submitted by hildena@augsburg.edu
The Playwrights’ Center (Augsburg CGEE partner) recently held the PlayLabs Festival, one of the nation’s most comprehensive new play festivals. If you want to experience the festival for yourself, you can stream filmed readings of the three featured plays now:
That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven
by Franky D. Gonzalez
Glory. Survival. Legacy. Citizenship. Four Latino boxers all chase a world title to achieve their personal versions of heaven. But to get there, they must battle each other, their own battered bodies, society, and the universe itself. All four men walk the line between life and death in this collision of combat and cosmos.
A Walless Church: The Black Woman’s Guide To Making God
by AriDy Nox
A Walless Church is a Living Room play/ritual/lecture where three godlings create God, interweaving between narrator and protagonist and teacher and student and priestess and witness and god and God recklessly. Oru, the seasoned expert, Nona, the perfectionist, and Mo, the newbie. While Oru, Nona, and Mo struggle to create a God worthy of Creation, they also struggle with the various black women they haphazardly embody, all of whom are struggling to see the God within themselves. But our godlings are persistent and they refuse to fail. (At least, not without a fight.)
Stockade
by Andrew Rosendorf
Five years after the end of WWII, a group of gay soldiers gather for a reunion of sorts on Fire Island—and are met by an outsider with a surprise that will cause them to question whether history is best left in the past. At a time when “security risk” was government code for “homosexual,” it will take courage to step out of the shadows as each confronts their present and future.
You can also stream the festival showcase and a conversation with the featured playwrights, all on the Playwrights’ Center website May 15-21!