38th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival Lineup Confirmed, 7/17-26

Playwrights Foundation has announced the lineup for 38th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF), which will run July 17-26, 2015 at Tides Theatre in the heart of San Francisco's Theater District, building on the festival's historic legacy of innovation in theater.

This year's BAPF will include Geetha Reddy's On a Wonderverse and Lauren Gunderson's The Revolutionists from within the Bay Area community; newly penned plays by highly regarded national playwrights, including Kara Lee Corthron's Welcome to Fear City and Christine Evans' Galilee; and exceptional works coming from graduate playwriting programs, including Tearrance Chisholm's Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies (Catholic University), Sam Lahne's #julys (University of Iowa), and Brendan Pelsue's Read to Me (Yale University).

"For the BAPF we seek playwrights of exceptional talent and potential who are writing ambitious plays of epic scope," says Amy Mueller, Artistic Director. "They represent a new aesthetic shift that privileges formal structure over intimate content. These are 21st century writers, pushing the boundaries of playwriting into new storytelling modalities."

Each of the seven plays will receive a deep developmental process, tailored to its specific needs, paired with local directors, dramaturgs and actors. The public showcases of the work allow audiences to experience vivid readings of the work and engage with the artists in advancing these plays towards production.

"In this rapidly changing world in which we live, it's fitting that all of the plays in this year's festival are about transformation," says Festival Producer Karen Altree Piemme. "Told from a wide diversity of perspectives, we experience the transformation of an individual, a family, a community, an ecosystem, a nation, and a universe.

The voice of each of these playwrights is gorgeously unique, and when you come see the stories they're bringing to life, you are almost certain to undergo your own transformation."

For almost forty years, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival has served as a forum and a showcase for vanguard playwrights to experiment with new ideas, develop and nurture creative collaborative relationships, and push the boundaries of the form. This year's lineup continues that tradition, developing work that spans topics as wide-ranging and relevant as the widespread criminalization of young black men, the history of hip hop and the exploration of black identity, nuclear physics and the role of women in tech, climate change, literacy, and the power of the Internet.

Playwrights & Plays

Tearrance Chisholm: Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies. Rhythm, repetition and erudition reveal the commonalities between two wildly different black American teens. Nietzsche and 2pac may not be all that far apart, after all.

Christine Evans: Galilee. In a tiny coastal town along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, competing economic and environmental forces threaten global catastrophe.

Lauren Gunderson: The Revolutionists. A comedic feminist quartet about four very real women who lived boldly during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.

Sam Lahne: #julys. A suspenseful farce complete with hacktivists and bumbling FBI agents, in which a troubled teen loses control of his on and offline identities.

Brendan Pelsue: Read to Me. A child who is living with grave illness...and maybe dying...cannot have a real conversation with his father. But, seemingly out of nowhere, Elmo the Shaman and the oldest woman in Alaska appear to fill in the gap.

Geetha Reddy: On a Wonderverse. After a brilliant young, female physicist is overlooked for a Nobel Prize, she succeeds in creating a universe from 'Nothing' in her lab. But then it begins to expand with alarming speed. Will it provide insight into the origins of our universe, or will it destroy her?

Tickets for this year's Festival will go on sale starting June 1st at http://www.playwrightsfoundation.org.