Third Annual One PlayGround Festival (May 30-June 1)

Posted by on May 23, 2025

Registration is now open for the 3rd Annual ONE PLAYGROUND FESTIVAL, a three-day festival and conference, celebrating the national PlayGround community! The entire PlayGround community, theatre-makers from across the country, and the general public are invited to attend Potrero Stage or participate online May 30-June 1, 2025. The Festival will be available On-Demand through June 8. To register/reserve tickets, visit https://playground-sf.org/oneplaygroundfestival.

One PlayGround Festival Schedule

Friday, May 30
7pm – Opening Session: Recess LIVE, featuring excerpts by PlayGround playwrights from across the country, performed on-the-spot by members of the national PlayGround community

Saturday, May 31
10:30am-11:30am – Opening Plenary: “Making Art in a Time of Crisis,” with Devin Christor, Norman Gee, Abigail Rosen & Chris Steele; moderated by PlayGround Artistic Director Jim Kleinmann

11:40am-12:50pm – Morning Discussion/Workshop: “Writing for PlayGround”

12:50pm-1:40pm – Lunch on your own

1:40pm-2:50pm – Afternoon Discussion/Workshop: “Directing and Acting for PlayGround”

3pm-4pm – Closing Plenary: “A Starter’s Guide to Self-Producing,” with Melina Cohen-Bramwell, Jon Gentry, Rebecca Pingree, & Kaz Valtchev, moderated by PlayGround Company Member Lana Richards

7pm – Best of the Best of PlayGround ’25

Isabella Speaks by Saiya Floyd (NY)
Grandma’s First Festivus by Laura Domingo (SF)
Disloyal by Anne Brady (Chicago)
Son of a Kaiju by Mikee Loria (LA)

Sunday, June 1
10am-12:30pm – PlayGround All-Company Gathering (not open to the public)

$$ : $10 registration fee for non-PlayGround members

PANELISTS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

“Making Art in a Time of Crisis”

Devin Christor, PG-Chicago Executive Producer (he/him) is a director focused on plays that create a discussion. Since receiving his B.A in Drama from the University of North Texas he has traveled the country working for several professional theatres to observe established directors and study the ecology of regional theatre in America. He was recently the Directing Resident at Milwaukee Rep, where he directed Julius Caesar & God of Carnage and assisted directed Indivisible With. Other directing credits include The Damage of Doing it Alone (Gloucester Stage Company “Young Playwrights” Festival), and Oba (Triangle Rainbow Productions “LGBTQ Short Play” Festival), The Gift of the Magi (American Players Theatre). He is the Founder of Nomad Street Theatre, a nomadic site-specific theatre company, that uses plays in the kitchen sink drama or well made play format. He wants to make Chicago his home base and believes Victory Gardens DII can be a great starting point.

Norman Gee, Play-Ground Associate Producer (he/him) has performed in Meet John Doe at the San Jose Stage, a Word For Word production of HOME which toured France, and Much Ado About Nothing in Livermore with SPARC. He understudied BIG DATA at A.C.T. and directed a new work to celebrate the James Baldwin Centennial, more info at www.baldwincentennialproject.com.

Abigail Rosen, PlayGround-NY Executive Producer (she/her) is a New York-based director, dramaturg, and producer, and she is the Executive Producer of Playground-NY. Abigail has experience with new play workshops on Broadway, off-Broadway, and local levels. Follow her career and pop culture blog on Instagram @abimayrose, and on her website at abigailrosen.me.

Chris Steele, PlayGround Company Member (they/she) is a queer trans nonbinary performance artist, writer, and activist. Their work centers on highlighting queer narratives throughout history and combating bigotry and white supremacy. Her award-winning drag persona Polly Amber Ross can be found on Instagram @pollyamberross. As a producer, Chris specializes in Marketing and Communications and is currently the Curation Director of Cutting Ball Theatre.

Jim Kleinmann, PlayGround Artistic Director, moderator (he/him) co-founded PlayGround in 1994, along with playwright Brighde Mullins and director Denise Shama, and has served as Artistic Director since 1996. For PlayGround, he has provided artistic and administrative leadership for the past twenty-four seasons, developing PlayGround’s unique array of new playwright and new play incubator programs, including Monday Night PlayGround, the PlayGround Festival of New Works, the full-length play Commissioning Initiative, the New Play Production Fund, Potrero Stage: PlayGround Center for New Plays, and most recently the Innovator Incubator. For PlayGround, he has directed more than one hundred short and full-length plays, including works by Garret Jon Groenveld, Aaron Loeb, Geetha Reddy, Lauren Yee, Katie May, and many others. Recent directing and dramaturgy credits include David Steele’s Vignettes on Love and Ruben Grijalva’s Value Over Replacement. He is a veteran arts administrator with more than thirty years of experience, including stints leading Traveling Jewish Theatre, Smuin Ballet, and Berkeley Symphony, and received his MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

“A Starter’s Guide to Self-Producing”

Melina Cohen-Bramwell, PlayGround-SF Writer (he/him), is a writer and lifelong San Francisco Bay Area resident who also happens to be a mixed-race, gender-queer, spoonie. Never a fan of the education system, at age sixteen, Melina dropped out of school and began a career in theater. After years of working as a technician at regional theater companies such as Aurora, Cal Shakes, and Berkeley Rep, Melina “retired” to focus on healing from chronic illness and pursuing writing as a career. His book Bar Fights with Sad Kids will be available for preorder from Finishing Line May-July 2024.

