Playwrights Realm Announces INK'D FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS

As the Playwrights Realm continues its pandemic pivot to being a full-time playwrights service organization, the company announces the 2021 edition of one of the Realm's long-standing programs: the INK'D Festival of New Plays, the culminating event of its Writing Fellowship Program, annually awarding four early-career playwrights nine months of financial and professional resources.

Over the last year, the organization has expanded its vision for how arts organizations can support artists at every turn; now, the return of INK'd underscores the importance of responsive audiences to the creative process. This year's virtual festival offers playwrights the ability to hone new work and audiences the chance to interact with exciting new artists at an early stage in their career (previous fellows include Bleu Beckford-Burrell, Donja R. Love, and Celine Song), through readings and a panel on writing during the pandemic. In keeping with the adaptation of the festival to a virtual format, meetings with industry leaders will be arranged with Realm Fellows surrounding this year's INK'd.

Reservations for INK'D readings (April 19-22) and the INK'd Opening Panel: Playwriting in a Pandemic (April 15) with Fellows Omar Vélez Meléndez, Francisca Da Silveira, Phillip Christian Smith, and May Treuhaft-Ali open today, and can be made here.

This spring, the Realm also introduces two audience-facing community programming series, beginning with Making Theater With, which spotlights different professions in the field, aimed at expanding the public's knowledge of what it takes to put on a play, and encouraging those who may want to pursue these careers. Often centering less visible roles within theater production, the series in its first iteration focuses on casting directors, while the following events will feature stage managers and dramaturgs. Making Theater With is yet another way the Realm is expanding its approach to demystifying the ways professional theater works, in order to create a more inclusive and accessible industry and illuminate all of the potential career paths within it. Another initiative, Play Club, provides in-depth discussions about the work of playwrights who are part of the Realm community.

2021 INK'D FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS

Striving to be flexible and attentive to playwrights' needs, the Realm offered Fellows, on an individual basis, the opportunity at the end of their development workshops for the virtual INK'D final readthroughs of their plays to be public or private this year-whichever they'd find more beneficial to their process. Three public readings and a private one will take place, via Zoom, from April 19-22. In addition to these opportunities for Fellows and audiences to hear these works read aloud, the Realm offers audiences another introduction to these groundbreaking storytellers in a panel discussion that will frame and precede the readings on April 15th.

INK'D Schedule:

Opening Panel: Playwriting in a Pandemic

Thursday, April 15th at 6pm ET

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bMLbunKPS8SOTnMnIcUBtQ

This year, for the first time ever, the Realm's Writing Fellowship took place completely online. In this panel, Fellows will talk about the current state of their careers, the work they developed during their Fellowship, and the challenges of developing plays virtually.

Omar Vélez Meléndez

Lajasarriba

Directed by Andrés López-Alicea

Monday, April 19th at 11am ET

This is an invite only reading

Roberto Campero Benitez, Isabel's grandfather and head of the absurdly conservative Campero family, is dead. In the span of one otherworldly funeral, demons are unearthed, tears are cried, history is encountered, the meaning of land is reconsidered, promises are never fulfilled, and goodbyes are said... or it could all be inside Isabel's head? Lajasarriba is a ghost story of a colonized people and a myth about the souls that reside among the hills and valleys of the Puerto Rican countryside.

Omar Vélez Meléndez is a playwright born and raised in Puerto Rico. Their playwriting debut took place at the 2016 UPR Student Theatre Festival with The Natives Fight for Their Cave: Part 2. They are a member of Playgroup at Ars Nova and a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow. Their work has also been developed at The Lark, Teatro SEA, Pregones/PRTT, The Latinx Playwrights Circle and Fresh Ground Pepper. Plays include We Built Our Homes Near Kingdoms of Animals and Magic (The Lark's Playwright's Week, 2019 Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize), ¡GARGOLA! (MCC LiveLabs), Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members and Lajasarriba. Playwriting MFA: Hunter College.

May Treuhaft-Ali

ABCD

Directed by Zi Alikhan

Tuesday, April 20th at 4pm ET

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iKxJftzER0idjTJyTjdzaw

In an underserved public school on the verge of shutdown, a teacher erases wrong answers from his students' exams, hoping higher scores will keep the school open. In an elite magnet program nearby, a student texts 140 classmates the answers for a physics test. ABCD weaves these stories together to interrogate the inequities of our public school system. When the joys and challenges of learning are reduced to a multiple-choice test, who runs out of options?

May Treuhaft-Ali is a playwright, director, and dramaturg. After graduating from Wesleyan University, she completed an M.Phil in Theatre and Performance Studies at Trinity College Dublin on a George J. Mitchell Scholarship. She is an alumna of Clubbed Thumb's Early-Career Writers' Group, and her plays have been produced at the Dublin Scene+Heard Festival, the Wild Project, Young Playwrights Inc., the Blank Theatre Company, and the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. As a director, she specializes in site-specific performance. She has worked as a dramaturg at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Haven Theatre, and Ars Nova ANT Fest. Treuhaft-Ali is currently the Literary Fellow at Playwrights Horizons.

