Before getting caught up in the Old Spanish Days confetti hurricane, spend a quiet weekend in Ojai taking in fresh storytelling at the 29th annual Ojai Playwrights Conference (OPC) New Works Festival, July 30–August 2. This year, five playwrights will spend two weeks bringing a play from the page to the stage, culminating in a series of dramatic (and comic) readings. Featuring professional actors and directors, and with the benefit of dramaturgical research, the Ojai Playwrights Conference gives audiences a sneak peek of new work-in-progress from some of today’s most intriguing dramatic writers.
The festival kicks off on July 31 with Mat Smart’s The Last Nun at Lake Leaf Monastery. “Half of the play takes place in silence,” says OPC Producing Artistic Director Jeremy Cohen. “It takes place at an old monastery on a deserted island with one final nun who lives there. These intrepid millennials kayak their way out for a silent retreat with her, and all hell breaks loose.” Cohen points out that one of the important roles of the audience in presenting these new comedies on stage is to see which jokes land (and which of them crash). “A big part of comedy is the opportunity to actually have an audience laugh or not laugh. In a way, the audience matters this year more than ever.”
Another comedy premiering at the festival is Closing Costs by L.A.-based writer Grace McLeod, a farce about purchasing real estate in Los Angeles. “We haven’t developed a farce at OPC in a while,” says Cohen. “I think comedy tends to be very male dominated in theater and television and film. For me, finding strong female comedic voices is super important.”
The remaining plays include The Collectivists (by Jaclyn Backhaus), The Loyal Opposition (by Keith Bunin), and Except That It Is God (by Harrison David Rivers). The Collectivists explores a small co-op-style community on working farm, while The Loyal Opposition follows three long-time friends on the night they plan to open a restaurant. Playwright Keith Bunin says the play, which Cohen describes as akin to a three-piece jazz band, is about “the lifelong friends who hold us to our best selves.” Except That It Is God explores the bleak outlook of young people in dead-end lives, unsure of how to manifest a greater destiny. “I graduated high school and college with so much hope,” says Rivers. “Young people now are coming of age in a moment of seeming scarcity, a moment of profound socio-economic and global anxiety. They’re stuck before they even get a chance to move. And many are quitting before they even get a chance to try. I wanted to write about that, about stasis. To interrogate it. And to tell a story … that says, no, stasis is not destiny, you still have agency, you can still dream and achieve and change the world.”
Beyond the play readings, the festival also offers a panel conversation with the writers, and a kick-off celebration of the work done by this year’s OPC cohort, including interns, writers in residence, and the OPC youth workshop. The New Works Festival is housed at the Milligan Center for the Performing Arts at The Thacher School in Ojai.
“New plays capture the present moment,” says Rivers, “what we are grappling with, embracing, warring against, and laughing about right now…New plays are our heartbeat. They are us at our most human.”
See ojaiplays.org for tickets and information.
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