PlayGround Announces 2nd Annual WomenArts Night!

PlayGround and WomenArts are partnering once again on “WomenArts Night,” a special Monday Night PlayGround evening featuring short plays that will celebrate women in the arts and exemplify gender parity in theatre. The topic for this year’s WomenArts Night will be announced next Friday, March 11 and PlayGround writers will have four days to generate their original ten-minute scripts inspired by the topic. The top six plays will be performed on the set of Berkeley Rep’s current show on Monday, March 21 at 8pm at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  Tickets and discount flex passes for Monday Night PlayGround can be purchased online at http://playground-sf.org/boxoffice.

Each month, PlayGround announces a topic to the thirty-six playwrights in the PlayGround Writers Pool and the writers have four-and-a-half days to generate original ten-minute scripts inspired by the topic. Recent topics have included: “A Very Hitchcock Christmas,” “Artificial Intelligence,” and “The Water Plays” as part of a now-two-year collaboration with Planet Earth Arts. The top six plays from each month are rehearsed for just one-and-a-half hours each and presented as script-in-hand staged readings at Monday Night PlayGround, now celebrating its twenty-second year. PlayGround audiences get to enjoy a unique behind-the-scenes perspective, with a free Pre-Performance Discussion at 7:10pm.  Audience members can also experience the thrill of being a producer through the monthly People’s Choice Awards, helping to determine which plays and playwrights go on for consideration in PlayGround’s annual showcase, the Best of PlayGround Festival.

PlayGround, the Bay Area’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported more than 200 local playwrights in the development and staging of over 750 original short plays and 61 commissioned full-length plays. For more information, visit http://playground-sf.org.

WomenArts (Co-Producer) is a non-profit advocacy group for women artists that facilitates the annual world-wide Support Women Artists Now (SWAN) celebrations in March and April.  Currently celebrating its twenty-first year, WomenArts created Support Women Artists Now Day (SWAN Day) as a new international holiday in 2008.  SWAN Day has inspired people all over the world to donate to women artists and to create events celebrating women artists on SWAN Day (the last Saturday of March) and throughout March and April.  There have been over 1,400 SWAN events in 26 countries over the past eight years.  Everyone is welcome to participate by creating or attending SWAN events or by making donations to their favorite women artists. No applications or fees are required.  For more information, please visit: www.WomenArts.org.

WHAT: Occurring monthly, October-March, the popular Monday Night PlayGround series presents staged readings of thematically-connected short works by the Bay Area’s best new playwrights each month at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, staged by leading local professional actors and directors.  For March’s performance, PlayGround and WomenArts will present an evening of short plays, inspired by a topic to be announced March 11.

WHERE: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St, Berkeley, CA

WHEN: Monday, March 21, 2016 at 8pm

TICKETS: $15 general admission ($20, priority seating) in advance, $20 at the door.  4-admission priority seating flex passes are just $60.  For more information about the Monday Night PlayGround series, call (415) 992-6677 or visit www.PlayGround-sf.org.