Welcome to “the festival within the festival!” We at PDX Playwrights are honored to uphold our reputation for robust creativity with an outstanding offering of new staged readings, recorded live, for the 2021 Fertile Ground Festival of New Works.
PDXP has envisioned an entirely new pre-recorded, virtual program for Fertile Ground 2021 — different from anything we’ve ever done before, yet continuing to showcase the storytelling talents of Portland playwrights. Ironically, the COVID-19 quarantine will reveal more than ever our famous capacity to make relevant and entertaining theater together, even in challenging circumstances.
Alongside our friends with LineStorm Playwrights, we will be contributing three timely programs of short works for the Fertile Ground Lunchtime Series. In addition, some of our playwrights will help to create instant monologues for Bag & Baggage‘s “Sequestered Soliloquies” later in February. The Festival runs Thursday, January 28 through Sunday, February 7, 2021. Our Fertile Ground events will “drop” at noon Friday, January 29, noon Sunday, January 31, and noon Friday, February 5, 2021.
All events will be viewable FREE on the Fertile Ground website, and later on the PDXP Youtube Channel.
The Programs
Epic Shorts
Noon Friday, January 29, 2021
Produced by Karen Polinsky and Ajai Tripalthi
In the tradition of our “Daisy Dukes Shorts Night” of the past six years in Fertile Ground, PDX Playwrights offers a juried selection of short plays (ten minutes or less) exploring a common theme by a collection of talented playwrights, performed by local actors, recorded live. These plays will explore the theme “No Place Like Home” in their own compelling ways.
PDXP ZOOM INstant Play Festival
Noon Sunday, January 31, 2021
Produced by Kate Belden and Brad Bolchunos
PDXP’s fifth annual Instant Play Festival takes a new twist in 2021! This Festival-within-the Festival-within-the-Festival is guaranteed to be the very newest, freshest work performed at Fertile Ground 2021. How do we know this? Because the work is getting created DURING the festival! Think of it as theatre on a high wire with no net. A team of talented playwrights will obtain 3-4 prompts during a live, on-line event, open to the public, on December 4, 2020, and will be randomly assigned 2-5 cast members. The playwrights will then write, rehearse, produce and perform plays with run-times of six- to ten-minutes within 48 hours.
Experimental Plays
Noon Friday, February 5, 2021
Produced by Alisha Christiansen and Lisa Collins
Similar to our co-produced shows of short and one-act plays in years past (such as 2020’s “5×3: Five Plays by Three Diverse Playwrights”), this is a series of short and one-act plays that respond to the creative challenges of the pre-recorded format and virtual presentation, all bound by the common theme, “Life As We Know It.”
Sequestered Soliloquies
Date and Time to be announced
Produced by Gary Corbin, Alisha Christiansen and Karen Polinsky
Along with Line Storm Playwrights, PDXP will select up to five (5) playwrights who will, in a 24-hour period, each develop a 3-5 minute monolog for a collaborative show entitled “Sequestered Soliloquies.” Bag & Baggage Productions will supply actors and a director who will collaborate with the playwright to produce the work in a 24-hour time period. This show’s theme will be “Me and My Masks.”
Thank you for your interest and support of new work through the Portland Area Theatre Alliance, Fertile Ground, and PDX Playwrights. We can’t wait to see you online at our “festival within the festival!“
