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Dramatists Guild members are burning up the Philadelphia new play scene this summer!

The summer new play season kicked off June 3 with a celebratory reading of excerpts of new plays by five emerging local playwrights curated by Dramatists Guild members Michael Hollinger, Quinn Eli, and me. The reading was produced by The Foundry, a local playwright development organization, in partnership with the Arden Theatre Company. The reading featured a new work by Dramatists Guild member Emily Acker. Acker’s play, I Am Not My Motherland, will have a world premiere production in early July produced by Orbiter 3. Co-founded by Acker and Dramatists Guild Ambassador Emma Goidel, Orbiter 3 mounts professional productions of two new plays written by local playwrights each season.

“Motherland is about a hotshot Palestinian-American surgeon and her fledgling Israeli-American resident who botch a life-saving operation. The story unravels in Rashomon-style repeated scenes telling a story of both collective grief and collective possibility,” says Acker. “I wrote the first draft of this play in the summer of 2014 during the most recent war in Gaza. Having lived in Israel during some formative high school and college years, a lot of my early questions of identity are tied to the country and my experiences there; the play is my response to what it means to be a liberal Zionist in today’s political climate. As I developed the script as part of a workshop in The Foundry, the play became more about the conversational nature of reality and objective truth.”

I Am Not My Motherland runs July 13-31 at the Lantern Theatre and tickets are available for purchase at Orbiter3.org

In mid-to-late July, the PlayPenn New Play Conference will offer eight playwrights the opportunity to develop a new play over a three-week period. Dramatists Guild members Gabriel Jason Dean and Jonathan Payne are both featured playwrights in the Conference. Dean’s play Heartland follows an Afghan refugee as he travels to Nebraska to find an old family friend and what results is a moving meditation on loss and forgiveness. Payne’s play Poor Edward is about a mismatched couple struggling to make a new life together; it’s a haunting tale of intimacy and survival. See the PlayPenn site (http://playpenn.org) for more information and to reserve your free tickets.

During the Conference, I am working with PlayPenn to run five master classes that focus on writing and creating new work. There are classes for writers and theater artists of all experience levels. For more information: http://playpenn.org/classes.

In August, the Philadelphia Women’s Theater Festival will round out the summer new play season. As of our publishing deadline, they have not finalized their line-up of productions and readings, however, their offerings usually include Guild playwrights from our region.

“Dramatists Guild members have been a major part of our Festival from the beginning, and the Guilds’ work, especially with Theresa Rebeck, to document gender inequality on-stage has inspired us. As more theaters in Philadelphia embrace diversity we want to be both a part of that movement and encourage our colleagues to go further, do more, in order to keep Philadelphia at the forefront of great, new work that is representative of its population and the population as a whole,” said Artistic Director Polly Edelstein.

You can find more information about the Festival at: www.phillywomenstheatrefest.org.

jgoldfinger@dramatistsguild.com