Theatre Squared, the professional theater company in Fayetteville, Ark., is hosting its fourth annual Arkansas New Play Festival this weekend.
Each year, four plays are chosen out of the many submitted to be put through an intensive process of revision and rehearsal to ready them for a weekend of staged reading performances. Each performance is followed by a question-and-answer session that will involve the audience, actors and author of the play.
The four new plays to be presented are:
-- "Uprooted" by Clinnesha Dillon Sibley, about a family of long-separated siblings who come together for their mother's funeral.
-- "The Spiritualist" by Theatre Squared artistic director Robert Ford, a comedy about a woman who claims to communes with the spirits of dead composers and the reporter out to prove her a fraud.
-- "The Ballad of Rusty and Roy" by Troy and Jonny Schremmer. A play with original music, about two Texas brothers and their divergent musical careers in New York City.
-- "The Football Project," by Samuel Brett Williams, an untitled work in progress that imagines the aftermath in a small town when its football team is disqualified because one player forged his grades.
The weekend will also include a showcase of plays by young Arkansas playwrights, as well as a "24-Hour Play-Off," in which teams of writers, directors and performers spend a single day created, rehearsing and performing original short plays.
The event is similar to two of Playhouse Tulsa's efforts this year -- "The Origins Project," which featured staged readings of several plays, and the "24-Hour Play Festival."
For ocmplete information about the Arkansas New Play Festival, go
here.
