PlayGround Festival: Kick-Off & Playwrights Panel Tuesday, May 7

PlayGround Festival: Kick-Off & Playwrights Panel
Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 7:00 PM PDT – Potrero Stage
Admission is free, Reserve your ticket here

Hear from seven of the playwrights featured in this year’s Festival of New Works! Join Artistic Director Jim Kleinmann in conversation with PlayGround playwright alumni Robyn Brooks, Anne Yumi Kobori, Matthew Y. Morishige, Bridgette Dutta Portman, Louel Señores, Stan Stone, and Lisa Gaye Thompson. These award-winning dramatists will discuss their plays, their processes, and the role of new works in the evolving landscape of American theatre. A festival kick-off reception with the playwrights immediately follows the panel discussion.

Meet the panelists:

Robyn Brooks (Bessie in Medias Res – Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24), she/her, M.F.A., Creative Writing/Poetry, and M.F.A., Creative Writing/Playwriting, author of the poetry chapbook, “venus in retrograde” (Finishing Line Press, 2015), is a poet, playwright, and director. Her plays have been staged/read at Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Tennessee Women’s Theater Project; Theatre of Yugen; Theatre Rhinoceros; Los Angeles Women’s Theater Project; Potrero Stage; and other venues. She has directed several of her plays. A playwright for SF PlayGround’s Writers Pool 2007-2013 and 2023-2024, Brooks is SF PlayGround’s November 2023 People’s Choice Award winner, and a selected playwright for CIMIENTOS 2024, a play development program for playwrights, through IATI Theater, New York.

Anne Yumi Kobori (Apertures of Love in Times of War – Festival Premiere) is a Japanese-American playwright, actor, producer, director, and teaching artist. As a director, she has worked with Utopia Theatre Project, EnActe Arts, Los Altos Youth Theatre, and SF Shakespeare Festival, where she spent 5 years as Education Program Manager. Her full-length plays Seeds, Every Day Alice, and her adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull have premiered with Utopia Theatre Project. Currently, Anne is a co-writer for Braided, a play exploring Native American liberation and Japanese American resilience, in development with Theatre of Yugen. BA Theatre Arts, summa cumlaude, Santa Clara University.

Bridgette Dutta Portman (Rivals of Mars – Festival Staged Reading) is an award-winning playwright and novelist. More than two dozen of her plays have been produced locally, nationally, and internationally. She is president of the Pear Theatre board of directors and a member of the Pear Playwrights’ Guild, the 2023-24 PlayGround writers pool, and the Dramatists’ Guild. She received the 2023 June Anne Baker Prize from PlayGround, and has been a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, the Theatre Bay Area TITAN award, the PlayPenn Conference, the Kentucky Women’s Theatre Conference Prize for Women Writers, the New Dramatists playwrights’ residency, and more. She teaches composition and creative writing at UC Berkeley.

Matthew Y. Morishige (Work/Shoot – Festival Stage Reading) is an actor, musician, and playwright based in the Bay Area. Matthew has been a member of the Playground Writers’ pool since the ’22-’23 season. This is Matthew’s first full-length as a part of Playground’s Festival Staged Readings. Matthew is committed to amplifying diverse perspectives and is energized by collaboration with artists across many disciplines.

Louel Señores (Better Unkept– Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24), he/him, is an actor, playwright, and stage manager based right here in Berkeley! You may have recently seen him in The Engine of Our Disruption (Central Works), Tea Party (One of Our Own), or you probably didn’t see him stage managing Yerma (Shotgun Players), Balikbayan Box (TheatreFIRST), and Water by the Spoonful (SF Playhouse). He’s a proud company member of Berkeley Interactive Theater and PlayGround SF (This is his first season in the Writers’ Pool!), as well as a member of Shotgun Players’ EDIB Committee. Much gratitude to those still creating and supporting live theater in this crazy time we’re living in! LouelSenores.com

Stan Stone’s (Freedom – Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24), he/him, past work at a SF hospice facility taught him a lot about life and death and love. It was rewarding work but also emotionally exhausting. As a way of self-care, he found solace in writing. Journaling and short stories gave birth to screenwriting, poetry and playwriting. When his mother passed, he wrote and performed a one-man show about it. Life, death and love are a constant thread in the fabric of his imagination.

Lisa Gaye Thompson (Mack & Mimi Encounter Totality), she/her, is thrilled to be in her fifth season writing with Monday Night PlayGround. This season, Mack & Mimi Encounter Totality and America Chavez: Particle Flyer were staged and won the People’s Choice award. Last year, Three Centimeters Per Second also won that award before going on to a production at Fringe of Marin. Other short plays have also had readings around the Bay. She’s a founding company member, playwright and sometime host of Write Away, an online improvisational playwriting show.

Jim Kleinmann (Moderator/Artistic Director), he/him, co-founded PlayGround in 1994, along with playwright Brighde Mullins and director Denise Shama, and has served as Artistic Director since 1996. For PlayGround, he has provided artistic and administrative leadership for the past twenty-four seasons, developing PlayGround’s unique array of new playwright and new play incubator programs, including Monday Night PlayGround, the PlayGround Festival of New Works, the full-length play Commissioning Initiative, the New Play Production Fund, Potrero Stage: PlayGround Center for New Plays, and most recently the Innovator Incubator.  For PlayGround, he has directed more than one hundred short and full-length plays, including works by Garret Jon Groenveld, Aaron Loeb, Geetha Reddy, Lauren Yee, Katie May, and many others. Recent directing and dramaturgy credits include David Steele’s Vignettes on Love and Ruben Grijalva’s Value Over Replacement. He is a veteran arts administrator with more than thirty years of experience, including stints leading Traveling Jewish Theatre, Smuin Ballet, and Berkeley Symphony, and received his MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

For the complete festival schedule, visit https://playground-sf.org/festival.