PlayGround’s Incubator Innovator Announces 4th Annual Cohort

PlayGround has announced the 4th annual cohort for the Innovator Incubator program. The Innovator Incubator was launched in 2019 to foster new innovative theatre companies and productions with a strong commitment to BIPOC representation. The multi-year intensive incubation program provides access and opportunity for emerging theatre companies, by offering financial support and mentorship to bolster the diverse voices of the participating companies.

To date, more than 13 companies have been launched through the Innovator Incubator, helping to employ more than 200 local theatre artists and fostering the development of over 20 new works for the stage. Last year’s initiative supported eight production companies and provided more than $50,000 in tools and resources — including fiscal sponsorship, one-on-one mentoring, free and discounted performance and rehearsal space, and co-marketing.

The 2021 culminating Innovators Showcase ran from November 16th – December 5th at Portero Stage with all shows simulcast live, and received notable press coverage from the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. It featured world premiere productions, numerous other new play developmental activities and staged readings highlighting the works of the Incubator cohort (Home by The Forum Collective; The Act of Care by The Chikahan Company, La Vida Lobo by Theatre Cultura, Telling Tales and Roll’n Eyes by Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, Velorio by Latinx Mafia, The Black Queer Joy Project by Poltergeist Theatre Project, and an evening of new plays by Native Writers’ Theater).

“PlayGround’s Innovator Incubator has made my lifetime dream of establishing a theatre company come true. The support and guidance from the incubator has given Theatre Cultura a great foundation for structure and tools to produce and feature underrepresented Latinx artists and stories. This interactive program has been valuable and an integral part of Theatre Cultura’s development to feel accepted and connected to the San Francisco Bay Area theatre scene.” – Linda Amayo-Hassan, Theatre Cultura

“We were able to realize a conversation that took seed almost four years ago–to create a Filipinx-driven theatre company and establish a platform committed to Filipinx American voices claiming ownership of our narratives. The open exchange of knowledge and the support of everyone involved were invaluable, especially during the COVID Era when theatre, like every other community and industry, went through a re-examination of itself–its practices and viability–and a reckoning of its inclusivity.” – Alan S. Quismorio, The Chikahan Company

This year’s participants include two companies new to the Incubator, and seven returning candidates. Returning companies include Poltergeist Theatre Project, Theatre Cultura, The Chikahan Company, Latinx Mafia, Native Writers’ Theater, Analog Theatre, and Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project.  The two new additions to the program are City Street Artists and Oakland Public Theater.

These chosen companies will work to refine their organizational structure, learn the strategies of fundraising and budgeting, and hone their mission and vision statements to enter the wider Bay Area theatre scene prepared to continue on as full fledged production organizations. PlayGround will continue to support and sponsor these companies until they decide to matriculate from the program.

2022 THEATRE COMPANIES AND TEAMS

Analog Theatre (Rebecca Pingree, Elissa Beth Stebbins)

The Chikahan Company (Alan S. Quismorio, Marissa L. Ampon, Krystle Piamonte, Ely Sonny Orquiza)

City Street Artists (Tony Ortega, Linda Maria Girón, Sedrick Cabrera)

Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project (Aldo Billingslea)

Latinx Mafia (L. Duarte, Connie Galvan, J. Lynn Jackson, Juan Manzo, Katja Rivera)

Native Writers’ Theater (Matt Kizer, Armondo Solorzano Jr., Nick Garcia)

Oakland Public Theater (Norman Gee, Natalie Rich, Richard Talavera, Kobi Appel-Bernstein)

Poltergeist Theatre Project (Britt Lauer, Brooke Jennings, Caroline Portante, Chris Steele AKA Polly Amber Ross, Giselle Boustani-Fontenele, Jesse Annette Koehn, Lavale-William Davis AKA Coco Buttah, Linda Maria Girón, Ling Lee, Mey Lee, Sgt. Die Wies)

Theatre Cultura (Linda Amayo-Hassan, Dov Hassan, April Ballesteros)

Past participants of the Innovator Incubator include: Epic Party Theatre, The Forum Collective, Kunoichi Productions, The Moonrisers, and Queer Cat Productions.

THE INNOVATOR INCUBATOR 2022 COMPANY STATEMENTS:

Analog Theatre

Analog Theatre’s mission is to create collaborative, out-of-the-box, multidisciplinary, multi-sensory storytelling, devising performances that rely on performing skills and collective acts of actor-audience imagination, rather than literal representations of reality onstage. Rather than competing with film to faithfully reproduce realism, Analog seeks to create rich settings, stories, and characters from an empty stage and bring alive objects that are inanimate. They believe that simpler styles of storytelling can provide catalysts for increased hope and imagination that are gravely needed in the world today. 

