About The Pitch

People would sacrifice anything to work with star investor May Lee. When May meets an entrepreneur that radiates talent it’s her turn to decide what must be sacrificed in the name of making her mark. Aaron Loeb brings psychological suspense to the world of Silicon Valley as characters explore purpose, identity, success, playing the game, and who you can trust.

About Aaron Loeb

Aaron Loeb’s work has been performed around the world. His full-length plays include Ideation (which premiered Off Broadway in 2016), The Trials of Sam Houston, The Proud, Brown, First Person Shooter, Blastosphere (with Geetha Reddy), and Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party (Off-Broadway premiere in 2010). Loeb received the Will Glickman award for Best New Play in the Bay Area for Ideation in 2013. He is the resident playwright of San Francisco Playhouse and a member of the Dramatists Guild, Inc.

About Bill English

About the play

In Northern Virginia, sisters Eugenia and Mercedes Silva are surrounded by old friends and lovers as Eugenia fights for endorsement on her primary campaign for a seat in the Virginia General Assembly, hoping to join the wave of women of color elected to public office. As a storm brews outside, the sisters must confront how traditional Latino family values conflict with an American definition of success that is always changing.  An experimental play that explores how fragmented identity can tear you apart.

About Noelle Viñas

Noelle Viñas is a Uruguayan-American playwright, educator, and theater-artist from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation and a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her play Derecho was a Finalist for the 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and a Madison New Works Lab Residency at JMU; a Semi-Finalist for the 2019 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship and the Premiere Stages Play Festival, and an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Jane Chambers Award. La profesora, her one-woman show starring Virginia Blanco, was produced by TheatreFirst and is in development for a podcast called Abuelito with We Rise Production. Earlier works Nevermind and Apocalypse, Please were self-produced in Boston and San Francisco. An Emerson College alumna, she has performed, written/directed plays, taught, and produced with many theaters including ArtsEmerson, Arena Stage, GALA Hispanic Theatre, PianoFight, Apollinaire Theater, TheatreFirst, Shotgun Players, Berkeley Rep, and is a company member of Ubuntu Theater Project. Viñas is currently attending Brooklyn College for her Playwriting MFA and a teaching artist with the social justice non-profit People’s Theatre Project in Upper Manhattan.

About the play

In TRUEST, Sam Shepard meets Thelma and Louise when we find two sisters in a kitchen, smoking guns in hand, standing over a pair of brothers who they’ve just shot dead. As these women chase their own uniquely twisted American dream in a landscape of canonical corpses, they dance an intricate psychological duet across a surreal terrain of luck, danger, slapstick, trauma, laughter, and yearning. In this delightfully upsetting comic grapple by an emerging feminist playwright, we follow a pair of sisters on their brutal hunt in search of tenderness. “Nobody ever said utopia would be easy.”

About Megan Cohen

“In the sui generis mind of theater artist Megan Cohen, silliness intermingles with oh-no-she-didn’t moxie; searing smarts blend seamlessly with surreal reverie and a bottomless capacity for feeling.” -San Francisco Chronicle

Megan Cohen (b. 1983) is a playwright and opera librettist based in San Francisco, CA. Her next production is FREE FOR ALL: A NEW MISS JULIE FOR A NEW WORLD commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, CA for a world premiere in Sept 2019. Her scripts have enjoyed over a hundred readings, workshops, and productions.

Called “a ruthless innovator” (SF Weekly), “funny, erudite, and poignant” (Poetry Monthly), and “one insightful and confident woman with a devilish sense of humor” (Huffington Post), she’s been cited in SF Bay Guardian’s “Best of the Bay” and was honored with a Theater Bay Area “Eye On” Emerging Artist award. Recent artistic partners include Berkeley Rep, The Southbank Centre in London, American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.’s currently commissioned by Houston Grand Opera’s HGOco “Song of Houston” program with composer Nell Shaw Cohen to write TURN AND BURN, a feminist rodeo opera inspired by the lives of modern-day cowgirls, which will premiere in 2021.

Full production history and expanded bio at www.megancohen.com

About the play

Using the tragic 2017 Las Vegas shooting as a point of departure, Emmylu explores how Trumpism appeals to many people of color, specifically immigrants of color.  At the center of the play is Perla Robles, a dutiful Filipina housewife, who is forced to reconcile her political beliefs with her family loyalty when the President goes after her daughter.

About Boni B. Alvarez

BONI B. ALVAREZ – A native of the SF Bay Area, Boni is a Los Angeles-based playwright-actor.  His plays include America Adjacent, Bloodletting, Fixed, Nicky, Dallas Non-Stop, Dusty de los Santos, Driven, and Ruby, Tragically Rotund.  His plays have been produced at Center Theatre Group – Kirk Douglas Theatre, Echo Theater Company, Coeurage Theatre Company, Skylight Theatre Company, Theatre Rhinoceros, and Playwrights’ Arena.  He has been a Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project, and Clubbed Thumb’s Biennial Commission. He is currently in Skylight Theatre’s PlayLAb and Geffen Playhouse Writers’ Room.  He is an Adjunct Lecturer at USC and a Resident Playwright of New Dramatists.

About the play

SIDE EFFECTS travels back to 2009 in order to better interrogate the present as it relates to the American Dream, gentrification, and the marijuana industry. 

The play follows two very different (weed smoking) households in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. On one street we find a married couple struggling to start a family in their newly purchased home. On another street we’re introduced to a mother and daughter in the process of rebuilding their relationship upon the daughter’s return home from a marijuana-related prison sentence. This play asks us to consider where exactly do privilege and hope intersect—and to what effect?

About Star Finch

Star Finch is a native San Franciscan trying her best to hold ground amidst the erasure of gentrification. She’s a member of Campo Santo Theater Company and a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation. Her plays include H.O.M.E. [Hookers on Mars Eventually]and BONDAGE (Princess Grace Award semifinalist, Relentless Award honorable mention). She was also the lead writer on the collaborative performance piece Babylon is Burning, a loose adaptation of Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop; and on Death Become Life: Banish Darkness, a collaboration with AXIS Dance, Ensemble Mik Nawooj, and Crowded Fire Theater. Finch has also contributed to various collaborative projects including TheaterFirst’s PARTICIPANTS and Campo Santo’s ETHOS DE MASQUERADE. She’s held residencies in Crowded Fire’s R&D LAB and AlterTheater’s Alter Lab. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission in Theater.

About Sean San José

Sean San José is co-founder of Campo Santo, the award-winning resident theater company of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. Program Director of Theatre for Intersection for the Arts, San José has helped create and curate a new program called the Hybrid Project, formed to bring together artists of all genres, merging differing and emerging styles of performance in order to find a new performance language. He has been awarded one of the Audrey Skirball-Kennis TIME Grant Awards to support the development of his new work. He has also been awarded a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission, two residencies at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from the Wattis Artist Residency, a Bay Area Critics’ Circle Award, the DramaLogue Award, Backstage West, the Cable Car Award, and the Bay Guardian Goldie Artistic Achievement in Theatre Award. Productions he has conceived, created and produced have also garnered numerous awards in excellence, including; the Bay Area Reporter Best of the Season, Cable Car Award, DramaLogue and Bay Area Critics’ Circle Award.