It’s 1935. The Taft State Hospital, created during the Jim Crow era for ‘insane and idiotic negroes’, is overcrowded and understaffed – a toxic mix of the downtrodden and the mentally ill. Attius – an inmate resigned to his fate – has carved himself a safe haven from the mayhem, taking pride in his woodwork, when the fierce and defiant young Effie invades his sanctuary and radically alters his future.

Terence Anthony is a playwright, artist, and communications specialist based in Oakland, CA. He has been awarded writing fellowships to the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. Terence’s plays include Burners (nominated for four 2017 Ovation Awards), Euphrates (Max K. Lerner Playwriting Fellowship), Tombolo (Finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference) and Blood and Thunder (LA Weekly Award Winner for “Best Performance” – Candice Afia). Terence’s work has been seen at PlayPenn Conference in Philadelphia, the Chicago Dramatists in Chicago, the RADAR L.A. Festival in Los Angeles, the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, the Without Walls Festival in La Jolla, and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez.

Ilhan is a Somali high school student living in Minneapolis on the verge of deportation when she is visited by figures from far flung places: the Arctic, European fringes, and an African refugee camp. They draw her into an unseen and forgotten world that exists just beyond reality and appeal to her for the sanctuary of their souls.  A poetic drama on migration, displacement and freedom.

JEESUN CHOI is a transnational Korean playwright and physical theatre artist. Her plays move through diaspora, (im)migration and transnationalism to reveal the joy and agony of the human condition. She currently is the Playwriting Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. Plays include The Seekers (2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Winner, 2019 O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference Semifinalist, 2018-19 Bushwick Starr Reading Series, Fresh Ground Pepper Artist Retreat); Dahlia (Lark’s 2018 New Voices Fellowship Finalist) which received a public reading at Dell’Arte International; Cecilies (Red Eye Theater’ New Work 4 Weeks, 2013 Minnesota Fringe Festival). She was the Fellow at 2017 National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation, hosted by Pangea World Theater and Art2Action, and Works-In-Progress Artist at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder of Creative Traffic Flow, a theater collective committed to creating ensemble-driven performances that uphold the power of communities. As the Artists-In-Residence at the University Settlement, CTF produced Duets of Difference for Speyer Hall and Women Center Stage Festival. Supported by Clean Valley Council and Works On Water, they presented Voices from the Roanoke River at the Governors Island and Earth Summit 2018. MFA Ensemble-Based Physical Theatre, Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre.

It’s 1997 and Cynthia Cooper rules the WNBA. It’s no wonder every player on Plainnole’s Lady Train wants to “go pro,” and none more than Point Guard Starra Jones. And they’re damn good. However, the realities and pressures of life for black women in rural Arkansas threaten to tear them apart, and with it, their chance for the life they so crave. A play divided over 4-quarters of the game.

Playwright, poet, and educator, Candrice Jones is from Dermott, Arkansas. Candrice has been honored to have been a fellow at Callaloo for poetry at Brown University and London. She has also been a VONA Playwriting Fellow, and Calarts MFA Critical Studies recipient. Candrice’s primary goal as a writer is to write love letters for and to women of the American South. She is the author of the full-length play, Crackbaby. Candrice also serves as board member of The Weekend Theater as the Educational Outreach Specialist as well as Ozark Living Newspaper. In the summer of 2018, Candrice was a resident a Ground Floor where she developed FLEX. She was recently was given the 2018 Arkansas Arts Council Individual Arts Playwriting Fellowship and is ecstatic to develop FLEX at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

When the hapless, unemployed actress Stace opts out of her marriage, she becomes (rather suddenly) a live-in nanny for her best friend, his husband, and their newborn baby.  But then she gets the chance of a lifetime: an audition for a French Horror Theater. Hilarity, mayhem and Grand Guignol hijinks ensue with the only prop available. Baby, it gets bloody. A dark, absurdly comic play about parenting and performing invisible pain.

Originally and proudly from Pittsburgh, Tori writes curiosity-chasing plays that sniff out in-between spaces in big theatre to change the world. Many of them decide to be comedies.

She has presented work around the country and abroad. Recent plays include How the Baby Died (BAPF, Ingram New Works), Seph (Araca Project, Princess Grace Finalist), Air Space (Kilroys Top 5, Ingram New Works), Truth/Dare (Project Y, Best Ensemble Pittsburgh Fringe), Egypt Play (InterAct Finalist, PWC Mentorship), Episode #121: Catfight! (Yale Cabaret), How to Be a Widow (Ellie Award), and others. 

