The PlayGround Festival Goes Digital!

In response to the extended shelter-in-place orders and theater closures, this year’s PlayGround Festival of New Works and a special 25th Anniversary Celebration are going digital! The five-week online PLAYGROUND ZOOM FEST (May 11-June 14) will feature 25 real-time live-streamed performances, including three fully-produced off-book premiere presentations: DISBELIEF by Garret Jon Groenveld (May 30 & May 31), a #MeToo telling of the Cassandra myth, directed by Tracy Ward; THE RENDERING CYCLE by Genevieve Jessee (June 6 & June 7), a theatrical journey through 400 years of the African Diaspora, directed by Margo Hall (original development by Lauren Spencer); and BEST OF PLAYGROUND 24 (June 13 & June 14), featuring 10-minute plays by Tom Bruett, Melissa Keith, Martha Soukup, Addie Ulrey, Leela Velautham, and Christian Wilburn. The festival will also include developmental staged readings of four new full-length plays by PlayGround alumni — TRANSLATIONS by Victoria Chong Der (May 25), SAPIENCE by Diana Burbano (May 29), BURST by Rachel Bublitz (June 1), and THE NESTING INSTINCT by Tom Bruett (June 5) — as well as short plays by this year’s top high school dramatists as part of the 12th annual Howard & Lenore Klein Foundation Young Playwrights Contest. Tickets for the premiere presentations start at just $15 (additional discounts and radical accessibility options are available) and all other readings and events are free of charge. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-sf.org/zoomfest.

In celebration of PlayGround’s 25th Anniversary and with generous underwriting from the City of San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts, the PlayGround Zoom Fest will also include highlights from the company’s short play, full-length play, and short film programs over the past two-and-a-half decades. This special anniversary celebration kicks off the festival on May 11 with the first of two programs of short plays, featuring works by Martha Soukup, Jonathan Spector, Linda Amayo-Hassan, Genne Murphy, Cleavon Smith, and Tom Swift. The second evening of shorts on May 18 includes works by Cass Brayton, Nicole Jost, Robin Lynn Rodriguez, Kirk Shimano, Nic A. Sommerfeld, and Aaron Loeb. Full-lengths, all commissioned by PlayGround and since premiered, include: FIRST PERSON SHOOTER by Aaron Loeb (May 15), SAFE HOUSE by Geetha Reddy (May 16), LOLITA ROADTRIP by Trevor Allen (May 17), ABOMINABLE by Katie May (May 22), 1980 OR WHY I’M VOTING FOR JOHN ANDERSON by Patricia Cotter (May 23), and ANNA CONSIDERS MARS by Ruben Grijalva (May 24). Four evenings of short films, all originally premiered at the PlayGround Film Festival and celebrating the intersection of storytelling and digital media, will be rescreened via Zoom live stream on May 13, May 14, May 20 and May 21, with opportunity for audience interaction and chat, and a post-screening panel discussion with filmmakers and writers. PlayGround has also curated a Zoom Town Hall (“PlayGround & the American Theatre: Past, Present & Future”) on June 8, with three micro-panels: Past – Kent Nicholson (moderator), Lauren Yee, Aaron Loeb, and Geetha Reddy; Present – Annie Stuart (moderator), Lily Janiak, Ruben Grijalva, and Rinabeth Apostol; Future – Chris Steele (moderator), Christian Wilburn, and Diana Burbano, and one more panelist TBA. Following the final performance of Best of PlayGround 24 on June 14, PlayGround will close out the Zoom Fest with a live-streamed 25th Anniversary and Dance Party (DJ to be announced). All performances start at 8pm PT (Sundays at 5pm PT) and the closing night party will begin at 7pm PT.

Working since the pandemic and shelter-in-place order was officially announced to ethically employ artists and maintain contracts during this time of crisis, PlayGround has coordinated with SAG-AFTRA, the nation’s largest performers union, to develop an agreement for the employment of over 140 actors under #FairWage terms. Originally formalized for PlayGround’s recent Zoom presentation of the Monday Night PlayGround season finale on April 6, this groundbreaking partnership between PlayGround and SAG-AFTRA has allowed PlayGround to gainfully employ artists in their creation of world-premier Zoom content, and facilitates the breadth of their programming for the upcoming Zoom Fest. This Festival stands as a community celebration of the new works PlayGround has incubated and championed from their inception, and a hopeful reminder that even in the most uncertain of times, the stories we share and the communities they form shape our culture and our lives.

In tandem with the PlayGround Zoom Fest and 25th Anniversary Celebration, PlayGround has also launched a special 25th Anniversary Campaign with a goal of raising $250,000 in support of three key priorities, more critical than ever before in light of the current crisis: artist compensation, artistic innovation, and performance facilities (including digital broadcast capabilities and a new pop-up second stage). This multi-year fundraising campaign will help PlayGround increase its investments in artists and art-making at a time when many organizations are having to pull back and many artists are unemployed. To date, PlayGround has already received pledges and/or gifts totalling more than $100,000. For more information about the 25th Anniversary Campaign, contact PlayGround Artistic Director Jim Kleinmann at jim@playground-sf.org or call (415) 992-6677.

