21st Century Voices to Feature Readings in New Play Festival

21st Century Voices: New Play Festival

January 11-14

4 Days | 5 Plays | Live Staged Readings

American Stage is proud to continue our commitment to 21st Century Voices with a New Play Festival featuring live staged readings of five new plays from five exceptional up-and-coming playwrights from Tampa Bay and beyond.

A committee comprised of a diverse cross-section of community members worked with our producing artistic director to read, evaluate and discuss hundreds of new play submissions from all over the United States. The selected works will be featured in staged readings and workshops and will provide audiences the opportunity to contribute to the plays' development through audience talk-backs with the playwrights and Producing Artistic Director Stephanie Gularte following each play reading.

Individual Tickets: $10 per reading
All-Access Pass: $40 General Public | $30 American Stage Subscribers & Act 1 Club Members

Schedule:

Thursday, January 11 @ 8pm
LENI & JOSEPH by Jacob Marx Rice

Leni Riefenstahl is a dancer, actor, and perhaps Germany's most influential director. Joseph Goebbels is the charmingly brutal Minister of Propaganda, intent on consolidating power for the Nazi Party. When the ambitious minister hires the even more ambitious filmmaker to shoot the greatest propaganda movie ever made, it will pull two brilliant and dangerous minds into one of most productive, powerful, and deeply antagonistic relationships in the history of film. Leni & Joseph explores the wild true story of two giants as they flirt, fight, and shape the lives and deaths of millions.

Friday, January 12 @ 8pm
IF NOW WERE HENCE by Tess Light

21st century newlyweds Allie and Maggie have just moved into an old house that's been in the family for generations, where Vesta, a young bride-to-be (and frustrated intellectual) of the 19th century lives with her parents. Through the quantum vagaries of time, Allie and Vesta become visible to one another, past and future co-existing in a small parlor room. While multiple souls echo across time, resonating with alternate versions of themselves, Allie teaches Vesta of modern female emancipation, changing the lives of both women in the process.

Saturday, January 13 @ 3pm
POSTLINGUAL by Brooke Downs

Alexa, a home shopping host, is at the top of her field and ready to take the leap into network broadcasting. After routine wisdom teeth extraction, she wakes up deaf. (It can happen-inspired by a true story.) Now Alexa faces many choices which will change-or end-her life. Does she get a cochlear implant when she's just reacted so drastically to surgery? Would it be better to learn American Sign Language? Can she continue her career in television or should she find another path?
Everyone has a different opinion from her brother, who wants the implant right away for her network audition, to her more cautious husband. Alexa must sort through everyone's beliefs, including her own, as a speech pathologist leads her to see that silence is a wonderful way to learn to communicate.

Saturday, January 13 @ 8pm
GROUP by Alex Rubin

In a quiet New Jersey beach town, four women are about to have a very unusual reunion. Kari, Rachel, Janet, and Joy are the 1988 graduates of a center for teenagers with eating disorders. Thirty years later, their lives have taken vastly different directions, but there is still one secret that unites them...

Sunday, January 14 @ 3pm
GOOD BAD PEOPLE by Rachel Lynett

June returns to home to a family in crisis. Her brother, Amiri, has recently been shot and killed by a police officer. Her father is missing, her mother, Miriam, has locked herself in her bedroom as a response, and her sister, Audre, has gone into overdrive of "everything is fine, everything is fine." Now it's up to June to find a way to protect her brother's legacy while deciding whether she can finally confront long buried issues between herself and her surviving family.

163 3rd Street North, St. Petersburg, FL 33701

Americanstage.org

americanstage.org/new-play-festival/

https://tickets.americanstage.org/TheatreManager/1/login?event=1664

(direct link to purchase 21st Century Voices New Play Festival tickets)

727.823.PLAY (7529)

boxoffice@americanstage.org

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