Season 8’s Best of PlayGround-LA Gala
PlayGround-LA, Los Angeles’s incubator for a new generation of playwrights, caps off its eighth season on Monday evening, April 20, with Best of PlayGround-LA, a one-night gala celebration of the best playwrights and short plays selected from more than 150 submissions and 36 works developed as part of the season’s Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and current shelter-in-place order, this year’s gala event will be live streamed only via Zoom on April 20, with actors performing remotely. The Gala will feature an all-star performance of the six Best of PlayGround winners and, at the conclusion of the evening, audience members will participate in the selection of the People’s Choice Award and recipient of the 2020 PlayGround-LA full-length play commission. Tickets are $15-$100 and include a virtual reception with the artists following the show. For tickets or more information, visit PlayGround-LA.org/bestof or call 323-992-6766. Ticket purchasers will receive a private link to the Best of PlayGround-LA live stream the day of the performance. All proceeds support PlayGround-LA’s playwright incubator programs.
Best of PlayGround-LA
The six plays to be presented in this year’s Best of PlayGround are:
None of Your Business by Rachel Borders
Dining in the Desert by Julianne Jigour
hellokitty55 by Misao McGregor
Hamlet at the Prom by Scott Mullen
A Part of the Circle by Nicholas C. Pappas
Mother Earth Day by Daysha Veronica
About the Playwrights
Rachel Borders has written for FOX’s Proven Innocent and DirecTV’s Rogue. She was a Writers’ Assistant on NBC’s Chicago Justice & CW’s Life Sentence and currently works for In Good Company under their WBTV overall deal. Originally from Chicago, Rachel attended Brown University and loves hot dogs.
Julianne Jigour earned her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she received the West Coast Drama Alumni Clan Award for Dramatic Writing. Her play Bright Shining Sea, commissioned by PlayGround-LA and Planet Earth Arts, premiered in the 2018 PlayGround Festival of New Works, where it was selected as a TBA Awards Recommended Production.
Misao McGregor received her BA in Theater and Music from Connecticut College and studied playwriting at East West Players, the nation’s longest running theater of color. Produced works include Dandelions Conquer (Wig & Candle, CT), Pizza Over Flowers (Slingshot New Works, Seattle, WA), and Firefly / A Foreigner’s Tale (Connecticut College, CT).
Scott Mullen is a playwright and screenwriter, whose thrillers The Summoning and In Broad Daylight aired on TV One. His short plays have been produced hundreds of times around the world. An evening of his comic plays, A NIGHT OF S.M., had a two-week run in Hollywood.
Nicholas C. Pappas is a playwright, dramaturge, and director. Plays: Including Shooter (publisher: Playscripts), The Ballad of 423 and 424 (Heideman Award, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville), and Fatty (Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor). MFA from San Francisco State. @NicholasCPappas and nicholascpappas.com for more info on Nick’s directing, dramaturgy, and film projects.
Daysha Veronica is a playwright, author, digital media producer and MFA candidate at UCLA. Her plays have been workshopped/performed at UC San Diego, UCLA, Meet Cute LA, Celebration Theatre, and now PlayGround-LA. Her digital work has appeared on Hulu, Amazon Prime, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and The Huffington Post. Social: @DayshaVeronica
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 850 original ten-minute plays by 220 Bay Area and Los Angeles early-career writers and has commissioned/developed 75 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’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, Sundance Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and New York International Fringe Festival, among others. Directors and actors participating in PlayGround are among some of the most distinguished theatre professionals, regularly working on leading local stages.
For more information, visit http://PlayGround-LA.org or follow PlayGround on Facebook (http://facebook.com/PlayGround.LosAngeles), Twitter (http://twitter.com/PlayGround_LA) and Instagram (https://instragram.com/PlayGroundLATheatre).