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 250 local playwrights in the development and staging of more than 950 original short plays and 80 new full-length plays, with 5 more commissions currently in development. PlayGround also operates Potrero Stage, 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. For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org.

For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org/zoomfest or call (415) 992-6677.

PLAYGROUND ZOOM FEST
PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS & ARTIST BIOS

DISBELIEF by Garret Jon Groenveld (May 30 & May 31)

Synopsis: Disbelief is a #MeToo retelling of the Cassandra myth – Apollo’s gift of prophecy to Cassandra, from her point of view, examining how women are perceived, controlled, and disbelieved (or dismissed). Groenveld’s scintillating language explores the parallels of belief in a higher power, with belief in a powerful man, versus a woman being able to be believed at all.

Garret Jon Groenveld (Playwright, Disbelief) is a poet and playwright living in San Francisco, CA with an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Playwriting from San Francisco State University. His plays include Missives, The Hummingbirds, and The Empty Nesters, among others. A PlayGround founding writer and current resident playwright, his work has been produced in the Bay Area, New York, and internationally in connection with the Internationalists Prize. He is a past resident playwright of Playwrights Foundation and proud member of the Dramatists Guild.

THE RENDERING CYCLE by Genevieve Jessee (June 6 & June 7)

Synopsis: In the spirit of August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle, The Rendering Cycle explores the African American experience through ten interwoven short plays depicting a saga of inextricable tradition, trauma and joy across continents and characters ranging from present-day United States to West Africa of a millennium past. 

Genevieve Jessee (Playwright, The Diaspora Cycle) is a playwright based jointly in the Bay Area and Puerto Rico. She received her MFA in Playwriting from Boston University. Her work has been staged at PlayGround, The Source Festival, Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, SF Fringe, Those Women Productions, and the Festival de Marseille, France. She is a semi-finalist for the 2019 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She has received commissions from PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts, and is the recipient of a California Arts Council Artists-in-Communities grant for her work on The Rendering Cycle.

BEST OF PLAYGROUND 24 (June 13 & June 14)
Selections & Synopses (alphabetically by title):

Agent of Change by Addie Ulrey
Through a series of repeat interactions between a stalwart Customer and a Server at a Berkeley restaurant, Agent of Change explores the exhausting logistics of sausage shipping, client service relations, and food waste. Is caring about change enough change itself to spark global reform?

Christmas Evita by Tom Bruett
When volunteering at a nursing home on Christmas, Edgar is faced with the challenging task of serving dinner to the most crotchety member of the community. Though wildly different, the two men bridge the generational divide by connecting around shared love, loss and a mutual appreciation for a certain Andrew Lloyd Weber musical.

I’m Back by Christian Wilburn
Nobody wants Michael Jordan to play baseball, except Michael Jordan. When the ghost of Michael’s father visits, MJ know he has a decision to make: stay in baseball or return to basketball. Through this supernatural take on a superstar story, we learn that even Michael Jordan has doubts, fears and the desire to make his parents proud.

Love, Pray, Eat by Melissa Keith
Wanda is distressed by Jackie’s avant-garde views on love. Is there more to life than fulfilling a biological imperative? Wanda wants the traditional love story: to find a partner, have kids, and to decapitate and devour her partner immediately after breeding. In this story about love, lust, and tolerance, is it really survival of the fittest?

The Evocation by Leela Velautham
In this prequel to the Scottish play, Lady Macbeth is processing the pain from the premature death of her third child and looking for consolation from her husband, who’s preoccupied with his next planned battle. As her pleas for him to stay become increasingly desperate, she is pushed to the point of saying something she immediately regrets – setting in motion one of the greatest tragedies ever written.

The Gravedigger’s Wife by Martha Soukup
Following the advice of great Greek philosophers, Shakespeare’s greatest plays focus on the highest of the high: princes and queens born to greatness by nature of their nobility. But triumph and tragedy strike even the most common of common. Breathing life into the far tangents of Hamlet’s side characters, this prequel asks if it’s only “poor Yorick” we ought to pity.

For information, synopses and playwright bios on other Zoom Fest events, please visit https://playground-sf.org/zoomfest.

PLAYGROUND ZOOM FEST
CALENDAR

May 11 8pm PT – PlayGround Shorts, Program A (COLD CALLS by Martha Soukup, MY BETTER HALF by Jonathan Spector, LA VIDA LOBO by Linda Amayo-Hassan, SOMEONE by Genne Murphy, YOU EAT WHAT YOU KILL by Cleavon Smith, MY NAME IS YIN by Tom Swift)

May 13 8pm PT – PlayGround Film Festival, Program A (MEETING MATT DAMON by Ron Burch & Frieda de Lackner, MISS FINKNAGLE SUCCUMBS TO CHAOS by Kirk Shimano & Amy Harrison, OBIT by Geetha Reddy & Brian Tolle, READING IN BED by Ken Prestininzi & Sandor Weiner)

