PlayGround & Planet Earth Arts Bring New Play Festival to NYC March 27!

“Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.” – Rumi. Playwright incubator PlayGround-NY in partnership with Planet Earth Arts has announced the prompt for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround staged reading event of its 2nd season and the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival, following a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Thirty-six New York writers had just four-and-a-half days to generate their original scripts inspired by the prompt “Grief and Hope for Planet Earth” as they vie for one of six slots in the latest round of this year’s Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, presented via live stream on Monday on March 27th at 7pm ET. PlayGround-NY’s sister companies, PlayGround LA, PlayGround SF, and – new this year! – PlayGround Chicago will present their own interpretations of the opening theme on March 13, March 20, and April 3, respectively. All PlayGround programs in all four regions are being performed under SAG-AFTRA New Media agreements, providing union wages and protections for all performers. Monday Night PlayGround is admission-free (donations gratefully accepted) and advance reservations are required. For the complete schedule or to reserve tickets, visit https://playground-ny.org/monday.

PlayGround-NY’s celebrated Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series on fourth Mondays will be simulcast live (October 24, 2022 – March 27, 2023). Each month, PlayGround-NY announces a topic and writers have just four-and-a-half days to generate their original ten-page script. 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 an in-person and live-stream viewing audience. 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-NY’s annual short play showcase, Best of PlayGround-NY. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted and directly support artist compensation.

PlayGround-NY’s 2022-23 Writers Pool, the thirty-six New York-based writers competitively selected to participate in the monthly series, are: Sam Affoumado, Momo Akashi, Anthony Anello, Andy Boyd, Christin Cato, Todd Cerveris, Jayne Deely, Josh Drimmer, Barry Eitel, Bailey Elis, Jack Feldstein, Kari Floren, Ruth Geye, Dana Leslie Goldstein, Stanley Hathaway, Rachel Herron, David Hilder, Carlos Jerome, Rebecca Kane, Elizabeth Lee, Dani Nelson, Matthew Park, Alexander Perez, Jacob Rice, Rachael Richman, Kathryn Ryan, Natalie Sacks, Louise Schwarz, Marcus Scott, Riley Tollen, Gaven Trinidad, Rebbekah Vega-Romero, Charles Velasquez-Witosky, Leela Velautham, Rhys Washington, Maggie Wilson

Supporting PlayGround-NY playwrights and the Monday Night series are the members of the PlayGround-NY Company, representing some of New York’s leading directors, actors, designers, and stage managers. The 2022-23 PlayGround-NY Company includes: Jen Anaya, Rebecca Aparicio, Julia Brothers, Nathaniel Claridad, Sarah Guilbault, Neal Gupta, Tyler Kent, Kalina Ko, Nico Krell, Austin Ku, Jully Lee, MeeWha Lee, Norm Munoz, Graceson Abreu Nuñez, Betsy Rosen, Abigail Rosen, Alex Shafer, Rebecca White

Planet Earth Arts was founded in 2014 out of our conviction that environmental and racial/social justice are the most urgent issues of our time, and our belief that the arts, in collaboration with the sciences and humanities, must play a leading role in transforming the human presence on our planet from a destructive role to one that is mutually beneficial to the entire community of life. We collaborate with actors, playwrights, directors, photographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists. Planet Earth Arts supports them by commissioning, presenting and showcasing their powerful transformative work – confronting and illuminating climate change, mass extinctions, threats to oceans, habitat loss, sea rise and the struggles for environmental justice. That same year we launched the Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival at Berkeley Rep and at Stanford University, in collaboration with PlayGround and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford, to inspire playwrights to create bold new works for the stage that explore issues of planetary sustainability as well as environmental and social justice. For the past nine years Planet Earth Arts has worked with more than 75 playwrights from PlayGround’s Writers Pool in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival has generated a living library of more than 200 short plays. PlayGround and Planet Earth Arts have co-commissioned 12 new original full-length or one-act plays – several of which have had World Premiere Productions in San Francisco at Potrero Stage: PlayGround Center for New Plays. Each year at least one or two Planet Earth Arts plays have been included in the Best of PlayGround. We are thrilled to resume collaborating with PlayGround on the 2023 Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival and look forward to supporting the new visions and voices of the Chicago and New York Writer Pools.

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’, New York’s and now 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 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.

WHAT: PlayGround-NY & Planet Earth Arts Announce Topic for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround of Season 2: “GRIEF AND HOPE FOR PLANET EARTH”, marking the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival!

WHERE:   Simulcast and On-Demand

WHEN:     Monday, March 27, 2023 at 7pm ET

TICKETS: Admission is free (donations gratefully accepted) but advance reservations are required. To reserve tickets for in-person or online viewing, visit https://tickets.playground-sf.org.