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writemarcus · 1 year

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Finalists/Semifinalists Revealed For 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival

The festival received 614 applications from playwrights across the United States.

By: Chloe Rabinowitz

Jun. 01, 2023

Playwrights Foundation, the West Coast's premier launchpad for exceptional new plays and playwrights, has revealed the semifinalists and finalists for the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which will be presented in a hybrid festival (both in-person and streamed attendance options) April 12-21, 2024, per Playwrights Foundation's recent announcement to shift to a biennial festival structure. BAPF continues to uphold its legacy as one of the oldest and most successful new play festivals uplifting playwrights' new works early in their career.

The festival received 614 applications from playwrights across the United States. Applicants underwent a thorough evaluation process and were reviewed by Playwrights Foundation staff in collaboration with 189 committee readers-local and national theatre professionals serving as evaluators, with 57% who identify as playwrights. From this pool of 614 applicants, 148 semifinalists were carefully chosen based on the writer's voice, skills, and the play's potential. Applicants were narrowed down further to 45 finalists encompassing unique voices, under-represented narratives, and bold theatrical forms across various levels of experiences. Ultimately, five playwrights will be selected among the finalists and announced at a later point.

"The current landscape of contemporary playwriting is so vibrant. There is an abundance of writing which blooms with strong points of view, memorable plots and characters, and risk-taking moments of stagecraft." says Literary Manager Heather Helinsky. "Our community of readers were highly engaged by a wide range of theatrically innovative styles, compelling narratives, and poignant issues and themes. The semifinalists and finalists are deserving of reaching audiences in need of catharsis-from communal grieving to a good laugh."

Bay Area Playwrights Festival is one of the oldest and most successful new play festivals for new works in their early stages. Established in 1976 by acclaimed director Robert Woodruff, the festival has built a respected reputation for uplifting original and distinctive new voices in the theater, investing in the development of their work, and launching storied careers. Among the first writers developed at the inaugural BAPF was the young Sam Shepard. Since then, more than 500 prize-winning, nationally significant playwrights have received one of their first professional experiences at the BAPF, including Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Paula Vogel, and Annie Baker; and acclaimed playwrights Lauren Gunderson, Rajiv Joseph, Katori Hall, Christopher Chen, Lauren Yee, and Marcus Gardley. BAPF's ongoing success in supporting and amplifying exceptional, newly emerging writers and launching their ground-breaking new work is its enduring legacy.

"We are excited to spotlight these talented playwrights and incredible plays in this year's BAPF semifinalists and finalists," says Executive Artistic Director Jessica Bird Beza. "There are an abundance of powerful narratives included on the list that made for an incredibly difficult selection process. We want to uplift and advocate for the dynamic work of this next generation of playwrights to other theatermakers and hope to see them on stages around the country."

After listening closely to playwrights and other constituents, Playwrights Foundation recently announced that the Bay Area Playwrights Festival model will shift from an annual festival to a biennial hybrid festival in order to expand the pre-festival program from 4 to 12 months. This change will allow staff to be more intentional and responsive to each playwright's needs and increase the amount of time, care, and resources dedicated to each playwright.

"The past few years have been a time for reflection and growth at Playwrights Foundation, resulting in newly expressed purpose, vision, and values," said Beza. "We move forward with a deeper commitment to center and empower the playwrights we serve, guided by a strategic plan co-created with significant playwright representation, and the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival program model changes reflect this."

45 FINALISTS FOR THE 46th BAY AREA PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL

Calley N. Anderson, The Alligator

Jennifer Barclay, Behave Yourself

Nikki Brake-Sillá, ReWombed

Karen Marguerite Caronna, Dream of a Marginal Deity

Sam Chanse, Fellowship

Sean-Joseph Choo, otou-san

Avery Deutsch, The Last Beach Day

NJ Draine, The Housing Situation on Neptune

Lisa Sanaye Dring, Seven Hoshi

Jahna Ferron-Smith, Are We There Yet?

