TheatreSquared has announced the lineup of new plays for the 2024 Arkansas New Play Festival (ANPF). New plays presented in staged reading presentations will include Eugene Onegin by Sarah Gancher, Have to Believe We Are Magic by Sara Guerrero, Edi Ya & Diamond’s Ak Payne’s Grove and Malcolm X and Redd Foxx washing dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Jonathan’s Harlem. Norton. Additional special screenings include LatinX Theater Project’s 2024 Arkansas Young Playwrights Showcase, Sherlock Holmes: The Timbers Family File, and Sarah’s ANPF Apprentice Showcase of Songs for Drunk Cowboys Who May Also Be Women: An Anti-Musical (For Fools Only). Locks.
Performances will take place in Bentonville at Ovations Plus, formerly Trike Theater (902 SW 2nd St., Bentonville), in Springdale at Medium (214 S. Main St., Springdale) and in Fayetteville at TheatreSquared (477 W. Spring St . ., Fayetteville). The new Play Passes, which grant access to all performances, are now on sale for $50. Passes can be reserved by calling (479) 777-7477 or visiting arkansasnewplayfest.com.
Now in its 16th year, the Arkansas New Play Festival has helped incubate the development of more than 75 new works. Join a series of innovative new works. As well as watching/attending the performances, you are also invited to hear the playwrights talk about their process and share your own thoughts with the creative team, and help shape new works from scratch. Through the Festival, TheatreSquared seeks to give voice to playwrights whose timely and relevant stories resonate with the moment we live in: in Arkansas, in middle America, and as a nation.
“In recent seasons in particular, many of the plays presented at ANPF have had major productions and received awards,” says Singleton. “More recently, Candrice Jones’ FLEX, which premiered last summer at Lincoln Center with an all-star cast after co-premiering in T2 and developing at ANPF a few summers ago.”
Another example: TheatreSquared’s flagship season will close with a June 5-30 world premiere of Arkansas playwright Joseph Scott Ford’s dark comedy Responders, which played at the 2022 Arkansas New Play Festival. Tickets are available at theatre2 .org/responders. As part of this year’s festival, Ford will lead a playwriting workshop in conjunction with the Fayetteville Public Library on June 18 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. This event will be free and open to the public, but registration is required on the FPL website.
“When you’re a writer and you’re working on these things in a vacuum, or maybe sharing them with a handful of people along the way, just to get that kind of positive enthusiasm and support from a team of artists, it’s hard to overstate how much useful as this is in itself,” says Ford. “All kinds of little moments appear. They may be little words, they may be little words, but it’s like tightening all the screws: ‘Hey, do we need to add a moment here? Do we need to cut this moment there?’ All of these things can happen because the talent and intelligence is so high in the room. This is probably a process that could take months, but because of the caliber of people that TheaterSquared put in the room, it’s accelerating all of that in a rapid manner. .really useful way.”
Comments
To post a comment, you must register and log in.
Keynote USA
For the Latest Local News, Follow Keynote USA Local on Twitter.