Off Opera News
These 4 Playwrights Featured in the Playwrights Kingdom 2013 INK’D Award Line-Up
Alex Lin, Andrea Ambam, Jesse Jae Hoon, and Alyssa Haddad-Chin will present their new play at Off-Broadway Theater at Theater 511 later this month.
Alex Lin, Andrea Ambam, Jesse Jae Hoon, and Alyssa Haddad-Chin
From April 24-27, The Playwrights Kingdom will present its annual INK’D Festival of New Plays, the culminating event of its Writers Associate Program, at Theater 511. The 2023 Lineup features works by Alex Lin, Andrea Ambam, Jesse Jae Hoon, and Alyssa Haddad-Chin. Each work will receive daily lessons at 3 PM and 7 PM.
This year’s festival includes Andrea Ambam’s lectures Fragile state (April 24) Jesse Jac Hoon’s Who is looking at me? (April 25), Alyssa Haddad-Chin’s Grandfathers Dot Com Play (April 26) and Alex Lin’s LASTHUNTER (April 27). Through these works, they grapple – through unknown, inventive and unexpected approaches – with pressing social and tenacious interpersonal issues that inhabit our everyday lives, while exploring everything from diasporic identity and generational divides, to gentrification and the limits of personal value systems; the grandmother is constrained in the present, the unseemly, the morality of extreme revenge.
Over the course of their time with The Kingdom, the Allies develop one new story (the works of which are finally presented in reading format at INK’D). This process includes monthly group meetings that provide a collaborative space for writers to share and develop their work, and one-on-one meetings with Kingdom’s artistic staff to support each writer’s process. For two lessons, one private recently in the fall and one for the audience in INK’D- Partners, they work with the director, design consultants and managers. There are personal professional opportunities to form the group: mentoring opportunities, meet and greets, and professional seminars designed to highlight the business of theater and allow Members to become active, informed participants in their careers. Former Writers Associates have won numerous awards, accolades, and are produced throughout the country; Most recently the 2017/18 Sarah Mantell Fellow won the 2023 Susan Smith Blackburn Award.
The Writers’ Kingdom program is a career accelerator, helping emerging writers build an agency and provide greater access to the theater world of New York, and provide these authors with a roadmap to navigate. Alexis Williams, Kingdom’s Associate Director of the Arts, says, “More and more open auditions these days, we’ve received nearly 800 in the last year, and the growing number demonstrates the dire need for such a program. It also highlights the amazing amount of theatrical minds who are seeking institutional support to accelerate their careers. At INK’ D, these writers, whose process has been nurtured by resources, generative resources, support and story support, are ready to reap the rewards of nine months spent with ideas that excite them and present their artistic visions. We can’t wait for audiences to see what their hard work has to offer!”
Andreas Ambam’s Fragile state four days of lessons will kick off on April 24. The Afro surrealist story follows Manny, a gen-z radical Black author, whose life is turned upside down when his grandmother from Cameroon visits. Chika will direct Ike.
Next on April 25th, Jesse Jae Hoon’s Who is looking at me? will be directed by Miranda Cornell Olivia, an Asian American author, returns to the Chinatown that inspired her work where she discovers that the neighborhood is rapidly being overrun by people from the past. As she makes new friends, Olivia is increasingly faced with the struggle between the lifestyle she can afford now and the good things she preaches.
Grandfathers Dot Com Play by Alyssa Haddad-Chin will be presented on April 26 under the direction of Kate Moore Heaney. Arab Americans Samia never knew their father and can’t get answers from their mother. So when Samia’s friend does a DNA test without Samia’s consent, he answers the questions he’s been asking for years. But is the truth too much?
It will be Alex Lin’s next day LASTHUNTER April 27. NASA interns Reggie Nielson and Elisa Yang plan to go through time travel through various adventures. Why? The biggest aerospace hero turns out to be their former Nazi employer, and the two want revenge by killing him. Mike Donahue directs the work, which explores the fragility of the nation and the grayness of the soul.
The program encourages members to sign up for nineteen months for the first four months of each year. With resources, workshops, and feedback, each story writer receives a $4,000 stipend and tuition.
Attendees of INK’D Festivals whose attendance incurs treatment costs will be able to receive up to $60 in reimbursement as part of Playwrights Kingdom’s Radical Parental Inclusion Project.
visit PlaywrightsRealm.org.
