SOAP Fest Returns 6/3-7

Building upon its overwhelming success, West of Lenin presents the Sandbox One-Act Play Festival, returning June 3-7 with another stellar evening. It's the stories that matter, where each play has been selected for its quality of craftsmanship, and the playwrights are revealed only after the lineup has been carefully assembled. Experience the latest by award-winning playwrights, as well as emerging voices, of The Sandbox Artists Collective.

Nominated for the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award for 99 Layoffs, and a winner of the McKnight and Bush fellowships, as well as a Jerome Commission and the Heideman Award, playwright Vincent Delaney's Las Cruces transports us to the New Mexico desert. Not far from the casinos and the spaceport, Sheridan is camped out, hiding in a gutted trailer. Everyone knows he's there, but no one knows why. Except maybe a card player named Soledad. Directed by SOAP Fest 2013's Julie Beckman (The Bunner Sisters at Theatre Off Jackson), Delaney weaves a finely tuned story with equal parts humor and pathos.

Chosen Less, by emerging playwright Phillip Lienau, reveals a chance meeting on the street where two men learn the hard way that leaving is not the same as escaping, and that dreams can change in the chase. Kelly Kitchens (Associate Artistic Director at Seattle Public Theater, and 2014 Gregory Award for Outstanding Director), directs this poignant tale. Mr. Lienau serves as Lecturer of Scenic Design at the University of Washington. Chosen Less is his first produced play.

A former Washington State Artist in Residence, and a grant recipient from the Washington, King County, and Seattle Arts Commissions, Carl Sander's plays have been produced by Seattle Rep, ACT, Seattle Children's Theatre, and many others. In Why Do We Keep Broken Things, it's 2011 in Seattle: Mike McGinn is in office, Bertha is in Japan, pot is illegal, and the Occupy Movement is camped in Westlake Park. Directed by Tim Hyland (Wooden O, Seattle Public Theater), five inhabitants of the city by the Sound collide in a kinetic collage of civics, sex, and estranged friendship, leading us to ask why some things change and others stay the same.

"SOAP Fest may be young, but it is setting the stage for emerging local theater," says Seattle Met. Don't wait until 2017! See the Sandbox One-Act Play Festival before it moves to a biennial schedule. For more information, please visit http://soapfest.org/.

This production is being presented under the auspices of the Actors' Equity Association Members' Project Code.

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