May 14 8pm PT – PlayGround Film Festival, Program B (AEGIS by Jonathan Luskin & Mark Leialoha, CLIMAX by Sean Owens & Jeremy Solterbeck, ECCE HOMO by Jonathan Luskin & Mark Leialoha, IOWA by Malachy Walsh & Alex Vietti)

May 15 8pm PT – FIRST PERSON SHOOTER by Aaron Loeb (a PlayGround commission; premiered 2007, co-production with SF Playhouse)

May 16 8pm PT – SAFE HOUSE by Geetha Reddy (a PlayGround commission; premiered 2010, co-production with SF Playhouse)

May 17 5pm PT – LOLITA ROADTRIP by Trevor Allen (a PlayGround commission; premiered 2011, co-production with San Jose Stage)

May 18 8pm PT – PlayGround Shorts, Program B (I’D LIKE TO BUY A VOWEL by Cass Brayton, MONARCHS IN SPACE by Nicole Jost, HELLA LOVE OAKLAND by Robin Lynn Rodriguez, MISS FINKNAGLE SUCCUMBS TO CHAOS by Kirk Shimano, DEAR SANTA by Nic A. Sommerfeld, and ALL THUMBS by Aaron Loeb)

May 20 8pm PT – PlayGround Film Festival, Program C (REUNION by Kenn Rabin, Greg Runnels & Mark Runnels, THE BEGINNING by Tom Swift & Brian Tolle, THE ETYMOLOGY OF ZERO by Katie May, Liz Anderson & Seth Podowitz, THE SECRET LIFE OF A HOTEL ROOM by Garret Jon Groenveld, Greg Runnels & Mark Runnels)

May 21 8pm PT – PlayGround Film Festival, Program D (UNDONE by Diane Sampson & Bruce Coughran, VALUE OVER REPLACEMENT by Ruben Grijalva, WEDNESDAY by Daniel Heath & Jennifer Arzt)

May 22 8pm PT – ABOMINABLE by Katie May (a PlayGround commission; premiered 2016, PlayGround Festival)

May 23 8pm PT – 1980 OR WHY I’M VOTING FOR JOHN ANDERSON by Patricia Cotter (a PlayGround commission; premiered 2017, Jackalope Theatre Company)

May 24 5pm PT – ANNA CONSIDERS MARS by Ruben Grijalva (a PlayGround-Planet Earth Arts co-commission; premiered 2019, PlayGround Festival)

May 25 8pm PT – TRANSLATIONS by Victoria Chong Der (a Zoom developmental reading)

May 29 8pm PT – SAPIENCE by Diana Burbano (a Zoom developmental reading)

May 30 8pm PT – DISBELIEF by Garret Jon Groenveld (a Zoom Premiere Presentation); Opening Night

May 31 5pm PT – DISBELIEF by Garret Jon Groenveld (a Zoom Premiere Presentation); Closing Night

June 1 8pm PT – BURST by Rachel Bublitz (a Zoom developmental reading)

June 5 8pm PT – THE NESTING INSTINCT by Tom Bruett (a PlayGround-Planet Earth Arts co-commission; a Zoom developmental reading)

June 6 8pm PT – THE RENDERING CYCLE by Genevieve Jessee (a Zoom Premiere Presentation & PlayGround commission); Opening Night

June 7 5pm PT – THE RENDERING CYCLE by Genevieve Jessee (a Zoom Premiere Presentation & PlayGround commission); Closing Night

June 8 8pm PT – A ZOOM TOWN HALL: PLAYGROUND & THE AMERICAN THEATRE – PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE
Past: Lauren Yee, Aaron Loeb, and Geetha Reddy, Kent Nicholson (moderator)
Present: Lily Janiak, Ruben Grijalva, Rinabeth Apostol, Annie Stuart (moderator)
Future: Christian Wilburn, Diana Burbano, Jeunee Simon, Chris Steele (moderator)

June 12 8pm PT – Young Playwrights Project, featuring professional performances of 10-minute plays by top high school dramatists as part of this year’s 12th annual Young Playwrights Contest and select YPP alumni works

June 13 8pm PT – BEST OF PLAYGROUND 24, featuring the top 10-minute plays from the 2019-20 season, including LOVE PRAY EAT by Melissa Keith, CHRISTMAS EVITA by Tom Bruett, I’M BACK by Christian Wilburn, THE GRAVEDIGGER’S WIFE by Martha Soukup, AGENT OF CHANGE by Addie Ulrey, and THE EVOCATION by Leela Velautham (a Zoom Premiere Presentation); Opening Night

June 14 5pm PT – BEST OF PLAYGROUND 24, featuring the top 10-minute plays from the 2019-20 season, including LOVE PRAY EAT by Melissa Keith, CHRISTMAS EVITA by Tom Bruett, I’M BACK by Christian Wilburn, THE GRAVEDIGGER’S WIFE by Martha Soukup, AGENT OF CHANGE by Addie Ulrey, and THE EVOCATION by Leela Velautham (a Zoom Premiere Presentation); Closing Night

June 14 7pm PT – CLOSING NIGHT CAST & DANCE PARTY

For more information or to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-sf.org/zoomfest.