“Development” is the watchword of the regional theater community. In past decades, that could mean the building of repertory acting companies, loyal subscriber bases or new performance spaces.
These days, it’s plays. Many of the regional theaters in Connecticut have special programs to fund, encourage and produce new work by contemporary playwrights.
One of the Long Wharf Theatre’s efforts in that direction, a weekend-long festival of play readings, happens Friday and Saturday, Sept. 9 and 10.
Jeff Augustin’s “The Last Tiger in Haiti” is an interesting choice for the reading series, since the play has already had a full production, in August at the La Jolla Playhouse. The same production moves to another California theater, the Berkeley Rep, in October.
Augustin says it was the Long Wharf that approached him about reading this particular play. “This reading is very interesting for me in my process,” Augustin said in a phone interview last month. “I’m going to be able to try out a couple of things. Certain writers may know how something will sound when they put it on the page, but not me. It’s important to hear the actors. The rhythm and the language is very important —especially in this play, which has both English and Creole.
“It’s great to have a different audience see it, and a new director.”
The director of “The Last Tiger in Haiti” reading is Lileana Blain-Cruz. She was a standout talent when she attended the Yale School of Drama, known for “devised” ensemble pieces, including a postmodern rethinking of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and Gertrude Stein’s “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.” She graduated in 2012, and is directing five shows in New York this season, working with such admired playwrights as Lucas Hnath, Alice Birch and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
A Long Wharf press release describes “The Last Tiger in Haiti” thus: “It’s the final night of Kanaval in Haiti, and a group of restaveks, abandoned children living in servitude, trade spellbinding tales blurring fiction and reality, and dreaming of freedom.” Augustin says his play asks “How do kids grow up in difficult situations, physically or emotionally?”
The other two plays in the Contemporary American Voices Festival are both directed by Lee Sunday Evans, who like Lileana Blain-Cruz has considerable experience working with new plays and living playwrights.
“Miller, Mississippi,” by the Mississippi-raised, New York-based playwright Boo Killebrew, is called “a “Southern Gothic tale of one family’s heartfelt and devastating descent into ruin.” Clare Barron’s “Dance Nation,” which was cited as why the playwright won a “Relentless Award” from the American Playwriting Foundation last year, is described: “An army of pre-teen competitive dancers plots to take over the world.”
The Contemporary American Voices Festival is held at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven, Friday and Saturday, Sept. 9 and 10. Boo Killebrew’s “Miller, Mississippi” is read Friday at 7 p.m., Jeff Augustin’s “The Last Tiger in Haiti” is read Saturday at 5 p.m. and Clare Barron’s “Dance Nation” is read Saturday at 8:30 p.m. Suggested donation is $5. 203-787-4282, longwharf.org.
