Tripwire Harlot Press to Publish Plays By Ground-Breaking BIPOC Writers in Sledgehammer Series

 

The Sledgehammer Series, a book project hosted by Tripwire Harlot Press, was created during the pandemic by playwrights Sheila Callaghan, Jacqueline Goldfinger, and Sarah Ruhl to address limited opportunities in dramatic publishing in the American theater, and specifically to redress a lack of published visibility for BIPOC playwrights. The first two Sledgehammer Series titles, Rarities & Wonders: Plays by Phillip Howze and Doodles from the Margins: Three Plays by Hansol Jung will be released on June 27, 2022. The following two volumes, Recent Alien Abductions by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and Plays by Christina Anderson, will be published in the fall of 2022. All books will be available online at Amazon and at the Drama Book Shop. Sledgehammer Series writers will hold a book signing in September 2022 at Drama Book Shop in New York City as well as throughout the year at additional locations to be announced. For updates and to pre-order books, please visit: www.tripwireharlot.com/books

The Sledgehammer Series is comprised of a collective of playwrights publishing work through a nimble consensus model. These plays are wild, language driven, form-breaking works of art that demand to explode across the page. They utilize the printed format in unusual ways, in an effort to allow artist driven conversations fuel how plays are regarded as literary documents in the world. All work published in The Sledgehammer Series is completely artist-driven, including the design of covers and all printed matter. The volumes feature introductions and afterwords that frame the plays within a larger conversation, particularly a critical conversation around a playwright's body of work that has until now been insufficiently canonized due to strategies and concerns hailing from white, Anglo-Saxon traditions. The Sledgehammer Series aims to make some of the most exciting work in the American theater available across the country to those who want to read, teach, and perform these incredible titles, creating a dynamic rising circle of published dramatic work. We seek to anthologize individual playwrights' work so the plays can be read in dialogue with each other, and to celebrate and create more visibility around these ground-breaking writers. All playwrights retain full rights to their work.

"This Sledgehammer initiative is a great opportunity for playwrights to publish their work on their terms," says Christina Anderson. "The book itself is the playwright's canvas. And to share these works with students, teachers, theatergoers, and the curious reader is a delightful endeavor."

"Selfishly, I just want these beautiful plays in my hands! And it has mightily irritated me over the years that I teach these brilliant plays all the time but can't provide my students with physical copies of them," says Sarah Ruhl. "It has been a joy to be part of an artist centered publishing process that creates community around theater on the page. I am swooning with delight over the covers that these writers have designed, and what's more, the plays that are inside are truly extraordinary. You will want to read them over and over again, and you will want to produce them immediately,"

The four Sledgehammer Series books being released this year are:

Rarities & Wonders: Plays by Phillip Howze. "The collected works included in my book, Rarities & Wonders, represent an array of actions, disclosures, marvels, and meanderings. In a word: plays. I'm delighted to share them here, for the first-time, published together in a singular assembly," says Howze. "An assembly is defined as a group of objects or people gathered together for a common purpose. Like the works gathered in my book, this special group of four playwrights-invited here to inaugurate Tripwire Harlot's brand-new 'Sledgehammer Series'-are a rare and awesome assembly. Though each individual collection is beautifully unique, we all possess a common purpose: to dismantle some dogma, revitalize the landscape, and nourish the collective garden of American plays."

Doodles from the Margins: Three Plays by Hansol Jung comprises the plays Wolf Play, No More Sad Things, and Wild Goose Dreams. Most recently, Wolf Play completed a sold out and extended run at Soho Rep in New York City. All of the plays will have doodles and thoughts from Jung in the margins about her process and the play itself. "I get weirded out by published plays. I never feel like they are finished, and yet the ink is so firm and out in the public, that it demands that I put the pencil down. So when Sarah, Jackie, and Sheila rang me up about this brilliant project the Puck in me thought sneakily, I could maybe rattle that permanence of the public ink. I shall scribble and doodle the heaviness of a printed text into something more malleable and forgiving. It might just end up an annoying mess. But you know, it's my mess and if I'm gonna mess up personally in the public square, I'm glad it's in the hands of Sledgehammer," says Jung.

