Z Space, Second Stage Uptown & More Partner for 2015 One-Minute Play Festival

The One-Minute Play Festival #1MPF, America's largest and longest consistently running short form theatre festival, announces their 2015 National Season.

"I'm still in awe that 1MPF has grown to the size and scope that it has", says 1MPF Founder & Producing Artistic Director, Dominic D'Andrea. "We started nine years ago in a tiny theatre in Brooklyn as a fun artistic challenge for our community. Since then we've grown into a full company, which focuses on investigating the zeitgeist of different local communities by looking at emerging connections, themes, ideas, styles, and trends that bubble up to the surface. We perform a community mind map, through a series of 70-90 pulses of storytelling."

D'Andrea attributes a lot of 1MPF's growth to their unique methodology. "There's really nothing like 1MPF. We are half play festival, half community-engaged convening. In addition to the festival itself, we offer town hall meetings, consensus, community-building, and dialogue sessions, and special events to help shape this work as a community action. This work is a chance for local participants, audiences, and stakeholders to dig into questions like: who are we? What is our relationship to each other; to our community; to our work? I think the fact that we have such a focus on local narratives is part of the reason our programming demand has exploded on a national platform."

For each festival, 1MPF invites local writers and community members into their unique playmaking process. Writers are asked to consider the world around them, their cities, their communities and the ways in which they view the world, before writing topical moments that say something about the world as it is in the here and now. Local directors, actors, and community members are tapped to stage and shape these moments (70-90 on average) with a unique local flavor. D'Andrea comes in and leads a community put-together tech, before presenting the festival to local audiences, who are eager to experience what themes and ideas come up in the work.

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