Surprising, provocative and always engaging, the Rough Reading Series was a new play festival in which we brought promising new text to light in an intimate setting. Exceptional new works in development were read that pushed into new theatrical territory, challenged assumptions, and presented deeply felt dilemmas within our culture and world society.
2018/2019 READINGS
About the play
At a possibly haunted party, Wallis, the world’s worst hostess, attempts to entertain her guests—one of whom is hellbent on commandeering her home before the night is over. When unexpected secrets are revealed, the party takes a turn no one is prepared for. Soon new friends and strangers are forced to choose sides as the chaos inside begins to reflect the turmoil brewing outside.
About Jihan Crowther
Jihan Crowther’s plays have been read, produced and developed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, New Georges, 52nd Street Project and New York Theatre Workshop in New York; the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival in Scotland; Theatre 503, The Oval Theatre, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, The Actors’ Centre, The Space, University of London – Goldsmiths College in London; Actors Gang, Son of Semele, Stella Adler Theater, Moving Arts MADlab Play Development in Los Angeles and Eastern Bloc in Montreal, Quebec. She was a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellow and a former New York Theatre Workshop Emerging Artists Fellow. She’s an alumna of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood Writers Collective and has received two EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commissions. She’s an alumna of the LA-based Playwrights Union. She’s also an Affiliate Artist at New Georges Theater in New York and an alumna of their multidisciplinary artists’ collective, The Jam.
Jihan has written essays for Jezebel, Hello Giggles and Esquire. She is also a writer for the TV show The Man in the High Castle as well as the forthcoming Barry Jenkins adaptation of The Underground Railroad, both on Amazon. She received her MA in Writing for Performance at the University of London – Goldsmiths College and her BA in English & Creative Writing from James Madison University.
Lions is directed by Becca Wolff
2. Crystal Skillman
Pulp Vérité
November 12 & 13
About the Play
Joy is an active member of the filmmaking collective Pulp Vérité when she is captured and held overseas for five years. After being released from captivity she returns to the U.S. to reunite with her friends and restart her life. But when the group realizes Joy has gathered them together for the impossible: to bring her sister who is still a captive with ISIS home, their strength as a collective, youthful ideology, and commitment to the cause are shaken to the core.
About Crystal Skillman
Crystal Skillman is an award-winning dramatist based in Brooklyn. Her plays include: Geek!, Cut, and King Kirby (NYTimes Critics Picks); as well as Rain and Zoe Save the World, awarded the 2018 Earth Matters on Stage Prize. Crystal is the musical theater book writer of Mary and Max the musical, based on the animated film, with Composer/Lyricist Bobby Cronin, which premiered this fall at Theatre Calgary directed by Stafford Arima. Other upcoming productions include her play Open, which will premiere in 2019 as a part of All for One and The Tank Theater’s upcoming season. Her musical Postcard American Town (Composer/Lyricist Lynne Shankel) was selected for the 2018 Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. Awards include the 2018 MUT Award (Critics’ Prize) for Mary and Max, Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission (Pulp Vérité), and the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play (The Vigil). Her TV writing credits includes the original pilot Paper Heroes, co-written with Fred Van Lente, named one of the top three pilots for 2017 Final Draft’s Big Break contest, one of the top fifty in the 2017 Launchpad Pilots competition, and a finalist for the 2018 Orchard Project Episodic Lab. Her digital webtoon comic book, Eat Fighter, also co-written with Fred Van Lente, launches this fall on Line Webtoon.
Pulp Vérité is directed by Erik Pearson
About the Play
In Our Bones asks the question, “How did one of the 20th century’s most radical artists become an accomplice to fascism?” Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas survive in WWII France under German occupation at a time when most other Jewish lesbian artists did not live to share their experience. It is their untold story, reimagined with love, respect, and humor.
