PlayGround & Planet Earth Arts Bring New Play Festival to Chicago April 3!

“Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.” – Rumi. Playwright incubator PlayGround-Chicago in partnership with Planet Earth Arts has announced the prompt for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround staged reading event of its 1st season and the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival, following a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Thirty-six Chicago 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, April 3rd at 7pm CT. PlayGround-Chicago’s sister companies, PlayGround LA, PlayGround SF and PlayGround-NY will present their own interpretations of the opening theme on March 13, March 20, and March 27, 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-ch.org/monday.

PlayGround-Chicago’s celebrated Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series on first Mondays will be simulcast live (October 31, 2022 – April 3, 2023). Each month, PlayGround-Chicago 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-Chicago’s annual short play showcase, Best of PlayGround-Chicago. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free but donations are gratefully accepted and directly support artist compensation.

PlayGround-Chicago’s 2022-23 Writers Pool, the thirty-six Chicago-based writers competitively selected to participate in the monthly series, are: Austin Adams, Leah Barsanti, Alica Benning, Gabriella Bonamici, Sarah Bowden, McKennzie Boyd, DC Cathro, Rammel Chan, Ada  Cheng, Richard Lyons Conlon, Scott Cooper, Sunny da Silva , Emma Durbin, Lisa Feriend, Kym Fraher, John Frank, Jay Greve, Dana Hall, Tanuja Jagernauth, Kerri Killeen, Samuel Levit, David Lipschutz, Marjorie Muller, Karissa  Murrell Myers, Ryan Oliveira, Taylor Owen, Susan Pak, Kendall Phillips, Edward Pinkowski, Emma Rund, Matt Schutz, Justin Sikes, RJ Silva, Ryan Stevens, Wai Yim, Desiree York

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-Chicago is the first Midwest expansion of the celebrated California-based 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 & Planet Earth Arts Announce Topic for the sixth and final Monday Night PlayGround of Season 1: “GRIEF AND HOPE FOR PLANET EARTH”, marking the 7th annual Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival!

WHERE:   Simulcast and On-Demand

WHEN:     Monday, April 3, 2023 at 7pm CT

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.