There are always new stories to be told, new voices to be heard.
That, in a nutshell, explains why for more than a decade and a half the Cleveland Play House has celebrated bold and thrilling contemporary theater and stories that come from a diverse array of voices and perspectives through its New Ground Theatre Festival.
This year’s festival takes place May 9 through 18 at Playhouse Square.
“What it has always been — and it continues to be — is a place for playwrights to hear their plays out loud in front of an audience for the first time,” Cleveland Play House Literary Director Craig Joseph said. “(It’s designed) for them to get a sense of where they are in their writing of the development of the play and to start to get feedback both from the actors who are in the roles and the audience members who are listening about what works.”
Basically, what works and what doesn’t? What’s clear and also what’s a bit confusing?
“It gives them a couple of days in the rehearsal room to kind of play with it, do rewrites and do edits,” he said. “We really like to think of it as a time to pour into the development of writers and be sort of like an incubator for new plays. That’s what it has always been.”
This year’s New Ground Festival schedule: “Comedy, Errors, Vanity, and Stupidity” (May 9), “Fade” (May 10), “Louder” (May 11), “The First Snow Of Summer” (May 16), “Escapegoat” (May 17) and “One-Shot” (May 18).
All shows start at 7:30 p.m. and appear in the Helen Lab Theatre. Tickets are $5.
The readings range from a sequel to a Shakespeare classic written in verse (“Comedy, Errors, Vanity, and Stupidity”) to a family drama (“Fade”) and a coming-of-age queer story (“One-Shot”).
After taking two years off due to the pandemic, New Ground Theatre Festival returned last year, having to deal with a backlog of commissioned projects and submissions.
“This year we’re in the middle of another commission cycle where playwrights are writing right now,” he said. “So it allowed us to look a little beyond the stuff that we were commissioning to some stuff that’s going on outside of CPH.”
That brings us to a new facet of New Ground Theatre Festival, which finds Cleveland Play House teaming up with Northeast Ohio companies Blank Canvas Theatre, LatinUs Theater Company Seat of the Pants Productions to produce readings.
“Historically, these workshops and readings have always been produced by Cleveland Play House,” he said. “We get so many script submissions every year. A lot of them are good, but not all are necessarily appropriate for Cleveland Play House, just in terms of what our brand is and who our audience is.
“So this year we’ve given those scripts to some other local theater companies. We’re giving them money to pay their directors and actors to produce the reading and then to come and perform it here as part of the festival. It feels like it’s important as sort of the theater ecosystem in Cleveland to share those resources because we can’t possibly use them all.”
The New Ground Festival is something unusual that arguably helps to solidify the Tony Award-winning Cleveland Play House’s position in the national theater community.
“We want to be known as an incubator for new work or a place where playwrights are given time and resources to hear their work in real-time lived out,” he said. “It’s not just going to be full-stage productions, big production budgets and big production values — which we certainly do — but also that we think it’s important for new stories to be told and new voices to be heard.”
New Ground Theatre Festival
Presenter; Cleveland Play House.
When: May 9 through 18.
Where: Playhouse Square’s Helen Lab Theatre, 1501 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.
Tickets: $5.
Info: 216-241-6000 or visit clevelandplayhouse.com.
