Columbia MFA Theatre Program presents New Plays Festival

Columbia Stages presents eight new plays written by the Columbia MFA playwriting class of 2017. All of the plays will be performed at The Ford Studio at Pershing Square Signature Center (480 W 42nd St. New York, NY 10036). The esteemed faculty who have cultivated these students, including Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, Charles L. Mee, and Kelly Stuart, invite you to experience these innovative new plays.

From Head of Playwriting, David Henry Hwang, "The works of the MFA playwriting class of 2017 exhibit a wide range of cultural, international and aesthetic diversity. Theatre is vital enough to tell many different kind of stories, using a variety of formal techniques, to engage our hearts and minds. We're proud of these bold and energetic new works by the next generation of playwrights."

OUTER BANKS by Stephen Foglia

One sunny afternoon on a North Carolina beach, Junie's twin sister disappeared without a trace. Two years later, no sign of the missing woman has surfaced, and Junie's family has decided it is time to say goodbye. But Junie may not be ready. She begins to receive mysterious messages that might just be coming from her sister. By the brackish waters of the Neuse River, the borders between worlds grow porous, and death's door opens.

Performances: April 19 at 2:30 PM

April 21 at 8 PM

April 22 at 2:30 PM

you do not look by Callan Stout

Gerda is trying to sell encyclopedias in order to stay in America. But she keeps getting sidetracked as she tries to save a world of other women around her. As the play loops and unravels in repeating patterns of PTSD, Gerda cannot escape her own traumatic past. you do not look challenges the audience to see female trauma that is too often purposefully overlooked. Developed with Fresh Ground Pepper and the Denmark Arts Center.

Performances: April 20 at 8 PM

April 21 at 2:30 PM

April 22 at 7:30 PM

SAINTS GO MARCHING by Matt Barbot

Jo's grandfather-a decorated veteran-has died, leaving emotional wreckage and unpaid debts in his wake. As she prepares for the funeral, Jo's heart is set on keeping grandpa's burial flag; to get it, she'll have to deal with her despondent mother, an attempted exorcism, and competition from a secret aunt young enough to be her little sister. It won't be easy, but nothing an aspiring saint like Jo can't handle.

Performances: April 26 at 2:30 PM

April 28 at 8 PM

April 29 at 2:30 PM

HATEWATCH by Ellen Steves

After a televised intervention goes off the rails, three friends go to extreme measures to take things into their own hands. HATEWATCH is an exploration of the connection between art and commerce, torture, manipulation, friendship, pornography, and cheese dip.

Performances: April 27 at 8 PM

April 28 at 2:30 PM

April 29 at 7:30 PM

BLACK HOLLOW by Aeneas Hemphill

After a school shooting rips open the heart of an idyllic American town, the people of Black Hollow reckon with their loss and fight to live on. A play about grief, community, and resilience.

Performances: May 3 at 2:30 PM

May 5 at 8 PM

May 6 at 2:30 PM

A DollZes HoUse by Becca Plunkett

A power-hungry King in a war-torn nation forces his royal court to perform a heavily redacted version of A Doll's House. The King's favorite, Tulip, stars in the show as Nora, a role she's been preparing for her entire life. When Tulip discovers that the King has altered Ibsen's ending to promote his own, twisted ideology, her porcelain world begins to crack. A DollZes HoUse is a play about History, hegemony, and resistance/rebellion.

Performances: May 4 at 8 PM

May 5 at 2:30 PM

May 6 at 7:30 PM

UNDER THE MOUNTAIN'S GRASS by Alex Viteri

A family comes together to celebrate life in a country on the verge of signing peace after 52 years of war. Or the trip journal of a paranoiac daughter who falls in love far away from home.

Performances: May 10 at 2:30 PM

May 12 at 8 PM

May 13 at 2:30 PM

LAST NIGHT IN INWOOD by Alix Sobler

A major disaster in Manhattan has everyone on the island looking for high ground. For Danny's family and friends, that higher ground happens to be her one-bedroom apartment in Inwood. As the world outside goes to pieces, Danny tries to keep the peace among the assorted characters gathered in her space. They might make it through this crisis, if they can manage to survive each other.

