Love, Family Dominate 2010 PPF Lineup
by Soyia Ellison
The Plays
COMPLETENESS
by Itamar Moses
Friday, April 23, at 1 p.m.
How does a computer scientist hook up with a molecular biologist? He uses the algorithm method, of course. But when Elliot offers to build a computer program to help Molly with her latest research project, they discover that megabytes and microbes might not be compatible – and even the most sophisticated algorithm may freeze in the face of life’s infinite possibilities. From the author of Bach at Leipzig, a 21st-century romantic comedy about the timeless confusions of love.
HAPPY FACE
by David West Read
Friday, April 23, at 3:30 p.m.
Wendy has a lot on her plate. A force of nature in the form of a 20-year-old karate-chopping gamine, she has been the sole provider for her troubled younger brother, Poots, ever since their parents died in a tragic canoeing accident. While Wendy lives in the family house, Poots lives out back in a refrigerator box and wears a Phantom of the Opera mask to hide his disfigured face. Now their funds are dwindling and prospects are bleak, but the indefatigable Wendy has a plan – and no one should bet against her.
BETWEEN US CHICKENS
by Sofia Alvarez
Friday, April 23, at 8 p.m. and Saturday, April 24, at 2:30 and 8 p.m.
Meagan and Sarah are small-town girls new to L.A. Meagan’s all about the retail, the scene and the celebrities; Sarah’s a computer-surfing homebody. When a smooth-talking opportunist named Charles crashes on their couch and takes Sarah out on the town, he threatens to upset the balance of a lifelong friendship – especially when Sarah’s secret life comes to light. This smart, savvy comedy by a promising new playwright surprises turn-by-turn as it asks how well you really know your friends.
RIGHT TO THE TOP
by Amy Freed
Saturday, April 24, at 10:30 a.m.
He’s a giant of the architecture world: Gregor Zubrovsky, whose buildings rise like post-post-modern megaliths out of the center of the earth. So why has he decided to take on a project to remodel a decaying boathouse in a remote backwater? That’s what up-and-coming architects Dieter and Rita want to know – especially since that project was supposed to be theirs. But nothing prepares them for the truth about Gregor, whose past is far more checkered than anyone might have imagined. Another outrageous outing from the author of The Beard of Avon and You, Nero.
KIN
by Bathsheba Doran
Sunday, April 25, at 10:30 a.m.
Anna is a quietly ambitious, Ivy League-educated New Yorker with an emotionally distant father. Sean is an Irish personal trainer with an emotional wreck of a mother. When Anna and Sean fall in love, their parents get involved, along with a tangled web of friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic. So before they can begin a future together, the couple must reconcile with their past in this wonderfully wry drama about the inevitable influence of kin.
Ah, spring, when a theatre-goer’s thoughts turn to…new plays.
This year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival takes place April 23-25 and features staged readings of new plays by Amy Freed, Itamar Moses, Bathsheba Doran, David West Read and Sofia Alvarez and full productions of two plays that were read during last year’s festival: Julia Cho’s The Language Archive and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Dr. Cerberus.
Three of the plays—Moses’ Completeness, Doran’s Kin and Cho’s Language Archive – have love on their minds.
Do we just keep making the same romantic mistakes again and again?
Can we move past our parents’ failings to forge a healthy relationship of our own?
Is it too much to ask for a partner who really listens to us when we talk?
These playwrights want answers.
Kin, as you might imagine, also deals with family, as does Read’s Happy Face, in which a 20-year-old spitfire cares for her depressed, disfigured younger brother after the death of their parents. (Don’t worry—it’s funnier than it sounds.)
Doctor Cerberus gives us the very funny Robertson family, as seen from the perspective of 13-year-old Franklin, a horror-film-loving geek tormented by his older brother and dominated by his well-meaning but clueless parents.
And then there is Alvarez’s Between Us Chickens, in which a sort-of family—twenty-something best friends Meagan and Sarah, newly arrived in L.A. from small-town Pa.,—is threatened by the intrusion of a stranger who challenges the roles the girls have always played in each other’s lives.
Amy Freed’s play, meanwhile, sets its satirical sights on architecture and ruthless ambition.
Since its creation in 1998, PPF has grown into one of the most important festivals of new scripts in the United States. SCR’s previous festivals have introduced 83 new plays to the national stage, including Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon, Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics, Rolin Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole.
For 12 years the Pacific Playwrights Festival has served as an exceptional incubator of new work, offering playwrights an opportunity to hear their words read by professional actors while they are still in the process of shaping their final drafts. PPF also gives playwrights a chance to get feedback on what they’ve written from theatre lovers and industry professionals.
