SAN FRANCISCO: The Playwrights Foundation has announced the lineup for their 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which includes work by emerging playwrights Jon Bernson, Dustinn Chinn, Kristiana Rae Colón, Patricia Cotter, T.D. Mitchell, and Madhuri Shekar. Their plays were selected from a pool of more than 700 submissions from across the U.S. and reflect moments of change and rebellion. The festival will run July 20-29 at the Potrero Stage in San Francisco, Calif.

“BAPF 2018 will be a supercharged ride into six completely different worlds,” said artistic director Amy Mueller in a statement. “The festival includes everything that’s exciting about theatre – stories that engage and enrage you, that allow you to imagine the power of the individual to fight back, that make you laugh, make you feel deeply, and take you on a journey to new places. More than that, being in the room when a play is raw and unfinished is an intimate invitation to your imagination. ”

The following plays will receive staged readings at the festival:

• When Lighting The Voids by Jon Bernson, a commission by documentary theatre project StoryWorks from the Center for Investigative Reporting, about the trauma experienced by workers in The Voids on ships and the causes of the tragic explosion at a Gulf Coast shipyard in 2009.
• Colonialism Is Terrible, But Pho Is Delicious by Dustin Chinn, a satire about colonialism that takes audiences from 19th-century Indochina to contemporary Brooklyn, which also documents the evolution of pho, a Vietnamese noodle dish.
• Kristiana Rae Colón’s suspension, about a futuristic world where an AI robot serves as the imposing security guard at a high school, as two students discover their ancestral magic and black girl badassery.
• The Daughters by Patricia Cotter, which documents the 60-year history of the lesbian community in San Francisco, and how identity, gender, and sexuality changes throughout the generations.
• VRT-UL by T.D. Mitchell, about a VR training camp and a modern warrior’s struggle to distinguish the differences between the virtual world and reality.
• House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar, an action-romance about the bodyguards of an imperial harem who fight against their oppression.

Founded in 1976, Playwrights Foundation is a launchpad for new plays in the Bay Area and beyond, dedicated to the growth of emerging and mid-career playwrights.