PianoFight part of Bay One Acts Festival

For the Ninth year in a row Three Wise Monkeys is putting together its Bay One Acts (BOA) Festival running at Boxcar in February, and they just announced the line-up of playwrights, directors, and producing partners.

PianoFight's part of it, producing Sam Leichter's deliciously evil play "The Philadelphian," with Rob Ready directing. Essentially, BOA picks scripts and signs up companies to handle the production of each piece.

Interestingly enough, of the eleven playwrights selected for BOA, PianoFight has already produced four of them, and two of those at length. Megan Cohen, Lauren Yee, Bill Bivins and Daniel Heath, the former who each had pieces in the first ShortLived, and the latter who have each won ShortLived and subsequently had world premiere full lengths at PianoFight. Bloggotubing playwright buddy Tim Bauer's got a script in also, and our homies Sleepwalkers have a piece in the mix too.

Jessica Holt has taken over as AD of Three Wise Monkeys, and at pre-festival meetings (which have inexplicably been scheduled for the unholy hours of before noon on weekends), she has stressed the importance of community throughout the festival. While I'm not exactly certain how that plays out in terms of the fest (probably just means she wants us all to get loaded together), it helps that a bunch of us have already worked together (we've hosted two of the other producing companies, Playwrights Center and No Nude Men, for rehearsals at Off-Market).

Point is, BOA has gotten some pretty dope writers, directors, actors and companies on board for this and the 2010 line-up should be nothing short of killer with this level of talent collaborating. We're looking forward to it, especially that whole community part (read: drinking).

"A Merry FORKING! Christmas" Is Even More Fun Than This

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

"50 Years Hungry" by D. Heath

I caught Daniel Heath's Fifty Years Hungry as a staged reading part of The Best of Playground festival earlier this year.

The Aurora Theater in Berkeley also staged a reading of the play just last week I think and by all accounts it went off great.

Fifty Years Hungry is Heath's first full length drama, commissioned by Playground in 2009, and he wrote it just after completing his first full length comedic show, FORKING! which PianoFight premiered in SF for a month and moved to Theater Asylum in Hollywood with the help of Combined Artform.

The two plays could not be more different. It's staggering. FORKING! is a hooping and hollering audience driven riot while Fifty Years Hungry is a razor sharp deconstruction of family and funerals full of dark wit. What's truly amazing is how good both of these shows are, and Heath's apparent ability to write high caliber work for whatever audience will be seeing it.

I hope the Aurora picks it up, cause Hungry is perfect for that community (feel free to email the Aurora at general@auroratheatre.org and lustily voice your need to see Fifty Years Hungry fully produced on their stage). And if they foolishly pass on the script, there are always a few stages at Off-Market.

Speaking of, if you'd like to catch another of Daniel's fully scripted plays in which the audience decides the ending, A Merry FORKING Christmas, premieres at Off-Market on December 15th, and runs like crazy through the holidays (more info coming soon).