Noa Gardner, Nan

Sara Guerrero, Have to Believe We Are Magic

Mya Ison, Laure

Hasti Jafari, Superposition: A Crawling Play in Two Parts

Alicia Kester, Water Spirits

Garrett David Kim, Belligerency

Claire Koenig, DYKER BYKES

Molly Olis Krost, Nanay

Melissa Leilani Larson, A Form of Flattery

Minna Lee, My Home on the Moon

Jeffrey Lo, Balikbayan Box

Ethan Luk, Flight of a Legless Bird

Zizi Majid, They Came in the Night

Nick Malakhow, Optional Boss Battle

Divya Mangwani, Vigil-Auntys

Schaeffer Nelson, Hottest Church Dads

Miles Orduña, Lola

Rena Patel, Pyar aur Coffee

a.k. payne, Dwellers

Aidaa Peerzada, Children of the Wise

Phanésia Pharel, R&B

Eliana Pipes, Cowboy and the Moon

Christina Pumariega, Her Math Play

Ankita Raturi, Fifty Boxes of Earth

Aurora Real de Asua, The Pride Before

Harrison David Rivers, maybe the saddest thing

Nia Akilah Robinson, The Great Privation: How to flip ten cents into a dollar.

TyLie Shider, Whittier

DeAndre Short, At Ease

Phillip Christian Smith, Riverside Drive

Caridad Svich, Chelsea & Ivanka

Jason Tseng, Fear & Wonder

Emma Watkins, Elizabeth is Going into the Ground

Madison Wetzell, The Body Play

David Zheng, Ching Chong Maka Haya

103 SEMIFINALISTS FOR THE 46TH BAY AREA PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL

Ai Aida, The True Tale of Princess Kaguya

Boni B. Alvarez, Sticky Rice

Amanda L. Andrei, Lena Passes By

Brent Askari, The Refugees

Alayna Jacqueline, You Know I'd Never (Even If I Did)

Jen Browne, Standing in the River While the World Falls Down

Phillip Gregory Burke, The Suncatchers of Sahel: An Ancestral Tale Told To Today's Griot, Part II: The Two Twilights

B.J. Burton, Maddie on Her Way Home

Nora Sørena Casey, The Censorship of Dreams

Chima Chikazunga, 1 Letter Shy of Coincidence

Matthew Chong, Lessons

Xavier Clark, backstroke boys

Katie Coleman, The Madonna of Logan Square

Lynne Conner, The Mother

Samantha Cooper, She Lives with a Shrine

Kate Danley, Working for Crumbs

Angela J. Davis, Griswold

Maddie Dennis-Yates, We're Just Redoing The Kitchen

Nelson Diaz-Marcano, 1898 or How Sugar Conquered the Enchantment

Judy M. Dove, Shinsei (rebirth)

Sean Dunnington, The Children's Farm

Alisha Espinosa, The Dirt is Fertile

Helen Everbach, Tea Patches

Zachariah Ezer, The Stones of Life

Jeanette Farr, Hedda on Fire: A Play Inspired by Ibsen and Climate Grief

Gina Femia, the thing about air

Lisa Dellagiarino Feriend, Come Again

Elizabeth Flanagan, Meth

Jeremy Gable, Carpenter Gorge

Craig Garcia, The Here and Now

Taylor Dodd Geu, Passing Over

Ruth Geye, These and Those

Emma Gibson, Lumin

Maximillian Gill, Blank Slate

Mikki Gillette, American Girl

lily gonzales, my eyes are up here honey

Franky D. Gonzalez, Escobar's Hippo

Ahon Gooptu, Seasons of Love

Keiko Green, Hells Canyon

Malique Guinn, Bounty on Our Heads

Katherine Gwynn, All I Want to Do is Be Pretty Like You

Rach Harris, Trophically Cascaded

Andrea Hart, Mounds or Talking Shit about a Pretty Sunset

Alli Hartley-Kong, People Should Talk About What's Real

Steven Hayet, Hugo Saves Christmas...in May!

Howard Ho, Reset

Daniel Holzman, Me & Who

Poliento Ico, A Love Letter to Loss

J. Lynn Jackson, Lucía Fuentes

Keenya J. Jackson, The Return of the Shogun

KJ Jarboe, Soured Milk

Jen Jarnagin, demolition extreme

Jacob Juntunen, See You in a Minute

Lisa Y. Kang, American Migration

M.J. Kang, The Battle of Saratoga

Ambata Kazi-Nance, M Power: A (Re)Birth Story

Lisa Kenner Grissom, here comes the night

Alex Lead, Easter Eggs for a Statistic

Tracey Conyer Lee, The First Time

Matthew Libby, Sisters

Alex Lin, Bad Chinese Daughter

Alicia Louzoun-Heisler, Bashert

John Mabey, Desert Oceans

Gloria Majule, Uncut

Eric Marlin, AirSpace

Leigh M. Marshall, The Hunters & All the Haunted

C. Meaker, Ghosts in the Graveyard

Francisco Mendoza, Piggyback

Alison Minami, Sinkhole

LJ Morizono, Transcending the Belly of the Beast

Aya Sophie Nassif, Without Her

Asia Nichols, The Incredible Darling(s)

