2nd Annual Final Draft New Play Festival Comes To New Village Arts

New Village Arts announces its second New Play Festival, FINAL DRAFT, scheduled for January 3-6, 2019. This year's festival will feature plays by local playwrights Aleta Barthell, Dea Hurston, Karen Riehl, Roy Sekigahama and a full-length musical by Blake McCarty and Trevor Bachman. Selections were decided from an open submission pool of over 80 new plays and musicals and a five-person readership panel.

Inaugurated last year, FINAL DRAFT spotlights new work from San Diego artists. The festival features four days of events geared towards celebrating and developing new work. In addition to staged reading performances of five new plays, the theatre will also host a character- and dialogue-writing workshop for playwrights with playwright and Disney screenwriter Kelly Younger, as well as a moderated community conversation on equity, diversity and inclusion in play development with Dramatists Guild Representative Josh Gershick.

New Village Arts will also host social networking events featuring Carlsbad-based craft beers.

More information on schedule and ticket pricing will be forthcoming at www.newvillagearts.org.

Trevor Bachman (CHASING FEAR) is a composer, vocalist, and writer of socially conscious musicals that fuse the traditions of opera with storytelling practices of modern theatre. While partnering remotely with San Diego playwright and theatre artist Blake McCarty, Trevor can also currently be seen performing Off-Broadway in BLACK LIGHT while spending his days developing two new musicals: THIS BE MAGIC, an adaptation of THE WINTER'S TALE, and Farmed, an interview-based concert series inspired by Animal Farm that will tour the country in 2019. Other projects include PYRE CANTATA, IN REAL LIFE: A SLENDERMAN MUSICAL, and PIANO BAR in collaboration with the late Elizabeth Swados. His work has been performed in Abu Dhabi, London, and Tokyo, and at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Joe's Pub, and countless other venues in New York City.

Aleta Barthell (NIGHT WITCHES) is very excited to have NIGHT WITCHES be a part of the New Play Festival at NVA. She was a finalist for the 2016 HUMANITAS/CTG Playwriting Prize for her play, WINDOW OF SHAME. Aleta is currently developing a television series about the 12th century queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for which she received a grant to study source material in Paris through the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Aleta was a panelist for "Writing from History" at the 2015 Dramatists Guild National Conference. She is a teaching artist with Playwrights Project and founder of the youth theater education program, Kids Act, at New Village Arts Theatre. She holds a B.S. from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and has trained at BADA (Oxford, England); Shakespeare and Company (Lenox, MA). She studied playwriting and screenwriting at UCSD with Allan Havis. Associate member Dramatists Guild. Member SAG/AFTRA.

Dea Hurston (Stevie Wonder) is a longtime arts advocate, patron and philanthropist. She is a retired teacher and former Commissioner of Arts and Culture for The City of San Diego and is still very active in the local arts and culture community. Although she has been writing plays for many years, she only recently came out of her self imposed writing closet in June of 2017 with a successful reading of her play IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH. She has had a productive year with three of her plays selected as winners and awarded readings. Dea is thrilled to have NVA take her award winning Stevie Wonder play from page to stage.

Blake McCarty (CHASING FEAR) is an artist and educator, as well as the Executive Artistic Director of Blindspot Collective, a local theatre company focused on the development of new work at the intersection of advocacy, education, and entertainment. His original works include PLAY/DATE, a site-specific play about dating that ran six months Off-Broadway; HALL PASS, an immersive musical set in a high school commissioned by New York University; Qulili, a documentary play about refugees and immigrants; and UNTOLD and THE MAGIC IN THIS SOUL, two verbatim plays that won awards at the San Diego Fringe Festival in 2017 and 2018, respectively. As a director or designer, Blake's work has been seen in San Diego at La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego Rep, Cygnet, Diversionary, and others, and in New York City at Dixon Place, 3?Legged Dog, The New Victory Theater, Theatre Row, La Mama E.T.C., and MCC Theater. For New Village Arts, Blake has designed RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET, GOD OF CARNAGE, BUDDY: THE Buddy Holly STORY, and CLOUD TECTONICS as well as creating and directing eight original verbatim plays with local high schools. As an educator, Blake has developed educational programming for organizations that include The New Victory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, New York University, New Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Tribeca Film Festival, and Invisible Children in Northern Uganda. Blake is an alumnus of Tisch School of the Arts, and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, both at New York University.

Karen Truesdell Riehl (BAD GIRL) Karen Truesdell Riehl's writing achievements are remarkable, given the award-winning author's lifelong battle with dyslexia. She was unable to read until the age of ten. Her published works now include a 2015 San Diego Book Awards winner, HELGA: GROWING UP IN HITLER'S GERMANY. Her other books include a memoir, LOVE AND MADNESS: MY PRIVATE YEARS WITH George C. Scott, telling of her 30-year hidden liaison with the international film star, six novels, eight plays and a radio comedy series, THE QUIBBLES, available from ArtAge Publications. Her children's play, ALICE IN CYBERLAND, was an award winner in the National Southwest Writers Contest.

Roy Sekigahama (A DESERT ROCK GARDEN) A DESERT ROCK GARDEN is Roy's first full-length play. It was initially developed in a Playwrights Project workshop in spring of 2018. His first one-act play, FACE THE MUSIC, won third-prize in Script Tease of Short Plays in 2016 and THE PURPLE SWASTIKA was a semifinalist in the JCC's Five Minute Play Festival in 2018. Until his retirement, Roy was a Quantitative Analyst for an investment bank in Tokyo.

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