Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Adding A Little Arkansas
New Play Festival enjoys new perspectives
TheatreSquared’s artistic director, Robert Ford, says that the planning for the theater’s 11th annual New Play Festival — which kicks off on March 29 — started the day after last year’s festival closed.
“Even during it, we were thinking about who we would like to invite out,” says Ford. “We have a network now. All of the playwrights who have been here before, playwrights that I know, that [executive director] Martin [Miller] knows, through other theaters — we have a wide network, and we have feelers out all of the time for exciting new playwrights and exciting new plays that more seasoned playwrights might be working on.”
This year’s line-up offers a mix of experienced and emerging playwrights that includes Bryna Turner, Adrienne Dawes, Na’Tosha De’Von, Rachel Lynett and LatinX Theatre Project, a Northwest Arkansas theater collective. T2 and LatinX announced an artistic affiliation, supported by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, that will start with the New Play Festival.
“We’re getting to bring in Rebecca Rivas to work with this company,” says Miller. Rivas, co-founder and artistic director for the Chican@/ Latin@ Theatre Series in El Paso, is coming on board as the LatinX Theatre Project’s program director and an artistic associate for TheatreSquared. “They’re testing the limits of this devised work. The fact that they’ll be our workshop production this year, moving from being part of the festival to being, almost, the focus of our closing weekend, coinciding with bringing on an artist that we love — that is a really exciting story in and of itself. We’ll be working with LatinX very closely over the next few years, and it’s very clear we’ll learn as much from them as they learn from us.”
The festival allows the visiting playwrights to focus on a work-inprogress for two weeks, working with a director and actors as they shape their play. Playwrights have two opportunities to present a public reading of their play to a live audience, the two performances a week apart. This gives them time to take into consideration the audience’s reaction to the first reading and, if they desire, to make changes before the second reading.
Miller and Ford agree that the lowkey atmosphere of the festival is a perfect backdrop for productivity.
“There’s a wonderful sense of [complementary interplay] between these intensely urban environments, where there’s so much hustle and bustle and a lot of theater in the air, and a place where there’s kind of a freshness to the audience — an audience that is sophisticated about their theater but is bringing a fresh perspective that is highly valued by playwrights and producers,” says Ford. “We’ve been trading on that for a while now. They come on out here and get away from that cacophony and get to be themselves a little bit among some very high-quality artists.”
“You don’t have to feel pressure that someone is there to judge your work,” adds Miller. “You have all the indications that people are coming with totally open minds to listen and give feedback, people who are excited to be a part of it. A new work is a very vulnerable thing, and Northwest Arkansas is a place that respects that and meets the playwright where they are in their process.”
The New Play Festival, agree Ford and Miller, is integral to what T2 hopes to do as a theatrical institution.
“Speaking regionally, I think there’s a lot of interest in asserting something that has always been true — and that is, art comes from Arkansas,” says Miller. “Art comes from Northwest Arkansas, and there’s something favorable about it originating here. When something is of this place, it has a particular value to the people who live here, and it says something to the people who don’t. So originating work in Northwest Arkansas and putting our imprint on work that is on its way elsewhere really is another litmus test for existence as a place.”