Established in 2005, the Producing Partners Initiative (PPI) is a program that enables Playwrights Foundation to form partnerships with producers in order to advance the careers of our alumni.
Since its launch, the PPI has supported the development of 16 plays, several of which have gone on to win top industry awards.
Upcoming
Producing Partnership:
Jon Bernson
Third Eye Moonwalk
Fall 2020
Partnership with Encore Theatre
PREVIOUS PARTNERSHIPS
2010 – Current
2000 – 2010
PLAYS DESCRIPTIONS
A darling of the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, House of Joy is an action-adventure romance set in a harem at the beginning of the end of the Mughal Empire. Once upon a time and place, in something like 17th century Delhi, an imperial bodyguard risks her life to fight for what’s right, turning against everything she’s been raised to believe.
Good. Better. Best. Bested. is a one-night journey down the Las Vegas strip, an interwoven story of bachelorettes, magicians, street performers, gamblers, and tourists. As the nighttime festivities get under way, an earth-shattering event happens half a world away. In the midst of this tragedy and the chaos it unleashes, the characters must reckon with how much to let it disturb their good time.
Hooded. Marquis and Tru, both 14 and black, meet one evening in the holding cell of a police station. Marquis is a Nietzsche-loving prep-schooler, adopted by white people; while Tru is a super smart, Tupac loving, kid from central Baltimore. Tru decides Marquis has lost his blackness and pens a how-to manual for him entitled “Being Black for Dummies.” They navigate through both Marquis’ and Tru’s world while they debate, struggle and ultimately develop a friendship that reveals that maybe Tupac and Nietzsche were saying the same thing all along. *2018 Helen Hayes Award AND Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play recipient*
This play was developed at the 2013 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Moving fluidly between past and present, brownsville song (b-side for tray) is a story about loss and renewal, grief and healing. When tragedy strikes, how do we come together? brownsville song is a raw, visceral tale of the ties that bind. Every record has a b-side, and so do the stories of our lives. While not every person is a hit single, every life is a rich, beautiful song that deserves to be heard.
It’s a politically charged election year in the U.S. and a collective of “Generation D” Asian American actors are collaborating on a new play about one of the most defining socio-political phenomena of the 20th Century: Mao Tse Tung and the birth of modern China. In an effort to connect the power of today’s media to the propaganda employed throughout China’s Cultural Revolution, they expertly exploit 21st Century multimedia tools of the masses. As THE HUNDRED FLOWERS PROJECT becomes a world-wide high-tech spectacle, events from the actors’ real lives mysteriously infiltrate the story. And when the play spins out of control, this earnest troupe of players unexpectedly finds itself in dangerous territory. Just who—or what—has taken over their narrative?
Set on the banks of the Mississippi during the Civil War, …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi is a poetic journey of forgiveness and redemption. Inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, this deeply personal play combines traditional storytelling, gospel music, and a wicked sense of humor to create a rich, imaginative world that allows trees to preach, rivers to waltz and Jesus to moonwalk. *Won three SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards for Best Ensemble, Best Actor (Aldo Billingslea), and Best Production.*
The 2010 festival focused on the theme of building community, between and across small theatre companies and artists devoted to cultivating new theatrical work. 3WM presented a symposium on new play development and the short play form with festival playwrights, directors and producers. BOA featured two days of festival programs.
Fragmented memories and calloused dreams dance across the stage in this moving play by Christina Anderson. Mae, a Black American woman lies dying in her hospital bed. As the hospital heart monitor beeps in a-rhythmic pulses, both she and her grandson struggle to accept their shared legacy bound by love and scars.
Current Nobody offers a play on gender roles against the backdrop of the Trojan War, as stay-at-home father Od struggles to raise his children while his wife Pen covers the military conflict as a journalist. This production marks the expansion PPI to give second life to previously performed plays.
In The Listener, Liz Duffy Adams looks at our current world through her sci-fi lens, making today’s pop culture icons and slang words the mythological basis of religion for the very far off future inhabitants of Junk City, Planet Earth. This production was the World Premiere.
Inspired by the book of Jeremiah and the exploits of The Weather Underground, it’s a tale of True Prophets, False Prophets and Non-Prophets, fighting for the salvation of Ancient New York.
In a dark comedy about the end of the world as we know it, two troubled and immensely likable teens face the ultimate career choice: “Should I go to college or destroy the universe?” With an enormous invisible dog, a death-metal soundtrack, and some truly cosmic questions, BIG DEATH & LITTLE DEATH skewers suburbia and our belief that everything is going to turn out all right.
An honorable mention for the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, this play is an intimate journey into the friendship of two young girls growing up amidst the wreckage of a fictional third-world nation. Belly and Moth peer through the windows of an internet café, the only remnant of technology left, hoping to cross over into the mysterious realms they can glimpse on the screen. When Leather arrives from the other side of the river to do research on their culture, their encounter threatens to explode everyone’s ideas of history, and forge a connection that will save them all.
Developed in the Bay Area Playwright Festival 2005, Hunter Gatherers won the Will Glickman New Play Award and the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. Pam and Richard are hosting their best friends, Wendy and Tom, for an annual dinner get-together. An animal sacrifice kicks off the evening, followed by a little more sex, violence, deception, wrestling, and dancing than at previous parties. A darkly comic evening where the line between civilized and primal man is blurred, and where not everyone will survive long enough to enjoy the brownies for dessert.
Developed at Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2004, this play explores the role of religion in U.S. politics. As a shadowy group of American power brokers meet to discuss how to hasten the “end times,” a young man named Juan Gelion returns to a small Latin American island and begins to heal the sick.
A wildly humorous fable of competition, betrayal and unstable seasons presented as a post-apocalyptic vaudeville, Dog Act features a comic assortment of wayward travelers, each on a quest to survive a world that has been turned inside out.