Having written for Colonial Williamsburg’s Emmy Award-winning PBS education series, Tori has been named an Emmy Nominee, Kilroys Lister, Jerome Finalist, 3-Time Princess Grace Finalist, 2-Time O’Neill Semifinalist, Playwrights of New York Nominee, and some other things. She is affiliated with The Lark, The Playwrights’ Center, Ingram New Works Lab, Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights’ Unit, Fresh Ground Pepper, & the Dramatists Guild. Some of her short plays are published by Next Stage Press. AB, Harvard. MFA, NYU Tisch Asia (Singapore)

A “Model Immigrant” and business mogul, Honduran born Mando’s cleaning empire is bracing for a downturn and he must rein in his over-privileged American son Orlando — who is living large on his dime. To teach him a lesson, he puts Orlando on the floor with the cleaning team, but in the wake of a personal gay-bashing, Orlando suddenly finds himself responsible for the fate of a treasured undocumented worker and the future of his father’s entire enterprise. A play about the complexities of privilege, status, sexual identity and legal status within a newly wealthy immigrant family.

christopher oscar peña is a writer originally from California, now residing in Harlem and LA.

His work has been developed or seen at the Goodman Theater, Public Theater, Two River Theater, INTAR, Ontological Hysteric Incubator, Playwrights Realm, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Old Vic, Theater For a New City, Orchard Project, Naked Angels, The Flea Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, among many others.

A two time Sundance Institute Theater Fellow (2015 Theater Lab Fellow with awe/struck, 2014 UCross Fellow), he has also held Fellowships with the Lark Play Development Center (2014 Playwrights Workshop Fellow, 2012-2013 Van Lier Fellow) was a recipient of the Latino Playwrights Award (Kennedy Center), an NYTW Emerging Artist Fellow, Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, and was a part of the US/UK Exchange (Old Vic New Voices).

The Clarence Brown Theatre, where he’s currently playwright-in-residence, commissioned and will produce the world premiere of his play “The Strangers” in their 2017/18 season. He is also working on a new play, “How to Make an American Son” commissioned by Yale Rep.

He’s a proud member of New Dramatists, an Artistic Patriot at Merrimack Rep, was named one of “The 1st Annual Future Broadway Power List” by Backstage, and was a writer on the Golden Globe nominated, debut season of the CW show, “Jane the Virgin.” His work is published through NoPassport Press and Smith and Krauss. He teaches playwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is represented by Heroes and Villains and CAA. In television he has written for Jane the Virgin – CW, Insecure – HBO – (as well as recurring on screen as “Gary”), and Sweetbitter – STARZ.  Currently, he writes for the upcoming Freeform show Motherland: Fort Salem, and is developing an original series based on Stephen King’s Joyland.

B.A. UC Santa Barbara / M.F.A. NYU-Tisch School of the Arts

It’s Florida…sometime in the future. Violent militia rule is followed by violent resistance. Years later, the atrocities of this period are filtered through a rich cinematic lens and the distant memories of those perceived as perpetrators or victims  — in an attempt at revealing The Truth, and achieving reconciliation. Through shifting time, ambiguous TV-style interviews, and unreliable narrators, Siesta Key investigates the complexity of moral absolutism, its personal cost, and the elusiveness of truth in acts of hate.

Jonathan Spector is a playwright and based in Oakland, CA. His play Eureka Day premiered at Aurora Theater in Berkeley, and received all of the region’s new play awards: Glickman Award, Theatre Bay Area Award, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, and Rella Lossy Award. Other plays include Good. Better. Best. Bested. (Custom Made Theater, San Francisco), In From The Cold (Just Theater, Berkeley) and Repair The World.

He has developed work with Roundabout Theatre Company, South Coast Rep, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Aurora Theatre, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark, Crowded Fire, San Francisco Playhouse, Custom Made Theatre, Mugwumpin, Source Theater Festival, Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, Theatre of NOTE, Road Theatre, Something Marvelous Theatre, and Stanford’s National Center for New Plays.

Jonathan is a recipient of South Coast Rep’s Elizabeth George Commission, two-time winner of Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a former Resident Playwright at Playwrights Foundation, and was recently featured as one of “100 artists putting the East Bay on the map” by San Francisco Magazine. He is also the Co-Artistic Director of the award-winning Just Theater. Upcoming: Eureka Day at Mosaic Theater (Washington, DC), InterAct Theatre (Philadelphia) and Spreckles Performing Arts Center (Sonoma).