Photo Flash: THE MAY QUEEN, Artist Interact and More at Bay Street Theatre's New Works Festival

The 2014 Bay Street Theatre New Works Festival took place on April 25-27 at the Bay Street Theatre on the Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, NY. The Festival is produced in Association with SPACE on Ryder Farm. Scroll down for photos from the event!

The three day festival included readings of new plays by some of New York's most exciting emerging playwrights. The focus of the festival is to give the playwrights a chance to hear their works in development in front of an audience and to give the audience at Bay Street and East End Community a chance to experience cutting edge voices in the theater. Each reading was followed by a talkback with the audience. The plays in the festival were: Fight Call by Jess Brickman, The May Queen by Molly Smith Metzler, and The Orchard Play by P. Seth Bauer.

There was also an Artist Interact - a panel discussion with the authors, led by award winning writer John Weidman, which explored what it means to be a playwright working today, and the way in which new work is created and developed in the theater. The panel was followed by a cocktail reception at Bay Street where the audience met the writers and other artists involved with the readings.

FIGHT CALL by Jess Brickman. A promising young actor and a stage veteran test the boundaries of trust when one of them threatens to commit an act of real violence on stage during a performance. A backstage comedy about theater, love and getting on.

THE ORCHARD PLAY, by P. Seth Bauer, is a contemporary re-envisioning of Chekhov's A Cherry Orchard set on a Pennsylvania farm that has been in the family for generations. For a hundred and fifty years, the Olson family has tried to keep up with the times and have faced down famines, the Depression, and any number of wars. Only this time, they face natural gas drilling, global warming as they struggle to preserve their way of life.

THE MAY QUEEN, by Molly Smith Metzler, starts when former May Queen Jennifer Nash suddenly resurfaces in her hometown, no one is more excited than Mike Petracca, a high school flame who still carries an obsessive torch for the beauty. But when their reunion turns out to be a FAR cry from what he expected, Mike is forced to see his golden May Queen-- and himself-- with new eyes. A searing comedy about the roles we play in each others' lives.... whether we know it or not.

Photo Credit: Michael Heller

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