PHILADELPHIA: PlayPenn will present its 13th annual new-play conference at the Drake Theatre July 11-30. The conference will include workshops and public readings of six plays, additional readings of works-in-progress, forums for artists, and monologues written by past conference playwrights.
The six plays for the 2017 conference are:
- Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane, about a patient at a psychiatric facility for negroes who is asked to help two new patients escape.
- Hard Cell by Brent Askari, a comedy about an Iranian-American professor whose car breaks down during a cross-country road trip.
- Galilee by Christine Evans, about the competing pressures of climate change and economic survival in a small Australian coastal town on the Great Barrier Reef.
- C.A. Johnson’s Thirst, about a couple living in the woods who become in conflict with their political leader when their son is unable to gather the family’s water rations during war-time.
- With by Carter William Lewis, about a couple whose worlds straddle both hysterical and heartbreaking as they live out their final days.
- Jonathan Norton’s penny candy, about a family-run candy store in 1988 that is struggling to compete as a crack epidemic ravages in the neighborhood.
The six conference playwrights were selected from a pool of more than 800 applicants. This year’s participants are from both the United States and Australia. In the final review stage, this year’s playwrights were chosen from a group of 12 finalists which also included Matthew Capodicasa (The City in the City in the City), Angela Joy Davis (The Spanish Prayer Book), Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (One of the Women), Deneen Danielle Reynolds-Knott (Baton), Andrew Lawrence Rosendorf (Paper Cut), and James Anthony Tyler (Stewart and Lamb).