Francisca Da Silveira

not-for-profit (or the equity, diversity and inclusion play)

Directed by Reginald L. Douglas

Wednesday, April 21st at 4pm ET

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pxlJ52M5QUmPJcEYvERkWw

With a mission to match urban youth of color with mentors from the world of business, Nadine and her fellow junior staffers at RiseUP, an education nonprofit, just want to do right by the community they serve - even though they're overworked, underpaid, and have to deal with out-of-touch board members, microaggressive co-workers, and unqualified Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion consultants. But when a scandal breaks within the mentorship program, Nadine finds out there are some hard choices to be made by even the most well-intentioned of workers.

Francisca Da Silveira is a Cape Verdean-American playwright and Boston native who holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an MSc in Playwriting from the University of Edinburgh. She has been featured in ArtsBoston, The LA Times and American Theatre Magazine. Her plays have been developed with Theatre503 (London), The Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), TC Squared Theatre Company (Boston), Company One Theatre (Boston), Flat Earth Theatre (Boston), Fresh Ink Theatre Company (Boston), The Fire This Time Festival (New York), and Horse Trade Theater Group (New York). She has been a finalist for SpeakEasy Stage's 2018 and 2019 Boston Project Residency, Space of Ryder Farm's 2020 Creative Residency and has been a semi-finalist for the Dennis & Victoria Ross Playwrights Program, the 2019 Papatango New Play Prize and the 2019 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award. Da Silveira's play CAN I TOUCH IT? was featured in the National New Play Network's 2020 National Showcase of New Plays in November 2020.

She is currently the Assistant Literary Director at Geva Theatre Centre in Rochester, NY, a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, a member of The Public Theater's 2020-2022 Emerging Writers Group and is under commission from Colt Coeur Theatre in Brooklyn. In addition to writing, she also identifies as a playwright dramaturg.

Phillip Christian Smith

We Can't Breathe

Directed by Taneisha Duggan

Thursday, April 22nd at 4pm ET

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IKrIcSdCSMC6P4cyqVGAuQ

Franklin and Rivington are two gay, Black teenage friends growing up in Bushwick in the aftermath of the 2014 murder of Eric Garner, and they yearn to have their voices heard for the first time. When Franklin's white aunt comes to stay with the family and expresses pro-police sentiments, differences erupt, identities are called into question, and the family's love for one another is put to the test.

Phillip Christian Smith is a Lambda Literary Fellow, Winter Playwrights Retreat, Blue Ink Playwriting Award Semi-Finalist, Finalist for The Dramatists Guild Fellowship and New Dramatists, Finalist and Semi-finalist for PlayPenn, two-time Semi-finalist for The O'Neill (NPC), and runner- up in The Theatre of Risk Modern Tragedy writing competition for his play The Chechens, which also won Theatre Conspiracy's playwriting award, and will be produced in a future season. He has been a semi-finalist for Shakespeare's New Contemporaries (ASC), finalist for Trustus, former Playwright in Residence Exquisite Corpse and founding member of The Playwriting Collective. 2021 Playwright in Residence: Quicksilver Theatre's Playwrights of Color Summit. He's the 2021 Sewanee Scholar, and Co-Literary Director of Exquisite Corpse Company. His work has been supported by The Fire This Time Festival, Bennington College, Primary Stages (Cherry Lane) ESPA, Fresh Ground Pepper, the 53rd Street New York Public Library, and Forge. He writes about black people, gay people, black gay people, and the issues which persistently follow them. MFA Yale School of Drama, BFA University of New Mexico.

The Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship Program annually awards four early-career playwrights with nine months of resources (including a $3,000 stipend), workshops and feedback designed to help them reach their professional and artistic goals. Over the course of the fellowships, Fellows develop a single, new play; participate in monthly group meetings that provide a collaborative space for writers to share and refine their work. One-on-one meetings with Realm artistic staff support each writer's process, and Fellows collaborate with a director and actors for two readings. Personalized professional development resources are tailored to the group - with mentor opportunities, meet-and-greets, and professional seminars designed to shed light on the business of theatre, and empower the Fellows to be active, informed participants in their own careers. The INK'D Festival is the culminating event in the program.

SPRING COMMUNITY PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE

Making Theater With: Casting Directors

Tuesday, March 30 at 4pm ET

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NzOZvXvKT1eKdrXOOfmzJw

The Making Theater With series spotlights different professions in the field, aimed at expanding the public's knowledge of what it takes to put on a play, and encouraging those who may want to pursue these careers. In our first panel, Realm Casting Associate Ada Karamanyan sits down with casting directors/associates Andrea Zee, Charlie Hano, Danica Rodriguez, Destiny Lilly, and Jason Styres to discuss the evolution of the role of casting, avenues of entry into the field, and their hopes for the future of the profession.

Play Club: The Hatmaker's Wife

Tuesday, April 6 at 5pm ET

https://forms.gle/rNwh9o2eMZH5VyGx5

Play Club is exactly what it sounds like: a book club, but for plays! In its first session, led by dramaturg Megan McClain (Second Stage Theatre, The Lark, The Civilians), participants will discuss the Realm's 2013 Page One Production, Lauren Yee's The Hatmaker's Wife, a magical tale of a woman's new house and the history contained in its walls. Those that didn't see the production or want a refresher, can get a copy of the script to purchase in advance here (with financial support available by emailing community@playwrightsrealm.org).

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