BEST OF PLAYGROUND(NY) '24 Returns This Month

PlayGround has announced the selected plays and playwrights for our annual ten-minute play fest, BEST OF PLAYGROUND(NY) '24, including first-time festival writers Claire Abramovitz, Anthony Anello, Howard Ho, Lyra Nalan, and returning "Best of" alumni Bailey Jordan Garcia and Vicky Pham.

PlayGround will celebrate these artists and their place within the next generation of great playwrights in New York and beyond. Tickets can be reserved at https://tickets.playground-sf.org for live performances at The Producers Club and simulcast online, April 22 at 7pm ET and on-demand for one week. Admission is free (donations gratefully accepted) but advance reservations are required.

From over 150 submissions and the 36 plays staged this season for PlayGround's Monday Night PlayGround series, PlayGround's artistic leaders have selected six ten-minute plays to give full productions in "Best of", based on the plays' artistic excellence and dynamism and the playwrights' unique voice: Island Full of Monsters by Claire Abramovitz, Slash/Her by Anthony Anello, @RudyMocha Has Entered the Chatroom by Bailey Jordan Garcia, Jie Jie by Howard Ho, The Origin of the Prince of Denmark by Lyra Nalan, Refuge to Planet Min by Vicky Pham.

Since 1997, PlayGround has recognized over 150 of the most promising new writers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago through the annual Best of PlayGround, including Lauren Yee, Jonathan Spector, Geetha Reddy, and Cleavon Smith, among others. Alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Glickman Awards (including 3 of the last 5), O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and NNPN Rolling World Premieres, among others.

Lineup & Synopses (alphabetically by playwright)

Island Full of Monsters

by Claire Abramovitz

Caliban and Miranda have a perfect life on the island, will it end when the incoming boat drifts ashore?

Slash/Her

by Anthony Anello

Three masked figures in the woods. Three different plans.

@RudyMocha Has Entered the Chatroom

by Bailey Jordan Garcia

Lowkey high school vengeance overflows into unintended consequences.

Jie Jie

by Howard Ho

On the heels of winning his Oscar for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan hopes to visit the ghost of Oppenheimer at Berkeley, but instead gets a different supernatural encounter.

The Origin of the Prince of Denmark

by Lyra Nalan

Truths revealed between Claudius and Old Hamlet in the wake of an appearance by their ghostly father.

Refuge to Planet Min

by Vicky Pham

Not every story has to have vats of nuclear waste and an evil doctor.

About the Playwrights

CLAIRE ABRAMOVITZ (Island Full of Monsters), she/they/any, is an emerging playwright living and working in New York City. She has recently returned to America from two years living in Jerusalem and learning as an Arts and Culture Fellow at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies. She holds a bachelors degree in English, Theatre, and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. In addition to all her studies, she is a published author and playwright. Her play To Rot in His Bones was a semifinalist in the 2021 Jewish Plays Project Annual Jewish Playwriting Contest. In her spare time she writes poetry, song parodies, jokes, keeps a list of fake band names, and makes soup for at least thirty. Her dream is to open a soup restaurant/comedy club.

ANTHONY ANELLO (Slash/Her), he/him, is a graduate of NYU Tisch's Dramatic Writing program where he was awarded the John Golden Playwriting Prize and served as a co-founder/president of the Broke People Play Festival. Some of his works include A Dog Dies (Goldberg Prize, runner-up), The Carter Play (Dixon Place), GAY ST./MONTAUK (developed with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), and let's talk about anything else (Loading Dock & the Tank). He served as a Writing Advisor for Out of the Box Theatrics' Off-Broadway and Drama Desk-nominated revival of Baby.

Bailey Jordan Garcia (@RudyMocha Has Entered the Chatroom), they/them, is a non-binary playwright located in NYC. Selected PlayGround Plays: "The Day Ophelia Drowned", "@rudymocha has entered the chatroom", "Thanks for the Mammaries!","Eve" ("Best Of LA" 2023 Winner), "This Is Beauty" ("Best Of NY" 2022 Winner). They've worked with places such as Atlantic Theatre Company, The Blank, Boston Theatre Company, The Bechdel Group, Cry Havoc, Ohio University, PlayGround-LA , and more! Currently, Bailey is in a residency with PlayGround. They're also the proud co-founder of Fresh Binder Productions - a theatre company supporting transgender and non-binary playwrights! When they're not writing, you can probably find them at Bethesda Fountain or at Brave Trails - an LGBT+ leadership summer camp! baileyjordangarcia.com

Howard Ho (Jie Jie), he/him, is a playwright and composer. His play RESET was produced at Moving Arts and was an O'Neill Finalist. WHERE I'M FROM was a Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival Finalist, was featured in Center Theatre Group's Community Stories, and is being developed into a musical. His musical analysis Youtube channel (youtube.com/HowardHoMusic) has 120,000 subscribers and was recognized by Lin-Manuel Miranda. His sound design has earned him Ovation and SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominations. He's been published in American Theatre Magazine and the LA Times. He holds degrees from UCLA and USC. Instagram: @howardwho

LYRA NALAN (The Origin of Prince of Denmark), she/her, is a bilingual Chinese playwright based in Brooklyn. She is the Judith Royer Award-winning playwright for the play Paper Dream and recipient of the Horticultural Playwriting Fellowship and Three Brother's Playwright Residency. Her work has been showcased or developed at the Kennedy Center, Cherry Lane Theatre, Theatre Row, Adventure Theatre MTC, Silk Road Rising Theatre, Round House Theatre, Spooky Action Theatre, Avant Bard Theatre, Strand Theatre, etc. Lyra is so thrilled and honored to be part of PlayGround-NY! EDUCATION: Northwestern University: MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage. Lyranalan.com.

VICKY PHAM (Refuge to Planet Min), she/her, is a writer, SCU alumna, and current Playwriting MFA student at Columbia University. Through her work, Vicky wishes to raise awareness and champion change to issues afflicting the AAPI, immigrant, and first-gen communities. She is the writer of plays such as White Christmas and A Seat At The Table, which was selected for a reading under the direction of Tony Award winning actor, BD Wong. Vicky is a past Hackworth Fellow, recipient of the Justin T. McCarthy Award for Voice, and currently working on her next full-length play Lipstick Pig focusing on the ethical considerations of diversity casting.

About PlayGround

Founded in 1994 by Jim Kleinmann, Brighde Mullins and Denise Shama, PlayGround has grown into a leading national playwright incubator and theatre community hub, providing unique development opportunities for the Bay Area's, Los Angeles', New York's, and Chicago's best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 350 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,500 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 100 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 36 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities.

Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco's Potrero Hill as The Producers Club, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround's expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area's most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre.

PlayGround's alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Glickman Awards (including 6 of the last 10), O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and New York International Fringe Festival, among others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.

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