The Chikahan Company

Exploring Filipinx history, politics, psychology, and diaspora through the craft of theatre and the performing arts, ChikaCo strives to develop the unique voices of and uplift the robust Filipinx narratives and artistries, and advocate its influence to the American theatre. They aim to reclaim and to reveal the multifaceted experiences of the Filipinx community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The vision is to amplify the complex and dynamic narratives that have long been pushed to the margins and to actively challenge the stereotypes about our kababayan (people), our kuwento (story), and our kasaysayan (history).

City Street Artists

City Street Artists’ mission is to promote representation and perform in underserved communities to showcase that representation matters. They will utilize city store fronts, recreational parks, and community venues to bring the art to the people. They strive to give BIPOC/Latinx/queer storytellers voices and help bring an audience to hear the minority experience. Their vision is to bring live theatre to underserved locations and to help educate minority communities that are not exposed to the arts. 

Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project

The Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project was launched by Aldo Billingslea to center Black theatre artists and new voices, address systemic racism in the theatre industry, and help raise much needed funds in support of Black Theatres around the country. The inaugural project featured more than half a dozen online staged readings of Vincent Terrell Durham’s play, Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, on Juneteenth 2020, involving over sixty theatre companies from around the country and in support of a national GoFundMe campaign for Black Theater.

Latinx Mafia

The Latinx Mafia was founded to empower and support Latinx teatristas by reclaiming, demystifying and recreating Latinx representation in theatre/media. They aim to ensure that Latinx representation in theatre and media radically and accurately embraces historically marginalized communities including but not limited to: the LGBTQ+ community, indigenous and Afro-Latinx people, differently-able folx, migrants regardless of immigration status, and the many linguistic backgrounds in Latin America. For more about Latinx Mafia please see www.latinxmafia.com.

Native Writers’ Theater

Native Writers’ Theater is dedicated to: Creating opportunity by making space for the playwriting process and producing the resulting works onstage; Fostering dialogue to tell Native American stories to inspire open, decolonized communication between all people; Amplifying stories of a forgotten people to preserve our heritage that has been all but erased. They aim to bring Native American stories to the theatre through creating new works and producing existing or evolving works.

Oakland Public Theater

Oakland Public Theater creates a ‘different kind of Black Theater’, expanding notions of culture to encompass often the invisible roles of African-Americans & others. OPT gives old stories a multicultural face: a Strindberg ancestral fantasy shifted to Africa; a Filipina immigrant trapped in the secretive world of Ibsen; actual people of color in Shakespeare’s foreign lands (& referencing the long history of Africans in England). OPT also features new works, celebrating things like complex families, intellectual love affairs, heroism, tragedy, engaging histories -from OUR perspective, and yet often surprisingly familiar. The goal is to make established theater more accessible to a wider range of community, while sharing with traditional audiences some insight into both the nuance and universality of our diverse community members.

Poltergeist Theatre Project

“Theatre that follows you home.”

Poltergeist’s mission is to reclaim Queer narratives through performance processes that dismantle toxic cultural norms, viscerally immerse audiences, and celebrate the innovation and liberation of Queer folx. Honoring San Francisco’s strong tradition of revolutionary art that ignites the flame of cultural and societal progress, Poltergeist creates radically queer, feminist, intrinsically participatory theatre. Whether highlighting work by new artists or subverting and re-framing a problematic public domain play to create a brand new adaptation, Poltergeist seeks to normalize and centralize Other narratives. Focusing on the tenets of inclusivity, representation, and accessibility, Poltergeist seeks to remind this city of its deep roots in queer art. 

Theatre Cultura

The mission of Theatre Cultura is, first and foremost, to provide the opportunity for local and national Latina theatre artists to have a place for their voices to be heard in high quality, deeply invested productions. TC’s intention is to create theatre that will inspire, inform, challenge, empower, embrace and reflect the lives and communities of Latinas of the SF Bay Area and around the country. Themes of immigration, Latinx and women’s issues will provide the main focus for content. Plays will mostly be original and selected from active, working Latina playwrights from around the country in order to build a community of professional Latina playwrights who wish to tell the stories borne of the Latina experience and create a dynamic connection between those artists and the communities they serve.

ABOUT PLAYGROUND

PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’ and now New York’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 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 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 34 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theatre 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 Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and 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.

For more information on last year’s teams, and upcoming information on this year’s, visit https://playground-sf.org/incubator/ or call (415) 992-6677.