The winning 2006 full-length plays and playwrights
LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING , by Sheila Callaghan
On a secluded Greek island, an American ex-pat pursues his passions: wine making and his breathtaking young bride. On the eve of his first tasting, an old lover reappears, and with her, a wild an violent past
Friday 7/28 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS) & Saturday 8/5 @ 4pm (BUY TICKETS)
Sheila Callaghan's plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Annex Theatre, Moving Arts, and LABrynth, among others. Sheila is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a 2001 LA Weekly Award for Best One-act, a 2001-02 Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, a 2002 Chesley Prize for Lesbian Playwriting, a 2003 Mac Dowell Residency, and a 2004 NYFA grant. Her plays have been produced internationally in New Zealand, Norway, and the Czech Republic. She has been commissioned by Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include Scab , The Hunger Waltz , Crawl Fade To White , Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) , We Are Not These Hands , Dead City , Lascivious Something , Kate Crackernuts and her opera Elemental with music by Sophocle Papavasilopoulos. Sheila is a member of the Obie winning playwright's organization 13P.
THE KEPLER PROJECT: When Religion Lost The Soul , by D.W. Jacobs, Nina Wise, and Ralph Abraham
* A Playwrights Foundation commission
A forgotten 17 th century astronomer, his unconventional mother and his famous friend Galileo are the central figures in this contemporary exploration of what was lost when sacred and secular visions of reality went their separate ways.
Saturday 7/29 @ 12pm (in-house reading, not open to public) & Saturday 8/5 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS)
D. W. Jacobs is a director, writer, actor, teacher and producer. He co-founded San Diego Repertory Theatre in 1976 with Sam Woodhouse, and worked as Artistic Director until 1997, when he resigned to focus on independent projects. Jacobs is now developing scripts for theatre, film and digital video. Plays: R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) Of The Universe ; a commission from Z Space Studio to adapt Edward Bellamy's 19 th century utopian novel, Looking Backward ; The Whole World Is Watching (Oedipus trilogy as TV, co-written/directed with Scott Feldsher.) Directing: Mac Wellman's Albanian Softshoe (with Michael Roth); Arial Dorfman's Death And The Maiden/La Muerte Y La Doncella (in English and Spanish); Antonio Skarmeta's Burning Patience/Ardiente Paciencia (with Jorge Huerta); Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, and Titus Andronicus . His 1986 production of Romulus Linney's Holy Ghosts played New York City as part of the 1987 American Theatre Exchange.
A performance artist and founder of Motion Theater, Nina Wise creates physical autobiographical theater based on a unique method that she developed. Originally a dancer with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Ms. Wise's original works have been performed at Magic Theater, Traveling Jewish Theater, Theater for a New City, Franklin Furnace, Highways, SF Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Intersection for the Arts, and in Europe, South America and Asia. In addition to presenting her pieces in traditional theaters, performance art galleries, and theater festivals, Ms. Wise has expanded her venue-base to include think tanks, international conferences, medical institutions and spiritual centers. Ms Wise is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the Marin Arts Council, and her performance works have been honored with seven Bay Area Theater Critics' Circle Awards. She teaches performance and writing at Motion Studio in San Rafael and has been a visiting lecturer and presenter at the University of Southern California, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley Extension.
Ralph Abraham is a chaos theorist and professor of mathematics at UC Santa
Cruz. He is the founding director of the Visual Math Institute in Santa
Cruz, California and author or coauthor of: Foundations of Mechanics;
Dynamics, The Geometry of Behavior; Chaos in Discrete Dynamical Systems;
Chaos, Gaia, Eros; Chaos, Cosmos, and Creativity; and The Evolutionary Mind.
THE DANGER OF BLEEDING BROWN , by Enrique Urueta
Queer club-kid Marco loves disco, drag-queens and hot anonymous sex. But when he hooks up with his white film professor, he exposes himself and his friends to devastating consequences.
Saturday 7/29 @ 4pm (BUY TICKETS) & Sunday 8/6 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS)
Colombian-American, by way of Virginia, Enrique Urueta was educated at The College of William and Mary where he studied theatre and geology. In August 2003, Impact Theatre in Berkeley, produced his ten-minute play The Johnson Administration . His play The Danger of Bleeding Brown had its first staged reading at the 2005 National Queer Arts Festival. His one-act play Learn To Be Latina received staged readings in the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and U-Mass Amherst and was produced by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco. He is a recipient of a 2005 Theater Bay Area CA$H Grant for the ongoing development of Learn To Be Latina, the full-length version of which will have a reading at the 2006 National Queer Arts Festival. He is a proud member of NoPassport, a pan-American theatre coalition devoted the advocacy of Latino/a and hemispherically-minded work. He will begin the MFA playwriting program at Brown University in the fall of 2006.
KITCHEN TABLE , by Eugenie Chan
When Nicky's obsession with his ‘Vette (and the white mechanic who helps him fix it) interferes with his family's traditional dinner ritual, it ignites a battle with his strict Chinese father that drives him to carve his own definition of manhood.