Plays by Christina Anderson comprises the plays How to Catch Creation, Good Goods, and Hollow Roots. "I'm excited to not only invite readers to read a few of my plays, but also offer a glimpse into my process as a playwright and creative. The three works I include each capture a significant moment in my theatrical journey that continues to evolve. And I designed the book cover, using my photography to create a collage that symbolizes my approach when crafting my play worlds," says Anderson.

Recent Alien Abductions by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas. Cortiñas's play uses the metaphor of alien abduction to explore two kinds of asymmetrical relationships: the experience of growing up queer in a straight family and the geopolitical relationship Puerto Rico has with the United States. "A good measure of the strength and resiliency of any art form is how many opportunities exist for artists that are run by artists, designed by them, and accountable to them. This matters because when artists are in charge theater gets bolder, more idiosyncratic -- it dreams further. Sledgehammer is a much needed experiment in putting play publishing in the hands of playwrights" says Cortiñas.

"The limited publication of plays, especially work by BIPOC artists, leads to a butterfly effect of access issues for producers, academics, historians, and others," says Jacqueline Goldfinger. "In addition, the formatting demands of traditional publishers force text into a monolithic mold which may not serve the artist's intention. Sledgehammer supports playwrights so that they can create an experience for the reader on the page, just as they create one for the audience on the stage; making the experience of the text singularly performative for each reader."

Hansol Jung is a playwright and director from South Korea. Productions include Wolf Play (Artist Rep, Company One, Soho Rep), Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Commissions from Public Theater (NY), Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, La Jolla Playhouse. She has received residencies and fellowships from Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, Royal Court, New York Theater Workshop's 2050 Fellowship, Berkeley Repertory, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, and Page 73. Awards include the Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, DGF Award and theHelen Merrill Award. She has written for TV series Tales of the City (Netflix), Pachinko (Apple +) and is currently developing various onscreen projects with Bad Robot, Amazon Studios, and the team at Kindred Spirit/Ink Factory/Endeavor Content. Hansol is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, NYTW's Usual Suspects, and The Kilroys. MFA: Yale School of Drama.

Christina Anderson is a current Tony Award Nominee for Outstanding Book of a Musical for Paradise Square. She is a playwright, screenwriter, educator, and creative. Her plays have appeared at The Goodman Theatre, OSF, The Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Kansas City Rep, and other theaters in the United States and Canada. Awards and honors include: 2021 Prince Prize, 2020 United States Artists Fellow, MacDowell Fellowship, Lily Awards Harper Lee Prize, Herb Alpert Award nomination, Barrymore Nomination, and New Dramatists Residency. She taught playwriting at Wesleyan University, Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase College, and served as the interim Head of Playwriting at Brown University.

Phillip Howze is a writer and theater maker whose works include Self Portraits (BRIC-Arts Media) and Frontieres Sans Frontieres (Bushwick Starr). His plays have been developed or produced at Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Clubbed Thumb, Cutting Ball, New York Theater Workshop, PRELUDE Festival, Public Theater/NYSF, San Francisco Playhouse, Signature Theatre, Theater Masters, and Yale Cabaret. He is a Fellow of the Sundance Theater Lab, a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, and a Resident Writer at Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3. His commissions include the American Repertory Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club/Sloan Initiative, and Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3. He was recently appointed the inaugural Associate Senior Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University's new Theater, Dance & Media program. https://tripwireharlot.com/howze_secret.html

Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas's most recent plays include Bird in the Hand (Fulcrum, New York Times Critics Pick) and Blind Mouth Singing (NAATCO, New York Times Critics Pick). His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts (three years), and the Helen Merrill Award, among others. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a NYTW Usual Suspect.

Tripwire Harlot is a small artist-driven press that began in late 2019 as an imprint of Savage Candy Productions. It was initially founded by playwright Sheila Callaghan as a thought experiment, and soon grew into a platform for amplifying under-represented voices in the American Theater and beyond. Tripwire H. is dedicated to spotlighting adventurous work that might otherwise be overlooked by risk-averse institutions. It seeks to give voice to unique, insightful perspectives through interrogation and creative inquiry. It strives to serve the field by playfully poking at the boundaries of the impossible. And finally, it challenges our presumed limitations around dramatic works in print.