PlayGround-NY Celebrates MLK Holiday with January 17 Monday Night PlayGround “Keep Moving Forward”

“Keep moving, for it may well be that the greatest song has not yet been sung, the greatest book has not been written, the highest mountain has not been climbed. This is your challenge! Reach out and grab it… but there is something we can learn from the broken grammar of that mother, that we must keep moving. If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., Spelman College (1960)

PlayGround-NY begins the New Year with a special Martin Luther King, Jr.-inspired round of Monday Night PlayGround, Monday, January 17, 7pm EST (4pm PST), live online and on-demand. The evening will feature six original short plays inspired by the prompt “Keep Moving Forward”, drawn from MLK’s 1960 speech at Spelman College. PlayGround’s sister companies, PlayGround-LA and PlayGround and will present their own interpretations of the theme on January 10th and January 24th, respectively. As part of PlayGround-NY’s commitment to radical accessibility, Monday Night PlayGround is admission-free (donations gratefully accepted). Advance reservations are required. For the complete schedule or to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-ny.org/monday.

The inaugural season of PlayGround-NYs Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series on fourth Mondays*, Oct-Mar, will be held via live simulcast (October 25, 2021-March 28, 2022). Each month, PlayGround announces a topic and writers have just four-and-a-half days to generate their original ten-page script. Recent topics have included: “Fearless”, “Reunification”, and “Lore.” The top six scripts are matched with directors and a cast of leading local professionals and rehearsed for just ninety minutes on the day of the performance. Following a brief technical rehearsal to add sound and other design elements, the six short plays are performed as script-in-hand staged readings for a live-stream viewing audience on fourth Mondays, October through March. 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 short play showcase, Best of PlayGround. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted.
** January round is on third Monday instead of fourth.

PlayGround-NY is excited to announce its inaugural Writers Pool, the thirty-six New York-based writers competitively selected to participate in the 2021-22 season and Monday Night PlayGround monthly series. These writers are: Sam Affoumado, Anthony Anello, Maria Arreola, Karina Billini, Lilly Camp, Nelson Diaz-Marcano, Barry Eitel, Jessica Fleitman, Bailey Garcia, Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin, Ruth Geye, Stanley William Hathaway, Libby Heily, David Hilder, Nina Ki, Christian Missonak, Alex Moon, Louis DeVaughn Nelson, Matthew Park, Lila Perlman, Phanesia Pharel, Jacob Marx Rice, Rachael Richman, Natalie Sacks, Fernando Segall, Matthew Stephen Smith, Niara Smith, Cece Suazo, Kate Thomas, Charles Velasquez-Witosky, Leela Velautham, Annie Jin Wang, Catherine Weingarten, Cate Wiley, Maggie Wilson, and Lauren Wimmer.

PlayGround-NY is the second regional expansion of the celebrated Bay Area playwright incubator and theatre community hub, PlayGround(SF). PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’ and now New York’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 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 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 34 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 Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and 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.

2021-22 PlayGround-NY Season Calendar

January 17th, 2022 7pm ET via Vimeo live stream
February 28th, 2022 7pm ET via Vimeo live stream
March 28th, 2022 7pm ET via Vimeo live stream
April 25th, 2022 7pm ET (Best of PlayGround-NY) via Vimeo live stream

For tickets and more information, visit https://playground-ny.org/monday/.