Arkansas New Play Festival Set For This Month

TheatreSquared has announced the lineup of new plays for the 2024 Arkansas New Play Festival (ANPF). New plays featured in staged reading performances will include Eugene Onegin by Sarah Gancher, Have to Believe We Are Magic by Sara Guerrero, Edi Ya & Diamond’s Grove by a.k. payne,and Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem by Jonathan Norton. Special additional showings include the 2024 Arkansas Young Playwrights Showcase, Sherlock Holmes: The Timbers Family File by LatinX Theatre Project, and the ANPF Apprentice Showcase of Songs for Drunk Cowboys Who May Also Be Women: An Anti-Musical (For Fools Only) by Sarah Loucks.

Performances will be held in Bentonville at Ovations Plus, formerly Trike Theatre (902 SW 2nd St., Bentonville), in Springdale at the Medium (214 S. Main St., Springdale), and in Fayetteville at TheatreSquared (477 W. Spring St., Fayetteville). New Play Passes, granting access to all performances, are on sale now for $50. Passes may be reserved by calling (479) 777-7477 or visiting arkansasnewplayfest.com.

Now in its 16th year, the Arkansas New Play Festival has helped incubate the development of more than 75 new plays. Join in for a series of trail-blazing new plays.  In addition to watching/attending the performances, you’re also invited to hear from the playwrights about their process and share your own thoughts with the creative team—and help shape new works from the ground up. Through the Festival, TheatreSquared seeks to give voice to playwrights whose timely and relevant stories resonate with the moment we live in—in Arkansas, in mid-America, and as a nation.

"In the last several seasons in particular, many of the plays featured at ANPF have gone on to major productions and award recognition," says Singleton. "Most recently, FLEX by Candrice Jones, which ran last summer at the Lincoln Center with an all-star cast after co-premiering at T2 and being developed at ANPF a few summers ago."

Another example: TheatreSquared’s main season is set to close with a world premiere run from June 5-30 of the dark comedy Responders by Arkansan playwright Joseph Scott Ford, which was featured in the 2022 Arkansas New Play Festival. Tickets are available at theatre2.org/responders. As part of this year’s festival, Ford is set to lead a playwriting workshop in conjunction with the Fayetteville Public Library on June 18th from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. This event will be free and open to the public, but registration is required on the FPL website.

"When you're a writer, and you're working on these things in a vacuum, or maybe sharing it with a handful of people along the way, just to get that kind of positive enthusiasm and support from a team of artists—it's hard to overstate just how helpful that is in and of itself," says Ford. "All sorts of little moments show up. It can be small words, it can be tiny words, but it's kind of like tightening all the screws—’Hey, do we need to add a moment here? Do we need to trim this moment there?’ All of these things can happen because the talent and the intelligence is so high in the room. This is probably a process that could take months, but because of the caliber of people that TheatreSquared put in the room, it's expediting all of that in a really helpful way."

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