PlayGround-Chicago Concludes Season 1 In-Person With Best Of PlayGround-Chicago Gala

Playwright incubator PlayGround-Chicago celebrates the best writers and short works from its inaugural season and its first in-person performance at the BEST OF PLAYGROUND-CHICAGO GALA, on Monday, May 1, 7pm CT, live at Theater Wit (1229 W Belmont Ave, Chicago, IL 60657) and simulcast via Vimeo Live! The Best of PlayGround-Chicago Gala features a special live presentation of six short plays originally developed through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted and all proceeds support PlayGround-Chicago artists. Audience members will have the opportunity to vote for their favorite play/playwright through the Best of PlayGround-Chicago People's Choice Award and help initiate a new full-length commission to be adapted from the award-winning short. For more information or to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-ch.org/bestof.

The evening's plays include:

Tomato Tattoo by Rammel Chan
(Un)drinkable by Dana Hall
Mosquitos by Tanuja Devi Jagernauth
Funeral for a Friend by Samuel Kelly Fair Levit
Search for an Ending by Karissa Murrell Myers
.PDF Preferred by Matt Schutz

ABOUT THE PLAYS

Tomato Tattoo by Rammel Chan
After meeting through a dating app, a neurotic widow finds herself going on her first date in nearly forty years.

(Un)drinkable by Dana Hall
It should not be a privilege to have safe tap water.

Mosquitos by Tanuja Devi Jagernauth
Grace attends a backyard barbecue in hopes of securing work and making it home alive.

Funeral for a Friend by Samuel Kelly Fair Levit
The Earth holds a funeral for herself... and the attendants responsible for her death.

Search for an Ending by Karissa Murrell Myers
Three writers search for the perfect ending for a film with a strong female lead.

.PDF Preferred by Matt Schutz
Sometimes applying for a job can feel... Sisyphean.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS

Rammel Chan (Tomato Tattoo), he/him, is a writer and actor based in Chicago. His short plays have premiered at the Gift Theater and his fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Riksha, Empyrean Literary Magazine and the Tiger Moth Review. In 2023, his full-length play "House of the Deaf" will be read as part of the Gift Theater's In The Work series. As an actor, he has performed at Steppenwolf, Goodman Theater, Second City, Writers Theatre, Lookingglass and the late Victory Gardens, among others. On screen credits include The Red Line, Crisis, Patriot and the indie comedy feature I Used To Go Here.

Dana Hall ((Un)Drinkable), she/her, is a playwright, actor, and mental health therapist. She was awarded Excellence In Playwriting by the Theater Association of NYS (TANYS). Her Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, Under the Floorboards, was named Outstanding Theatrical Adaptation, Gee-Rated Intertainment. She was a finalist with Morecambe Fringe John Clarke Memorial Prize for scriptwriting. She was the Audience Choice Award winner (Underneath) Eclectic Theatre Patchwork Festival 2021. A Finalist Winner in 2021 Hear Me Out Monologue Competition & Labor Day Festival (Sound Mind). Her plays have been published with Next Stage Press, Heuer, Stage Plays, & Smith Scripts. New York Journal recognized her as one of their 50 under 50 most influential creators during the pandemic list 2022. She is in the Dramatists Guild Institute's Certificate of Dramatic Writing program. She is also a member of the Dramatists Guild, League of Professional Theatre Women, Honor Roll!, and International Centre for Female Playwrights. DanaHallCreates.com Instagram: @DanaHallCreates

TANUJA DEVI JAGERNAUTH (Mosquitos), she/her, is an Indo-Caribbean playwright and dramaturg who believes in the necessity of creation during times of destruction. In 2016, she shifted career paths from Traditional East Asian Medicine to theatre in hopes of practicing four frameworks for collective liberation and wellness through theatre: self/community care, harm reduction, trauma awareness, and body positivity. Inspired by healing justice and PIC abolition, Tanuja employs comedy, magical realism, the fantastic and the absurd to raise questions around how we heal and fight back against internal and external oppressions and build a prison- and police-free world.

Samuel Levit (Funeral for a Friend), he/him, is a Chicago-based writer. At Bennington College, he studied under playwrights Sherry Kramer, Jackie Sibblies-Drury, and Sarah Hammond, whose work and teachings continue to influence his practice. His dramatic work has been seen and developed in the Apprentice Showcase at Magic Theatre, Bennington College, and most recently at PlayGround. Through all the mediums he works with, Samuel is interested in exploring genre fiction, language, comedy, queerness, and masculinity.

Karissa Murrell Myers (Search for An Ending), she/her, is a Hapa American theatre artist based in Chicago, where she works as an actor, playwright, producer, and casting director. As a playwright, her work has been developed and/or produced at Strawdog Theatre, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, American Blues Theatre, The Gift Theatre, Silk Road Rising, Our Perspective: Asian American Plays, and Bramble Theatre Company, where she serves as Artistic Director and Co-Founder. Her stage acting credits include working at Court Theatre, Remy Bumppo, Goodman Theatre, The House Theatre of Chicago, and Renaissance Theaterworks. Television work includes Chicago Med, Chicago PD, The Big Leap, Exorcist, and Electric Dreams. She is the resident Casting Director for Strawdog, and works as freelance casting director and consultant for various theatre companies around the US. In 2020, she was featured as one of the American Theatre Magazine's "Theatre Workers You Should Know" for her work in casting. MFA in Performance from University of Hawaii, BA in Directing and Acting from Boise State University, and proud graduate of The School at Steppenwolf 2019. More at www.kmurrellmyers.com

MATT SCHUTZ (.PDF Preferred), he/him, is a playwright and actor currently based in Chicago. His play With the Weight of her Fate on her Shoulders was a winner of the New South Young Playwrights Contest, was workshopped at the Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia and earned him a finalist slot for the Dramatist's Guild Young Playwright Award. He has developed plays with the University of Iowa, Intrinsic Theatre, the Pride Arts Center, and Inkwell Theater.

ABOUT PLAYGROUND-CHICAGO

PLAYGROUND-CHICAGO is the third regional expansion of the celebrated Bay Area playwright incubator and theatre community hub, PlayGround(SF). PlayGround, California's leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area's, Los Angeles', New York's and now 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 34 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 Potrero Stage, 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 Humana Festival, O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark's Playwrights' Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and 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. For more information, visit https://playground-ch.org.

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