New Works Festival at Shoebox Theatre

First Lamb Productions announces the opening of its New Works Short Play Festival, an evening of nine original short plays selected from more than sixty submissions received from playwrights across the country. The festival runs September 11 through September 26 at the Valley Academic and Cultural Center on the Los Angeles Valley College campus, with opening night Friday, September 11 at 8:00 p.m.

Presented as a single two-hour program, the festival gathers nine recent works ranging from ten to twenty minutes in length — several receiving their world premieres, others among their earliest stagings anywhere. The nine plays come from seven playwrights and are staged by seven different directors, with a large ensemble of 21 actors moving across all nine pieces over the course of the night. The result is a fast-moving, deliberately eclectic evening that shifts in tone, style, and subject from one play to the next.

Rather than organizing around a single theme, the festival is built on one premise: the work is new. Drawn from a national open call, the program is a showcase for fresh voices in playwriting and for the directors and performers bringing them to the stage for the first time.