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.
1. Patricia Cotter
The Daughters
March 2018
About the play
“The Daughters” is a comedy about transformation, identity, gender, and sexuality. It explores two milestone moments in history, sixty years apart, from the founding of the Daughters of Bilitis (the first political and social club for gay women) in 1955 and the closing of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco in 2015. Two groups of very different women gather to dance, drink, fall in love, break up, talk politics and even though they don’t know it, change the world.
About Patricia Cotter
Patricia Cotter Awards include American Academy of Arts Letters, Richard Rodgers Award, three-time Heideman Award Finalist, Emmy Award. Plays include Drinking on A Plane performed as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s The Tens in 2018, Rules of Comedy which was produced in 2015 Humana Festival Ten-Minute Plays and The Anthropology Section, previously performed as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s The Tens in 2015. Other plays include 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson) Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre 2017, The Surrogate, production Centenary Stage Company, NJ, 2017 and The Break Up Notebook (a GLAAD Award nominee). Musicals (librettist/ adaptations) include Rocket Science: A Musical, received readings at Playwrights’ Horizons in New York (directed by Kathleen Marshall) and was produced at The Village Theatre, Seattle; The Break Up Notebook: A Musical (based on her play), at The Vineyard Theatre in New York and produced at Hudson Theatre, Los Angeles, and Mulan, Jr., based on the Disney film Mulan. She has written for Twentieth Century Fox Television, Disney Theatrical and Comedy Central. Patricia is a Resident Playwright at The Playwrights Foundation class of 2019.
• Member of Actor’s Equity Association
2. Tori Sampson
Cadillac Crew
February 2018
About the play
A lost narrative from the Civil Rights movement, Cadillac Crews were women who drove across the South, mobilizing other women to unite against segregation—risking their very lives along the way. In 1963 Virginia, four women join the fight for equality, only to find themselves also fighting for a voice within the movement itself. When Rachel’s plan for Rosa Parks to speak at a local rally is shot down, she finds that even her close friends question her opinions, arguing that female activists must accept subordinate roles to keep the movement unified. But new crises in their community galvanize all four women to find common ground and take action, and they decide to form a “Cadillac Crew” of their own. Inspired by this invisible aspect of Civil Rights history, Playwright Tori Sampson reflects on the importance of black women in the fight for equality and asks us to consider the implications of their erasure from these movements.
About Tori Sampson
Tori is a Boston playwright living in Minneapolis. Her plays include If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must be a Muhfucka, THIS LAND WAS MADE (Vineyard Theater 2018 developmental Lab), CADILLAC CREW, Where Butterflies go in the Winter and Some Bodies Travel. Her plays have been developed at Great Plains National Theater Conference, Berkeley Repertory Theater’s The Ground Floor residency program, Victory Garden’s IGNITION festival and UBUNTU theater. Tori is a 2017-18 Playwright’s Center Jerome Fellow. Two of her plays appeared on the 2017 Kilroys List and she holds an Honorable Mention from the 2016 Relentless Award. She is the Kennedy Center’s 2016 Paula Vogel Playwright and second-place Lorraine Hansberry recipient. She is a 2017 finalist for the Alliance Theater’s Kendeda Prize. Tori is currently working on commissions from Berkeley Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, and Atlantic Theater Company. She holds a B.S. in sociology from Ball State University and an MFA in playwriting from Yale School of Drama.
3. E. Hunter Spreen
Care of Trees
January 2018
About the play
How do you care for something fragile and spectacular without understanding the rules? What happens when your partner takes a path that you simply cannot follow? Deeply moving and mysterious, Care of Trees is an elegiac consideration of love, life and the eternal that integrates live performance, sound and video.
About E. Hunter Spreen
E. Hunter Spreen is a writer and independent theater artist. She enjoys engaging and exchanging ideas with artists, makers and thinkers across disciplines. Her work includes performance, communal gatherings, facilitated investigations, broadsides and experimental texts. She is a playwright in residence with Playwrights Foundation’s four-year Resident Playwright Initiative. Her work has been developed or produced by Crowded Fire, Playwrights Foundation, Shotgun Players and Paducah Mining Company. This past summer, she developed and performed portions of her Dumb Puppy performance cycle as part of a two-week residency at Flugwerk in Berlin.