Performances: May 11 at 8 PM

May 12 at 2:30 PM

May 13 at 7:30 PM

Tickets are free. Reservations can be made here: http://columbiastages.org/tickets.html

About the Playwrights:

Stephen Foglia (mentored by Sharr White) uses diverse theatrical forms to approach the intimacy of other lives and search out the magic lurking in the cracks of our experiences. In 2015, he wrote and directed a dance-theatre piece inspired by NASA's Voyager program (Voyager) and an immersive detective story about mental illness (Mistress of the House). Prior to arriving in New York, he adapted Ulysses and The 1,001 Nights for performance at the Dallas Museum of Art. September Gurls, a time-skipping exploration of first best-friendship, debuted in 2016 at Columbia. Stephen is a member of Lincoln Center Directors Lab.

Callan Stout (mentored by Daniella Topol) is a playwright, troublemaker, and storyteller. Callan writes plays about women confronting a world that often doesn't want them. She believes it's important to write plays that are not only about ideas and people, but plays that interact with the world we have, and try to create the world we want. Her plays include LEG (Princess Grace Semi-Finalist), Girl Becomes Bone (Pipeline Theatre Company), Breathing in the Rain(Columbia University), A Song for a Surfer (LA Female Playwrights Initiative). Callan's children's plays are published by YouthPLAYS. She holds a BFA in playwriting from NYU and an MLitt in Folklore from University of Aberdeen, Scotland. www.callanstout.com

Matt Barbot (mentored by Kristoffer Diaz) is a writer and actor from Brooklyn, New York. He has been a finalist in Repertorio Español's 2014 Nuestras Voces competition, was named the Kevin Spacey Foundation's 2016 Artist of Choice in US Theatre, and won a production grant from the Hispanic Federation. His work has been read and performed at Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, the Brick, Two River Theater, INTAR, and the Lucille Lortel Theatre. In his work, Matt often seeks to tell stories about stories - mining pop culture, mythology, heritage, history, and comic books to examine the ways we define ourselves.

Ellen Steves (mentored by Sheila Callaghan) is a founding member of boom!, a small production house/arts collective in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Her work focuses on the semiotics of performative violence. She likes to explore status and manipulation, often focusing on small micro-chasms to explore large ideas. You can find out more at www.thisisboom.com.

Aeneas Sagar Hemphill (mentored by Naomi Wallace) is a writer and performer based in New York City. His work mythologizes the historical and the contemporary to uncover buried truths. His plays include Ariadne, The Wordless End, A Stitch Here or There: A Sock Tragedy in One Act, and The Troll King. He is currently a member of the Pipeline Play Lab.

Becca Plunkett (mentored by Taylor Mac) is a theatre-maker from Austin, Texas. She is a writer, director, and performer, as well as a maker of music, videos, and found object art installations. She was a resident artist at the Rhodopi International Theatre Laboratory in Smolyan, Bulgaria, where she studied performance traditions such as Kathakali, Kabuki, and Peking Opera. Many of her plays are influenced by these performance techniques and often explore gender roles, class structure, and semiotics/codification. Becca has worked on productions in Macedonia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Argentina. Her plays include: The Conflabbergation, Love Is, Love Was, and The Fifth Sun.

Alex Viteri (mentored by Young Jean Lee) is a multidisciplinary artist who believes in parallel dimensions, chaos and happy encounters. Alex graduated from the Visual Arts department at Universidad de Los Andes, where she focused on Live Arts-which included video art, installation, and performance studies. While pursuing her Bachelor's in Colombia, her home country, she worked as an actress and dramaturg for the theatre company TeatroR101. Her latest playTales of Imaginary Birds was based on an internship in the south of France where she worked with refugees from around the world. In 2016, she was a playwright in exchange at Shanghai Theater Academy. Nowadays, she lives and works in Berlin. https://foliosviteri.wordpress.com/

Alix Sobler (mentored by Lisa Kron) is a writer from New York whose plays have been read, workshopped, and produced in North America and England. In 2016, she had three plays produced, including her play The Secret Annex at the Segal Centre in Montreal; JONNO, at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival; and The Great Divide, at the Finborough Theatre in London. Her play Sheltered won the 2018 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition and will have its world premiere at the ALLIANCE THEATRE in Atlanta in 2018. You can find out more about her and her work at alixsobler.com.

About Columbia Stages and Columbia University School of the Arts:

Columbia Stages is the producing arm of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University School of the Arts. Columbia Stages presents annually a season of graduate actor and director productions as well as a festival of new plays by emerging playwrights. The Theatre Program at the School of the Arts offers MFA degrees in: Acting, Directing, Playwriting, Dramaturgy, Stage Management, and Theatre Management & Producing. For more information about the Theatre Program visit http://arts.columbia.edu/theatre.