PlayGround & Planet Earth Arts Resume New Play Festival March 13!
“Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.” – Rumi. Playwright incubator PlayGround-LA in partnership with Planet Earth Arts has announced the prompt for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround staged reading event of its 11th season and the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival, following a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Thirty-seven Los Angeles writers have just four-and-a-half days to generate their original scripts inspired by the prompt “Grief and Hope for Planet Earth” as they vie for one of six slots in the latest round of this year’s Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, presented live at the Broadwater Theaters and simulcast online on March 13th at 7pm PT. PlayGround-LA’s sister companies, PlayGround SF, PlayGround NY and – new this year! – PlayGround Chicago will present their own interpretations of the theme on March 20, March 27, and April 3, respectively. All PlayGround programs in all four regions are being performed under SAG-AFTRA New Media agreements, providing union wages and protections for all performers. Monday Night PlayGround is admission-free (donations gratefully accepted) and advance reservations are required. For the complete schedule or to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-la.org/monday.
PlayGround-LA’s celebrated Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series on second Mondays will be once again held in-person this year, at Broadwater Theaters and live simulcast (October 17, 2022 – March 13, 2023). Each month, PlayGround-LA announces a topic and writers have just four-and-a-half days to generate their original ten-page script. The top six scripts are matched with directors and a cast of leading local professionals and rehearsed for just ninety minutes on the day of the performance. Following a brief technical rehearsal to add sound and other design elements, the six short plays are performed as script-in-hand staged readings for an in-person and live-stream viewing audience. Audience members can also experience the thrill of being a producer through the monthly People’s Choice Awards, helping to determine which plays and playwrights go on for consideration in PlayGround-LA’s annual short play showcase, Best of PlayGround-LA. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted and directly support artist compensation. Proof of vaccination and masks are required for in-person performance at Broadwater Theaters.
PlayGround-LA’s 2022-23 Writers Pool, the thirty-seven Los Angeles-based writers competitively selected to participate in the monthly series, are: Michael P. Adams, Monique Aldred, Steve Apostolina, Jaisey Bates, Evan Baughfman, Summer Broyhill, Emily Brauer Rogers+, Joe Luis Cedillo, Allie Costa, Bailey Jordan Garcia, Lauren Gorski, Mason Greer, Julio Hanson, Briggs Hatton, Aaron Higareda, Uma Incrocci, Starina Johnson, M.J. Kang, Michael Kaplan, Ross Tedford Kendall, Arthur Keng, Keyanna Khatiblou, Ethan LaCaro, Mildred Inez Lewis, Rhea MacCallum+, Liza McGowan, Scott Mullen, Peter Pasco, Lina Patel, Joni Ravenna, Jessica June Rowe+, Mark Sherstinsky, Ayesha Siddiqui, Nicki Spencer, Jennie Webb, Karl Williams
Supporting PlayGround-LA playwrights and the Monday Night series are the members of the PlayGround-LA Company, representing some of Los Angeles’ leading directors, actors, designers, and stage managers. The 2022-23 PlayGround-LA Company includes: Jahnavi Alyssa, Julia Belanova, Josef Bette, Sylvia Cervantes Blush, Ben Cain, Hugo Carbajal, Jordan Carlson, Jordan Covington, Frieda de Lackner, Hillary DeMartino, Carolyn Deskin, Rogelio Douglas III, Danny Gomez, Christian Haines, Julio Hanson, Mark Jacobson, Alexia Jasmene, Kurt Kanazawa, Stephanie T. Keefer, Emily Kuroda, Christopher Gary Lawson, Jully Lee, Christine Liao, Lea Madda, Jackie Marriott, Gabi Mayorga, Paris McCarthy, Rondrell McCormick, Sherry Michaels, Krystal Mosley, Melissa Ortiz, Tansu Philip, Gary Poux, Tiana Randall-Quant, Maiya Reaves, Jesus Reyes, Ivan Rivas, Debba Rofheart, Tahmus Rounds, Mae Ruling, Collette Rutherford, Anthony Rutowicz, Lamar Usher, Carla Vega, William Warren, Charlotte Williams, Christina Wren, Demetrius Wren
Planet Earth Arts was founded in 2014 out of our conviction that environmental and racial/social justice are the most urgent issues of our time, and our belief that the arts, in collaboration with the sciences and humanities, must play a leading role in transforming the human presence on our planet from a destructive role to one that is mutually beneficial to the entire community of life. We collaborate with actors, playwrights, directors, photographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists. Planet Earth Arts supports them by commissioning, presenting and showcasing their powerful transformative work – confronting and illuminating climate change, mass extinctions, threats to oceans, habitat loss, sea rise and the struggles for environmental justice. That same year we launched the Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival at Berkeley Rep and at Stanford University, in collaboration with PlayGround and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford, to inspire playwrights to create bold new works for the stage that explore issues of planetary sustainability as well as environmental and social justice. For the past nine years Planet Earth Arts has worked with more than 75 playwrights from PlayGround’s Writers Pool in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival has generated a living library of more than 200 short plays. PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts have co-commissioned 12 new original full-length or one-act plays – several of which have had World Premiere Productions in San Francisco at Potrero Stage: PlayGround Center for New Plays. Each year at least one or two Planet Earth Arts plays have been included in the Best of PlayGround. We are thrilled to resume collaborating with PlayGround on the 2023 Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival and look forward to supporting the new visions and voices of the Chicago and New York Writer Pools.
PlayGround-LA is the first regional expansion of the celebrated Bay Area playwright incubator and theatre community hub, PlayGround (SF). PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’, New York’s and now Chicago’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 34 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.
WHAT: PlayGround & Planet Earth Arts Announce Topic for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround of Season 11: “GRIEF AND HOPE FOR PLANET EARTH”, marking the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival!
WHERE: Broadwater Second Stage, 6320 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles CA 90038
WHEN: Monday, March 13, 2022 at 7pm PST
TICKETS: Admission is free (donations gratefully accepted) but advance reservations are required. To reserve tickets for in-person or online viewing, visit https://tickets.playground-sf.org. COVID PROTOCOLS: Proof of vaccination and masks are required for all in-person attendees.