Kevin Artigue's THE MOST DANGEROUS HIGHWAY IN THE WORLD Set for Stanford Reading

Playwrights Foundation and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford present the February Rough Readings.

The plays and playwrights are:

The Most Dangerous Highway in the World by Kevin Artigue
Sunday, February 21 - 5:00pm at Custom Made Theatre
Monday, February 22 - 7:30pm at Stanford

All readings will be performed at ROBLE HALL in Stanford University, and CUSTOM MADE THEATRE, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA 94102.

For information visit us at www.playwrightsfoundation.org.

Rough Readings bring playwrights and theatergoers together in an intimate setting to showcase work that is still at a very early stage of development, giving audiences a rare opportunity to engage directly with the artistic process of bringing a play to life. The Rough Reading Series is presented in partnership with the National Center for New Plays at Stanford, a producing partner of the National New Play Network, helping to foster a thriving relationship between Stanford University and the greater San Francisco theater scene.

The Readings are open to the public and are always pay-what-you-can. Monday and Sunday readings take place at Roble Hall on the Stanford University campus, and Tuesday and Saturday readings are held at Custom Made Theatre in San Francisco.

ABOUT THE PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS:

The Most Dangerous Highway in the World by Kevin Artigue
Directed by Evren Odcikin - A Producing Partnership with Golden Thread
Productions
Sunday, February 21 - 5:00pm at Custom Made Theatre
Monday, February 22 - 7:30pm at Stanford

A fearless eight-year old businessman makes his living selling fish and directing traffic with a coke bottle on the highway connecting Jalalabad to Kabul, Afghanistan. Soldiers, generals and ghosts are no match for this little fighter with a knack for surviving the toughest challenges.

Kevin Artigue is a playwright and filmmaker. He is a current member of the Public Theater's 2014-2015 Emerging Writers Group. His play THE MOST DANGEROUS HIGHWAY IN THE WORLD was featured at the National New Play Network's 2014 National Showcase of New Plays. The play will premiere with Golden Thread as part of their 2015-2016 season. His plays have been performed and developed with Theatre of NOTE, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Yale Cabaret, Iowa New Play Festival, Golden Thread, and the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, where he was a Core Apprentice. A graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Kevin was awarded a Provost's Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa, where he taught creative writing.

2016 Winter Rough Readings Series Continues (March & April Readings):

Mercury by Steve Yockey
Monday, March 14 - 7:30pm at Stanford
Tuesday, March 15 - 2:00pm at Custom Made Theatre

One couple abruptly ends an illicit affair while another couple hangs on by a thread. No one's happy, people stop being nice, and blood spills in a story that uses violent myth and our expectations of "good neighbors" to explore what happens when escalating anger eclipses rational response.

Br'er Cotton by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm
Monday, April 11 - 7:30pm at Stanford
Tuesday, April 12 - 2:00pm at Custom Made Theatre

Lynchburg, Virginia. The former site of a thriving cotton mill is now an impoverished neighborhood. Deeply affected by all the recent killings of young black men like himself, Ruffrino, a 14 year old "militant," incites riots at school and online. More and more at odds with his mother and grandfather, the boy's anger grows beyond containment while the family home literally sinks into the cotton field, and no one seems to notice but him.

ABOUT THE UPCOMING PLAYWRIGHTS:

Steve Yockey is a Los Angeles based writer with work produced throughout the country, Europe, and Asia. His plays Afterlife, Octopus, Large Animal Games, CARTOON, Subculture, Very Still & Hard to See, The Fisherman's Wife, Wolves, Disassembly, and Niagara Falls & Other Plays are published and available from Samuel French. He was selected for the first US/Australia playwright exchange in February 2013 for his play Pluto, sponsored by the National New Play Network and Playwriting Australia. This season, Blackberry Winter will be an NNPN Rolling World Premiere with productions at Actor's Express/Out of Hand, Salt Lake Acting Company, New Rep, Forum, Kitchen Dog, Capital Stage Company, and Oregon Contemporary Theatre. Steve holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He currently contributes issues to the Zenescope comic book series Grimm Tales of Terror and writes on HBO's The Brink.

Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm is a playwright. That title is an indelible part of his character. Theatre is the filter through which he sees and interprets the world. As a playwright, Tearrance is interested in exploring the many facets of the African American experience. He feels that race is double edged sword, equipped with its advantages and shortcomings. It is the exploration of this theme that permeates all of his work. His works includes Burning Books (MU New Play Series), Liddy's Samiches Potions & Baths (Arkansas Rep; Voices on the River), Vulpicide (MU New Play Series), Month of Sundays (Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival; NYC) and In Sweet Remembrance (Endstation Theatre Company and Sweet Briar College). Tearrance has also been published in interJACtions: 75 Monologues by some of America's Finest Playwrights and Arcadia Magazine. He has worked closely with Endstation Theatre Company (Lynchburg, VA), Theatre Alliance (Washington DC), The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival and has held residencies at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (Playwright Observer). Tearrance is currently an MFA Playwriting candidate at The Catholic University of America.

ABOUT PLAYWRIGHTS FOUNDATION - Playwrights Foundation (PF) was founded in 1976, and is today widely
recognized as one of the top play development labs in the U.S. Our artistic purpose is to support and champion contemporary playwrights in the creation of new works to sustain theater as a vital, dynamic art form. PF seeks to identify exceptional emerging artists and give them space and time to explore new theatrical ideas and forms in an environment free from the pressures of the marketplace. By providing a creative home for largely unknown, exceptional local and national playwrights, and committing to accelerating their careers, PF fulfills an essential need in the cultural ecology of the Bay Area. In so doing, we have earned a national reputation for introducing a truly diverse range of singular, boundary-breaking new voices to the American stage, challenging assumptions about subject matter and artistic complexity. The only development lab of its size and scope on the West Coast, PF is widely recognized for its programmatic excellence. Our programs include the Bay Area Playwrights Festival; the Resident Playwrights Initiative; and the Producing Partnership Initiative, which includes our monthly Rough Readings Series. For information, visit www.playwrightsfoundation.org.