Baldwin New Play Festival Nurtures Theatrical Talent

Aimee Zygmonski | April 11, 2011

Megan Robinson and Kyle Anderson. Photo by Manuel Rotenberg.

In 1999, Ken and Ginger Baldwin had an idea: to donate funds to create an annual play festival that brought to the stage the work of the MFA playwrights in the department of theatre and dance. Now each year, four to five playwrights work long into the night writing plays that will become fully realized on the stage in UC San Diego’s Baldwin New Play Festival. This undertaking is no small matter, with almost the entire cadre of MFA actors, directors and designers participating.

This year, the plays run from April 13 to 23 and tell a wide range of stories, from deals with the devil to haunting by ghosts; the trials and tribulations of parenthood (and really, growing up); and the search for lost love—and a hat.

Filled with passion, insight, humor and a dose of magic, these four plays represent “some of the most original and ground-breaking new voices in American theatre,” says Festival Director Naomi Iizuka, faculty head of playwriting and herself an accomplished playwright. “It really is a one of a kind opportunity, not only for these playwrights, but also for the audience.”

New plays showcased at the Baldwin Festival in recent years have had major productions and readings in all major metro areas of the country, and San Diego audiences are the first to see them.

Anne Stella (foreground) and Zack Martens (silhouette). Photo by Colin McGurk.

Local theater critic Pat Launer has written of the festival: “The writing, acting, direction and design are excellent across the board. This is a festival more San Diegans should attend. It gives us a sense of what young people are thinking and obsessing about these days.”

This year’s productions include Salamander Leviathan by third-year playwright Krista Knight, winner of the Kennedy Center's 2011 American College Theatre Festival's Musical Theatre Award, A Man, his Wife, and a Hat by Lauren Yee, Small Prophecies by David Myers, and the one-act Bodies in the Park by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh.

Past playwrights include Rachel Axler, the first female writer on "The Daily Show" and a former writer with NBC’s "Parks and Recreation," and Mat Smart, a recipient of two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center. Recently, the prestigious summer festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival produced the world premiere of his newest play, Samuel J. and K. Steppenwolf Young Adult will produce the Midwest premiere of the play this winter.

Also part of the Baldwin Festival is the fifth annual Dr. Floyd Gaffney National Playwriting Competition on the African-American Experience. This competition was open to all enrolled undergraduate students throughout the country. This year’s winner, A-lan Holt, hails from Stanford, and she will be invited to campus to participate in a staged reading of her play 8ball as part of the festival. According to Holt, “8ball is a work informed by many sets of politics. It is a play that is haunted by a very real historical past surrounding drugs, drug sentencing and the government’s (dis)investment in poor communities of color. The work attempts to break open discussions surrounding drugs and places them within the context of the everyday, the here and now, the past and future.”

Zack Martens and Anne Stella. Photo by Manuel Rotenberg.

Because the judging committee was so impressed with another play, they awarded an honorable mention to UC San Diego student Tylar-Nicole Pendgraft-Clabby and her play Take Up Your Cross. Pendgraft-Clabbby’s script, based on Langston Hughes’s poem Cross, depicts a young woman of African-American and white descent who occupies her father’s home and is confronted by ghosts of her African-American family. 

“The Baldwin New Play Festival really showcases the creative talents of our students and truly fulfills the department's mission to support the creation of new original work that is imaginative, eclectic and interdisciplinary,” says Allyson Green, department chair.

Annually, BNPF is performed in three theatres over two weeks in late April, including the gala “Guest Weekend,” a three-day event attended by a dozen theater professionals from across the United States, including artistic directors, literary managers, agents and playwrights. Most guests participate in small seminars as well as seeing all productions.

Members of the campus and San Diego communities interested in seeing the full festival can purchase a “Flex Pass,” which offers tickets to each play at a reduced cost.

For more information on the Baldwin New Play Festival, please visit the department’s website or click here to purchase tickets online and scroll down to “Events.”