Bay Area Playwrights Festival
The 33rd Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival was a tremendous success!
The 2010 BAPF brought together 8 up-and-coming playwrights with professional collaborators to engage in an in-depth development process that resulted in spectacularly entertaining staged readings. Each play—6 full-length plays and 2 shorts—unfolded in two public staged readings, with a week of rehearsal and rewriting in between the readings.
This year the Festival included topics ranging from the Jewish/Palestinian conflict to European xenophobia. With exceptional directors bringing a keen artistic eye to each piece and talented dramaturgs helping the writers further shape their work (a dramaturg’s function is similar to that of a book editor’s), each play had been carefully staffed to provide playwrights and audiences with an amazing experience in new play development.
The Festival filled more than 1,000 seats at our new home at The Thick House on Potrero Hill—where our stalwart audiences witnessed eight new plays come to life—most of them for the very first time. Since the first BAPF, more than 80% of plays to come out of the festival go on to become award-winning productions. We’re already getting calls and emails from theaters across the country for scripts.
Final drafts of Festival plays are coming in and will be available! Contact Artistic Associate Jonathan Spector at literary@playwrightsfoundation.org to order an electronic copy. Read play descriptions and playwright bios:
- The Killing of Michael X, A New Film by Celia Wallace by Cory Hinkle
- Three Wolves and a Lamb by Yussef El Guindi
- Atlas of Longing by Jeanne Drennan
- Hunter’s Point by Elizabeth Gjelten
- Tvá Kamila by Erin Marie Bregman
- Port Out, Starboard Home by Sheila Callaghan
A co-commission with foolsFURY Theater.
BASH! (Bay Area SHorts)
- Pookie Goes Grenading by JC Lee
- The Expiration Date by Steven Salzman
As our cornerstone program, and the heart of the organization, the annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF) brings together a select group of playwrights and professional collaborators to engage in an in-depth 
development process over three weeks every summer. The work leads to two public staged readings of each play, with a week for rehearsal and rewriting in between the readings.
The festival is our primary means of getting to know playwrights for all of our programs. Because we don't accept open submissions for any other program, we encourage you to submit your unproduced play for BAPF consideration. To be considered for the 2011 festival, see full guidelines and instructions here.
See BAPF's play history here.
