PlayGround-LA presents Season 10 BEST OF PLAYGROUND-LA GALA

Help celebrate the best writers and short works from the PlayGround-LA tenth season! Join us for the BEST OF PLAYGROUND-LA GALA, in person at the Broadwater Main Stage & online Simulcast/On-Demand on Monday, April 11th, 2022 at 7pm PT.

The Best of PlayGround-LA Gala features a special in-person and simulcast presentation of six short plays originally developed through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series at the Broadwater Theater.

Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted. Get your tickets today!

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This evening’s plays include:

In the Terrarium by Briggs Hatton
Directed by Paris McCarthy
Featuring Tansu Philip, Julio Hanson, and William Warren

To solve the mystery of its own death, a fifth-grade classroom pet needs the help of a precocious ten-year-old.

BRIGGS HATTON is a Los Angeles-based WGA screenwriter, playwright, and solid dude, who is thrilled to return for his second season with PlayGround-LA. His short play “Happy Holidays” was commissioned this summer by NY’s Atlantic Theater School. In TV, he recently wrote and developed “Tantrum Jesus,” a half-hour animated comedy pilot, and worked for two seasons on the hit TBS comedic game show “The Misery Index.” Previously, he worked for four seasons on the NBC cult-favorite sitcom “Community.” He’s written and performed at U.C.B. LA, Second City Chicago, and Improv Olympic Chicago. He holds an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a degree in Theater and Creative Writing from Northwestern University.

 

South Hope St. by Aaron Higareda
Directed by Jim Kleinmann
Featuring Hugo Carbajal, Danny Gomez, and Roland Ruiz

On a bus to Hope Street, Sergio, Eddy, and Noah battle their inner demons for salvation.

AARON HIGAREDA is an emerging playwright from southern California. He is currently the Data and Membership Specialist at Theatre Bay Area. Aaron has had workshop productions with CASA 0101 and El Teatro Campesino and most recently self-produced a zoom staged reading of his first full length play “You don’t even speak Spanish!”. He holds a B.A. in Theater: Writing for the Performing arts from the University of California, Riverside, and will be entering UC Riverside’s Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts M.F.A. program in the fall of 2021.

 

 

Brown Eyed Killer by M.J. Kang
Directed by Sylvia Cervantes Blush
Featuring Stephanie Keefer, Krystal Mosley, Lea Madda, Tansu Philip, and Shoshanna Green

A mother plans her daughter’s 13th birthday party. It’s a murder mystery.

M.J. KANG  is a playwright, actor, director and storyteller. She’s had 10 plays produced. Her plays have been produced at Tarragon Theater, Theater Passe Muraille, Son of Semele, Pan Asian Rep, and Factory Theater. This season, she is in the playwrights groups at Company of Angels, The Barrow Group, Vagrancy Theater and Playground-LA. She’s been commissioned by Shotgun Players, Portland Playhouse, AFO Solo Shorts, and Blyth Festival Theater among others. She played Kwan Won-Ji on CBS’ Seal Team and has been on TV, film, new media videos and national commercials.

Miss Rebecca Is Here With the New Rules by Scott Mullen
Directed by Jesus Reyes
Featuring Hillary DeMartino, Krystal Mosley, and Alexia Jasmene

Two female cast members of a play are surprised when a woman arrives with new rules the play must follow.

SCOTT MULLEN is a playwright and occasional screenwriter, whose short plays have been produced over 600 times around the world. Most recently he co-wrote the TV movie LINE SISTERS, which aired on Lifetime this past weekend.

The Passing Storm by Jessica June Rowe
Directed by Jully Lee
Featuring Richard Ruyle, Lea Madda, and Josef Bette

A lost mountaineer is visited by ghosts both real and not-so-real.

JESSICA JUNE ROWE is an author, playwright, editor, and perpetual daydreamer. Her short plays have been featured on multiple stages in Los Angeles with companies such as Playground-LA and NEO Ensemble Theatre. She is the Flash Fiction Editor of Exposition Review and her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and the Best of the Net. One of her poems is stamped into a sidewalk in Valencia, CA, where she currently lives. She also really loves chai lattes. Find her on Twitter @willwrite4chai.

The Intervention by Ayesha Siddiqui
Directed by Rondrell McCormick
Featuring Tahmus Rounds, Tansu Philip, Danny Gomez, and Alexia Jasmene

At the Interplanetary Summit, the Sun, Venus, and Mars stage an intervention in an attempt to stop Earth’s worrying and reckless behavior that is having a negative effect on the galaxy.

AYESHA SIDDIQUI  is a playwright of Pakistani-American descent. Works include: Water Lily (Sundance Institute Playwriting Intensive, 2019) and Baba, Jee (Father, Yes)(Hollywood Fringe Scholarship Winner, 2018). Her newest play, Jaldee/Hurry, is in development with The Vagrancy 2020-21 Writers’ Group.

 

 

 

PLAYGROUND-LA is the first regional expansion of the celebrated Bay Area playwright incubator and theatre community hub, PlayGround. PlayGround was launched in San Francisco in 1994 by co-founders Jim Kleinmann, Brighde Mullins and Denise Shama. In 1996, Kleinmann became PlayGround’s first Artistic Director. Since its founding, PlayGround has developed and staged over 1,000 original ten-minute plays by 250 Bay Area and Los Angeles early-career writers and has commissioned/developed more than 100 full-length plays. In the process of staging those works, PlayGround has helped to identify some of the leading emerging writers and, at the same time, has engendered the creation of a true community of theatre artists, bringing together hundreds of local actors, directors and playwrights. Each month, Oct-Mar, PlayGround-LA announces a topic to the thirty-six writers of the PlayGround-LA Writers Pool. Writers have four-and-a-half days to generate their original short plays and the top six are cast with leading local professionals and rehearsed for just 1.5 hours before being presented as script-in-hand staged readings on the second Monday of the month via Zoom live stream. At the end of each season, six of the thirty-six works developed in the Monday night series are selected for a one-night celebration, the Best of PlayGround Gala. The 10th annual Best of PlayGround Gala will take place on Monday, April 11, 2022, live at the Broadwater Theaters and simulcast via Vimeo Live. PlayGround-LA is a fiscally sponsored project of PlayGround. For more information, visit http://playground-la.org.