PlayGround’s ANNA CONSIDERS MARS Heads to Stanford!

PlayGround’s 2019 Festival premiere production, Ruben Grijalva’s ANNA CONSIDERS MARS, returns for a two-week limited engagement at Stanford’s Nitery Theater, August 1-11, 2019. The TBA Awards Recommended Production with the complete original cast is being presented by Stanford Repertory Theater and Planet Earth Arts as part of the 2019 Summer Festival, dedicated to the environment and social justice. Tickets are $10-$15. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit https://playground-sf.org/annaconsidersmars.

“To take in the future Ruben Grijalva imagines is to constantly double-take. So richly, thoroughly and plausibly does he envision, in Anna Considers Mars, a world taking place not even a century from now that for half an instant, you have to remind your brain, ‘No, that hasn’t happened — yet.’” – Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle.

Co-commissioned by PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts and PlayGround, Anna Considers Mars tells the poignant story of a young woman who dreams of being chosen for a one-way journey to Mars. The play explores a near-future full of peril and possibility, in which the digital and physical worlds blend seamlessly, intractable diseases are in retreat, and our multi-planetary dreams are on the cusp of fulfillment. At the same time, great cities have been abandoned to the tides, keystone species have been lost forever, and the gap between haves and have-nots has stretched into an ever-more dangerous chasm. Directed by Susi Damilano and featuring Melissa Ortiz, Wilma Bonet, Christian Haines, Katie Rubin, Aaron Wilton and Soren Oliver, the PlayGround/Planet Arts co-production of Anna Considers Mars comes to Stanford’s Nitery Theater following its world premiere this past spring at PlayGround’s Potrero Stage in San Francisco.

“Part science fiction, part hilarious comedy with a dark streak, part family drama… Anna Considers Mars is a crazy, compelling, complicated, and comedic view of where we may be headed.” – Eddie Reynolds, Theatre Eddys

Ruben Grijalva is an award-winning San Francisco-based playwright and filmmaker. His short plays include Full Steam Ahead and the PianoFight ShortLived winning All The Worlds Are Stages. His full-length plays include Foresight, Anna Considers Mars, and the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award-winning Value Over Replacement, which premiered in the 2016 PlayGround Festival of New Works. He began writing for PlayGround in 2011 and is a three-time Best of PlayGround finalist and current Resident Playwright.

PlayGround, the Bay Area’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’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 200 local playwrights in the development and staging of more than 950 original short plays and 80 new full-length plays, with 6 more commissions currently in development. PlayGround also operates Potrero Stage (formerly Thick House), a state-of-the-art 99-seat black box theatre in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, home to some of the Bay Area’s leading new play developers and producers, including PlayGround, Crowded Fire, Golden Thread, and Playwrights Foundation. Most recently, PlayGround launched the Innovator Incubator, a year-long intensive program supporting the development of innovative new theatre companies and productions and culminating in the Innovators Showcase. For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org.