The Playwrights Realm Announces Month-Long Festival

The Playwrights Realm (Founding Artistic Director Katherine Kovner and Producing Director Roberta Pereira) announces Beyond the Realm (February 2019), a month-long festival showcasing bold new works-in-progress by four boundary-pushing playwrights, with four workshops of new plays by MJ Kaufman, Nia Witherspoon, Michael Yates Crowley, and Asiimwe Deborah Kawe. Responsiveness and a commitment to playwrights' needs are at the heart of the Realm's practice; with the launch of this new program-in lieu of a second full-length production this season-the Realm seizes the opportunity to devote the beginning of the year to these four playwrights testing and honing their exhilarating new works. Throughout a month of programming, the definitions of theater will be challenged as the festival creates new ways of presenting live storytelling and blurs the lines that divide creators from spectators. Tickets for the Festival are free and reservations open to the general public on Tuesday, January 22nd. Donors receive early access starting January 17th. For more information, visit http://www.playwrightsrealm.org/beyond/.

About the festival, Katherine Kovner says, "Playwrights are always thinking of what's ahead, pushing boundaries, telling new stories, and imaging new ways to use the stage. As a playwright-centric organization, we've always strived to embrace playwrights evolving needs. We are constantly evaluating whether our programing is doing as much as we can to nurture exciting new work from early-career playwrights. In programing this season we wanted to encourage, big, bold, and unconventional work, so we decided to create space for those projects that needed a bit more support-ideas that were aiming bigger and pushing further."

MJ Kaufman (who was a Scratchpad Series playwright in 2017) will explore the world of projection in their latest play Double Atlas, a queer thriller with a shapeshifting central character. Nia Witherspoon brings aspects of a religious ritual to Witness, which intertwines the stories of black women warriors with Yoruba sacred texts. Michael Yates Crowley (whose dark satire The Rape of the Sabine Women premiered at the Realm in Fall 2017) presents Block Association Project-an interactive piece whose narrative starts long before the performance itself, as audience members receive e-mails and texts from the characters in the world of the play once they've purchased their tickets. Asiimwe Deborah Kawe's Appointment With gOD takes audiences into an American embassy in a foreign country. Using movement and sound, the story of Visa seekers is elevated to a religious quest.

Over the past twelve years, the Realm has continually produced work by bold new voices. With the annual Writing Fellowship, they grant a career-propelling nine months of resources, workshops and feedback to four playwrights, and with the Scratchpad Series, playwrights from across America are brought to New York to work with The Realm in a one-week developmental workshop. The Realm will be accepting submissions for its Writing Fellowship and Scratchpad Series from January 28, 2019 to February 24, 2019. For more information please visit http://www.playwrightsrealm.org/general-info/. Now, with the Beyond the Realm festival, The Realm is giving four playwrights support for ambitious plays that need more than a traditional reading. This new model of support further expands their commitment to providing holistic support to playwrights striving to make a life in the arts.

About Beyond The Realm Projects

Double Atlas
MJ Kaufman
Directed by David Mendizábal

February 10
Theatrelab
357 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

On Atlas' 33rd birthday a mysterious new person starts flirting with him at the one queer club in town. A fellow trans man with whom Atlas has quite a lot in common, he is instantly drawn in. Soon enough, he's testing the limits of his open relationship to find out just how much they have in common, even as everyone around him warns that he's starting to lose himself to this shadowy figure.

Witness (Part I of The Dark Girl Chronicles)
Nia Witherspoon
Directed by Mei Ann Teo

February 13 & 14
The West End Theatre
263 W 86th St, New York, NY 10024

Yoruba deities searching for home find a portal into our world - at the very moment when Diamond Reynolds goes on Facebook Live after Philando Castile is shot by police. Witness is the first play in The Dark Girl Chronicles, a cycle that intertwines the stories of black women warriors with Yoruba sacred texts.

Block Association Project
Michael Yates Crowley
Directed by Michael Rau

February 20, 22, 23
University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (corner of Rivington)
New York, NY 10002

Welcome to Oak Street! We hope you join our new Block Association to help us allocate city funding, join our efforts to give back to the community, and agree on a few new policies regarding signage and other public nuisances. Please be warned, though - we're trying to keep this a "politics-free" space, so we'd appreciate it if you could refrain from making overtly political statements. After all, regardless of how we vote, we're all invested in making Oak Street the best place it can be, right?

Appointment With gOD
Asiimwe Deborah Kawe
Directed by Saheem Ali

February 26, 27, 28
Theatrelab
357 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

Kayke is applying for a visa to go to the US. She has her application, valid passport, invitation letter and a hundred dollars. But is that enough? The "gODs" at the American Embassy won't be easily appeased, and Kayke (like the thousands of other visa applicants) has no choice but to play their game.

The Playwrights Realm, led by Artistic Director Katherine Kovner and Producing Director Roberta Pereira, is devoted to supporting emerging playwrights throughout their careers, helping them to hone their craft, fully realize their vision, and build meaningful artistic careers. To serve this mission, The Playwrights Realm provides comprehensive support to playwrights throughout their creative processes and careers with the Page One Residency, Alumni Playwrights Program, Writing Fellowship, Scratchpad Series, and of course productions.

The Writing Fellowship has served as a launching pad for writers such as Donja R. Love, whose play Sugar in Our Wounds (developed during his 2016-2017 Writing Fellowship) was recently produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, andPatricia Ione Lloyd's, whose play Eve's Song (developed during her 2016-2017 Writing Fellowship) recently had an acclaimed run at The Public Theater. Three of the plays presented at the Realm's most recent Ink'd festival have already been produced elsewhere. In the fall of 2016, The Playwrights Realm produced the world premiere of Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, which became an Off-Broadway sensation during its sold-out run, extension and remount. It was then named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, featured on the New York Times' Best Theater of 2016 list, and remounted at Lincoln Center (with its original director, design team and most of the cast) in the fall of 2017. It's currently hailed as one of the "25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America'" by The New York Times, and was recently featured on TCG's "Top 10 Most-Produced Plays in 2018-2019" list.

Previous Productions by The Playwrights Realm include Jonathan Payne's The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll'd (2018), Don Nguyen's Hello, From the Children of Planet Earth (2018), Michael Yates Crowley's The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias (2017), Jen Silverman's The Moors (2017), Mfoniso Udofia's Sojourners (2016), Anna Ziegler's A Delicate Ship (2015), Anton Dudley's City Of (2015), Elizabeth Irwin's My Mañana Comes (2014), Lauren Yee's The Hatmaker's Wife (2013), Ethan Lipton's Red-Handed Otter (2012), Jen Silverman's Crane Story (2011), Gonzalo Rodriguez Risco's Dramatis Personae (2010), Christopher Wall's Dreams of the Washer King (2010), Anna Ziegler's Dov and Ali (2009) and Anton Dudley's Substitution (2008).

www.PlaywrightsRealm.org