Center for the Art of Translation to Support Bay Area Playwrights Festival

Playwrights Foundation's 39th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF) has announced a commitment by The Center for the Art of Translation (CAT) and substantial support for Korean playwright Hansol Jung's play "Wild Goose Dreams", written in Korean and translated to English, opening the 2016 Bay Area Playwrights Festival July 15-24. The 39th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF) will open July 15, 2016 featuring staged readings of six acutely original, new works by emerging playwrights reflecting contemporary issues ranging from Futuristic Allegory, Vegas Apocalypse, Korean Social Media Fantasia and Gamer Misogyny, to Magic Neorealism.

"What's exciting and different about this piece is that the composer will be here, we are hiring members of a choir and a musical director and we will be working the 'choral cacophony' called for in the script..." remarks Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller "...a cacophony filled with social media chatter and coded messages,"

The Friday, July 15 8PM festival opening features Wild Goose Dreams by Hansol Jung; with choral score by Paul Castles (also on Saturday July 23 at 4PM). Set against a choral cacophony filled with social media chatter and coded messages composed by Paul Castles, a North Korean defector and South Korean "goose father" (a Korean man who works in Korea while his wife and children stay in an English-speaking country for the sake of the children's education) hook up online to assuage their loneliness. But will their quiet, surreptitious intimacy be enough to cut through the noise? Performed with a live choir, this darkly humorous, highly theatrical piece deploys multi-sensory modalities to show humanity at a breaking point.

The festival continues with the magic neorealism of Andrew Saito's whisper fish (7/16 12PM, 7/24 6PM), continuing with gamer misogyny eviscerated in Walt McGough's Non-Player Character (7/16 4PM, 7/22 8PM). The festival then features a futuristic allegory of life for families of color by Philana Omorotionmwan in her Before Evening Comes (7/16 8PM, 7/24 2PM), the drunken Vegas apocalypse of Jonathan Spector's Good, Better, Best, Bested (7/17 2PM, 7/23 8PM), and a sexy young stranger exploding a tight family unit in Sycamore by Sarah Sander (7/17 6PM, 7/23 12PM). Each will be performed twice over two weeks, with additional enrichment and social events to be announced. For infromation go to http://bayareaplaywrightsfestival.org

The Festival will run July 15-24, 2016 at the Custom Made Theatre in the heart of San Francisco's Theater District at 533 Sutter Street. http://bayareaplaywrightsfestival.org

Background Wild Goose Dreams:

Hansol Jung (Wild Goose Dreams) is a playwright and director from South Korea. Her work has been developed at the Royal Court (London), New York Theatre Workshop, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, O'Neill Conference, Lark Play Development Center, Bushwick Starr, Asia Society New York, Seven Devils Playwright Conference, and OD Musical Theater Company (Seoul). Her works include No More Sad Things, Among the Dead, Wolf Play, Wild Goose Dreams, and Cardboard Piano. She has translated over thirty English musicals into Korean, including Evita, Dracula, Spamalot, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, while working on several award winning musical theatre productions as director, lyricist and translator in Seoul, South Korea. She is the recipient of the 2050 Fellowship at New York Theater Workshop, Sundance Playwrights Retreat Fellowship at UCross, MacDowell Colony Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court (London). Her plays have received the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award (Among the Dead), Honorable Mention from the 2014 Arch and Bruce Brown Playwriting Competition (Cardboard Piano), and was named 2014 finalist for the Ruby Prize (No More Sad Things). Hansol holds a Playwriting MFA from Yale School of Drama, and is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab.

Paul Castles (Wild Goose Dreams) is an internationally-working composer based in New York City and Sydney. His work has been performed in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States. The Fountain (with South Korean librettist by Chae-kyung Lee) was produced by Theater Troupe Georipae and won Best New Musical at the 6th Daegu International Musical Festival. Their other collaborations include adaptations of Miss Julie for the 2012 International Festival for the Centenary of Strindberg in Seoul and The Man Who Never Yet Saw A Woman's Nakedness by Mortiz Rinke for the 2014 Miryang Summer Festival. He has been commissioned by the Nexas Quartet and opera star Peter Coleman-Wright, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Three Act Theater, Chronology Arts, Clare Cook Dance Theater, Halcyon, Clock Ensemble, Alicia Crossley, and various other companies and solo performers. His work has been developed by Victorian Opera, Salt Lake Acting Company, New York Theater Workshop, Cybec 21st Century Young Composers Program, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows. Paul is a Masters graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program of the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

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