IAMA's Emerging Playwrights Lab to Culminate in Two Weekends of Free Playreadings in July

IAMA Theatre Company will present staged readings of six new plays written by members of the company’s 2022-23 Emerging Playwrights Lab. Readings will take place over the course of two weekends, July 21 through July 30, at Atwater Village Theatre. Admission is free.

Making up the Lab’s Class of ’23 are Amanda L. Andrei, Xavier Clark, Peter Pasco, Jasmine Sharma, Mak Shealy and Thomas Daníel Valls. The six met on a monthly basis during their one-year residency to share and develop work in a peer-guided format led by program director Nicholas Pilapil. (Pilapil, an alumnus of IAMA’s inaugural 2019 Playwrights Lab, recently received a full production of his Lab-developed play, The Bottoming Process, in a co-production between IAMA and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.)

The schedule of public readings is as follows: 
 

Friday, July 21 at 8 p.m.

El exorcismo de Georgie Garcia by Peter Pasco 
Growing up in the Bronx is complicated. The struggle gets real when your parents are devout Catholics from Peru, and you are a first generation agnostic child — whose imaginary best friend is White Jesus.
 

Saturday, July 22 at 8 p.m.

 
HIJO, MADRE by Thomas Daníel Valls 
Her son doesn't want to be here anymore, and his mother isn't really all there anymore.
 

Sunday, July 23 at 8 p.m.: 

PEACHY: a sorta Chekhovian traumedy, written by Jasmine Sharma, directed by Lavina Jadhwani
In 2022, the owner of a Los Angeles-based, family-run, Indi-Mex restaurant has the opportunity to franchise. In 1962, a Mexican woman and Punjabi peach farmer enter a "Mexidu" marriage in order to circumvent California's stringent miscegenation laws. Jasmine Sharma's PEACHY is a sorta chekhovian traumedy about cooking with love...and family.
 

Friday, July 28 at 8 p.m.: 

Victorian Psychedelic Sleepover Play by Mak Shealy 
After their writing is rejected by the school newspaper, four best friends meet on the eve of Sybil’s 16th birthday to create a literary zine of their own. Seeking editorial guidance, they conjure the ghosts of writers past and find themselves possessed by the spirit, chaos and conflict of the Victorian Era radicals they have long admired.
 

Saturday, July 29 at 8 p.m.: 

Brancusi v. United States, written by Amanda L. Andrei, directed by Nikki DiLoreto
An English translation of Tatiana Niculescu's Brâncuși contra SUA, a surreal comedic drama based on the 1926 court case of Romanian French sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957), who sued the United States for not categorizing his famous sculpture, “Bird in Space”, as art. The result: US courts legally changed the definition of art in America.
 

Sunday, July 30 at 8 p.m.:

ICONS. Written by Xavier Clark, directed by H. Adam Harris
When an established icon of a writer selects a younger Pulitzer Prize-winning author to interview him for a milestone newspaper article, lines between interviewer and interviewee get blurred, and the interview spirals into a nauseating loop of chaos. ICONS grapples with the meaning of legacy, loving and letting go, while still in the pursuit of peace, perfection and (im)mortality.

Atwater Village Theatre is located at 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90039. Free parking is available in the ATX (Atwater Crossing) lot one block south of the theater. 

For information and to make a reservation, go to www.iamatheatre.com.
 

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