Bay Area Playwrights Festival celebrates 40th anniversary.
Given how much he’s accomplished since 2002 — the impressive string of playwriting awards, the prestigious James Baldwin Fellowship, not to mention being described by the New Yorker at age 32 as the “heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams” — Marcus Gardley says it’s “really something to remember how new I was to everything about being a playwright” when he submitted, “on a whim,” a draft of one of his early plays to San Francisco’s Playwrights Foundation 15 years ago.
“Like Sun Fallin’ in the Mouth,” written during Gardley’s first year at Yale Drama School, was one of six plays (along with works that year by Mac Wellman and Liz Duffy Adams) accepted into the foundation’s prestigious Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
One of the nation’s oldest festivals celebrating new plays, serving as an incubator and presenter of newly written, unfinished plays, BAPF celebrates its 40th anniversary July 13-23 with a diverse slate of six ambitious works by rising, as well as more established, playwrights.
“I’d never worked with a director or a dramaturge, or experienced how actors can be used to help improve writing” before that first “magical” BAPF experience, says Gardley, 39, now one of this country’s most prolific playwrights. “Amy (Mueller, Playwrights Foundation artistic director) embraced my work, and then everything started coming together.”
The staged readings of “Like Sun,” set in Gardley’s native Oakland, led to a Shotgun Players commission and sparked interest from other theaters, effectively launching the poet-turned-playwright’s flourishing career. He now lives in Los Angeles and is writing a Showtime series and a movie based on abolitionist John Brown with fellow East Bay native Cary Fukunaga.
Gardley’s success story was unusually swift compared with the customary writer’s saga of rejections, yet it’s remarkably familiar among the impressive number of nationally significant playwrights who over the past four decades have had their first professional experiences at BAPF.
The festival’s impressive track record of discovery dates all the way back to its founding by Eureka Theatre cofounder Robert Woodruff. His inaugural festival included a one-act by newcomer Sam Shepard, who returned to the festival in 1983.
Since then, the staggering list of well-known playwrights whose early work was developed at BAPF includes Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Annie Baker and Paula Vogel, MacArthur Fellowship winner Anna Deavere Smith, Tony recipient David Henry Hwang, Claire Chafee, Liz Duffy Adams, Aaron Loeb, Christopher Chen, Lauren Yee, Katori Hall (“The Mountaintop,” BAPF 2008) and Rajiv Joseph prior to their Broadway debuts, as well as many others.
“Sometimes a writer’s voice just soars right off the page,” says Mueller, who has led the foundation for the past 16 years. “It’s the singularity of their voice, that spark, that we’re always looking for.”
Mueller attributes the festival’s success and national renown (it has become a model for other “writer-centric” festivals around the country) in part to the excitement it generates among Bay Area audiences hoping they might happen upon a work-in-progress by the next great American dramatic voice.
“There’s no question we have audience members thinking, This might be the next Shepard,” says Mueller. “I remember a friend who called me right after hearing George Brant’s ‘Grounded’ (BAPF 2012), which later ended up on Broadway (starring Anne Hathaway, directed by
Julie Taymor). She’s not a theater person, but she was beside herself that she’d heard something she knew would be big. And it was.”
“You can tell during the festival how much people enjoy feeling they’re in on the ground floor of the creative process,” says Brant from his home in Cleveland. “The festival’s format is so helpful, to start with a retreat outside the city (this year in Bolinas) and then have your play in front of an audience twice, with a week off in between to tinker.”
This year’s six plays, selected from 500 submissions, “are connected by their grappling with larger social issues, such as the great divide we’re feeling, but through the very personal lens of relationships — among family, between immigrants, across class,” says Mueller.
The 40th BAPF includes: “Magic City,” a Miami-set adaptation of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” by Hilary Bettis (who writes for television’s “The Americans”); Clarence Coo’s “The Birds of Empathy” about an avian-obsessed, socially awkward gay man; “Damascus,” a “road rage thriller” by Bennett Fisher about a Somali airporter driver; Lauren Gunderson’s pop music-infused “The Fatales;” the futuristic, dystopian “Endangered Species,” by Nilan Johnson; and Mona Mansour’s experimental “We Swim, We Talk, We Go To War,” about an Arab American woman’s relationship with her nephew.
Gunderson, 35, who lives in San Francisco and was the most-produced living American playwright of 2016, says a BAPF reading of her 2011 play “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” “made the play jump to life. It was an incredible transformation.”
Just as important as the artistic jump-start, says Gunderson, is the fact that “all my connections in the Bay Area, which is now this great big cohort of complementary people, started because of that first experience.”
Her new play, “The Fatales,” is a “funny play and a surprisingly weird one for me. It has a lot of music, which is the biggest challenge. I really don’t know how it will work out, but it’s exciting to have the time to play with tone and know that we’ll figure it out.”