Developing New Plays, Bringing Them to the Public with Br!NK

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For the sixth consecutive year, Midwestern female playwrights are getting a chance to get their voices heard thanks to Renaissance Theaterworks’ initiative: the Br!NK New Play Festival. Renaissance Theaterworks (RTW), which produces theater by women (and enjoyable by everyone), calls for female authors living in the Midwest to submit their scripts for review, either full-length plays or shorter, 10-minute ones (called Br!efs). Two full plays and half-a-dozen Br!efs are then chosen, and RTW’s team stages readings of the scripts to the public during the annual New Play Festival.

“It’s difficult for playwrights to get that first production, to get their work seen. It can be really helpful to have other theater professionals help you develop your work,” RTW’s artistic director Suzan Fete explained.

This year, the two staged plays are Inna Tsyrlin’s Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer and Karen Saari’s ’Rain on Fire. The former is inspired by a real historical event, when U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visited a Soviet labor camp and was deceived as the prisoners were made to perform a play, pretending to be free. In that context, Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer tells the fictional story of Aleksandra, sent to the gulag for reading a Western magazine and forced to choose between playing along with the scheme or sacrificing everything to unveil the horrors of the Soviet camps. ’Rain on Fire takes place in a Midwestern town ravaged by the present-day opiate crisis. The script focuses on a failed musician coming home for the funeral of her pill-addict mother, Lorraine; there, she discovers that her mother, under the pen name of ’Rain, was a poet and wanted her to turn one of her poems into a song to perform at the funeral.

Br!NK Brings New Plays to Life

The week-long Br!NK New Play Festival will initially be touring the region Sept. 3-6, visiting Arts @ Large, UW-Whitewater, UW-Parkside and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. It will eventually settle at Nō Studios on Saturday, Sept. 7, and Sunday, Sept. 8, where Br!efs, Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer and ’Rain on Fire will be presented to the public.

Br!NK is, first and foremost, a chance for winners to develop their scripts, as each playwright spends a week workshopping their play with a director, a cast and a dramaturge. “We are the midwives, and it is the playwright’s baby,” Fete said. “When playwrights send us their plays, they also tell us what they’re interested in working on. We choose two plays from the submissions, then we focus that week-long workshop on whatever it is the playwrights want to do.” They also bring in theater professionals with expertise in things like set design to help the playwrights see how their plays could best be brought to life. To go even further, the festival offers the chance to try scripts in front of a live audience, who are then encouraged to meet the playwrights and share opinions during talkbacks.

To be eligible for next year’s festival, playwrights need to be female, living in the Midwest (between and including North Dakota, Kansas and Ohio), and they must submit their scripts before the given deadline. “We solicit submissions beginning on Thursday, Aug. 15, and we will get plays sent to us through December,” according to Fete.

Previous Br!NK Plays Keep On Living

“It has been one of the most exciting things about Br!NK: The playwrights are starting to get some success with the works that they did for us,” Fete enthused. The objective of Br!NK was always to give opportunities to women playwrights, which is starting to become reality. For example, Philana Omorotionmwan’s entry to Br!NK in 2016, Before Evening Comes, set a resounding precedent by being named in The Kilroys List—an annual, national list of the 100 most producible plays by women.

The following year, Amanda Petefish-Schrag’s The Endurance of Light won Br!NK, and its staged reading was directed by Fete, herself. The play, which focuses on science and religion in the event of a miscarriage, was just produced by Milwaukee’s Acacia Theatre Company in July.

2017 was an exceptional year for Br!NK laureates, as the second winner, Reina Hardy’s Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven, was also produced earlier this year. Renaissance Theaterworks was the first to produce it, but it was also picked up by theater companies in Washington, D.C., Texas and Connecticut. The charming story—which introduces audiences to a small-town science genius contacted by an intergalactic supercomputer to lead humanity to the stars—garnered national attention thanks to its humor, drama and quirky characters.

The trend continues as one of the Br!NK Br!efs chosen last year—Alayna Jacqueline’s All of the Everything—made its mark in the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival. “They’re producing it in New York right before Br!NK,” Fete said. “I’m really thrilled that we were able to help the playwright create this relationship with Samuel French!”

The Br!NK New Play Festival will be touring Sept. 3-6 and at Nō Studios Sept. 7-8. For more information, visit r-t-w.com or community.nostudios.com.