Cynthia Galaz Ochoa, Matriarch

Dave Osmundsen, More of a Heart

Novid Parsi, Remains and Returns

José Pérez IV, Very Berry Dead

Reynaldo Piniella, Son of an Unknown Father

Zahida Rahemtulla, The Frontliners

Andrew Rincón, El Mito or The Myth of my Pain

Colette Robert, [landscape play]

Jacob K. Robinson, The Lark Ascending

Kira Rockwell, Space Bound

Ashley Lauren Rogers, Don't Think About Elephants

Lisa Marie Rollins, Token

Madeline Rouverol, You're Not a Mystery to Me

Martine Sainvil, Indispensable

Marcus Scott, There Goes the Neighborhood

Mak Shealy, exceptional

Nic A. Sommerfeld, Pieces

travis tate, YOUR MAXIMUM POTENTIAL

Sebastian Timpe, The House of Mulberry Street

Amy Tofte, The Rest of Us

Jackson Tucker-Meyer, The Perfection of the Donut

Josiah Thomas Turner, BECOMING!!, or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 2279 and All that Followed

James Anthony Tyler, Pranayama

Joseph D. Valdez, Warrior's Blood

Hope Villanueva, Brackish

Caity-Shea Violette, Rx Machina

Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters, Come to Me, Cling to You

LaDarrion Williams, Hurt People

Lauren Wimmer, The Cookie Institute

Susan Yassky, The Women's Center

Laura Zlatos, Show Trial

ABOUT PLAYWRIGHTS FOUNDATION

Playwrights Foundation, led by Executive Artistic Director Jessica Bird Beza, was founded in 1978 and is widely recognized as one of the top playwright service organizations and new play incubators in the U.S., dedicated to supporting and championing playwrights' artistic growth and careers while uplifting their voices on a national level. PF envisions a future where playwrights are radically centered as visionary leaders who transform the world through storytelling. Serving emerging and mid-career playwrights from the Bay Area and around the country, PF has identified over 500 exceptional writers early in their careers and given them space, time and professional artistic collaborators to explore new theatrical ideas free from the pressures of the marketplace for more than 45 years. Playwrights PF has worked with have won every award in the theater including the Pulitzer, the Tony, the Obie, the National Critics Circle Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and many more. On its 40th Anniversary, Playwrights Foundation was recognized with a Theatre Bay Area Legacy Award for its substantial impact on the field. PF has received two Glickman Awards for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area through its Producing Partnership Initiative. Among the many PF-developed works that have premiered across the country are Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Jihae Park's Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, Lauren Gunderson's The Revolutionists, Lauren Yee's King of the Yees, Madhuri Shekar's House of Joy, Mike Lew's Teenage Dick, and Mona Mansour's We Swim, We Talk, We Go To War, and many more.

#Bay Area Playwrights Festival #BAPF #BAPF2023 #BAPF46 #Marcus Scott #MarcusScott #There Goes The Neighborhood #horror play #horror #theatre #theater #social thriller #semifinalist

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just-ornstein · 4 months

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[JK] My first job was as an Assistant Producer for a video game company called Interplay in Irvine, CA. I had recently graduated from Boston University's School of Fine Arts with an MFA in Directing (I started out as a theatre nerd), but also had some limited coding experience and a passion for computers. It didn't look like I'd be able to make a living directing plays, so I decided to combine entertainment and technology (before it was cool!) and pitched myself to Brian Fargo, Interplay's CEO. He gave me my first break. I packed up and moved out west, and I've been producing games ever since.

[JK] I loved my time at EA. I was there for almost a full decade, and learned a tremendous amount about game-making, and met the most talented and driven people, who I remain in touch with today. EA gave me many opportunities, and never stopped betting on me. I worked on The Sims for nearly 5 years, and then afterwards, I worked on console action games as part of the Visceral studio. I was the Creative Director for the 2007 game "The Simpsons", and was the Executive Producer and Creative Director for the 2009 game "Dante's Inferno".

