Aurora Theatre Company Announces Call for GAP Submissions

Berkeley's acclaimed Aurora Theatre Company is proud to announce a call for submissions for its ninth season of the Global Age Project (GAP) festival of new works. The company will choose four new plays to be presented as staged readings with professional directors and actors during the GAP festival in February and March of 2014; the festival will coincide with the company's fully-staged Bay Area Premiere of Johnna Adams's incendiary new play GIDION'S KNOT, directed by Jon Tracy (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity). Each of the four prizewinners will receive a $1,000 award and their work will be considered for further development and production during Aurora Theatre Company's regular season; out of town artists will receive travel and accommodation expenses. The submission period opens June 3; deadline for play submission is July 31, 2013. Finalists will be announced in early December 2013.

Aurora Theatre Company is excited to offer online script submission for the GAP. Playwrights may upload their submissions directly to Aurora Theatre Company's website at www.auroratheatre.org; there is a $20 submission fee per play manuscript.

The Global Age Project is a discovery and developmental vehicle established to encourage playwrights to address life in the 21st century and beyond. Seeking forward-thinking unproduced work from both established and emerging playwrights, the festival celebrates the diversity of perspectives, styles, voices, concerns, and stories that make up the world today and provides a development opportunity for plays that directly respond to our complicated present and our possible future. Writers are encouraged to submit works that explore and/or examine the changing state of human relationships in this new century; plays need not be about science or technology. The company also encourages submissions that transcend traditional forms of theater presentation. Plays that are set in a historical time period prior to the year 2000 will not be considered.

"I am pleased to welcome back GAP producers M. Graham Smith and Deborah Taylor," said Aurora Theatre Company Artistic Director Tom Ross. "It's amazing to think of how The Global Age Project has grown over the past eight years, and the impact it has made. Over 30 unproduced plays have been developed under the GAP banner, many of them moving forward to the Aurora main stage and to theaters around the world. Additionally, over $30,000 has been awarded directly to the playwrights to help them continue to develop their writing. New York-based playwright, and 2011 GAP prizewinner, Jorge Ignacio Cortinas recently wrote, 'If every development process was run with the sensitivity and courage that the GAP Festival so effortlessly demonstrated, the American theater would be more vibrant, braver, more surprising, more relevant.' We are proud to receive this kind of encouragement from our playwrights, the theater community, and our audiences, and look forward to presenting another season of exciting new works to the stage."

"Each year we look forward to the surprising and nearly infinite ways that writers address the world today, with all its new possibilities, consequences, and relationships," said GAP Producer M. Graham Smith. "We are eager to start reading submissions and looking at our present moment through hundreds of innovative new plays."

Over the past eight years, the GAP has established an astounding track record for nurturing new playwrights. During the first year, Dan Hoyle's early draft of Tings Dey Happen was a GAP prizewinner and received its first public showing at Aurora Theatre Company; since then, the show has gone on to become a huge success in New York and San Francisco, where it won the Glickman Award. Laura Jacqmin, whose play Happyslap was a GAP prizewinner during the festival's second year, won the Wasserstein Award for an outstanding script by a young woman who has not yet received national attention. Additionally, playwright Zayd Dohrn, whose play Sick was a 2008 GAP prizewinner, garnered the first Sky Cooper New American Play Prize at Marin Theatre Company. Our Dad is in Atlantis by Javier Malpica, translated by Jorge Ingacio Cortiñas, was published in its entirety in American Theatre Magazine following its GAP reading in 2008.

Joel Drake Johnson's The First Grade originated as a GAP finalist and became the first Aurora main stage production to develop from the GAP. Allison Moore's Collapse, which originated as a GAP finalist, became the second main stage production to develop from the GAP; the play received its main stage debut as a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, a collaboration with Aurora Theatre Company (lead theater), Curious Theatre in Denver, and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, during the 2010-11 season, and has gone on to be staged in four additional professional productions. During the 2012-13 season, the company presented the World Premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's OUR PRACTICAL HEAVEN, the third Aurora main stage production to develop from the GAP.

