PlayGround's 25th Season Continues With Two World Premieres

PlayGround has announced highlights of its 25th Season, including two world premieres to be featured in this year's PlayGround Festival and its return to New York for a 25th Season Gala Performance. The world premieres, Katie May's A HISTORY OF FREAKS and Ruben Grijalva's ANNA CONSIDERS MARS, were both developed at past PlayGround Festivals. Anna Considers Mars is a PlayGround/Planet Earth Arts co-commission. The productions open May 15 and May 22, respectively, and will run in rotating repertory as part of PlayGround's annual new plays showcase, the PlayGround Festival of New Works, through June 16 at PlayGround's state-of-the-art San Francisco home, Potrero Stage. On April 15, PlayGround will celebrate its 25th Anniversary New York-style with a special one-night only Monday Night PlayGround "Musical Theatre" Gala Performance at Theatre Row's Beckett Theatre on 42nd Street, featuring plays and performances by PlayGround alumni and other distinguished guests. For more information, visit http://playground-sf.org.

Monday Night PlayGround MUSICAL THEATRE NIGHT gala April 15 performance at

Theatre Row's Beckett Theatre will be PlayGround's fifth project in New York, following co-productions of Garret Jon Groenveld's Missives (2008, 59E59 Theaters), Aaron Loeb's Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party (2009, NYCFringe & 2010, Theatre Row), and Katie May's Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2013, NYCFringe), all of which were commissioned by PlayGround and originally developed through the PlayGround Festival. Most recently, May's Abominable was featured at the Lark's 2015 Playwrights Week, following its initial development at the PlayGround Festival and subsequent PlayGround Festival premiere.

The PlayGround Festival has become one of the most important launching pads for early-career Bay Area (and, more recently, Los Angeles) playwrights and their work, leading to collaborations, commissions and productions both in continuing relationship to and often well beyond PlayGround. Alumni include Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Aaron Loeb, Geetha Reddy, Lauren Yee, Garret Jon Groenveld, Cleavon Smith, and Patricia Cotter, among others. Ruben Grijalva and Katie May have participated in a number of past festivals and were last paired up in the 2016 PlayGround Festival, where PlayGround premiered May's Abominable and Grijalva's Value Over Replacement.

The world premiere plays in this year's festival, Katie May's A HISTORY OF FREAKS and Ruben Grijalva's ANNA CONSIDERS MARS, both examine the delicate balance between extinction and survival. In A HISTORY OF FREAKS, May probes the nature of "otherness" and the power of storytelling through the frame of a traveling circus and its sideshow performers struggling to survive in a modern world. In ANNA CONSIDERS MARS, Grijalva takes us to the near future where humanity is on the precipice with earth becoming increasingly inhospitable and the dream of the first colony on Mars about to become a reality. It's an Adam and Eve story for the climate-change era.

Katie May's plays include Abominable (PlayGround/Symmetry Theatre Company, Lark Playwrights' Week Finalist), Manic Pixie Dream Girl (fringeNYC & A.C.T. Costume Shop, San Francisco), Black Sheep Gospel (Great Plains Theater Conference), and A History of Freaks (Finalist, David Mark Cohen Award), among others. Her short play Rapunzel's Etymology of Zero (Best of Playground Festival, Short + Sweet Sydney) was published in the Best of PlayGround Anthology, 2011, and was subsequently made into an animated short film that screened in festivals both nationally and internationally. May has been a member of the San Francisco PlayGround Writers Pool since 2008, and a PlayGround Playwright in Residence since 2014. Her work has received productions in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Arizona, Idaho, and Sydney, Australia. May is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Virginia Piper Writing Center, National University of Singapore, Women in Film LA, and a two-time PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award winner. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University.

Ruben Grijalva is an award-winning San Francisco-based playwright and filmmaker. His short plays include Full Steam Ahead and the PianoFight ShortLived winning All The Worlds Are Stages. His full-length plays include Foresight, Anna Considers Mars, and the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award-winning Value Over Replacement, which premiered in the 2016 PlayGround Festival of New Works. He began writing for PlayGround in 2011 and is a three-time Best of PlayGround finalist and current Resident Playwright.

PlayGround, the Bay Area's leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area's best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 200 local playwrights in the development and staging of more than 850 original short plays and 75 new full-length plays, with 6 more commissions currently in development. PlayGround also operates Potrero Stage (formerly Thick House), a state-of-the-art 99-seat black box theatre in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, home to some of the Bay Area's leading new play developers and producers, including PlayGround, Crowded Fire, Golden Thread, and Playwrights Foundation. For more information, visit http://playground-sf.org.

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