About Alan Stewart
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Alan is a playwright and veterinarian. Final Fire, a short play examining the human/animal bond had a production by UpMarketproductions. In Our Bones had a reading in Oakland in September 2017 and was a semi-finalist for Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2018. He is currently working on a full-length about the connections between PTSD in peopleand self mutilation syndrome in parrots. Additionally, Alan has spent his adult life as a veterinary internist. He prides himself as one of the original founders of the non profit organization San Francisco Aid for Animals, which to date has saved the lives of over 300 pets.
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In Our Bones is directed by Erin Merritt
About the Play
A man’s investigation into his missing wife launches us on a time-hopping fugue across the 20th century and into the mysteries of our unconscious minds.
About Jonathan Spector
Jonathan Spector is a playwright and theatre-maker based in Oakland, CA. His plays include EUREKA DAY (Aurora Theatre, SF Chronicle ‘Best of 2018’), GOOD. BETTER. BEST. BESTED. (Custom Made Theatre), ADULT SWIM (PlayGround Festival) and IN FROM THE COLD (Just Theater).
His work has also been developed and produced with Roundabout Underground (upcoming), South Coast Rep, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Crowded Fire, The Lark, San Francisco Playhouse, Mugwumpin, Source Theater Festival, Playwrights Foundation, Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, Theatre of NOTE, Something Marvelous Theatre, Stanford’s National Center for New Plays. He has received the Rella Lossy Award, Theatre Bay Area Award for Outstanding World Premiere, and been a two-time winner of Aurora Theater’s Global Age Prize. Jonathan is a 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 has taught theater and playwriting at San Jose State University, Sonoma State University, University of San Francisco, A.C.T. Studio, and his alma mater, New College of Florida.
Jonathan is the Co-Artistic Director of the award-winning Just Theater, which San Francisco Weekly has called “One of the Bay Area’s best small theaters.” With Just Theater, he has directed and/or produced local premieres of many adventurous new plays writers including Jason Grote, Anne Washburn, Jackie Sibblies Drury and Rob Handel.
This Much I Know is directed by Susannah Martin
In Renaissance Rome two profoundly mysterious paintings emerged out of a fierce artistic competition between Sebastiano del Piombo, his best friend Michelangelo, and their deepest rival, Raphael, as they are commissioned by the Pope to paint two parts of the same Biblical story. In modern-day Italy, three young, American art students compete for a life-altering prize to be awarded to the best artistic response to those 500 year old works. As the students engage in a struggle to unravel and understand the centuries-old mysteries behind these painting’s origin stories, they are forced to confront their deeply held internal beliefs, their fraught familial relationships, and ultimately their artistic and racial identities. Transcending time and space, BASTIANO OR THE TRANSFIGURATION OF RAFFI explores two parallel stories and what happens when one’s closest friend becomes one’s bitterest rival, and when one’s rival becomes one’s dearest friend.
About Carey Perloff
CAREY PERLOFF, Artistic Director Emerita of the American Conservatory Theater, is a writer, director, producer and educator, whose work spans Greek tragedy, devised-theater pieces and everything in between. At A.C.T., Perloff was frequent collaborator of Tom Stoppard’s, directing a dozen of his plays for including the American premieres of INDIAN INK and THE INVENTION OF LOVE, as well as major revivals of works by Pinter, Beckett, Chekhov, Gorky, Gogol, Schiller, Webster, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Moliere and more. A vigorous proponent of new work and new forms for the theater, Perloff has created the movement-theater pieces TOSCA CAFÉ and FATHERVILLE, written numerous award-winning plays including HIGHER (Blanche and Irving Laurie Award for Best American Play), LUMINESCENCE DATING (Bay Area Theater Critics Award, Best Original Script) and KINSHIP (first produced in Paris, starring Isabelle Adjani), and nurtured the work of contemporary playwrights. She was awarded the Chevalier de les Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2008, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from USF. Upcoming work includes Noel Coward’s PRIVATE LIVES at the Stratford Festival in Canada, Ibsen’s GHOSTS at Williamstown Theater Festival, and the premiere of her play THE FIT at SF Playhouse in June 2019, directed by Bill English. BASTIANO OR THE TRANSFIGURATION OF RAFFI was written on a Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in the fall of 2018.