[JK] I haven't played in a long while, but I do recall that after the game shipped, my wife and I played the retail version for some time -- we created ourselves, and experimented with having a baby ahead of the actual birth of our son (in 2007). Even though I'd been part of the development team, and understood deeply how the simulation worked, I was still continually surprised at how "real" our Sims felt, and how accurate their responses were to having a baby in the house. It really felt like "us"!

Now for some of the development and lore related questions:

[JK] So I ended up in the incredibly fortunate position of creating the shipping neighborhoods for The Sims 2, and recruiting a few teammates to help me as we went along.

Around the same time, we started using the Buy/Build tools to make houses we could save, and also bring them into each new build of the game (correcting for any bugs and incompatibilities). With the import tool, we could load Sims into these houses. In time, this "vanguard QA" process turned into a creative endeavor to define the "saved state" of the neighborhoods we would actually end up shipping with the game.

On playtesting & the leftover sims data on various lots:

Basically, we were in the late stages of development, and the Save Game functionality wasn't quite working. In order to test the game properly, you really needed to have a lot of assets, and a lot of Sims with histories (as if you'd been playing them for weeks) to test out everything the game had to offer. So I started defining a set of characters in a spreadsheet, with all their tuning variables, and worked with engineering to create an importer, so that with each new build, I could essentially "load" a kind of massive saved game, and quickly start playing and testing.

It was fairly organic, and as the game's functionality improved, so did our starter houses and families.

The thought process behind the creation of the iconic three neighborhoods:

I would not say it was particularly planned out ahead of time. We knew we needed a few saved houses to ship with the game; Sims 1, after all, had the Goth house, and Bob Newbie's house. But there wasn't necessarily a clear direction for what the neighborhood would be for Sims 2. We needed the game to be far enough along, so that the neighborhood could be a proper showcase for all the features in the game. With each new feature that turned alpha, I had a new tool in my toolbox, and I could expand the houses and families I was working on. Once we had the multi-neighborhood functionality, I decided we would not just have 1 starter neighborhood, but 3. With the Aging feature, Memories, a few wacky objects, plus a huge catalog of architectural and decorative content, I felt we had enough material for 3 truly distinct neighborhoods. And we added a couple of people to what became the "Neighborhood Team" around that time.

Later, when we created Strangetown, and eventually Veronaville, I believe we went back and changed Pleasantville to Pleasantview... because I liked the alliteration of "Verona-Ville", and there was no sense in having two "villes". (To this day, by the way, I still don't know whether to capitalize the "V" -- this was hotly debated at the time!)

Pleasantview:

Anyway, to answer your question, we of course started with Pleasantview. As I recall, we were not quite committed to multiple neighborhoods at first, and I think it was called Pleasantville initially, which was kind of a nod to Simsville... but without calling it Simsville, which was a little too on the nose. (There had also been an ill-fated game in development at Maxis at the time, called SimsVille, which was cancelled.) It's been suggested that Pleasantville referred to the movie, but I don't think I ever saw that movie, and we just felt that Pleasantville kind of captured the feeling of the game, and the relaxing, simple, idyllic world of the Sims.

Pleasantview started as a place to capture the aging feature, which was all new to The Sims 2. We knew we had toddlers, teens, and elders to play with, so we started making families that reflected the various stages of family life: the single mom with 3 young kids, the parents with two teens, the old rich guy with two young gold-diggers, etc. We also had a much greater variety of ethnicity to play with than Sims 1, and we had all new variables like sexual orientation and memories. All these things made for rich fodder for a great diversity of families. Then, once we had family trees, and tombstones that carried the actual data for the dead Sims, the doors really blew open. We started asking ourselves, "What if Bella and Mortimer Goth could be characters in Sims 2, but aged 25 years? And what if Cassandra is grown up? And what if Bella is actually missing, and that could be a fun mystery hanging over the whole game?" And then finally the "Big Life Moments" went into the game -- like weddings and birthdays -- and we could sort of tee these up in the Save Game, so that they would happen within the first few minutes of playing the families. This served both as a tutorial for the features, but also a great story-telling device.

Anyway, it all just flowed from there, as we started creating connections between families, relationships, histories, family trees, and stories that we could weave into the game, using only the simulation features that were available to us. It was a really fun and creative time, and we wrote all of the lore of Sims 2 within a couple of months, and then just brought it to life in the game.

