Festival Reading: Rivals of Mars at PlayGround

Join us in-person at Potrero Stage or online for staged readings of four bold new full-length plays in development by the Bay Area’s and Los Angeles’ best new writers and share feedback following each reading.

And don’t miss any of the other free play readings and presentations included in this year’s PlayGround Festival of New Works (May 7-26).

Rivals of Mars by Bridgette Dutta Portman, 7pm May 10 @Potrero Stage & Simulcast 
After the first crewed mission to Mars ends in tragedy, the daughter and husband of one of the deceased astronauts plan a risky mission to recover the bodies.

Bridgette Dutta Portman is an award-winning playwright and novelist. More than two dozen of her plays have been produced locally, nationally, and internationally. She is president of the Pear Theatre board of directors and a member of the Pear Playwrights' Guild, the 2023-24 PlayGround writers pool, and the Dramatists' Guild. She received the 2023 June Anne Baker Prize from PlayGround, and has been a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights' Festival, the Theatre Bay Area TITAN award, the PlayPenn Conference, the Kentucky Women’s Theatre Conference Prize for Women Writers, the New Dramatists playwrights' residency, and more. She teaches composition and creative writing at UC Berkeley.

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The lineup has been announced for PlayGround’s 28th annual Festival of New Staged Readings: Rivals of Mars by Bridgette Dutta Portman (Friday, May 10), Work/Shoot by Matthew Y. Morishige (Monday, May 13), The Passing Storm by Jessica June Rowe (Friday, May 17), and Crazy Jezebels by Bailey Jordan Garcia (Monday, May 20). With themes ranging from the eternal fight against misogyny to the tragedy of ambition, these four plays embody the wide-ranging, provocative, and imaginative future of the American Theatre. All four readings will take place at 7pm PT in-person at Potrero Stage and simulcast online. Admission is free (donations gratefully accepted) with extended on-demand viewing for Festival Sponsors. For tickets, visit https://tickets.playground-sf.org.

These four plays were selected from submissions of PlayGround’s Best of alumni from across the country. Numerous plays that began as Festival Staged readings have gone on to full productions with PlayGround including both of this year’s Festival Premieres (Apertures of Love in Times of War, May 11-12; and A Thousand Natural Shocks May 18-19). ​Through these staged readings, PlayGround helps to elevate the Bay Area’s most important new voices for the stage, sharing diverse and inclusive stories that center communities too often excluded from the American Theatre. Past festival readings have included Diane Sampson’s Bernie Madoff-inspired musical Sleeping Cutie (2014), Glickman Award winner Ruben Grijalva’s Anna Considers Mars (2019). and Genevieve Jessee’s The Rendering Cycle (2020).

About the New Works Festival

In addition to these readings, the festival will also include the premiere presentations of Anne Yumi Kobori’s Apertures of Love in Times of War and Jacob Marx Rice’s A Thousand Natural Shocks, as well as Best of PlayGround(SF) ’24, featuring the top short works from the 30th season Monday Night staged reading series, an evening of the top short works by Bay Area high school dramatists as part of the 16th annual Young Playwrights Project, as well as productions of two new full-length plays, and an artist roundtable of playwrights and other artists featured in this year’s Festival.

Taken all together, the festival provides theatre-makers and theatregoers with one of the most varied and robust opportunities to discover leading new voices of the American Theatre while providing up-and-coming writers with the exposure, production experience, and networks they need to succeed on the national stage. Both Funny like and Abortion by Rachel Bublitz (2022) and Sapience by Diana Burbano (2021) premiered in the PlayGround Festival of New Works before moving on to National New Play Network Rolling World Premieres. Other festival alumni include: Lauren Yee, Geetha Reddy, Jonathan Spector, and Cleavon Smith, among others.

Why Free?

PlayGround has made all programs admission-free in furtherance of our commitment to radical accessibility. If you are able, we hope that you’ll consider donating with your free ticket reservation, recognizing that your direct support makes it possible for us to continue providing fair and equitable wages for professional artists while sustaining our radical accessibility efforts for all.

PlayGround, a leading national playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’, New York’s, and Chicago’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 350 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,500 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 100 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 36 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Glickman Awards (including 6 of the last 10), O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and New York International Fringe Festival, among others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.