Playwrights Foundation Announces the Winners for the 34th Annual BAPF

The Playwrights Foundation, the West Coast's preeminent play development center, which is recognized as one of the country's top sources of new play development, today announced the 34th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF) will take place July 22 through July 31, 2011. The Festival will be presented at the Thick House in San Francisco's vibrant Potrero Hill neighborhood.

Selected from over 500 submissions, the 34th Annual BAPF will include full-length plays by Clarence Coo, Dan Dietz, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lauren Gunderson and Amelia Roper; and commissioned one-act plays by Bay Area locals Kate E. Ryan and Chinaka Hodge. The playwrights will engage in an in-depth development process over three weeks this summer, collaborating with professional actors, directors and dramaturgs. The process culminates with two staged readings of each play, with a week in between for rehearsal and rewriting. In addition, the Festival includes classes with veteran master playwrights Bill Cain and Lee Blessing, panels, symposia and other festivities.

This year's festival lineup is a testament to Playwrights Foundation's mission to support fresh, vanguard playwrights without concern for box office pedigree or previous national acclaim. The festival is a place to celebrate the emergence of the next wave of contemporary playwrights and the Playwrights Foundation has an incredible track record of discovering writers early in their careers, often providing a critical milestone for writers who go on to reshape the landscape of American theatrical expression. "It's a great time to focus on our incredible creativity as a country," says Mueller. "Broadway, and in fact the entire country, is suddenly exploding with extraordinary new work by relatively young writers like Katori Hall (The Mountaintop) and Rajiv Josef (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo), both of which had their first developmental readings and workshops at Playwrights Foundation. It is vitally important to continue to discover the next generation."

Year after year, BAPF has proven to offer some of the most extraordinary new plays developing nationwide. This year's five previously unproduced full-length works feature some of the most innovative, emergent playwrights in the theater. They accompanied by two new one-act plays commissioned especially for the Festival's Bay Area SHorts (BASH!) program by local writers Chinaka Hodge and Kate E. Ryan. "Chinaka Hodge and Kate E. Ryan are truly unique up-and-comers in the American Theater, and we're beyond excited to see what they come up with," says Mueller.

The selected works include a wide range of expression from challenges facing interracial families to genocide in Namibia to a young man's struggle with his sexuality. The 2011 Festival remains committed both to fostering local artists (three of the seven plays selected come from Bay Area writers) and providing an international perspective (playwrights will join us from across the United States and as far away as Australia).

The 34th Bay Area Playwrights Festival lineup includes:

Beautiful Province (Belle Province) by Clarence Coo (New York)
We Are Proud to Present a Presentation... by Jackie Sibblies Drury (New York)
Rock Creek: Southern Gothic by Lauren Gunderson (San Francisco)
Hong Kong Dinosaur by Amelia Roper (Sydney via Yale University)
Home Below Zero by Dan Dietz (Tallahassee)
The festival also includes an afternoon performance slot dedicated to Bay Area Writers called Bay Area SHorts, more affectionately known as BASH!, commissioned from the following local playwrights:

Chinaka Hodge
Kate E. Ryan
The Playwrights Foundation New Play Institute is thrilled to offer two playwriting classes in conjunction with the Festival. For details on these classes visit the webpage for The New Play Institute.

Lee Blessing: Writing From Your Own Ridiculousness, July 21-24, 2011
Bill Cain: The Sacred Duty of Finding Your Own Voice, July 25 - 28, 2011

To learn more about the playwrights and plays, or to view a calendar of events and purchase tickets starting June 1, visit the Playwrights Foundation website.
About the Thick House
Art Space Development Corporation (ArtsDeco) presents contemporary new theater that reflects and engages the San Francisco Bay Area's racially and culturally diverse audience community. We believe that when art is relevant and accessible it can transform the world, so our work rises naturally out of connecting to our local community, to popular culture, and to events of the day. To that end, we operate our venue, the Thick House, as a performing arts/community center -- presenting world-class professional theater, hosting neighborhood events, collaborating on community projects, and partnering with local businesses.

About Playwrights Foundation
Playwrights Foundation is dedicated to discovering and supporting local and national, and international playwrights across a broad spectrum of artistic and career positions, in the inception and development of new plays that speak to and from an increasingly diverse society. Founded on a deeply held belief that the relevance and vitality of American theater depends upon a continual infusion of new work, Playwrights Foundation sustains a commitment to the playwright, who we regard as the creative wellspring of theater.

Organization Overview
Since its founding in 1976 by the renown auteur director RoBert Woodruff, PF has served more than 375 writers at all stages of their careers, providing invaluable resources for the development of their work, and connecting them to theater companies interested in producing new work. PF is one of the top play development laboratories in the U.S., and our program's alumni include some of the most prominent names in contemporary American theater, including Sam Shepard, Bill Irwin, David Henry Hwang, Anna Deavere Smith, Philip Kan Gotanda, Paula Vogel, Naomi Iizuka, Marcus Gardley, Katori Hall, Claire Chafee, and Nilo Cruz, to name just a few who were discovered and nurtured by PF early in their careers.

PF's cornerstone program is the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF), one of the oldest and most highly respected play development festivals in the U.S. PF's other programming includes: the Producing Partners Initiative/Commissioning Program (PPI/CP), a set of intertwining activities aimed at bringing theater producers and BAPF alumni and finalists together for the creation and production of new work; the INKubator Lab, which deepens PF's connections with BAPF alumni and our commissioning partners by supporting work in need of further development in order to reach full production; the New Play Institute, a school for playwriting and new play development, with a faculty of outstanding working playwrights and theater artists; the Rough Readings Series (RRS), an annual series that showcases the newest work of up-and-coming playwrights; the Resident Playwrights Initiative, a three-year residency program that provides an artistic home within a community of professional writers for ten select mid-career, rising, or exceptional emerging Bay Area writers; and the Sister City Playwrights Exchange. Together, these programs constitute a continuum of services and resources for playwrights, helping them to acquire skills and forge the necessary connections to create new work and advance professionally.

Since PF's founding, more than 65% of the plays we have helped develop have been subsequently produced, reaching thousands of theatergoers in the Bay Area and across the U.S. Since 2005, 14 plays from the PPI/CP have had their World Premieres in partnerships between PF and Bay Area theaters. Success stories include: Dog Act by Liz Duffy Adams, developed in partnership with Shotgun Players and winner of the Will Glickman Award for Best New Play of 2005; Marcus Gardley's ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, which received a wildly successful premiere in partnership with Cutting Ball Theater after being developed in the Rough Reading Series and INKubator programs; and Gardley's every tongue confess, which was developed at PF in the 2008 BAPF, and premiered at the Mead Center for New American Theater in Washington, DC in November, 2010. In addition: PF Resident Playwright Peter Nachtrieb's play boom, after beginning in the RRS was recognized as the most produced new play in the U.S. in 2009-2010; his play BOB, which, having been first developed in the RRS premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in March 2011. Major successes have been seen in Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, which began at the 2008 RRS, was further developed during the 2008 BAPF, and subsequently premiered in London, was the surprise winner of the Olivier Award (the London theater world's equivalent of the Tony's), and is headed to Broadway later this year; and Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, developed by PF in the RRS in partnership with The Lark, premiered on Broadway this season in a production starring Robin Williams.