In 2002, PlayGround launched its first full-length play commissioning programs, the June Anne Baker Prize and the PlayGround Fellowship. The June Anne Baker Prize, established by PlayGround supporter John H. Gilman in memory of his late wife, honors the top female playwright each year, representing a gifted new comedic or political voice for the stage, and includes a full-length play commission. The PlayGround Fellowship honors a distinguished PlayGround alumnus and also includes a full-length play commission. PlayGround additionally awards three Alumni Commissions per year to previously commissioned PlayGround playwrights. The resulting new works are presented as public staged readings as part of The Best of PlayGround Festival.
In 2006, PlayGround launched its Commissioning Initiative, through which PlayGround will commission and develop ten new full-length plays by PlayGround alumni over the next two years as well as create strategic partnerships to support full production of at least two of these works.
2007 Commissions
The Secrets of the World by Evelyn Pine
Lost in the funhouse of Inquisition Spain, four Taino Indians - paraded
by Columbus before Ferdinand and Isabella - vow to take on the empire. Evelyn
Pine’s comic adventure explores the idiocy of conquest and the limits
of language, violence, and hope.
The Singularity of We by Molly Rhodes
A mathematician must examine what he knows and what he can prove when faced
with a possible affair between his wife and a colleague of his, a theoretical
physicist. Will mathematics help him find the truth?
The Serving Class by Garret Jon Groenveld
A companion piece to The Grand Divorce, Groenveld's hilarious send-up
of the super rich, developed at the 2007 PlayGround Festival, this comedy
looks at those who live off the wealthy, gaining the patina of wealth by
association, and the precariousness of their situations.
Ditch by Geetha Reddy
In Ditch, Reddy explores a young man who narcissistically decides
that he is going to live the next year as if he has "one year to live."
But faced with the possibility his "prediction" may be coming
true and running out of time, he embarks on one last adventure.
A Seminar: Winning the Fight For Financial Freedom in Post-War,
Post-Bubble America (Prospectus Under Lamé Cover)! by Tom
Swift
When a technical malfunction combines a Power-Point Seminar on Financial
Planning with a Masters Presentation on the Musical Theater Canon of the
late Michael Bennett, a Certified Financial Planner from Fresno, California
is catapulted into a post-apocalyptic captialist underworld, where he finds
himself waging a pitched battle against the forces of economic evil. Can
our hero, John Smith, The Last Honest Financial Planner on the Planet, stop
The Evil Dr. Debt and his plan for world domination? Can he find love (and
economic stability) with the mysterious Chorus Boy? Can he write and produce
a three-act, multi-character, epic musical comedy, bring it in under budget
and save the world in the process? This musical comedy work-in-progress
seeks to answer these questions and more, while redefiining Power-Point
as a viable theatrical construct.
All 2007 commissions will be presented to the public as staged readings during the 2008 Best of PlayGround Festival, scheduled for May 2008. To sign up for updates on these readings and other festival activities through PlayGround's monthly email newsletter, click here.
For more information on these or other PlayGround-commissioned plays, contact
PlayGround Artistic Director Jim Kleinmann.