Berkeley Rep Hosts Night of 6 Minute Plays

What does the future look like if we continue to do nothing about climate change? Can the actions of a single person make a difference for the future of our planet? We asked the PlayGround Writers Pool to tackle this question for our annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival collaboration. On December 21, the PlayGround Writers Pool participated in a topic prep session led by the Planet Earth Arts team. Out of the prep session came the January topic: "Probable Future or Possible Future." Writers had less than a week to generate their original ten-minute plays inspired by the topic. Six scripts were chosen to receive an hour-and-a-half rehearsal and a professional script-in-hand staged reading at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on January 15 at 8:00pm. General admission tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door. For tickets or more information, visit http://playground-sf.org/monday.

The January 15 selected plays/playwrights are: Snow-Ga-D'oh by Lynn Aylward, directed by Jim Kleinmannn; Anything Helps by Karen T. Hartline, directed by Britney Frazier; Sh*t Farming for Fun and Profit by Alanna McFall, directed by Kieran Beccia; Edith's Edibles by Cheryl Ossola, directed by Rebecca Capper; Apple Tree by Nic. A. Sommerfeld, directed by Soren Oliver; and At the Crossroads by Aimee Suzara, directed by Jeffrey Lo.

Audience members can experience the thrill of being a producer through the monthly People's Choice Awards, helping to determine which plays and playwrights go on for consideration in PlayGround's annual showcase, the Best of PlayGround. PlayGround-LA writers were given the same prompt and their finalists were presented at the Zephyr Theatre on January 8.

Recent topics have included: "In the Beginning" and "Reap What You Sow." The top six plays from each month are rehearsed for just one-and-a-half hours each and presented as script-in-hand staged readings at Monday Night PlayGround, now celebrating its twenty-fourth year. PlayGround audiences get to enjoy a unique behind-the-scenes perspective, with a free Pre-Performance Discussion at 7:10pm. Audience members can also experience the thrill of being a producer through the monthly People's Choice Awards, helping to determine which plays and playwrights go on for consideration in PlayGround's annual showcase, the Best of PlayGround.

Planet Earth Arts, www.planeteartharts.org, was founded in 2014 to inspire individuals to claim planetary sustainability and social justice as the most urgent issues of our time harnessing the universal language and transformational power of the arts and human creativity. Its purpose is to amplify the power of the collective voice of the global community of artists to help alter our trajectory away from the current dark vision of suffering and separation and put us on a path toward a civilization rooted in wonder, awe and inspired by the transcendent beauty of nature herself. www.planeteartharts.org.

PlayGround, the Bay Area's leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area'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 200 local playwrights in the development and staging of more than 850 original short plays and 75 new full-length plays, with 6 more commissions currently in development. PlayGround also operates Potrero Stage (formerly Thick House), a state-of-the-art 99-seat black box theatre in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, home to some of the Bay Area's leading new play developers and producers, including PlayGround, Crowded Fire, Golden Thread, and Playwrights Foundation. For more information, visit http://playground-sf.org.

The playwrights of the 2017-18 PlayGround Writers Pool are: Lynn Aylward, Kathy Boussina, Madeleine Butler, Karen Catalona, Nara Dahlbacka, Rob Dario, Victoria Chong Der+, Ai Ebashi, Nancy Fishman, Elizabeth Flanagan, Jerome Joseph Gentes+, Akaina Ghosh, Lauren Gorski, Ruben Grijalva+, Garret Jon Groenveld+, Tanya Grove, Karen Hartline, Devony Hof, Sam Hurwitt, Genevieve Jessee+, Melissa Keith+, Kate Keleher, Katie May+, Alanna McFall, Jeanie Ngo, Cheryl Ossola, Ishai Padawer, Lana Palmer, Erin Marie Panttaja+, Ken Prestininzi+, Madeline Puccioni, Marsha Roberts, Annette Roman, Cleavon Smith+, Nic Sommerfeld, Aimee Suzara, Jon Tracy, Mary Weikert, Steven Westdahl, Zoe Young, Maury Zeff+, L.Z. Zephyr, and Ignacio Zulueta+

+ Resident Playwrights

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