Readings and Plays Highlight the Bay Area Playwrights Festival
The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, now in its 42nd year, brings two weekends of readings and plays to the Bay Area… plays that are both inspirational and provocative. For audiences, it’s a chance to see playwrights working in an intimate setting.
Plays include:
The House of The Negro Insane by Terence Anthony
Set in the Jim Crow era, in a psychiatric institution, we get a sobering look at the parallels of how those institutions resemble policing and the prison-industrial complex today.
The Seekers by Jeesun Choi
After reading an article in the New Yorker the seeds of a story about a young person on the verge of deportation were sown into a poetic play about migration, displacement and freedom.
How the Baby Died by Tori Keenan-Zelt
Assumptions that one day, we jump into an already scripted life… asking other women what things in their lives they couldn’t speak of. The result is a comic play about parenting and performing invisible pain.
Flex by Candrice Jones
A play about girls’ basketball for black women in rural Arkansas, divided over 4-quarters of a game.
How to Make an American Son by Christopher Oscar Peña
Thinking of his father and how immigrants like him face insurmountable odds to survive in this country… Peña tells the story of a “Model Immigrant” and business mogul who must rein in his privileged, status-driven American son.
Siesta Key by Jonathan Spector
Right after the 2016 election, reading about the Nazi occupation led to other rabbit holes and a play… Set in a future Florida, future where violence reigns. Siesta Key investigates the complexity of moral absolutism and the elusiveness of truth in acts of hate.
Bay Area Playwrights Festival
Fridays, July 19th – Sunday, July 28th (Fri at 8pm / Sat at 12noon, 4pm, 8pm / Sun at 1pm, 6pm)
Potrero Stage, 1695 18th Street, San Francisco
