Looking for entertainment at a different volume than Fiesta frivolities? Consider the annual Ojai Playwrights Conference (OPC) New Works Festival, August 1-4. This year’s five participating playwrights will spend several weeks at the Ojai Conference, developing their fresh material with a team of professional theater creatives. In the final days of the conference, the plays will be brought to life as staged readings, born from the page to thrive (or perish) as a living dramatic work.
The plays include stories about the bonds of love and family, and explorations about control over one’s body. Alex Lin’s barren. is about an OB/GYN with fertility issues. “One in seven women starting families will experience a miscarriage in their lifetime, and yet, it’s almost never discussed,” says Lin about the impetus for writing her play. “I thought that was weird.”
Nigerian American storyteller Mfoniso Udofia’s The Ceremony is about generational tension between a father and son; Lee Cataluna’s Thursdays Come at Morning builds a relationship between two men working through grief; and Christina Pumariega’s ¡VOS! is a journey of creating new life against the memory of those lost to state terrorism in Argentina.
Finally, Libby Carr’s Calf Scramble explores the idea of the body as a commodity. “I was curious about what I saw as a mirrored relationship between Southern girlhood and the lives of show cattle,” says Carr. “I kept envisioning that the girls in the play would also play each other’s calves — so everyone is always both caretaker and animal. I wanted to know how the experience of claiming power and ownership over an animal might change an Evangelical teenager’s understanding of their community, their body, and God.”
Producing Artistic Director Jeremy Cohen, in his second year at OPC, continues to bring his passion for new stories, voices, and representation to the programming. “It’s crucial to create new work because theater as an art form exists to push up against, reflect, challenge, laugh with, and invite in so much of what our world is facing,” he says. “We wouldn’t only look to Monet or Van Gogh or Robert Frost for the one and only way to see the world; we needed Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí and Basquiat and Zaha Hadid to give us new ways of understanding form and shape and story.” “The classic ‘tent poles’ of American theater were all new plays once, and theaters and audiences took risks on them,” says Hannah Wolf, Senior Artistic Producer. “The Ojai Playwrights Conference gives audiences a rare look into the development of the new canon of American theater.”
Witness the first steps of potential future classics at the Ojai Playwrights Conference’s 27th Annual New Works Festival, August 1-4, at Milligan Center for the Performing Arts at The Thacher School (5025 Thacher Rd., Ojai). See ojaiplays.org.