Saturday 7/29 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS) & Saturday 8/5 @ 12pm (BUY TICKETS)
Eugenie Chan's plays have been produced and workshopped across the country at venues such as: The Public Theatre, Magic Theatre, Thick Description, Perishable, Northwest Asian American Theatre, Brava! For Women in the Arts, Opera Piccola/StageBridge, PlayLabs, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and others. Her work includes: Kitchen Table; B'umblebee; Pilgrim; Daphne Does Dim Sum; Rancho Grande; Emil, A Chinese Play, Novell-aah! ; and Tour Sino . Eugenie's opera libretto Snakewoman was part of the February 2004 Risk Is This Festival of New Experimental Plays at San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theatre. Her short film Sik Fan is scheduled to go into production in August 2006. Currently, Eugenie is working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe on their 2006 summer show, God, Damnit!, and has been commissioned by Cutting Ball Theatre to adapt Ariadne for the stage.
WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS , by Sherry Kramer
A woman and her vintage Barbie doll chronicle the history of petroleum and how the American dream lost its luster.
Sunday 7/30 @ 4pm (BUY TICKETS) & Friday 8/4 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS)
Sherry Kramer's plays include David's Redhaired Death , The Wall of Water , What a Man Weighs , The Ruling Passion , and The Bay of Fundy . Her plays have been produced at Second Stage, Soho Rep, EST, Yale Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, Signature Theater, The Theatre of the First Amendment, and other theatres here and abroad. She is a recipient of NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, and McKnight Fellowships, and a commission from the Audrey Skirball-Kenis New Play Project in LA. She has received the Weissberger Playwriting Award, a New York Drama League Award, and the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, as well as by TCG in their Plays in Process Series and in three Vintage/Random House anthologies. She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and an MFA in Playwriting from the Iowa Playwrights Workshops. She is often a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers and the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
AS AMERICAN AS , by Ken Prestininzi
The war comes home to middle America when the Penini's basement is transformed into a black-site where a hooded man is interrogated by two men named Frank. How far would you go to save your only son?
Sunday 7/30 @ 8pm (BUY TICKETS) & Sunday 8/6 @ 4pm (BUY TICKETS)
Ken Prestininzi is currently purusing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University, where he is Associate Artistic Director of the new Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre. Ken lived in San Francisco for over ten years and was Artistic Director of the new plays workshop organization West Coast Plays. Plays produced in San Francisco include Ariadne (composer Clark Suprynowicz; director Tracy Ward) Beholder, The Burger Girl Jingle, Gaveston (composer Christopher Winslow) The Hole, Kept, Soblonski, Peer Gynt (musical adaptation with Winslow,) and Presto Pronto. During that time he also wrote the AIDS youth script Touch Me with Joseph Chaikin, which was later published by Theatre Communications Group and collaborated with choreographer Jess Curtis. His plays have gone on to be produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and in the Czech Republic, England, Mexico, and Scotland. New working scripts include Love and Punishment, The Man from Caravaggio, and White Daddy and the Black Virgin Queen .
The winning BASH! (Bay Area Shorts) plays and playwrights
A single program of short plays and excerpts from evolving longer works by emerging Bay Area playwrights (BUY TICKETS)
Sunday 7/30 @ 12pm
BEYOND WORDS, by Tim Bauer
A marketing consultant suffers an existential crises, when he meets the only woman in the world he can't communicate with.
Tim Bauer is a San Francisco playwright. He has been a recipient of a PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award, a winner of the Short Leaps Festival, a winner of A.C.T.'s David Mamet Writing Contest, and a semifinalist for the Nicholl Fellowship. His plays have been produced at theatres such as Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Colonial Playhouse, National Comedy Theater, Phoenix Theatre and Austin Script Works, and they have been developed by Playwright's Center SF, Shelterbelt Theatre and Edward Albee's Great Plains Conference. Tim is a member of the PlayGround Writers Pool in residence at Berkeley Rep.
YOUR MONEY IS SAFE, by Molly Rhodes
A woman receives a sudden visit from a dust-covered man carrying important papers.
Molly Rhodes Molly has lived in San Francisco for the past two years, where she has had a handful of plays workshopped and her first local production in the Best of PlayGround festival this spring. When she's not working on numerous play ideas, Molly can be found raising money to help San Francisco's street youth or producing a variety of Magic Theatre playwriting development festivals. Molly's playwriting has become all the better through the quiet companionship of Sigmund, and the passion for theatre, sharp insights, and love of James.
SHE & HE, by A.P. Saito
A couple experiences the prismatic quality of time, memory and the true nature of their enduring love.
Andrew P. Saito has served as a resident playwright with the Asian American Theater Company's New Works Incubator, and a as writing intern for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His first play, El Río, was a runner-up for the 2002 Princess Grace Playwriting Award, and semilla was a finalist for the 2006 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He has presented work at Bindlestiff Studio, Kearny Street Workshop, Locus Arts, Million Fishes Collective, SOMArts, Intersection for the Arts, La Peña Cultural Center, the OffMarket Theater, and the Magic Theater.
HAYLEY'S COMET, by Christopher Karlin Tong
Before consummating a suicide pact with his online girlfriend, Ash must take care of some family business.
Christopher Karlin Tong is a playwright based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His plays include: THE NEGLIGENT SON, Honorable Mention at BAPF 2005 & finalist at the Humana Festival of New American Plays (Actors Theatre of Louisville); HAYLEY'S COMET, finalist at BAPF 2004 & winner of the Highsmith Award (San Francisco State); THE PERSONAL DRAMA OF PATTY PAYLESS, Honorable Mention at the New Works for Young Women Festival (University of Tulsa, Oklahoma); and ROUGH LOVE, One-Act Fringe (San Francisco State). A Fulbright Grant recipient, he received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and MFA degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.
