My dad called his hospital bed his throne. He’d take up space with a kingly energy, but I’d tease him for being more jester-like—making jokes and dancing, seated, from starched sheets. He’d pout as I called him a troublemaker for flirting with the nurses, then quickly pivoted to praising me for my organization as I pulled his medical documents out of the Ziploc bag we traveled with.
Memories of these moments, both bitter and sweet, flooded me as I experienced the Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF) at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, early this month. On the surface, the five staged readings and two full productions were connected by families, blood and found, surviving impossible decisions and circumstances. On a deeper level, the core of these plays centered grief in motion, anticipated and fresh, from the perspectives of teens, husbands, wives, queers, aliens, animals, even a hallucinated Greta Thunberg.
Andy Knight, PPF co-director and director of new play programs of The Lab@SCR, told me he was excited to present “a wide range of plays where all stories are told very differently, through different modalities, through different points of view.” This commitment was made tangible in a curation that highlighted a range of lived experience across generations and locations.
One stop is Rachel, Nevada, where a speedy new play of the same name by jose sebastian alberdi is set. The loss of a son for one means the loss of a best friend for another, and results in the deepening of an eyebrow-raising relationship. A road trip to the popular UFO site maneuvers through identity, lost and found, and the desire to be taken, by aliens and otherwise.
“This is a play that’s been giving me a lot of trouble for a very long time,” alberdi said with a laugh in an interview. SCR was the first LORT theatre to ever give him a commission, back in 2023—and then pass on the result. “After my first reading here, everyone was like, ‘We love the play. We don’t think it’s right for the theatre.’ That’s a normal thing that every playwright hears a lot.” What surprised alberdi is that SCR continued to invest in him despite that rejection, eventually leading to the PPF programming of rachel, nevada. “The field is really difficult and contracting,” alberdi said. “To have consistent support is super lucky.”
Indeed, SCR’s pipeline of commissions to readings and productions is intentional, as both of the world premieres running as full productions as part of PPF began as readings in prior festivals. And when SCR commits, they go all in.
For example, Noa Gardner’s warm yet heart-wrenching play The Staircase, in a full production at SCR, got its start there as a commission and was part of the 2023 PPF (with the earlier title A Small Man). As Gardner said he’s interested in making foundational pieces of Hawaiian theatre, finding ways to experiment across “cultural storytelling, hula, chanting, music, language, and mythology,” he was adamant that his story was told “with a lot of integrity.” So the theatre committed to investing in a cross-Pacific team that could produce his play with cultural specificity and intention. Gardner gives credit to dramaturg and music director Mehanaokala Hind for “shaping the final product of the play,” particularly with her guidance around drumming, chanting, and language. To produce such a work at PPF speaks to the breadth of SCR’s desire to showcase narratives from rarely examined points of view.
The Staircase, with characters named Mother and Son, creates its own lore, as the loving duo falls into nightly rituals of card-playing and storytelling. As Mother’s mind starts to go, grief clouds her reality as Son struggles to keep her safe and rooted in reality. Their Hawaiian home creaks under storms, and each packed corner hosts items we wish we could hear more about. Central is the eponymous staircase, which dance-like sequences transform, as each step up or down can be full of play or power.
South Coast Rep is situated across from South Coast Plaza, one of the largest malls in the country, in Costa Mesa, one of the most expensive cities to live in. Though industry professionals from across the country fly in for the festival, audience members chiefly comprise the theatre’s local patrons. Considering such a wealthy demographic, rooted in a historically conservative region, PPF’s curation of plays has a potential for meaningful expansion of worldviews—or at least a tangible way to showcase how urgent the lives of families can be at more extreme intersections of survival. In ways that feel surprisingly compelling, each play at PPF this year uniquely shone along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality, etc., rather than shying away from specificity in an attempt for universality. This year’s slate felt like real plays about real loss.
In The Red Man by JuCoby Johnson, twins, once inseparable, now estranged, meet again in a Florida swamp, but it’s not a happy or even intentional reunion. Caretaking for their abusive parent had fallen to the already struggling Jacqueline, whose world is gators and gossip until her brother—and the cops looking for him—appear in short succession. The horror play unfolds with laughs and twists, as questions of freedom, finances, and the possibility of starting over close in on them. And queerness strikes as Jacqueline and one of the cops fall into a relationship the state might not approve of.
Ever-present, a ghost of their late father hums and wheezes, sometimes a visceral presence, almost stepping into their reality. What is so complicated here is equally heart-wrenching: As the needs of an elder increase, he softens—but this doesn’t erase a harsh past. We see Jaqueline’s empathy and capacity stretched to the limit, and are left to witness the toll, until it’s too much.
The stories of elders are rarely centered, but in Jake Brasch’s Trip Around the Sun, we meet a retired couple, a pair of Jimmy Buffet fans, soaking up their not-so-sunny routine and margaritas at a retirement community in Florida. Their attachment to each other is clear and sometimes cringe-worthy, as jokes span the raunchy and the morbid. A little age difference sets the husband and wife up for tough conversations as Phil grows frustrated with his skipping memory and Suze is satisfied to plan for their cruise to celebrate her birthday.
