Yes, the stars of the seventh OC-Centric New Play Festival, Orange County’s only foray into full productions of new plays by local writers, are the three playwrights: La Habra’s Karen Fix Curry, Brea’s Sara Saenz and San Juan Capistrano’s Karly Thomas. And, of course, there’d be no festival without the actors, designers and running crew of the two-weekend festival, which opens Thursday at Chapman University.
Nor would it exist without the work of its founders and co-artistic directors: Chapman theater professor Tamiko Washington and Eric Eberwein, whose day job is providing content for financial advisors, but who has also written, worked and wailed in the relative playwriting wilderness of Orange County for more than 20 years.
Relative is the key word here. What has most surprised the two-headed brain trust that started the festival in hopes of filling a void in local theater is the scope, and quality, of local playwrights.
“I was saying to myself, ‘No one really gives new playwrights a chance,'” says Washington, who met Eberwein in 2008 while directing a staged reading of his in Laguna Beach. “There were all kinds of staged readings all over the place, but no one was fully looking at new plays and saying ‘We’re going to take submissions, and read them and then think of them being stage-ready to fully produce.’ That’s where my idea came from.”
For Eberwein—who founded the Orange County Playwrights Alliance (OCPA) in the early 1990s—Washington’s offer was “too good to refuse.”
“At that time, the local theater scene was coming out of the Great Recession, and it seemed like a lot of the programming was very conservative and seemed to be about risk-management rather than taking artistic risks,” he says. “So it seemed like the time was ideal to have a new play festival.”
While there have been a handful of companies since the 1990s, when the county’s storefront theater emerged, that included new works by local writers in their seasons, (such as Stages, which opened new one-acts by David Macaray Aug. 19), shepherding has been for the most part by playwriting groups like OCPA and New Voices, and, most recently, Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble, which takes a more community-based approach to creating new work. So that first year, Eberwein and Washington didn’t know if they’d receive enough work even deserving of a full production.
That hasn’t been the case. Each year, OC-Centric receives between 40 and 50 submissions from writers who either live in OC or grew up here. “I was surprised when we started getting submissions and realized these [people’s work] had been around, not just in Southern California, but also Chicago, New York, Seattle, around the country,” Washington says. “But here in Orange County, no one knows them.”
Both Washington, who is primarily a director and teacher, and Eberwein, an award-winning playwright, are passionate about new work. While each realizes it’s a tough sell at the box office, particularly for smaller theaters, they also realize theater withers without it.
“Theater ossifies without the new,” Eberwein says. “It becomes a museum unless you have plays that speak to our time.”
“Why are we always bound by what has been produced and published before us?” asks Washington. “And I think some people believe the best plays have already been written. And we all get stuck. Higher education gets stuck. Community theater gets stuck. Professional theater gets stuck in this idea of what you should be doing. There are so many other options out there but I don’t think people realize they can tell different types of different stories about different issues.”
New plays can also deliver a refreshing kick in the ass to actors and audiences. Most people know the character of The Crucible‘s John Proctor, Eberwein says, but a new character in a new play forces actors to dig for something raw and new, rather than relying on an archetype. The same holds true for not working continually with the same group of people, which invariably happens with most theater companies, but which is part of OC-Centric’s creative aesthetic.
“You grow innovatively and remain relevant to the time in which you live by working with new people and not consistently relying on the same people in a small group,” Washington says. “[It’s about] not becoming complacent and thinking these are the only people to work with. That is why one of the first things we discussed when we started this is that we wanted to hire new faces every year.”
New faces, new plays. But it’s the same old battle: getting audiences to care about something unfamiliar, a battle OC-Centric seems determined to wage against a most intractable mindset:
“I just wish more people in Orange County cared about new plays,” Eberwein says.
OC-Centric New Play Festival at Moulton Hall Studio Theatre, 300 E. Palm Ave., Orange; www.oc-centric.com or www.brownpapertickets.com. Opens Thurs., Aug. 17. Dates and show times differ for the one full-length production and two one-acts. Through Aug. 27. $12-20.
Joel Beers has written about theater and other stuff for this infernal rag since its very first issue in, when was that again???
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