Winners of the 2025 Young Playwrights Contest “The American Experiment”
PlayGround is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Young Playwrights Contest, an open-submission competition that provides winning high school playwrights with a professional staged reading during the PlayGround Festival of New Works. The winning plays and playwrights of this year’s contest are The Lavender by Myles-Alexys Jones (Moreau Catholic High School), The Poet’s Husband by Evelyn Grace Callejo (Galileo High School), and Stinky American Pants by Anya Lu (The Harker School). All three plays will receive staged readings by professional actors on May 23 at 7pm PT at Potrero Stage (1695 18th Street, San Francisco) & Simulcast. For tickets and more information, visit https://playground-sf.org/youngplaywrights.
Each year, Bay Area high school students, grades 9-12, are invited to submit short plays for consideration in the Young Playwrights Contest. Through the Lenore & Howard Klein Foundation PlayGround Young Playwrights Project, PlayGround and Bay Area high schools partner to enable young writers to find their own expressive voice through the creation, development, and production of short plays. This year’s theme was “The American Experiment” and drew submissions from throughout the Bay Area.
THE PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS
The Poet’s Husband by Evelyn Grace Callejo (Galileo High School)
A husband is forced to develop his own inner strength when his Japanese wife, an aspiring poet, is lost to an American Internment camp.
Evelyn Grace Callejo is an aspiring author and marine biologist who hopes to illustrate misrepresented topics such as grief and disability through a hopeful but critical lens in their art. Her passions for life and science have been with her since birth, but her biggest inspiration is Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel Frankenstein.
The Lavender by Myles-Alexys Jones (Moreau Catholic High School)
A sharp-tongued former government worker recounts her firing during the Lavender Scare. The play blends biting humor with buried heartbreak in a solo reckoning on truth, queerness, and democracy.
Myles-Alexys “MJ” Jones is a 14-year-old actor, writer and dancer with a deep passion for storytelling and creative expression. Over the past four years, she has been involved in numerous school productions which have earned her multiple accolades. Her experience on stage has shaped her love for bringing characters to life and connecting with audiences on a deeply personal level. She hails from Oakland, CA.
Stinky American Pants by Anya Lu (The Harker School)
Hear the story of Mei, a young Chinese immigrant, and her journey to America.
Born and raised in San Jose, CA, fifteen-year-old Anya Lu has grown up surrounded by the performing arts. When she was four, Anya took her first vocal course, kickstarting her passion for the stage. She’s performed in several plays and musicals, starring as both Baloo in The Jungle Book and Thirteen from In the Forests of the Night. Outside of performing, Anya enjoys writing as well, prompting her to combine both her passions.
PlayGround, a leading national playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’, New York’s, and 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 350 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,500 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 100 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 36 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 Steinberg Awards, Glickman Awards (including 6 of the last 10), O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and New York International Fringe Festival, among 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.
Why Free?
PlayGround has made all programs admission-free in furtherance of our commitment to radical accessibility. If you are able, we hope that you’ll consider donating with your free ticket reservation, recognizing that your direct support makes it possible for us to continue providing fair and equitable wages for professional artists while sustaining our radical accessibility efforts for all.
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