South Coast Repertory Announces 2011 Pacific Playwrights Festival Lineup

South Coast Repertory's 14th Annual Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF) will take you through time and across the map, from tornado-tossed Kansas to not-quite-past, not-quite-future London, from a ramshackle trailer in the Colorado desert to the visiting area of a Massachusetts prison.

The festival, which takes place April 29 - May 1, will feature fully-produced world premieres by Itamar Moses and Lauren Gunderson and staged readings of brand-new works by Sharr White, Catherine Trieschmann, Octavio Solis and Adam Gwon, Meg Miroshnik and Steven Drukman.

"The plays of this year's festival are stylistically diverse and exciting," said festival co-director Kelly Miller, "including a powerful new musical collaboration between playwright Octavio Solis and composer Adam Gwon, an inventive drama about the end of theatre by emerging playwright Meg Miroshnik, compelling dramatic stories from Sharr White and Catherine Trieschmann, and Steven Drukman's quirky family comedy set in the Down the Lake section of Boston."

Since its creation in 1998, PPF has grown into one of the leading festivals of new plays in the country, devoted to showcasing some of the best new work on our radar, in hopes of generating lively conversation, future world premieres and subsequent productions for myriad playwrights. Over the years, the festival has helped launch some of the most prominent plays in the American theatre, including Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, Rolin Jones' The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow and David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, among many others.

Anchoring the 14th annual Pacific Playwrights Festival are productions of Silent Sky, a beautiful historical drama based on the life of turn-of-the-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, and Itamar Moses' Completeness, a comedy about two graduate students who find that love is the most complicated algorithm of all.

The festival kicks off Friday afternoon with Steven Drukman's The Prince of Atlantis, also featured in January's NewSCRipts reading. Funny and full of surprises, it finds an imprisoned seafood importer trying to manage the sudden appearance of the son he gave up for adoption 30 years earlier.

Following that are two very different plays that are both interested in the uneasy relationships between religion and government. In How the World Began, veteran Catherine Trieschmann explores a modern-day dust-up over evolution in a Midwestern school. And in The Droll, newcomer Meg Miroshnik's imagines a ragtag troupe attempting to organize a secret performance of Hamlet in a world in which theatre has been outlawed.

Saturday morning brings a new SCR-commissioned work by Sharr White. Annapurna, which takes its name from one of the world's highest mountains, investigates the relationship between a dying, reclusive poet and his ex-wife, who re-appears at his trailer doorstep just as suddenly as she disappeared 20 years earlier.

Things conclude on Sunday with something of a PPF rarity: a new musical titled Cloudlands. Written by Octavio Solis, who gave us La Posada Magica, and Adam Gwon, who made a big splash last season with his musical Ordinary Days, Cloudlands is a play about family secrets and deadly desires.

The Pacific Playwrights Festival is made possible with support from The Shubert Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pacific Playwrights Festival Honorary Producers (Sophie and Larry Cripe, Yvonne and Damien Jordan, John and Sue Murphy, Thomas B. Rogers and Sarah J. Anderson, and Linda and Tod White). Special thanks to The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust and the Edgerton Foundation for supporting the development of new plays.

The Wyndham Orange County Hotel is the Official Hotel of the Pacific Playwrights Festival.

TICKET PRICES for the 14th Pacific Playwrights Festival are $12 per individual reading, and $31-$66 for Silent Sky and Completeness. The festival runs April 29-May 1. Tickets can be purchased online at www.scr.org, by phone at (714) 708-5555 or in person at the SCR box office.