Jon Gentry, PlayGround-LA, Best of Free-Play 2025 (he/him) was born and raised in Houston, Texas. He earned his BA in English from Harvard, where he served as President of BlackCAST. He holds an MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater. As a teaching artist, he co-directed “Child Life” with UCSF Children’s Hospital and led acting workshops across the Bay Area. He currently teaches Michael Chekhov Acting Technique at the Los Angeles Performing Arts Conservatory. Regional theater credits include roles in Masao and The Bronze Nightingale, A Christmas Carol, and Romeo and Juliet. Onscreen, he appeared in TEN, Behold a Lady, Meeting Matt Damon and voiced Preston Garvey in Fallout 4, gaining viral fame.

Rebecca Pingree, PlayGround Company Member (she/her) she/her, bas been a member of PlayGround’s Acting Company for over a decade and was delighted to return to the PlayGround Festival of New works as an actor in the staged reading of The Red Fortune Cookie and a director for the Young Playwrights Project. Outside of PlayGround, most recently, she played Adira in Exodus to Eden at OTP, Bridget Potter in the original cast of The Kilbanes’ The Code with ACT YC, and The Baker’s Wife in Sondheim’s Into the Woods at Berkeley Playhouse. She holds an MFA in Collaborative Theatremaking from Rose Bruford in London and co-founded Analog Theatre (analogtheatre.org) a member of PlayGround’s IN2 cohort.

Kaz Valtchev, PlayGround Writer, Best of Free-Play 2024 (he/they) has worked onstage, backstage, and front of stage for various theaters in the Bay area including Cal Shakes, Bay Area Children’s Theatre, Bindlestiff Studios, and many others. He has been a part of the PlayGround Writer’s Pool for the past two years and has been an actor and stage manager for PlayGround in the past as well. He has had short plays produced with the Pear Theater, the Queer AF Festival, and Left Coast Theater Company. He also had an original monologue published in the anthology, WE-US: Monologues for Gender Minority Characters.

Lana Richards, PlayGround Company Member, moderator (she/her) is a director based in San Francisco. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Dragon’s Egg, Access Theater, and The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and was a member of the 2024 Directors Lab North in Toronto. She is the Associate Director of Development and a resident company member with PlayGround SF. She was the 2019 Directing Fellow at Parallel 45 Theater. Education: Connecticut College, SITI Company, MICHA, Complicite, Bread & Puppet. Recent selected credits: We Players’s Macbeth at Fort Point (Assistant Director), Heart Piece at Cutting Ball’s Variety Pack, American Hunger at Enacte Arts, Tips for Nervous Fliers (solo performance) at PlayGround’s Free-Play Festival.

Best of the Best of PlayGround ’25

Saiya Floyd, PlayGround-NY, Isabella Speaks (she/her) is a Japanese-American writer based in Brooklyn. She studied screenwriting at Boston University, and primarily writes sci-fi, fantasy, and historical pieces to explore new perspectives. Her short play Five Star First Date was part of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre’s NuWorks festival, and she co-wrote the short film Sorry Dumpling, which was featured at the LA Shorts Fest. Saiya’s scripts have been recognized in the top 50 of the Launch Pad, and she has been a winner of WeScreenplay Diverse Voices, and a finalist at the Austin Film Festival.

Laura Domingo, PlayGround-SF, Grandma’s First Festivus (she/her) is a Native Hawaiian/Filipina writer and actor based on Oakland, CA. She just completed her first year with PlayGround and is honored to be this year’s winner of the June Anne Baker Prize. She has written screenplays for three Best Film winners for the 48-Hour Film Project (2019 – San Jose; 2020 – U.S. West; and 2021 – San Jose), and her short plays won runner-up in 2023 and 2024 for Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s 48-Hour Play Festival. She is part of the writing pool with SF-based sketch comedy company Killing My Lobster.

Anne Brady, PlayGround-Chicago, Disloyal (she/her), is honored to be a first-year Writer’s Pool member. After earning a degree in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, Anne worked as a professional actress and playwright in Seattle before relocating to Chicago in 2012. Her plays have been produced around the West Coast as well as internationally. She studied playwriting with Chicago Dramatists and The Second City and has authored or co-authored over 20 children’s books. She lives in Bucktown with her husband and 2 kids and has an astonishing amount of Bluey committed to memory.

Mikee Loria, PlayGround-LA, Son of a Kaiju (he/him) is a Fil-Am storyteller/actor based in SoCal. He is thrilled to make his Monday Night PlayGround-LA debut writing Lost Drive. Mikee earned a double B.A. in Theatre and Film from UC Berkeley, and is an alumnus of A.C.T’s Summer Training Congress. He is writing a feature-length screenplay in collaboration with World Builders Incubator. He co-lead in the World Premiere of A Driving Beat at Flint Repertory Theatre in March of this year. IG: @mikeeloria

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.

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.

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