ASHLAND, ORE.: The Ashland New Plays Festival (ANPF) has announced the lineup for its 31st annual fall festival. The festival has named four winning titles from 350 submissions of new plays.
The winners include Ashland by Isabel Estelle, love you long time (already) by Katie Do, Lyons Pride by Bleu Beckford-Burrell, and A Long Time Coming by Weston Gaylord.
ANPF will produce staged readings of three of the works October 19-22. Performances will be held at Southern Oregon University.
“We hope you will mark your calendars, invite your friends, and join us,” ANPF’s board president Peggy Moore said in a statement.
Estelle, an Ashland native, is a trans playwright and actor based in Minneapolis. Their credits include the Chameleon Theatre Circle, Picnic Basket Theatre, and Park Square Theatre. Ashland follows a young woman who is diagnosed with a terminal illness and must navigate the beginning and end of a new relationship.
Do is a Vietnamese American playwright who is a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She is currently developing a television series with ACRO. love you long time (already) follows the relationship between a woman from Saigon and her daughter. ANPF will not stage a reading of the play due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
Beckford-Burrell is a Jamaican American actor, playwright, and director based in New York. She also works as a teaching artist and playwriting workshop instructor. Lyons Pride follows the Lyons family as they struggle to stay afloat as immigrants in America.
Gaylord is a playwright, librettist, and virtual reality artist based in Los Angeles. His play A Long Time Coming takes place in two time periods, as families look toward a future of both disaster and hope, and a Norwegian forest might provide paper in the year 2114.
Tickets for the staged readings will go on sale early next month.
The Ashland New Plays Festival assists playwrights in the development of new works through public readings and offers an educational forum to the community. As of 2022, the organization had a budget of approximately $130,681.