As with the aforementioned plays, Trip reckons with the extent to which we can live or die with agency, and what happens to those we love in the process. A deftly written song-and-dance sequence dresses up what is hard to swallow, as a heavenly montage reminds us to indulge in the days we have left.
As PPF co-director Knight told me, when audiences are “coming to see seven new plays back to back over three days,” it’s “integral, from an artistic standpoint, that nothing you’re seeing feels the same to what you’ve seen before.” One can’t help but compare the plays, however, and search for what connects them.
Eat Me, by Talene Monahan, also preaches on the power of living in the moment and welcoming indulgence, as it swirls eating disorders and desire into a slow-cooked meditation. A maybe-mid-30s Chris and a maybe-in-her-70s Cindy are roommates with a rhythm: He’s fixated on the gourmet, and she’s satisfied with a Coke. Both dabble in queer desire and vaguely reminisce about meals and lovers, while Chris repeatedly interrupted by notifications from the Reddit thread r/gourmet_gourmands, where the food-enamored relate their otherworldly meals crumb by crumb.
The play is a testament to the ways we feed ourselves and perhaps alienate each other. Small comments on the what and how of nourishment do gradual harm that chips away until one crumbles—and no one is immune. Not the pregnant lesbian, nor her marathon-training wife. What strikes through clearly is just how personal, and often difficult, one’s relationship to food can be. A range of eating habits, on view before us—served so matter-of-factly—demanded quiet reflection.
How language lands on us, and the option of silence, are explored in Ten Grand by Kate Cortesi. Set in a Boston Goodwill, the play introduces us to a small crew of workers with big personalities. Their manager’s deep care and consideration makes their transgressions and gaffes that much more palatable, as they are entertained and challenged by customers with their own agendas.
As the PPF festival serves as a pipeline to full productions, this script shows great promise, buckling us in for a workplace sitcom but quickly delivering so much more. The imperfection of humans trying their best to show up for themselves, each other, and offstage families is a wild ride peppered with grief and care.
Seen in its closing weekend, Keiko Green’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! provided a sort of proof of concept for the entire PPF festival. This full production already had a long developmental history of readings and workshops when it entered the SCR pipeline via last summer’s PPF (indeed, it was first commissioned by Seattle Rep). But once it cleared that hurdle, it was on its way to the mainstage.
Called by Green an attempt to “wrap my head around the significance of a person,” the play follows a family dealing with a father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, but it is styled to feel like an event. Otherworldly sequences come by way of dance and drag, mostly centering climate catastrophe, as dying patriarch Greg’s newfound commitment to (obsession with) environmental justice only fractures the family further. His wife wants him home to rest, while their trans kid continues to feel unseen, despite Greg’s efforts to connect on drag culture and music. The result is a wrecking ball of emotions, as we contemplate both the slow death of a charming, endearing dad and of our one and only Earth.
The threat of extinction looms on other levels. As Green said of PPF, “We have fewer and fewer of these festivals around the country right now, and even fewer of those that people actually fly in to come see.” She admitted that a production in New York still remains any industrious playwright’s goal, but added, “These regional theatres are really putting in the work to make sure that it doesn’t just become, like, one dream that gets realized.” Instead, a theatre like SCR is resourcing intentional teams for the rehearsal room while investing in an ongoing commissions infrastructure.
As the National Endowment of the Arts is in the midst of evisceration by the Trump administration, the future of new plays is under further duress. (An NEA grant in the early days of SCR helped to fund its staff’s growth, but they recently lost $20,000 in the recent round of grant cancellation.) While festivals and new-work incubators contract, SCR still averages around 50 play commissions a year, and in PPF they host a festival where playwrights are invited to help build their room, with collaborators they’d like to work with. Such agency and resources to create are not taken lightly as similar opportunities continue to diminish.
Playwright Gardner admitted he “didn’t even know what a literary manager was” when Knight approached him offering a SCR commission. This commitment to fostering even the most emerging of playwrights provides a beacon of hope for artists weathering what looks like the continued collapse of our industry.
The only theatre my late father experienced was productions I worked on. But there were so many moments throughout PPF I wished I could turn and point and say, “See? That’s us.” So many colors of grief and caregiving rendered across various realities did something for my heart that I truthfully did not come equipped to sit with. My memories stared back at me from the stage, even a dying parent with the same diagnosis my dad faced. That recognition is its own powerful argument for work like this to continue, to live, at all stages of development.
Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel (she/they) is a Chicago-based dramaturg, arts journalist, and cultural producer. Learn more at yasminzacaria.com and follow them on socials @yasminzacaria, a.k.a. dramaturgically it tracks, or Substack BIYA BIYA.
This coverage was made possible by a travel grant from Critical Minded.
