The Fearless New Play Festival is a four-day celebration of new scripts in development that address urgent issues of today. The festival kicks off on November 19 with a speech by nationally renowned keynote playwright Lauren Yee. The festival features staged readings of new short plays by current TDPS students and alumni from November 19-22.

Thursday, November 19, 2020 Keynote Speech and Playwright Showcase

• Keynote speech by playwright Lauren Yee
• By Grace Part Two by Agyeiwaa Asante '18
• All of My Bullies and Where Are They Now by Liz Crino '18

Friday, November 20, 2020 Playwright Showcase

• RAPunzel by Jasmine Mitchell '20
• Please Like Me by Jordan Resnick '22

Saturday, November 21, 2020 Playwright Showcase

• The Ice Room by Liz Maestri '03
• Loving in the Age of Social Distancing by Amber Smithers '20
• Ghost Story by Evangelina Hakes '19

Sunday, November 22, 2020 Playwright Showcase

• A Tea Party by Mariel Berlin-Fischler '14
• Tiny Ruins by April Monu '18
• The Tao Island by Lyra Woods '17

Announcing Keynote Playwright Lauren Yee

The School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies is thrilled to announce that internationally-renowned playwright Lauren Yee will be our 2020 keynote playwright. Lauren Yee is a playwright, screenwriter, and TV writer born and raised in San Francisco. She currently lives in New York City.

Her play Cambodian Rock Band, with music by Dengue Fever and others, just had a lauded off-Broadway run at Signature Theatre. Her plays The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band led the list of top 10 most produced plays in the country for the 2019-20 season. She is the winner of the 2019 Doris Duke Artist Award for outstanding contributions to theater, the 2019 Steinberg Playwright Award, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her plays were the #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List. Lauren is a Residency 5 playwright at Signature Theatre in New York, New Dramatists member (class of 2025), Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab member, former Princeton University Hodder fellow, and Playwrights Realm alumni playwright. She earned her BA at Yale and her MFA at UC San Diego, and American Theatre Magazine named her as the second most-produced playwright in the country for the 2019/20 season. For more info, please visit www.laurenyee.com.