PlayGround-LA has announced the recipient of its 2020 PlayGround-LA play commission: Daysha Veronica. Over the next year, Daysha will expand her ten-minute play, Mother Earth Day, into a new full-length play. Originally written for the March 9, 2020 Monday Night PlayGround “Planet Earth Arts Night”, the short play was the March People’s Choice Award winner and was subsequently selected for PlayGround-LA’s season-ending Best of PlayGround-LA Gala, presented via Zoom live stream on April 20. Evoking the works of August Wilson and Eugene O’Neill, Daysha’s Mother Earth Day is a beautifully-rendered fablistic drama, simultaneously personal and universal as it examines the deep impacts of environmental change on families and their livelihoods. In the ten-minute script, an aging black farmer and his two sons struggle with how to best pass on their family’s legacy and heritage to the next generation while awaiting Mother Earth’s yearly delivery. Past recipients of the PlayGround-LA commission include Nicki Spencer (“Merry Christmas, Ruth”) and Mark Sherstinsky (“The Mission”).
Daysha Veronica is a playwright, author, viral spoken word artist, veteran digital media producer, MFA candidate at UCLA, and an alumni of the Television Academy Foundation internship program. Her plays have been workshopped/performed at UC San Diego, UCLA, Meet Cute LA, Celebration Theatre, and PlayGround-LA. She has also received recognition/awards for her work by Playwrights Foundation, Kentucky Women Writers Conference, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Central Florida, and PlayGround-LA. Her digital work has appeared on Hulu, AppleTV, Amazon Prime, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and The Huffington Post. She currently resides in Los Angeles, and can be found blogging on her female self-confidence building platform, Yes Queen (www.yesqueenlife.com).
About PlayGround-LA
The mission of PlayGround-LA is to support the development of significant new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround-LA has developed a unique model for identifying and nurturing the best new writers, helping them to build a significant body of original work, and strongly weaving these artists into the family of local theatre professionals. PlayGround pairs early development playwrights with established, professional actors and directors and fosters the artistic relationships that develop.
Ten days before the designated Monday, October-March, a topic is announced and emerging playwrights in the Greater Los Angeles Area have until 2pm the following Tuesday to submit a short script. A panel of judges selects six winners, whose entries are cast over the weekend and then rehearsed with the area’s best professional actors and directors in a whirlwind ninety minutes each before being performed as script-in-hand staged readings. Recent topics have included: “The Shakespeare Prequels,” “Gift Exchange,” “Anthropomorph,” and “Feeding 9 Billion” as part of a six-year collaboration with Planet Earth Arts and Stanford University on environmental-themed content.
PlayGround-LA is the first regional expansion of the celebrated Bay Area playwright incubator and theatre community hub, PlayGround(SF). 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 950 original ten-minute plays by 220 Bay Area and Los Angeles early-career writers and has commissioned/developed 85 full-length plays by distinguished PlayGround alumni. 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. For most if not all of the participating writers, PlayGround is the first professional staging their work has received and serves as their introduction into the professional theatre community.
PlayGround-LA has announced the recipient of its 2020 PlayGround-LA play commission: Daysha Veronica. Over the next year, Daysha will expand her ten-minute play, Mother Earth Day, into a new full-length play. Originally written for the March 9, 2020 Monday Night PlayGround “Planet Earth Arts Night”, the short play was the March People’s Choice Award winner and was subsequently selected for PlayGround-LA’s season-ending Best of PlayGround-LA Gala, presented via Zoom live stream on April 20. Evoking the works of August Wilson and Eugene O’Neill, Daysha’s Mother Earth Day is a beautifully-rendered fablistic drama, simultaneously personal and universal as it examines the deep impacts of environmental change on families and their livelihoods. In the ten-minute script, an aging black farmer and his two sons struggle with how to best pass on their family’s legacy and heritage to the next generation while awaiting Mother Earth’s yearly delivery. Past recipients of the PlayGround-LA commission include Nicki Spencer (“Merry Christmas, Ruth”) and Mark Sherstinsky (“The Mission”).