Alley Theatre Reveals Programming For The 2023 Alley All New Festival

Alley Theatre has announced the line-up for the 2023 Alley All New Festival, June 16 - June 25, 2023. The Festival will feature new plays including readings, workshop performances, and an Early Draft Preview. Plays by Katie Bender and Hilary Bettis will receive Workshop Performances. Readings include plays by Chisa Hutchinson, Marisela Treviño Orta, and Anna Ziegler. Early Draft Preview gives audiences a sneak peek into different works by two frequent Alley artists, Afsaneh Aayani and Mark Shanahan. Final weekend packages are available for the Festival and include priority seating, access to the lounge and a gift. Packages can be booked beginning April 25 at alleytheatre.org/allnew or by calling Guest Services at 713-220-5700. Advance reservations for individual events are recommended and can be made beginning May 10 at alleytheatre.org. All Festival performances are free and open to the public.

The Festival offers audiences a first look at plays that may appear in full productions at the Alley, as well as at theatres around the country. This season, the Alley will produce Torera by Monet Hurst-Mendoza which was developed in the 2022 Alley All New Festival. The Alley's 77th season will include Thornton Wilder's The Emporium completed by Kirk Lynn and The World Is Not Silent by Don X. Nguyen, which were both developed in the 2022 Alley All New Festival. Pictures from Home by Sharr White, currently making its world premiere on Broadway, received a reading in the 2020 Festival. Since the Festival began in 2016, 25 of the 38 plays presented have gone on to world premiere productions, 13 at the Alley and 12 elsewhere. The Festival has been represented on Broadway and Off-Broadway, with plays developed at the Alley also produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Washington DC, Seattle, and Dallas among many other locations. Alley All New Festival plays have received both the Arnold L. Weissberger Award and the Obie Award for Best New American Play.

Liz Frankel, Director of New Work at the Alley, said "The 7th Alley All New Festival features a wonderful mix of returning artists and voices new to the Alley. Hilary Bettis (72 Miles to Go..., Queen of Basel), Chisa Hutchinson (Amerikin) and Katie Bender (Survivors: An Alamo Play) return with new pieces. Our Early Draft Preview spotlights the work of two frequent Alley artists, Afsaneh Aayani and Mark Shanahan. Additionally, after admiring their work from afar for many years, we are thrilled to welcome Anna Ziegler and Marisela Treviño Orta. We can't wait to introduce more people to these stories".

"I'm so excited about the next edition of our Alley All New Festival! In the past four years, we have done seven world premiere productions that came directly out of either the Alley All New Festival, an Alley All New Reading, or our Alley at Ucross residency," shares Artistic Director Rob Melrose. "If you want to get a sense of what we will be doing in our season in the coming years, the Alley All New Festival is the place to experience these plays first. The Alley All New's reach goes beyond the Festival too. Just this year Pictures from Home opened on Broadway and our production of Born with Teeth played for a month at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis - both plays that got their start in Alley All New!"

All workshop performances, readings and the Early Draft Preview are free and open to the public. Alley All New programming is recommended for mature audiences. Each performance will be followed by a post-show Alley Chat with the artists and led by a member of the Alley artistic staff.

All updates and schedules will be available at alleytheatre.org/allnew

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