 Hi, my name is Eddie DeHaze and I am a trans director and choreographer and I'm here today to talk about Daryl Fazio. I wanted to bring Daryl Fazio to this group because she is writing the kind of theatre that I think we really need in this country right now. She's from the south and she's writing about issues that are very epic and very pressing. Things like climate change and our relationship to fossil fuels or the opioid crisis. But she tackles these plays in a way where she is going into the very personal and intimate relationships that people have with their families, with their generational history and with their jobs and the pride that they have with their jobs and how those jobs define them. For instance in Mountain Mamas there is a character named Patsy who has a disability and Daryl also has a disability so I really appreciate how she centres this female character who has suffered an accident in a coal mine. And we get to see the psychological landscape of that character and her own mother, the grandmother in the character who was the first female coal miner in the state and her daughter who both wants to take up the mantle and has pride in the fact that they are these women who have taken on these hard jobs but also understands the nature of climate change and Patsy who is both present and not present throughout understanding that her trauma and the trauma that we're dealing with in trying to get away from fossil fuels are directly related. The same sort of dynamics are present in Safety Net which is a project that I really hope gets produced all over. It's related to the opioid crisis and we see a woman who is the fire chief who has to navigate all of the opioid overdoses that are happening within her county and her relationship to her own mother who is older and who has pain and who is starting to think about how that pain could go away and a brother figure who's not there who unfortunately overdosed. There's also a young addict in the story and there's a queer love story between this addict and the fire chief and as someone who believes that stories of recovery that show us how recovery happens and the difficulty of the opioid crisis and how systemic it is and how difficult it is to tackle. Safety Net is just one of those plays that I think would allow theater goers to really understand what can be done. So that's why I want to talk about Daryl today. I think her work is phenomenal and I think her work is relevant and I think it speaks to communities of all kinds who need to get an insight into the intersection of these things that happen between our cultural need to hang on to things that are killing us and how those things can be associated with family but also how those things are systemically affecting the greater world. My name is Sloane L. Garner and I'm a dramaturg from Mississippi currently residing in Pennsylvania. I am grateful and delighted to be joining the playwrights under the radar sessions with LMDA this year and I'd like to use a singular work to highlight a singularly spectacular playwright, Peter Hyke. This 81-year-old father, Air Force veteran, retired bus driver and novelist from Iowa brought forth his latest works during the pandemic including Rose Fire, The Script, Part Experimental Theater, Part Medieval Mystery Play. This 60-page script features choir monks, dual role casting, backstage as onstage, and full frontal nudity. Excerpted from Rose Fire, The Novel, this two-act play unravels a new and officially unrecognized history of the Marian Rosary interweaving Catholic monastic chant with vignettes of the Old Testament, the Gospel of Jesus and Mary, and a modern saga of alcoholic drinking and redemption. The concept was born out of an unexpected revelation the playwright and established rosary scholar had while handling real-life primary texts from early Christianity. In other words, it was beamed in from elder's face. What is there not to love? With its breakneck comedic speed and heart-wrenching reflective realities, this play is a shining example of Peter's playwriting abilities. The play's official tagline is a medieval mystery play for the modern era, and Peter leans into a cyclical vignette style with multiple sets of three short scenes. The Old Testament prefiguring the new, the Gospel account of Jesus and Mary, and a modern parable of redemption. As the Old Testament figures wail, Jesus marches towards crucifixion, and alcoholics attempt to support one another, the vignettes often become so bleak that the audience is grateful for the speed and brevity that does not allow one to wallow in that darkness. Peter expertly crafts his own work to become a meditation literature with each read of the play bringing forth new material to explore, and thereby becoming more complex in its reflections, mimicking that of Judeo-Christian literature and the Marian Rosary. Peter's commitment to the accessibility of the arts and the sharing of his work is clear. Rosefire is perfect for budget theater, community colleges, religious organizations, and community theater troops. It has minimal costuming, minimal set, and a low script price of $5.99, link provided in Hoover, and no royalty fees. This script also has a small cast of six actors playing a plethora of parts and two cameos, with the only casting requirements being at least one woman and at least one person of African descent. He's open to talking about your options for vulnerability and intimacy, getting at the heart of the nakedness to make it work for you, your team, and your audiences. He'll help you bear it all without bearing it all. As Peter's self-proclaimed magnum opus, he simply wants to share this work with the world. As I close, I'd like to thank Peter for his willingness to answer a barrage of questions from a stranger on the internet, as well as these two quotes from the play that got me through much of this pandemic, whilst being daily battered by disheartening news. The hell translation is that by the abbot with his mic left on, and Veronica wipes his face, gives him a drink, and crushes him to her