JAW Play Reading: Without A Formal Declaration of War
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View Upcoming EventsJAW Play Reading: Without A Formal Declaration of War
By Anya Pearson
Directed by Nicole A. Watson
A PCS Commission!
The War in Vietnam rages, a revolution brews, and the FBI targets a community while Clytemnestra finds herself, and the world, on the brink of great change. Set in the section of East Oakland that will come to be known as The Killing Fields, PCS-commissioned writer Anya Pearson places characters from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in 1969.
Note: This public reading will be of Act 1, followed by a conversation with the playwright, director, and dramaturg about next steps. We look forward to sharing this commissioned play process with you.
JAW New Play Festival FREE! July 28-30
A week-long assembling of artists and audiences to create new plays! Artistic teams, including playwrights, directors and actors, come together to rehearse — and a lot of times rewrite! — a play. The final piece of the process happens during the weekend, when we share “music stands readings” with audiences so the playwrights can hear their work, often for the very first time!
Anya is an award-winning playwright, poet, screenwriter, producer, actress, and activist. On staff at Corporeal Writing, she is a current Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Anya is also currently finishing her debut collection of poetry, This is the After, writing three pilots, four plays, and a novel, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better, more just world. Her plays include The Measure of Innocence (The Kilroys List, Drammy Award for Best Original Script, finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Drama), Made to Dance in Burning Buildings (Showcase: Joe’s Pub, NYC; Shaking the Tree, Portland, OR), The Killing Fields (2018 Orphic Commission; Last Frontier Theatre Conference; Seven Devils New Play Foundry; Great Plains Theatre Conference), Three Love Songs (Play at Home Initiative, PCS), Butterflies Eat Decay (Go Play Outside). Memberships: LineStorm Playwrights, Dramatists Guild, Actors’ Equity Association. Her best production is her 9-year-old daughter, Aidee, who can be seen most nights, trying to circumvent bedtime by asking deep philosophical questions like: “When are we going to see the world? When is my life going to truly begin?”
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