29 Mar A Big Wonderful Weekend
It’s been a pretty crazy fews days here at PF.
On Sunday, we had a huge fundraiser “Brunch with a Playwright”. Almost three hundred people attended, including 30 playwrights spread out at tables among the masses. It was a really lovely event, on a much larger scale than anything we’d done in the past and thanks to an incredible amount of hard work from the board and army of volunteers, it went off without a hitch.
My four personal highlights:
1) Prince Gomolvilas saying that he wished Playwrights Foundation was a person so that he could make sweet love to it in every imaginable position.
2) Philip Kan Gotanda’s story about trying to talk to Sam Shepard at one of the first festivals. He followed him into the bathroom, sidled up next to him at a urinal and told him how much he liked his work. He was ignored.
3) Marcus Gardley’s beautiful story which I can’t really do justice to here, but the gist of this: When he had a play in the festival, a bunch of people from his old West Oakland neighborhood showed up at the reading, even though he hadn’t invited them. After the first reading, an old wise black woman walked up to him and said “I’ll be back”. After the second reading, she walked back up to him, this time with a young boy in tow. “You see”, she said to the boy “you can be anything you want to be, you can be a playwright.”
4) A friend of my girlfriend’s parents, who sat next to Peter Nachtreib at the brunch, asking me if he was seeing anybody, because she knew this nice Jewish girl who would be perfect for him.
The next day we kicked off our In The Rough Series, with Jason Grote’s play- Box Americana, which had a fabulous cast and went really well.
Now back to the grind – we’re trying to narrow our twenty-five finalists down to ten or twelve tomorrow. More on that later…
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