breast. Subtext, there is hope for the future of the human race. I leave you with this journey from the back of Rosefire the script. Notes, Drinks, Bull Frontal, a meditation on addiction, redemption, and the Catholic Rosary. I'm excited to see what comes next from Peter Hike. Thank you. I'm Catherine Carter. She, her state's director and big fan of Monet Herschmendoza. You should absolutely be checking out Monet Herschmendoza right now, because all of her work is extremely vivid. If you're looking for deep characters, interesting locations, unexpected situations and stories, Monet's the playwright for you. I highly recommend checking out her play Torera. It is being produced by the Alley Theatre in their upcoming season. It is about female bullfighter in her hometown of Merida in the Yucatan of Mexico. She also has a series of plays based in Merida and Torera is one of them, so that's a good one to start with. Or if you want something a little more edgy, I check out her play Blind Crest, which can be found on the new playwrights exchange. Monet is a playwright you want to read if you're interested in the details of like relationship dynamics. All of her plays involve either families and the generational power dynamics of them or power dynamics within our society that play out in interpersonal relationships. So check her out because she's amazing and I think you should be reading here. Hello, my name is Jihei Kim. I'm a new play dramaturg and a divisor based in Seoul, LA and Chicago. Today I'm going to introduce two female playwrights to Jin from Seoul, South Korea and Lyra Naran, originally from China but currently based in the East Coast. So Jin is a playwright based in Seoul as a playwright she's an artist who is devoted to hold the space for those who are marginalized. It has never given a voice throughout South Korea's tumultuous history. The number that is currently under translation commission is class, which features a female protagonist who tries to move on from her past trauma of female and female sexual abuse by owning the story and tell it out. It encounters a pushback from a playwright advisor who is concerned about the protagonist inclination to be too self indulgent. B, the protagonist and a graduating MFA player writing student at an art school in Seoul gets to take her last class with a her favorite star playwright throughout the eight weeks of classes. B and a power dynamic ships as be discovering that her teacher and her doesn't share the same values on artivism, whether the righteous art can still be an art that holds the truth. There's an underlying conflict between a and B unraveling as the plot moves forward, these roommate committed suicide asking for the justice. A has a different opinion and whether the death can be the answer to prove one's truth. And yet, due to the power structure between a and B, we can't argue with a. B's thesis play Lonely Cake Room, B attempts to implicitly shows where she stands. B has brought a new draft to the class and a and B reads B's play, B reads the protagonist and the survivor, and A reads the ghost of the perpetrator. Perhaps this is the most theatrical moment in the play. As a lonely cake room has to the climax, the dynamic between these two generations of women playwrights go through a change. As commissioned and developed as the part of Tucson Art Center's 2022 artists and residents will go on stage this October at Tucson Art Center. The translation will be completed in late September, and it will be available to read on MPX. Meanwhile, if you would be interested in getting more information about judging for free to email me or judging. Lyra Naran is a China born playwright currently based in the East Coast, her place frequently portrayed the world that is not centered around America, but directly impacted by America's global influences. Usually set somewhere in the distant past where Taoist masters or Buddhist goddess is reincarnated as a grumpy grandma, and the magical peach tree holds the power to offer a shortcut to longevity, or in a near future where wherever devices can check one's emotions and feeling to report to the government for censorship. Lyra's plays frequently explore the theme of how and why utopia turns into dystopia. Lyra is a prolific playwright and has written many plays. You can find your place at MPX. Here I am going to briefly introduce two plays of her. Paper Dream tells the story about Chinese woman kept in the Angels Island Detention Center in San Francisco in 1930s under the Chinese Exclusion Act. The sixth cast play mainly follows the Wang Mi Li, a Chinese woman in her 40s, trying to bring her daughter to the US and encounters a mysterious woman in white who guides her towards the truth that she had neglected. Lyra's most recent play, oh, this is the inspiration board that Lyra has created. In this, Lyra's most recent play, Psyche, is an exciting new kind of an experimental dark comedy that blends elements of traditional Chinese opera with Greek myth, exploring the theme of gender violence, human trafficking and female desire in an agency. During the well-known characters in the story structure from Psyche's journey to meet errors in Greek myth, Psyche tells a story about Psyche, a privileged princess and a PhD candidate who gets kidnapped and sold to a mountain to be the wife of the love god. Via Psyche's journey to hell and her journey back to escape the captivity, she ultimately reinvents herself to promote a provocative business model that addresses the men's thirst for a female body. Okay, this was Lyra Naran. You can find more information of Lyra via her website or her MPX page. Thank you so much for listening. I'm thrilled to introduce you to Lori. Lori is a playwright performer who lives and works in Philadelphia in New York City. Lori's writing has an incredibly robust humanity that manages to balance comedy and drama so that she can tackle difficult issues but underlie it with enough heart and hope and laughs to have us open to those difficult issues and explore them. I hope that you will check