Playwrights Winter Showcase 2024 [] Teatro Santa Ana

by Meredith Beaumont

Seven local playwrights together with top local directors and 19 of San Miguel‘s finest actors (both known and making their first appearance!) will bring to life seven brand new short plays. Comedy, tragedy, or just plain whacky – whatever your taste – there’s another one coming in ten minutes! with a variety of topics, guaranteed to please.

In Brief Therapy, Jack and Jill’s relationship is faltering and they are pinning their hopes on a confident psychologist and his questioning student, who each view this exercise as a wager for their own gain. Playwrights: psychologist, David Ziff, and filmmaker, Dennis Lanson, further their own agenda by betting on the winner.

What better place to turn one’s life around? As dogs pounce, chase, bite and play, Lauren Osornio’s In a Dog Park unfolds a human drama as Julie and Roger reconfigure their marriage, aided and abetted by an unsuspecting lone wolf who seems to know them both.

Is Dan having a midlife crisis? His needs certainly seem outrageous and designed to hurt those he loves the best. To placate those involved in this generational entanglement is not going to be easy. Playwright Martin Cohen does his best to help them navigate the storm in Baby Boomer Blues.

In a luxurious country inn, the Inglenooks are enjoying the second part of their Life Long Learning experience, an exciting melange of cooking and foraging. In Marilyn Bullivant’s concoction, their instructor is as enthusiastic as he is egregious as they wander through a lexicon of Fabulous, Fanciful, Fungi.

Painted skeletons drift past an office doorway on the Day of the Dead. A brother and sister meet to deal with their mother’s death having been parted by their parents’ divorce many years before. David Temple’s The Dead in Your Head forms a conundrum with multiple answers, none of which appears right until the street seems to offer a solution.

Serious misunderstandings can lead to international crises as two women from opposite sides of the Atlantic engage in a politically charged dialogue. Will writer Bill Considine‘s witty entrance into the world of diplomacy, A Common Tongue, be able to repair this ever-widening gap?

Two grandmothers meet in a public washroom, and set their lives on a course for change. Lauren Volpini’s first play with the showcase, Gas Station Chicken, features daughters who become more and more impatient as we laugh along with the two feisty old ladies as they attempt to outwit their manipulative progeny.