and a 2009 MacDowell Colony residency. She has also been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, the Jerome Fellowship, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Humana Festival’s Heideman Award. Lauren has received fellowships from the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, the New York Mills Arts Retreat, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, commissions from the O’Neill Studio at Yale and PlayGround, and funding from Theatre Bay Area. Other recent awards include PlayGround’s 2008 June Anne Baker Prize, Mu Performing Arts’ 2008 Emerging Playwrights of Color Fellowship, PlayGround’s 2008 Emerging Playwright Award, Kumu Kahua Theatre’s 2007 Pacific Rim Prize, and the 2007 Yale Playwrights Festival. Her plays have been developed/produced in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, and other cities. Producing companies include Asian American Theater Company, Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, Impact Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, and PlayGround, where she has been a member of the writers pool since 2007. Her work has been published in anthologies by Brooklyn Publishers, Meriwether Publishing, the O’Neill Studio at Yale, and Smith & Kraus.