out her work. Ipshitz is a multifaceted performative artist. They are educators. They are performers. They are creators and divisors. They both generate work as well as produce and tour work, both to curated museums and festivals but also to colleges and universities where they show their work and then also lead workshops with students. They are committed to helping blow open the doors of the American theater to all different types of people and aesthetics. And one of the reasons that I wanted to showcase Ipshitz this year is that there is a new maturity and boldness in their work that has become much more sophisticated over the past couple of years. And I feel like at this point has hit a high point for them aesthetically and artistically. And so I think this is a great time to begin paying attention to their work and bringing them into your schools and classrooms. And last but never least, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Gio. Gio had a thriving downtown arts career pre-COVID, just doing everything, maker, producer, divisor, performer. They moved to Philadelphia and now are focusing on text-based work. Work that, you know, you could sit down and read in the more traditional beginning-the-lend, well-made Western playing narrative style. And what I love about their texts is that they combine the best of the downtown theater aesthetic. So think whimsy, think magical, think juxtaposition of big ideas and nuanced characters. And yet they're also a really great fit for our more traditional spaces. They can be performed as like a play that you would see on one of our proscenium spaces. And I think that that makes their work much more mobile and widely producible. I really hope that you will check out Gio's work today. Hi, my name is Abigail Duclos. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm currently a student living in New York City. But I spent most of my life living in either Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And most of my work explores, in part, those regional identities. My most recent play was about a lesbian Jewish southerner healing from past intimate relationship violence. It was about being gay in South Carolina, about being Jewish in South Carolina, about being disabled in South Carolina. It was about all of those things, and it was also a comedy and a drama in equal parts. I've also written a revenge play about queer religiosity in Appalachia, a matrilineal play about generational trauma caused by opioid addiction. And in that work and in everything I've written, I love exploring characters I haven't seen on stage before, disabled, queer, female characters. I've always been at the forefront of what I write. And, you know, in conjunction with that, I like to think my work is about catharsis, about release, about grief and healing from grief, you know. So many horrible things happen all the time, and it can be really easy to take all of those horrible things and keep them deep, deep down inside you in your heart or in your stomach or wherever it is you hold all of your emotions. And I like to think my work is about letting them go, about breathing out. And, you know, also it's about bringing happy endings to characters who in the real world very rarely get happy endings. Many playwriting means asking questions that haven't been asked before. My most recent play asked, what the hell are you supposed to do when the demonic spirit of your evil dead ex-girlfriend possesses your body in the form of adibic? Which was a really fine question to explore. But more generally, playwriting to me is also a means of figuring out some of the bigger questions I have about the world we live in and about how it works sometimes and doesn't work most of the time about culture and religion, about how living things interact with one another, about the creation of violence and about healing from violence. To me, playwriting is about asking those big questions through writing and through storytelling and not answering them by myself, but instead trying to answer them and trying to figure them out in community and in conversation with other artists. Hi, my name is Anjali Ramakrishnan, and I am a playwright. Performance at Cedricinium, I think, is in many ways sort of the baseline of my playwriting philosophy. I hope to make work that, you know, challenges the boundaries of what it means to be theater, what it means to, you know, be a standard of worthwhile or, you know, the standard American drama. I feel like your prescenium obviously captures that, and this is a sort of, I think, thinking beyond it is really exciting, and I think it also will help with new voices that might not have previously been included in what it means to be in the prescenium theater. I'm right now at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. I am studying playwriting and having the most amazing time, thanks to such amazing faculty. After this summer, I will be heading back to college to finish my senior year where I'm a sociology major. Playwriting is the world to me. I'm so glad to have found it, and so glad to have found community in it as well, with those who love making theater. So thank you so much, and I hope things are great for you too. Hi there. My name is Kay Kemp. I use they them pronouns. I have a BA in theater from Columbia University, and I'm currently a PhD candidate in drama and theater there, and I'm also a playwright. Playwriting is very important to me because I think that it helps me to discover ways of learning and ways of being and ways of seeing that I wouldn't discover otherwise. For me, it's a really important learning tool about myself and the people around me when I playwright. It helps me to process who I am and who others are and how we can interact not only on stage, but also in our communities, in our families, the different ways that people work, and the different ways that brains work, I think, is what playwriting helps me to understand. And that's very, very important to me to understand those matrices and figure out how we can be better to each other.