Playwright Festival 2025
Workshopped readings and an Artist Salon with the 2025-2027 Featured Playwrights!
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What was it like being the first to hear early drafts of Angels in America? Or Fences? Or Twelfth Night? At Playwright Festival, you’ll know.
Last cycle’s Playwright Festival gave audiences the opportunity to meet with, and see early drafts of new work from Tony Award-nominated playwright Kristoffer Diaz and two-time Sundance Fellow christopher oscar peña. This year, you’ll be the first to welcome the visionary 2025-2027 Featured Playwrights and see early drafts of the plays commissioned for our 2025-2027 cycle.
You’ll enjoy two workshopped readings, and close the weekend off with a catered Artist Salon with the playwrights. You’ll have the opportunity to meet and mingle with the Featured Playwrights, and to discuss their work, their process, the state of their art, and the state of the world. At Playwright Festival, our audiences and artists build the future of live theatre together.
Thursday, June 26th @ 7:30pm| “Untitled Houdini Project” by Jen Silverman
Friday, June 27th @ 7:30pm| Alpha Asians by Mike Lew
Saturday, June 28th @ 12:00pm| Artist Talk, reception to follow
“Untitled Houdini Project” written by Jen Silverman
Created by Jen Silverman and Mike Donahue – June 26th @ 7:30PM
$15 Ticket
In the winter and spring of 1926, Harry Houdini was summoned to a hearing before the House of Representatives, to testify on behalf of a new bill that would make acts of fortune
telling illegal.
The newest project by playwright Jen Silverman takes as its starting point the exact
transcript for these Congressional hearings, while weaving in thrilling theatrical séance sequences, and the growing complexity of Houdini’s relationship with the Spiritualist mediums whose beliefs obsessed him even as he opposed them.
Are we to be a country of hard facts, scientific data, and honesty? Are we to be a country of comforting possibilities, where the boundary between the living and the dead is crossable if the right guides are permitted to take you? What does it mean to argue over the character of a nation in 1926? And, of course, what does it mean to do that right now?
Alpha Asians by Mike Lew – June 27th @ 7:30PM
$15 Ticket
Inspired by the real life frat hazing death of a pledge at an Asian-American fraternity, Mike Lew’s latest comedy, Alpha Asians, dramatizes this frat’s fateful pledge week in a work that smashes together Greek life with Greek tragedy. Using an ensemble largely comprised of Asian actors who were assigned female at birth (AFAB), this strikingly comedic script explores the dramatic possibilities in having performers “cosplay” maleness in order to examine Asian-American identity, toxic masculinity, and pervasive stereotypes around Asian men. Alpha Asians is a character-driven comedy that lifts frat culture into the realm of ritual.
Artist Talk and Reception – June 28th @ 12:00PM
$35 Ticket
Join Profile Theatre and 2025-2027 Featured Playwrights Jen Silverman and Mike Lew for an intimate Artist Talk, discussing the playwrights’s process, their work, the world at large, and (perhaps) hearing the earliest drafts of their yet-to-be-announced works. Followed by a catered reception Jen Silverman and Mike Lew, the Artist Talk is an opportunity for you to forge your own personal connection with our Featured Playwrights.
All events are held at The Ellen Bye Studio at The Armory: 128 NW 11th Ave, Portland, OR
Meet our Featured Playwrights!
Jen Silverman is a multi-hyphenate playwright, poet, and novelist whose work has been produced nationally and internationally, on and off Broadway. Their plays balance lyricism with grounded sincerity, and highlight the power of hope in seemingly hopeless times. Silverman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a three-time MacDowell Fellow, and recipient of the Yale Drama Series Award. Their play The Roommate recently closed its Broadway run, with Mia Farrow and Pattie LuPone in the leading roles.
Mike Lew leverages his razor-sharp wit and bombastic energy to create plays that are as hilarious as they are thought-provoking. A Chinese-American playwright, Lew’s work is a rioutous melding of personal, familial and cultural identities into one explosive comedic mix. He is a Tony voter, Dramatists Guild Council member, New Dramatists Resident, and recipient of the Richard Rogers Award. He is former co-director of Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the largest collective of Asian-American playwrights in the country.
PlAYWRIGHT FESTIVAL IN THE PRESS
PlAYWRIGHT FESTIVAL IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED IN PART BY
Harold Goldstein
Carol Streeter
David Katz & Lee Katman
