PlayGround’s Innovator Incubator 6th Cohort

PlayGround has announced the 6th 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 historically marginalized or excluded communities. The multi-year intensive incubation program provides access and opportunity for emerging theatre companies, by offering financial support, fiscal sponsorship, free space and mentorship to bolster the diverse voices of the participating companies.

To date, more than 14 companies have been launched through the Innovator Incubator, helping to employ more than 400 local theatre artists and fostering the development of over 30 new works for the stage. Last year’s initiative supported nine 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.

This year’s participants for the Innovator Incubator include two companies new to the Incubator, and six returning candidates. Returning companies include Analog Theatre, The Chikahan Company, Latinx Mafia, Network Effects Theater, Oakland Public Theater, and Poltergeist Theatre Project. New additions are The American Jewish Theatre and House Theater, both based in Los Angeles. 

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 and Los Angeles theatre scenes prepared to continue on as full fledged production organizations. PlayGround will continue to support and sponsor these companies on an ongoing basis, culminating in the season-ending Innovators Showcase each November. The 6th annual Innovators Showcase is scheduled November 4-24, 2024.

2024 THEATRE COMPANIES AND TEAMS

The American Jewish Theatre (Stephanie Liss, RebbeSoul/Bruce Burger, Elisheva Herrera)
Analog Theatre (Rebecca Pingree, Elissa Beth Stebbins, Jed Parsario)
The Chikahan Company (Alan S. Quismorio, Krystle Piamonte, Ely Sonny Orquiza)
House Theater (Sandra Cruze, Kevin Michael Moran, Saer Black, William Warren)
Latinx Mafia (Hector Zavala)
Network Effects Theater Company (Ipsheeta Furtado, Michael Tuton)
Oakland Public Theater (Norman Gee, Natalie Rich, Richard Talavera, Jake Fong)
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)

Past participants of the Innovator Incubator include: Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, Theatre Cultura, Native Writers’ Theater, Epic Party Theatre, The Forum Collective, Kunoichi Productions, The Moonrisers, and Queer Cat Productions.

THE INNOVATOR INCUBATOR 2024 COMPANY STATEMENTS:

The American Jewish Theatre
The American Jewish Theatre’s mission is to bring little known, rarely told, stories of Jews, to the world. Based on true stories, these plays serve as a mirror into the lives, and souls, of Jews. Our target audience is global, because the plays we are developing and producing are all global in scope. Our vision for this theatre is to reach out, not only to Jews, but to ALL people. The works of The American Jewish Theatre are all a deep dive into our world, and what it is like to be a Jew – and what it isn’t. It is a view of the non-Jewish world, and its effect on Jews – how we live, and how we survive. Our vision is for people to look deep inside, examining their attitudes toward and perceptions of Jews and Jewish history.

Analog Theatre
Analog is an experimental theater company, specializing in tangible, physical, old-school theater techniques. Our main producing activity is our Mask Monday series: on select Monday nights we take over a San Francisco brewery, engage a lineup of local original guest artists, and present a work-in-progress variety show, free to the public, hosted by mask characters inspired by the tradition of commedia dell’arte. Our mission is to create multidisciplinary, devised performances that celebrate old-school, low-tech theatre magic. We invite our audiences to join us in collective acts of imagination using mask, mime, puppetry, clowning, live music, improvisation and more. We create platforms that invest in our richly diverse community of Bay Area artists by providing paid opportunities to develop their experimental works-in-progress, and we organize events that welcome the public to witness the growth of theatrical art and artists in real time. 

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).

House Theater
House Theater will use our voices and stories to speak for those who cannot. We will provide a platform to raise awareness for members of society who have been historically marginalized: women of all colors and races, the LGBT community, and particularly those with disabilities. Whether young, old, impoverished, disenfranchised or invisible, their stories matter.  At House Theater we will fight to find them, write them and share them.  It is our promise to offer a safe haven where all are welcome to witness, contemplate, question and delve into affairs of the heart. We will present original works that will grapple with issues of society and themes that not only entertain, but resonate with the audience to bring hope,  change and acceptance in a world that often does not.

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.

Network Effects Theater Company
“Make passive impossible”
Network Effects Theater Company excavates the themes of today’s tech industry. By exploring the unconsidered effects of new technology–through its creation, its investors, its culture, and its end users–we can reverse the passivity of a public made numb to its effects.

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. Oakland Public Theater will use the Baldwin Centennial Project to revive the organization, develop staff & kickstart the company’s next era.

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 theater. 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.

ABOUT PLAYGROUND

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.

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.