Bastiano or the Transfiguration of Raffi is directed by Tony Taccone
About the Play
Cleveland, 2018. A trainer facilitates a breakout session during a mandated anti-bias training for CPD, only to find her own biases brought to light. Oh, yeah… and there’s a mole, bat, canary, crocodile, elephant and a mantis shrimp.
About Nikkole Salter
As a dramatist, Nikkole Salter has written 8 full-length plays, been commissioned for full-length work by 6 institutions, been produced on 3 continents in 5 countries, and been published in 12 international publications. Her work has appeared in over 20 Off-Broadway, regional and international theatres, and the Crossroads Theatre production of her play REPAIRING A NATION (directed by Marshall Jones, III) was regionally aired during the second season of the WNET program “Theatre Close-Up”on NYC’s channel THIRTEEN, WLIC, NJTV. The National Black Theatre production of her play CARNAVAL was nominated for 7 AUDELCO awards including Best Playwright and Best Production and won for Best Ensemble Performance. Ms. Salter is a 2014 MAP Fund Grant recipient, a Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist, USA Fellowship nominee, a two time Playwright’s of New York (PoNY) Fellowship nominee, is currently working on commissions from Woolly Mammoth, the National New Play Network/Cleveland Public Theatre, a musical with Neworks Productions, and is in development to write the television adaptation of Claude Brown’s New York Times Bestselling novel, Manchild in the Promised Land.
Breakout Session (or Frogorse) is directed by Beth Wood
About the Play
THE SUPREME LEADER is a coming of age story centered on Kim Jong-Un’s early days at an international school in Switzerland. This ninety minute political comedy compares Eastern and Western cultures through the snow globe lens of neutral Switzerland and explores the folly of two clashing cultures as Kim Jong-Un learns what it takes to become the next Supreme Leader of North Korea.
About Don Nguyen
Don Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam, grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and currently resides in New York City. Don studied theatre at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and served as the Artistic Director of the Shelterbelt Theatre in Omaha from 1999-2003.
In addition, Don’s work has been developed or produced at The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, The Flea, and the Ma-Yi Theatre. Don is the recipient of the 2015 GAP Prize from the Aurora Theatre and New York Stage & Film Founder’s award and has been a finalist for The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Princess Grace Award, and The Woodward International Playwriting Prize.
The Supreme Leader is directed by Ken Savage
About the Play
THE GARBOLOGISTS: Sanitation workers Danny and Marlowe have nothing in common except a 20-ton garbage truck. They spend their shifts bickering, one-upping each other, and practicing the secret art of “mongo” — hunting for treasure in the trash. But as their lives become increasingly entangled, they’re forced to expose the dirt of their past to discover the value of true partnership.
About Lindsay Joelle
Lindsay Joelle is a New York-based playwright, lyricist, and librettist. Plays include TRAYF (Theater J, Penguin Rep), THE GARBOLOGISTS, A SMALL HISTORY OF AMAL, AGE 7 (Forward Flux/Pratidhwani) and THE PRINCESS OF RIVERSIDE DRIVE (libretto, Vital Theater). She has received an Audible Playwright Commission, EST/Sloan Commission, NNPN collaboration grant with Curious Theatre, Rita Goldberg Award for Graduate Playwriting, Irving Zarkower Award, and has developed work with PlayPenn, The Great Plains Theatre Conference, and the Lark. Member of Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Works Lab and the New Georges Jam, alumna of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, Columbia University (BA), and Hunter (MFA).
The Garbologists is directed by Jessica Bird
Rough Reading Series 2018 Dates:
October 15 & 16
Lions by Jihan Crowther
November 12 & 13
Pulp Vérité by Crystal Skillman
December 3 & 4
In Our Bones by Alan Stewart
January 14 & 15
This Much I Know by Jonathan Spector
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February 11 & 12
Bastiano by Carey Perloff
March 11 & 12
Breakout Session (or Frogorse) by Nikkole Salter
April 8 & 9
The Supreme Leader by Don Nguyen
May 20 & 21
The Garbologists by Lindsay Joelle