Strangetown:

Strangetown was kind of a no-brainer. We needed an alternate neighborhood for all the paranormal stuff the Sims was known for: alien abduction, male pregnancy, science experiments, ghosts, etc. We had the desert terrain, which created a nice contrast to the lush Pleasantville, and gave it an obvious Area 51 vibe.

The fact that Veronaville is the oldest file probably reflects the fact that it was finished first, not that it was started first. That's my guess anyway. It was the simplest neighborhood, in many ways, and didn't have as much complexity in terms of features like staged big life moments, getting the abduction timing right, the alien DNA thing (which I think was somewhat buggy up until the end), etc. So it's possible that we simply had Veronaville "in the can", while we put the last polish on Pleasantville (which was the first and most important neighborhood, in terms of making a good impression) and Strangeville (which was tricky technically).

Veronaville:

But my personal favorite was Veronaville. We had this cool Tudor style collection in the Build mode catalog, and I wanted to ship some houses that showed off those assets. We also had the teen thing going on in the aging game, plus a lot of romance features, as well as enemies. I have always been a Shakespeare buff since graduate school, so putting all that together, I got the idea that our third neighborhood should be a modern-day telling of the Romeo and Juliet story. It was Montys and Capps (instead of Montagues and Capulets), and it just kind of wrote itself. We had fun creating the past family trees, where everyone had died young because they kept killing each other off in the ongoing vendetta.

[JK] You know, I have never seen The Lone Gunmen, and I don't remember making any kind of direct references with the Strangetown Sims, other than the general Area 51 theme, as you point out. Charles London helped out a lot with naming Sims, and I'm pretty sure we owe "Vidcund" and "Lazlo" to him ... though many team members pitched in creatively. He may have had something in mind, but for me, I largely went off of very generic and stereotypical ideas when crafting these neighborhoods. I kind of wanted them to be almost "groaners" ... they were meant to be tropes in every sense of the word. And then we snuck in some easter eggs. But largely, we were trying to create a completely original lore.

[JK] Well, I think we kind of pushed it with The Sims 2, to be honest, and I remember getting a little blow-back about Bunny Broke, for example. Bunny Broke was the original name for Brandi Broke. Not everyone found that funny, as I recall, and I can understand that. It must have been changed before we shipped.

We also almost shipped the first outwardly gay Sims in those neighborhoods, which was bold for EA back in 2004. My recollection was that we had set up the Dreamers to be gay (Dirk and Darren), but I'm looking back now and see that's not the case. So I'm either remembering incorrectly (probably) or something changed during development.

In general we just did things that we found funny and clever, and we just pulled from all the tropes of American life.

[JK] The alien abduction started in Sims 1, with a telescope object that was introduced in the "Livin' Large" expansion pack. That's when some of the wackier ideas got introduced into the Sims lore. That pack shipped just before I joined Maxis in 2001; when I got there, the team had shipped "House Party" and was underway on "Hot Date". So I couldn't tell you how the original idea came about, but The Sims had this 50's Americana vibe from the beginning, and UFOs kind of played right into that. So the alien abduction telescope was a no-brainer to bring back in Sims 2. The male pregnancy was a new twist on the Sims 1 telescope thing. It must have been that the new version (Sims 2) gave us the tech and flexibility to have male Sims become pregnant, so while this was turned "off" for the core game, we decided to take advantage of this and make a storyline out of it. I think this really grew out of the fact that we had aliens, and alien DNA, and so it was not complicated to pre-bake a baby that would come out as an alien when born. The idea of a bunch of guys living together, and then one gets abducted, impregnated, and then gives birth to an alien baby ... I mean, I think we just all thought that was hilarious, in a sit-com kind of way. Not sure there was much more to it than that. Everything usually came from the designers discovering ways to tweak and play with the tech, to get to funny outcomes.

[JK] Possibly we were just testing the functionality of the Wants/Fears and Memories systems throughout development, and some stuff got left over.

[JK] I can't remember, but that sounds like something we would have done! I'm pretty sure we laid the groundwork for more stories that we ended up delivering :) But The Sims 2 was a great foundation for a lot of continued lore that followed.

I once again want to thank Jonathan Knight for granting me this opportunity and taking the time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.

#BURNING LORE QUESTIONS FINALLY ANSWERED!! :D #the sims 2 #ts2 #sims 2 #ea games #ea #electronic arts #sims #the sims #strangetown #veronaville #pleasantview #jonathan knight interview #the sims 2 development #sims 2 development #sims 2 beta #I'm so glad I got this opportunity man.

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