Playwrights Foundation Presents its Rough Reading Series

Playwrights Foundation's 1st Rough Reading of the season will be Derecho by Noelle Viñas, directed by Lauren Spencer. Derecho is an experimental play that explores how fragmented identity can tear you apart.

Readings on October 7, 7:30pm, Roble Hall, Stanford University and October 8, 7:00pm, Mojo Theatre, San Francisco.

Playwrights Foundation's November Rough Reading will be Truest by Megan Cohen, directed by Jessica Holt. Truest is a delightfully upsetting comic grapple following a pair of sisters on their brutal hunt in search of tenderness.

Readings on November 4, 7:30pm, Roble Hall, Stanford University, and November 5, 7:00pm, Mojo Theatre, San Francisco.

The Playwrights Foundations Fall Reading Series (#RoughReadings Series) is a monthly series of new works by rising national playwrights. Now in its 13th year with ongoing support by the National Center for New Plays at Stanford University. The series offers an opportunity to listen to a new work in development, meet the writer, and participate in the creative effort of bringing contemporary theater to life. Like the Playwrights Festival the works are presented by Bay Area professional actors and directors. Two readings are held for each script. The Rough Readings are produced in partnership with National Center for New Plays at Stanford University. All readings are Pay What You Can.

Derecho by Noelle Viñas directed by Lauren Spencer

Monday, October 7, at 7:30 PM, Roble Hall, Stanford University

Tuesday, October 8 at 7:00PM, Mojo Theatre (SF)

In Playwright Noelle's Derecho sisters Eugenia and Mercedes Silva are in Northern Virginia, surrounded by old friends and lovers as Eugenia fights for endorsement on her primary campaign for a seat in the Virginia General Assembly, hoping to join the wave of women of color elected to public office. As a storm brews outside, the sisters must confront how traditional Latino family values conflict with an American definition of success that is always changing. An experimental play that explores how fragmented identity can tear you apart.

Noelle Viñas is a Uruguayan-American playwright, educator, and theater-artist from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation and a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her play Derecho was a Finalist for the 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and a Madison New Works Lab Residency at JMU; a Semi-Finalist for the 2019 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship and the Premiere Stages Play Festival, and an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Jane Chambers Award.

Truest by Megan Cohen, directed by Jessica Holt

Monday, November 4, 7:30pm, Roble Hall, Stanford University,

Tuesday, November 5, 7:00pm, Mojo Theatre, SF

In playwright Megan Cohen's Truest, Sam Shepard meets Thelma and Louise when we find two sisters in a kitchen, smoking guns in hand, standing over a pair of brothers who they've just shot dead. As these women chase their own uniquely twisted American dream in a landscape of canonical corpses, they dance an intricate psychological duet across a surreal terrain of luck, danger, slapstick, trauma, laughter, and yearning. "Nobody ever said utopia would be easy."

Megan Cohen has had more than 100 productions, workshops, and readings of her plays with artistic partners including Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, Southbank Centre in London, SF Olympians Festival, American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Australia. As an opera librettist, she has worked with Opera Theater Unlimited in San Francisco and with Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and is currently under commission to write the feminist rodeo opera Turn and Burn for Houston Grand Opera's HGOco "Song of Houston" initiative, with music by composer Nell Shaw Cohen and set for a world premiere in 2021. As a performance artist she is a founding alumni of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists ensemble and created the solo Homeric epic Take Me Home: A One-Woman Odyssey for runs in San Francisco and in Edinburgh.She is the inaugural playwright for Cutting Ball Theater's annual Commissioning Initiative with a new full-length play premiering there in 2019, a radical response to Strindberg's "Miss Julie" set in a ski resort on a snow-covered Nob Hill in a climate-ravaged San Francisco

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