"To me, there are few better places in the country to launch a new play than the PPF,” said playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. “Last year, I wrote a play (Doctor Cerberus) on commission for South Coast, turned it in, and had the play accepted into the festival… hearing the play aloud, with a fabulous group of actors, in front of an audience as smart and theatre-savvy as South Coast's, was invaluable."
SCR’s literary team is particularly happy with the mix of new and established writers represented at this year’s festival.
“Itamar Moses and Amy Freed, two SCR favorites, have written some of the funniest, sharpest plays in recent American theatre, so it’s great to have both of them contributing plays to this year’s festival,” said PPF Co-Director John Glore. “And Bathsheba Doran, who has gotten the attention of a lot of theatre people with the subtle truthfulness and layered complexity of her writing, brings a very different sensibility to the mix.”
Added Co-Director Kelly Miller: “We’re very pleased to introduce PPF audiences to two exciting, distinctive new dramatic voices in Sofia Alvarez and David West Read, who’ve written extraordinary plays about young people in a markedly contemporary world.”
The Playwrights
Sofia Alvarez is currently a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at The Juilliard School. She is an alumna of the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writer’s Program in London, where she developed her play Life Drawing. She was recently awarded Lincoln Center Theater’s Lecomte du Nouy Prize. She received her BA in Drama from Bennington College, where she directed a production of Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud. In New York she directed Jeff Tabnick’s Dissatisfaction # 4 (Impact Theatre One Act Play Festival) and Keith Hendershot’s Po-Mo Sex Romp (Foglight Production at the Abington Theatre). She has worked as an assistant to Christopher Hampton, Adam Guettel and in the theatre department at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she now lives in Brooklyn.
David West Read is currently pursuing his MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts on a full departmental fellowship. His plays have been produced at numerous festivals, including the Toronto Fringe, SummerWorks, the North Jersey New Found Theatre Festival (Winner-Best Play) and NYU’s Festival of New Works. His short play Double Penetration was selected as a finalist at the 2009 Samuel French Off- Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, and his full-length play The Dream of the Burning Boy will be produced at the Roundabout Theater Underground as part of their 2010-2011 season. Happy Face was first developed as a playwriting thesis project at NYU under the guidance of Marsha Norman.
Bathsheba Doran's play Parents Evening will receive its world premiere at The Flea Theater in April, directed by Jim Simpson. Her play Ben and The Magic Paintbrush will receive its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in May. Other plays include Living Room in Africa (produced Off-Broadway by the award winning Edge Theater), Nest (commissioned and produced by Signature Theater in D.C.), Until Morning (BBC Radio 4) and adaptations of Dickens' Great Expectations (starring Kathleen Chalfant at The Lucille Lortel), Maeterlinck's The Blind (Classic Stage Company) and Peer Gynt (directed by Andre Serban at the Theater of the Riverside Church). She is a 2009 recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and three Lincoln Center Theater Lecomte du Nouy Prizes. She is a Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow and a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist. Ms. Doran's work has been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, O'Neill Theatre Center, Lincoln Center, Sundance Theater Lab, Almeida Theatre (London) and Playwrights Horizons, among others. Ms. Doran's first play, Feminine Wash, was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe festival while she was a student at Cambridge University, from which she holds a BA and an MA. She then went on to Oxford University, where she received an MA before working as a television comedy writer with the BBC. Ms. Doran moved to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2000, received her MFA from Columbia University and went on to become a Playwriting Fellow of The Juilliard School. She is currently under commission from Atlantic Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York City and Schtanhaus in London. Her work is available from Samuel French and Playscripts Inc. She lives in New York City.
Itamar Moses is the author of the full-length plays Outrage, Bach at Leipzig (produced at SCR in 2006), Celebrity Row, The Four of Us, Yellowjackets, Back Back Back and The Den, a collection of short plays titled Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It), as well as various one-acts. He is presently adapting Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude for the stage with composer Michael Friedman and director Daniel Aukin. His work has appeared Off-Broadway and at regional theatres across the country, in Canada, France and Brazil; has been published by Faber & Faber, Heinemann Press, Playscripts Inc., Samuel French and Vintage. He has received new play commissions from The McCarter Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Berkeley Repertory theatre, The Wilma Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory and Lincoln Center Theater. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU and has taught playwriting at Yale and NYU. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, The MCC Theater Playwriting Coalition, Naked Angels Mag 7, and is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. He was born in Berkeley and now lives in Brooklyn.
Amy Freed is the author of You, Nero, Safe in Hell and The Beard of Avon, which were commissioned by and had their world premieres at SCR, and Restoration Comedy, among others. Her play Freedomland, also commissioned and premiered by SCR, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Psychic Life of Savages was the recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Award, and was also the winner of the Charles MacArthur Award. An earlier version of the play was first developed and performed in San Francisco under the title Poetomachia and received a Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Outstanding Achievement Award for an Original Script. In its earlier version, it was also a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Ms. Freed is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University.
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