SCR Announces 13th Annual Pacific Playwrights Festival 4/23-25
By: Charlie Piane Apr. 14, 2010
South Coast Repertory has lined up a slate of talented actors and directors to bring to life the five staged readings in this year's 13th annual Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF), which takes place April 23-25.
Tony Award-winner Doug Hughes (Doubt on Broadway) will direct Right to the Top by Amy Freed, starring Jane Carr, Mark Harelik, Reg Rogers, Susannah Schulman and Kate Jennings Grant.Pam MacKinnon (Our Mother's Brief Affair) will direct Completeness by Itamar Moses, starring Matthew Humphreys, Mandy Siegfried and Kristen Bush.Sam Gold, who directed the Off-Broadway production of Circle Mirror Transformation and will direct SCR's production of that play next season, will direct Bathsheba Doran's Kin. The cast for that reading includes Emily Bergl, Michael Gladis, Hal Landon, Jr., Richard Doyle, Jenny O'Hara, Laura Heisler, Sarah Rafferty and Barbara Tarbuck.Frequent SCR collaborator Art Manke (Noises Off) will direct David West Read's Happy Face, with Wyatt Fenner, Rebecca Mozo, Tracy A. Leigh and Peter Katona.And Casey Stangl (Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business) will direct Sofia Alvarez's Between Us Chickens, starring Fiona Dourif, Nick Mills and Liz Vital.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Julia Cho is the author of The Piano Teacher, Durango, The Winchester House, BFE, The Architecture of Loss and 99 Histories, which have been produced at SCR, The Vineyard Playhouse, The Public Theater, Long Wharf Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, East West Players and The Theatre @ Boston Court, among others. An alumna of the Juilliard School and NYU's Graduate Dramatic Writing Program, Cho is a member of New Dramatists. Last month, her play The Language Archive won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for the best new English-language play by a female writer.
Itamar Moses is the author of the full-length plays Outrage, Bach at Leipzig (performed at SCR in 2006), Celebrity Row, The Four of Us, Yellowjackets, Back Back Back and The Den, a collection of short plays titled Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It), as well as various one-acts. He is presently adapting Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude for the stage with composer Michael Friedman, and director Daniel Aukin. His work has appeared Off-Broadway and at regional theatres across the country, and in Canada, France and Brazil. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and has taught playwriting at Yale and NYU. Sofia Alvarez is currently a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at The Juilliard School. She is an alumna of The Royal Court Theatre's Young Writer's Program in London, where she developed her play Life Drawing. She was recently awarded Lincoln Theater Center's Lecomte du Nouy Prize. She received her BA in Drama from Bennington College. She has worked as an assistant to Christopher Hampton, Adam Guettel and in the theatre department at CAA. David West Read is currently pursuing his MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts on a full departmental fellowship. His plays have been produced at numerous festivals, including the Toronto Fringe, SummerWorks, the North Jersey New Found Theatre Festival (Winner-Best Play) and NYU's Festival of New Works. His short play Double Penetration was selected as a finalist at the 2009 Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, and his full-length play The Dream of the Burning Boy will be produced at the Roundabout Theater Underground as part of its 2010-2011 season. Happy Face was first developed as a playwriting thesis project at NYU under the guidance of Marsha Norman.
13TH ANNUAL PACIFIC PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL LINEUP
by Julia Cho
directed by Mark Brokaw
(Through April 25)PPF Schedule:
Friday, April 23, at 8 pm; Saturday, April 24, at 2:30 & 8 p.m.; Sunday, April 25, at 2:30 & 7:30 p.m.George is a brilliant linguist. But things aren't going his way. He's concerned that every two weeks a language vanishes from the face of the earth. Now his wife is about to vanish-from his life-leaving cryptic notes around the house as she goes (Husband or throw pillow? Marriage or old cardigan?), and he doesn't have the words to stop her. His assistant has strong feelings for him and has finally decided to open up, but believes she could better express herself in Esperanto, which she hasn't yet learned. To top it off, George is about to record the last two speakers of a long-lost language, but they've stop talking to each other!
DOCTOR CERBERUS
by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
directed by Bart DeLorenzo
(Through May 2) PPF Schedule:
Friday, April 23, at 7:45 p.m.; Saturday, April 24, at 2 p.m. & 7:45 p.m.; Sunday, April 25, at 2 p.m. & 7:45 p.m.
In the suburbs of Washington, D.C. in the mid-1980s, 13-year-old Franklin Robertson is trying to survive. His parents don't understand him. His older brother torments him non-stop. He'd rather write stories than go on dates. His great comfort comes from the horror movies he watches every Saturday night at midnight, on a black-and-white TV set in his basement, introduced by the enigmatic Doctor Cerberus. In fact, Franklin feels certain that Doctor Cerberus can save his misfit life-if only Franklin could get on his show. A coming-of-age comedy with a twist of terror, Doctor Cerberus is the latest from this "intelligent, compassionate writer" (Variety).
Staged Readings
(schedule subject to change)COMPLETENESS
by Itamar Moses
directed by Pam MacKinnon Friday, April 23, at 1 p.m.How does a computer scientist hook up with a molecular biologist? He uses the algorithm method, of course. But when Elliot offers to build a computer program to help Molly with her latest research project, they discover that megabytes and microbes might not be compatible-and even the most sophisticated algorithm may freeze in the face of life's infinite possibilities. From the author of Bach at Leipzig, a 21st-century romantic comedy about the timeless confusions of love.
HAPPY FACE
by David West Read
directed by Art MankeFriday, April 23, at 3:30 p.m.Wendy has a lot on her plate. A force of nature in the form of a 20-year-old karate-chopping gamine, she has been the sole provider for her troubled younger brother, Poots, ever since their parents died in a tragic canoeing accident. While Wendy lives in the family house, Poots lives out back in a refrigerator box and wears a Phantom of the Opera mask to hide his disfigured face. Now their funds are dwindling and prospects are bleak, but the indefatigable Wendy has a plan-and no one should bet against her.
BETWEEN US CHICKENS
by Sofia Alvarez
directed by Casey StanglFriday, April 23, at 8 p.m. and Saturday, April 24, at 2:30 and 8 p.m.Meagan and Sarah are small-town girls new to L.A. Meagan's all about the retail, the scene and the celebrities; Sarah's a computer-surfing homebody. When a smooth-talking opportunist named Charles crashes on their couch and takes Sarah out on the town, he threatens to upset the balance of a lifelong friendship-especially when Sarah's secret life comes to light. This smart, savvy comedy by a promising new playwright surprises turn-by-turn as it asks how well you really know your friends.
RIGHT TO THE TOP
by Amy Freed
directed by Doug HughesSaturday, April 24, at 10:30 a.m.He's a giant of the architecture world: Gregor Zubrovsky, whose buildings rise like post-post-modern megaliths out of the center of the earth. So why has he decided to take on a project to remodel a decaying boathouse in a remote backwater? That's what up-and-coming architects Dieter and Rita want to know-especially since that project was supposed to be theirs. But nothing prepares them for the truth about Gregor, whose past is far more checkered than anyone might have imagined. Another outrageous outing from the author of The Beard of Avon and You, Nero. KIN
by Bathsheba Doran
directed by Sam GoldSunday, April 25, at 10:30 a.m.Anna is a quietly ambitious, Ivy League-educated New Yorker with an emotionally distant father. Sean is an Irish personal trainer with an emotional wreck of a mother. When Anna and Sean fall in love, their parents get involved, along with a tangled web of friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic. So before they can begin a future together, the couple must reconcile with their past in this wonderfully wry drama about the inevitable influence of kin.
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