…from the Artistic Director

Hi friends - welcome to June! (Insert favorite seasonal metaphor here: heat, longer days, festive summer cocktails, gardens growing, take your pick!) We just harvested the four plays of the New Works Festival, and on June 21st we will wrap up the 2023-2024 Incubator/Mentor Program! Pretty exciting to know that we have successfully concluded the first fully in-person iteration of the I/M program.

Coming up next we’re excited to bring you Through the Windows: Apocalypse Edition, two short plays by Carolynne Wilcox and Miriam Tobin that run on themes of family and the end of the world…maybe. Join us August 23, 24, and 25 for three performances of these wacky experiments with space, time, family history, and a bunch of windows! The audience sits outside and we perform in the liminal spaces between inside, outside and the window sill. This annual site-specific event (it’s annual after two years, right?) gives us a chance to share our space with you and to challenge some of our favorite playwrights to write new theatre pieces on a specific theme. Come to any performance and be welcome to the closing night reception and Friendraiser on the afternoon of Sunday, August 25th!

We’re also pleased to announce that The Shattered Glass Project will present A Lonely Realization by Darby Sherwood and Emily Stone, running October 17-27, 2024 at Theatre4 in the Armory Building at Seattle Center. This absurd and comical piece tries to answer the question of how you tell a story that's hard to hear? Maybe with a pair of disembodied legs, trying to find justice in a nonsensical world? Set in a forest and a rehearsal room and a bedroom and a 1950s sitcom-style dining room, A Lonely Realization follows the trials and triumphs of aspiring actors Mushroom and Frog, the disembodied pair of legs, a tree, a beleaguered stage manager, the ideal 1950s couple, Vladimir Lenin’s wife, Jay Gatsby, and more. Tickets will go on sale in September!

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Incubator/Mentor Cohort News

Please enjoy the above gallery of production photos from the recent New Works Festival! We are so proud of our Incubator/Mentor Cohort graduates and their companies, as well as the entire ensemble of creatives for their hard work in their productions of Carmilla, The Uterine Files Part One: Voices Spitting Out the Rainbow, Out of Time and On the Train…and very excited to see what they’ll do next. …Especially since Christie Zhao (Director cohort) will be unveiling Passages (Christopher Chen) at StrawShop next week, The Uterine Files by Jourdan Imani Keith (Playwright Cohort) just finished a more fleshed-out run at Langston Seattle, and Lisa A Price (Playwright Cohort) has a new collaboration coming up at Mirror Stage - we’re beside ourselves at this embarrassment of artistic riches, and look forward to hearing more from everyone in this cohort, the last cohort, and all the cohorts yet to be!

LTR: Christine Shaw, Adrian Cerrato, Gwendolyn Quirk, Cricket James & Rebecca O’Neil read two plays about being in a cabin in the woods coming up in August for the annual Through The Window friendraiser.

Through The Window Journal

by Carolynne Wilcox

So, it had been awhile since Miriam and I met regarding this project, as the next step in the process was to hear the plays out loud. That finally occurred on Sunday, May 26, in the SGP space at the M.L.K. FAME Center. We gathered five actors to read the four parts plus stage directions.

I’ll back up here: it’s always an interesting exercise to hear your play being read aloud by someone else (five someone else’s in this case!) - it can sometimes be an out of body experience. As an actor myself, I’m always sitting in silence, and when a line comes out differently than I’d have said it, bite my tongue. Sometimes it changes the whole meaning of what I wrote, and it either makes me consider rewording it (as sometimes, it doesn’t trip off the tongue quite so easily as it did in my head), other times, though it wasn’t how I’d have said it, it ends up being something I hadn’t considered, and often, better than what I’d have done. This is why the collaborative nature of theatre is amazing - each part of an ensemble creates the final vision the playwright began - making it, ultimately, OUR play, not just *my* play.

Anyway, that being said, we had a little bit of an embarrassment of riches in our readers this day - four of whom I’ve worked with pretty extensively in the past, and one whose work I wasn’t familiar with - because they made my little play leap off the page, hitting most of the funny moments, the emotional touchstones, and the weird bits.

We read Miriam’s play after we read mine, and though I feel she maybe didn’t get as much time for feedback, the reading itself achieved what we were hoping - allowing us to see where the holes were (not many, and they were small), and getting to see if the plays held up emotionally (they did!).

Miriam and I got together for coffee to discuss two days later, and both came to the conclusion that, with just a few tweaks, these babies are ready to fly with the stork! Next step, to hone in on the right director and begin to plan for a rehearsal process. At any rate, we’re very excited to unveil these two new works, and hope you will join us in August in our “cabin by the lake” for the unveiling!