4. Michael Gene Sullivan
fugitive/slave/act
December 2017
About the play
William Parker is an intelligent, passionate Black man who – with his wife Eliza and their children – leases a small farm near the little town of Christiana, southern Pennsylvania. Living so close to the Maryland border should be unexceptional – except that the year is 1850, William and Eliza are both escaped slaves, and Maryland is a slave state. Even in the free state of Pennsylvania life for runaway slaves is tenuous, but after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act – wherein any U.S. citizen is law-bound to aid in the capture of escaped “property” – William, his family, and the may other escaped slaves in the community live under the constant threat of being betrayed by their law-abiding neighbors, and dragged back to slavery. So when the community hears of a party of slave-owners coming North to re-capture some escapees now living on his farm William must decide between running further North, or standing his ground.
Edward Gorsuch, Maryland slave-owner, searches southern Pennsylvania for two of his slaves. An honest, God-fearing man, Gorsuch does not suffer fools or cowards lightly, and has a strong sense of right and wrong. With his beloved son, Davidson, and a U.S. Marshall, he has come North on what he feels is a righteous quest for his legal “property,” and simply wants his slaves to accept their circumstances as ordained by the Lord, and to return to their senses – and his plantation.
Based on a true story fugitive/slave/act is about the confrontation – which turns from capture to bloody battle – the resulting trial for murder and treason, and the national hysteria that almost started the United States Civil War a decade early.
About Michael Gene Sullivan
Michael Gene Sullivan is award winning actor, director, and playwright. Based in San Francisco Michael’s plays have been produced at theaters throughout the United States, in Greece, England, Germany, Scotland, Spain, Columbia, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, as well as at the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Australia), the International Festival of Verbal Art (Berlin), The Spoleto Festival, (Italy), and The Hong Kong Arts Festival. For the past 16 years Michael has been Resident Playwright for the Tony and OBIE award-winning (and despite its name never, ever silent) San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he has written or co-written over 20 plays. He is also a Resident Playwright for the Playwrights Foundation, and was awarded a 2017 artist residency at the Djerassi Arts Center. Michael’s non-Mime Troupe plays include the award-winning all-woman political farce Recipe, Red Carol, (his activist adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), his critically-acclaimed one person show, Did Anyone Ever Tell You-You Look Like Huey P. Newton?, and his stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, which opened at Los Angeles’ Actors’ Gang Theatre under the direction of Academy Award winning actor Tim Robbins. 1984 has since been produced nationally and internationally, is published in the United States, Canada, and Spain, and in 2017 will open in Kiev, Ukraine, and Amsterdam, Netherlands, its fourth and fifth languages.
5. Liz Duffy Adams
Dear Alien
A play for one person, a comedic farse of epic tragedy
November 2017
About the play
A reclusive shambles of an advice columnist known as Dear Alien is under the gun: in danger of eviction, he or she (the part may be played by either) is desperate to turn in a book of columns and get the advance, but the agonizing sameness of the questions is an existential obstacle—and the deadline was yesterday. In the process, their advice and invective reveals prescient insight into the foibles and potentially lethal dangers lurking within banal contemporary life.
Liz Duffy Adams’s work has been produced Off Broadway at Women’s Project Theater, and at Magic Theater, Seattle Rep, and Humana Festival among other places. Publications include Dog Act in “Geek Theater: Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy Plays” (Underwords Press 2014) and Or, in “Best Plays of 2010” (Smith & Kraus); honors include a Lillian Hellman Award, Will Glickman Award, and New Dramatists residency. More at www.lizduffyadams.com.
6. CARIDAD SVICH
Fuel
May 2018
About the play
You live in a place that reeks of gasoline. You run on fuel. You don’t know anything else except living hard and surviving, but one day that fuel is gonna run out. How are you gonna know who you are, then? This is the story of Baby and their people living in a town left for dead. This is also the ballad of Baby and Girl in this mad America.
About Caridad Svich
Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2017-18 Visiting Fellow at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based Isabel Allende’s novel. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times. Key works in her repertoire include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, and Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues. Her play RED BIKE is currently receiving an NNPN rolling world premiere 2018 into 2019. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez and Jose Leon Sanchez, and has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. As a theatrical translator she has translated nearly all of the plays of Federico Garcia Lorca, and works by Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, and contemporary works from Spain, Mexico and Cuba. She has also edited several books on theatre and performance, among them Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft (Methuen Drama, 2017) and Audience Revolution (TCG, 2016). She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, contributing editor of Contemporary Theatre Review, drama editor of Asymptote literary translation journal, contributing editor of TheatreForum and an affiliated artist of EST, Lark and New Georges. She is currently under commission from American Conservatory Theatre, Cleveland Opera Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and teaches playwriting at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Primary Stages Einhorn School of the Arts.