Playwrights' Revolution

As Sacramento’s leader of bold, thought-provoking theatre, Capital Stage created Playwrights’ Revolution, to identify and develop new plays and playwrights.

Each year, a handful of plays are carefully selected from hundreds of submissions. Directors and actors are selected, and audiences are invited to participate in post-reading discussions to contribute to the development of the world’s newest plays.

Schedule:
-July 24: The End of the World by Andrew Biss
-July 25: Welcome to Matteson! by Inda Craig-Galvan
-July 26: Great White by Deborah Yarchun
-July 27: Monica: This Play is Not About Monica Lewinsky by Dianne Nora

About The End of the World:
Valentine’s parents have decided that the time has come at last for their son to make his own way in the world. Valentine, accustomed to a life of cosseted seclusion, isn’t so keen on the idea. But go he must, and soon finds himself venturing forth into the vast world beyond. His new adventure is soon drawn to a halt, however, when he is mugged at gunpoint. Frightened and exhausted, he seeks shelter at a bed and breakfast named, rather ominously, The End of the World, an establishment run by the dour Mrs. Anna. Then things start getting strange…an odd yet oddly touching tale of life, death and the space in-between.

About Welcome to Matteson!:
A suburban couple hosts a welcome-to-the-neighborhood dinner party for their new neighbors — a couple recently (forcibly) relocated from Chicago’s roughest housing project — and it’s anything but welcoming. A dark intra-racial comedy about reverse gentrification and how we deal with the “other” when the other looks just like us.

About Great White:
Fourteen-year-old Brooke is in trouble. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Ivy, is manic and increasingly violent, and their mother, Gail, refuses to acknowledge the danger. As Brooke struggles to hold her family together, she copes by tracking a great white shark. This leads her to Luis, a troubled fifteen-year-old boy intent on swimming out to meet the shark in the ocean. As their friendship deepens, Brooke becomes increasingly aware of the shark drawing closer in her own life: that her sister, in a manic fit, might kill her. Set in present-day southern Florida, between coastal floods, Great White is a coming-of-age drama that explores unremitting love for family, and the consequences of inaction.

About Monica: This Play is Not About Monica Lewinsky:
Through a series of scenes between Monica Lewinsky and different imagined lovers, this play asks what the cost of intimacy is, how we reckon with our past selves, and what we talk about when we talk about “Other Women.”