M. Graham Smith, Artistic Director of Precarious Theatre, returns to Aurora Theatre Company for a fifth season as GAP producer. He has directed at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia and the HERE American Living Room series in New York City. In San Francisco, directing credits include productions at the Yerba Buena Garden's Festival, Bay Area Playwright's Festival, American Conservatory Theater's Masters program, EXIT Theatre, Asian American Theatre Company, Playground, Brava Theater, Berkeley Playhouse, Golden Thread, and New Conservatory Theatre. He directed the West Coast Premiere of Jerry Springer: The Opera in San Francisco for Ray of Light Theatre, as well as the opera Love/Hatewith ODC and San Francisco Opera. He directed Ken Slattery's Truffaldino Says No at Shotgun Players, and will make his directing debut at Cutting Ball Theater this fall with the World Premiere of Basil Kreimendahl's Sidewinders.

Deborah Taylor is the founder of FireMused Production, LLC, a Broadway theater and film producing and consulting company, with a primary focus on developing and producing new works. A Tony award-winning producer, her Broadway credits include productions of Hands on a Hard Body, One Man Two Guvnors, The Mountaintop, starring Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett, Elling, starring Brendon Fraser and Denis O'Hare, American Idiot, and La Cage Aux Folles, starring Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge. Off Broadway credits include PIG PENS: The Old Man in the Old Moon, moving to The Writers Theatre in Chicago in fall 2013. Taylor is the former Producing Director of The Zephyr Theatre in Los Angeles, where she started the Zephyr Reading Series and produced the West Coast Premieres of Allison Moore's Slashed andThe Last Schwartz by Deb Zoe Laufer. Locally, she produced Des Voix...Found in Translation, in association with the French Consulate and Playwrights Foundation. She is a member of the San Francisco Ballet Board, chairing the 2013 season's opening night gala, and the San Francisco Ballet Student Showcase in 2011. Additionally, Taylor is a Board member and Development chair for Moises Kaufman's Tectonic Theatre Project in New York City, and a member of the San Francisco Film Society. Upcoming FireMused projects include The Glass Menagerie, starring Cherry Jones, and the musical adaptation of An American in Paris, currently in development for Broadway, directed by Christopher Wheeldon.

Aurora Theatre Company rounds out its 21st season in June with the Bay Area Premiere of Neil LaBute's THIS IS HOW IT GOES, directed by Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross. The company opens its 22nd season in August with the highly-anticipated Bay Area Premiere of Obie-winning playwright Amy Herzog's AFTER THE REVOLUTION, directed by Joy Carlin. Aurora Theatre Company Artistic Director Tom Ross helms the Bay Area Premiere of Samuel D. Hunter's Obie-winning A BRIGHT NEW BOISE in November, followed by the Bay Area Premiere of Johnna Adams' provocativeGIDION'S KNOT in January, directed by Jon Tracy. Josh Costello makes his Aurora directing debut in April with the Bay Area Premiere of WITTENBERG by David Davalos. The season concludes in June with David Mamet's searing dramaAMERICAN BUFFALO, directed by Barbara Damashek. As a special addition to the season, Aurora Theatre Company presents its first fully-staged production in the company's new Second Stage performance space, Harry's UpStage; award-winning Bay Area auteur Mark Jackson directs this sixth addition to the season in April, John W. Lowell's taut two-person drama THE LETTERS.

Aurora Theatre Company continues to offer challenging, literate, intelligent stage works to the Bay Area, each year increasing its reputation for top-notch theater. Located in the heart of the Downtown Berkeley Arts District, Aurora Theatre Company, declared "one of the best regional theaters around" by 7x7 magazine, has been called "one of the most important regional theaters in the area" and "a must-see midsize company" by the San Francisco Chronicle, while The Wall Street Journal has "nothing but praise for the Aurora." The Contra Costa Times stated "perfection is probably an unattainable ideal in a medium as fluid as live performance, but the Aurora Theatre comes luminously close," while the San Jose Mercury News affirmed Aurora Theatre Company is "arguably the finest small theater in the Bay Area," and theOakland Tribune stated "it's all about choices, and if you value good theater, choose the Aurora."

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