May 24 Potrero Hill Community Celebration: Land Acknowledgment Mural & Young Playwrights Project

On Friday evening, May 24, PlayGround will host a Potrero Hill Community Celebration, including the unveiling of a new land acknowledgment mural by Indigenous & San Francisco artist Natalie Contreras, developed in partnership with the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone (ARO), the original and continuing stewards of the lands upon which PlayGround’s home theatre, Potrero Stage, is situated. The evening will also include the 16th annual Young Playwrights Project (YPP), featuring performances of new short plays by Bay Area high school students Hiu Chu (Galileo Academy of Science & Technology), Shannon Floyd Jr (Galileo Academy of Science & Technology), Oona Haskovec (Ruth Asawa School of the Arts), and Alexis Tuchinda (The Nueva School), inspired by the prompt “The Legacy of the Land We Inhabit”. A reception with the muralist and playwrights will follow. The celebration continues Saturday and Sunday evenings, May 25-26, with the close of PlayGround’s 28th annual Festival of New Works and the annual short play fest, Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24. The mural project and public celebrations are generously underwritten by California Humanities and Avenue Greenlight, with additional support from the San Francisco Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts. Admission for all events is free and in-person tickets can be reserved at https://tickets.playground-sf.org.

About the Muralist: Natalie Contreras (Tepehuan, P’urhépecha)
Natalie is an Indigenous Innovator, Artist, & Educator born in Yelamu, occupied Ohlone Territory, also known as San Francisco, CA. A Bay Area born + based leader in the Social Impact space, working on strengthening bridges between innovation, art and indigenous culture & community. Currently exploring how indigenous people can lead innovative solutions specific to communities by leveraging the use of technology for empowerment. She has both technical and creative skills that have been applied to many projects and was born in San Francisco’s Mission District which was constructed over the ancestral Chutchui Ohlone village site of Yelamu. She has web development, product management, film making, photography and muralist experience, and has worked with organizations such as the Golden Gates National Parks Conservancy and the Native American Health Center.

Young Playwrights Project Playwrights & Plays

Take Charge by Hiu Chu (Galileo Academy of Science & Technology ’27)
A heartwarming tale of a village coming together to save their land.

Hiu Chu, also known as Christine, is a 9th grader at Galileo Academy of Science & Technology. She previously attended Marina Middle School. In her own time, she enjoys immersing herself in Chinese dramas.

Where I’m From by Shannon Floyd Jr (Galileo Academy of Science & Technology ’27)
Four high school students discover that there’s more to the history of San Francisco than they originally thought.

Shannon “Shawn” Floyd is a 9th grader at Galileo High School and has lived in San Francisco their whole life. He loves football and playing the electric guitar. He played in a band in Middle School where he wrote and produced original songs. Shawn has two older sisters, and in his spare time, he likes playing video games and drawing. This is Shawn’s first play!

2100 by Oona Haskovec (Ruth Asawa School of the Arts ’25)
It’s the year 2100 and the waters are rising!

Oona Haskovec is a high school writer based in San Francisco, CA. He has three previously published poems with Synchronized Chaos,  K’in Literary Journal, and Nightjar Magazine.

Curtain Speeches by Alexis Tuchinda (The Nueva School ’24)
A student comes to appreciate the use of land acknowledgments and history.

Alexis Tuchinda, an aspiring playwright with a background in musical theater performance, draws inspiration from her own life, her family’s, and her friends’ experiences to authentically capture the teenage perspective. While she has a penchant for fantasy and sci-fi, her goal is to infuse her work with realism, reflecting the complexities and nuances of adolescent life.

About YPP
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. Each year, Bay Area high school students, grades 9-12, are invited to submit short plays inspired by an assigned prompt for consideration in the Young Playwrights Contest. The top four playwrights receive professional public staged readings of their winning short works as part of the PlayGround Festival of New Works, this year presented fully online as the second annual PlayGround Zoom Fest. Through the Young Playwrights Project, PlayGround also offers Bay Area high school students free and significantly discounted student group tickets to its range of new play incubator programs, including Monday Night PlayGround series, PlayGround Solo Performance Festival, PlayGround Festival of New Works, and the PlayGround Innovators Showcase.

Festival of New Works/Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24

As part of PlayGround’s Festival of New Works, the Best of PlayGround does what it says on the tin: this is PlayGround at its best. From over 150 submissions and the 36 plays staged this season for PlayGround’s Monday Night PlayGround series, PlayGround’s artistic leaders have selected six ten-minute plays to give full productions in “Best of”, based on the plays’ artistic excellence and dynamism and the playwrights’ unique voice: Bessie in Medias Res by Robyn Brooks, Iván y El Justiciero by Justin P. Lopez, Madam Gorgo by Kimberly Ridgeway, Better Unkept by Louel Señores, Freedom by Stan Stone, and Mack & Mimi Encounter Totality by Lisa Gaye Thompson. In addition, PlayGround has named two honorary finalists this year: Christmas Spirits by Bridgette Dutta Portman and The Aisle by Daniel Martinez Jr. These plays and their playwrights highlight the commitment to playfullness, justice, and process at the heart of the PlayGround community.

Since 1997, PlayGround has recognized 107 of the Bay Area’s most promising new writers through the annual Best of PlayGround, including Lauren Yee, Jonathan Spector, Geetha Reddy, and Cleavon Smith, among others. 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 3 of the last 5), O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and NNPN Rolling World Premieres, among others.

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.

The Ramaytush (pronounced rah-my-toosh) are the original peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the Ramaytush Ohlone numbered approximately 1500 to 2,000 persons, but by the end the Mission Period only a few families had survived. Today, only one lineage is known to have produced living descendants in the present. Today, those descendants comprise the membership of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples and the staff of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone (ARO). https://www.ramaytush.org/

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.nd-sf.org.