←Ashland New Plays Festival

“You were oceans away. There were lifetimes of water between us.” - Pocket Universe. Beautiful, transporting, poignant, and high drama. These are some of the one-word responses audience members gave after seeing Pocket Universe by Thomas Brandon at Ashland New Plays Festival. This science fiction mystery tells a moving story about love and grief. Director Rhonda Kohl shared, “Grief is a universal language, and this play explores that common experience through an uncommon lens.” This wonderfully unpredictable show dazzled audiences at ANPF, and we are proud to support Pocket Universe by Thomas Brandon as an ANPF 2021 winner.

Heroines from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing come to vivid life in this comedic romp of self-discovery. An audience member stated, “Great farce is challenging to write. Great farce that riffs on Shakespeare triply so. Meghan Brown has created a unicorn.” Director Holly L. Derr says this play “...gives one of Shakespeare’s famously underdeveloped women characters a chance to take up space and come into her own in a way that is exciting, funny, and sexy." Here at ANPF we are excited to support What Happened While Hero Was Dead by Meghan Brown as an ANPF 2021 winner.

“A history lesson and an important cultural message via a compelling, entertaining and intensely human story with characters so alive that their creation seems effortless.” An enthusiastic account of Last Drive to Dodge from an audience member at Ashland New Plays Festival. ANPF audiences praised Last Drive to Dodge for its poeticism, truth, and authenticity, stating that this show "underscores why the stage really does matter." We are excited to support Last Drive to Dodge by Andrew Lee Creech as an ANPF 2021 winner, and we can’t wait for more audiences to experience this exciting new work.

Donna Hoke is always surprising, her characters disarming, her themes intricately explored. We recorded BWOA at play4keeps.org with Anthony Heald, Stefani Potter, and Román Zaragoza and the play just smokes! It was a very deft, in-your-face look at the way priorities shape the relationships we build and the choices we own. The conclusion may rattle you a bit, but it won't leave you doubting who's really in charge.

SCREENWRITER is a two-hander tour de force of great writing and deft character development that plunges us into the heart of Hollywood, where its peculiar brand of creative accomplishment and ennui eventually undoes even the brashest of the power brokers. Two very outstanding and thoroughly experienced actors, Douglas Rowe and Denis Arndt, performed this percussive dialogue for play4keeps.org and they absolutely crushed it. Jim Shankman writes like one who knows the soft underbelly of LaLaLand, where too much is never enough, and finds a place of empathy, maybe even forgiveness, for its tortured souls.

Marin Gazzaniga's fast-paced, funny and touching play will draw you into it's examination of two very different people coming to terms with their lives and each other in ways neither would freely choose. Erica Sullivan and Michael Gabriel Goodfriend recorded this for us at play4keeps.org and it's terrific. Millicent and Sparky aren't all that certain they want anything to do with each other at the outset and by play's end their relationship becomes the unique conduit for what they each need to understand about themselves to get on with their lives.

NAMING TRUE is a beautiful story about two people from very different places and a distant connection in the past that brings them together. Christiana Clark and Rachel Crowl recorded it for us at play4keeps.org and it's a very powerful experience to hear them bring their characters to life. If you can make it through this play without getting choked up and shedding a few tears, better check to see if your heart's still beating. Natalie Symons' work here is poignant and compelling, with redemption found in even these bleakest of circumstances.

Like Skye Robinson Hillis herself, AND VASTER is smart, witty, charming, provocative, and disarmingly complex. We recorded this beautiful play at www.play4keeps.org with David Kelly and Terri McMahon reprising their lead roles from its reading at ANPF 2015. They were joined by John Pribyl, Tamra Mathias, and Meghan Nealon in telling this tale about how love pushes, stretches, caresses, batters, and never fails to surprise in leading us to places we never suspected we wanted to go. Skye is a playwright to be paid close attention.

This powerful play about the artists Carl Andre, a founder of the Minimalist Art movement, and Ana Mendieta, a Cuban immigrant whose fame in New York art circles begins to eclipse his, examines in retrospect their torrid relationship that led eventually to her fall from the window of their 34th floor Village apartment shortly after they were married. At play4keeps.org, two extraordinary actors, Anthony Heald and Nancy Rodriguez, recorded this dialogue between the aged Andre and the ghost of Mendieta, who has haunted him for decades and now insists they examine together the truth of that fatal evening.

Donna Hoke is an extraordinarily gifted playwright who comes at her subjects in unexpected ways. We recorded ELEVATOR GIRL at Play4Keeps with three very talented young actors who absolutely killed it. But first they had to talk their way through all the different issues their characters raised for them. Like the big league talent she is, Donna pitches knuckleballs that will have you swinging wildly at your assumptions and thinking long after you've finished this play about all the subtleties and nuances she delivers. We highly recommend it.