Reading Series: The Plays that Inspired Lauren Yee
Step into the creative mind of Featured Playwright Lauren Yee by experiencing the plays that inspired her! Join us for readings of Five Flights by Adam Bock, and God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz, as well as quality Profile camaraderie as we gear up to leap into our mainstage shows!
Postponed! Check back for dates after the 2024 holiday season!
To Be announced!
Five Flights
by Adam Bock
Siblings Ed and Adele inherit an enormous aviary that their late father built for his deceased wife, whose soul, he believed, had transformed into the body of a wren. The grown children face the dilemma of what to do with the crumbling structure — sister-in-law Jane wants to build tidy new houses; friend Olivia wants to build The Church of the Fifth Day honoring birds and the Fifth Day of creation; Ed wants to let the building fall to the ground. Folded into this debate are issues of religious conviction, fear of commitment, the way Russian ballet resembles a hockey game, and the courtship of Ed by Tom, a gay professional hockey player.
Adam Bock | Playwright
About Adam Bock
Adam Bock. Adam Bock’s The Thugs premiered at NYC’s Soho Rep in 2006, winning an OBIE for playwriting for Mr. Bock and an OBIE for directing for Anne Kauffman, and was named to both of TimeOut NY’s Top Ten lists. His new play The Receptionist will world-premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in October 2007, directed by Joe Mantello. His play The Drunken City will be at Playwrights Horizons in early 2008.
Five Flights played Off-Broadway at Rattlestick Theater in 2004, after a five-month sold-out run at San Francisco’s Encore Theater in 2002. The play won the Glickman Award, and was nominated for the American Theater Critics Award, the Elizabeth Osborn Award, and two BATCC Awards. It has been published in Breaking Ground, an anthology of new plays edited by Kent Nicholson.
Shotgun Players’ production of Swimming in the Shallows won the 2000 Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards for Best Original Script, Best Production, and Best Ensemble. Swimming in the Shallows was a Clauder Competition Award-winner, an L. Arnold Weissberger Award nominee, an LA Weekly nominee, a GLAAD Media Award nominee, named to TimeOut NY’s Top Ten, and has been produced in Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Boston, Providence, Santa Cruz, Ithaca, Key West, Long Beach, Toronto, Montreal, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as Second Stage’s Uptown Series in New York City in the summer of 2005.
Mr. Bock helped Jack Cummings III develop The Audience, nominated for three 2005 Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical. His play The Shaker Chair, produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville in the Humana Festival in 2005, was nominated for the Kesselring Prize. The Typographer’s Dream has been produced in New York City and San Francisco, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in Berkeley in 2006. Mr. Bock’s play Thursday was produced in San Francisco with a 2003 NEA grant.
These and other plays have been read or workshopped at New York Theater Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, NYC’s Vineyard Theater, Soho Rep, Underwood Theater, Rude Mechanicals NYC, the JAW/West Festival at Portland Center Stage, Printer’s Devil, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Magic Theater, Salt Lake Actors Company, Southwark Theater, TheatreWorks New Works Festival, New Works at Perry-Mansfield, and Clubbed Thumb. Mr. Bock is an artistic associate at Shotgun Players and Encore Theater, and is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
God’s Ear
by Jenny Schwartz
God’s Ear marks the debut of Jenny Schwartz, “an indelibly clever playwright, possessed of linguistic playfulness and a lively sense of rhythm” (The Village Voice). Through the skillfully disarming use of clichéd language and homilies, the play explores with subtle grace and depth the way the death of a child tears one family apart, while showcasing the talents of a promising young playwright who “in [a] very modern way [is] making a rather old-fashioned case for the power of the written word” (The New York Times).
A husband and wife have trouble coping with the loss of their son, they find themselves speaking in cliches and the husband travels to forget. The wife stays with their daughter and the tooth fairy and tries to figure out how to cope from home.
Jenny Schwartz | Playwright
About Jenny Schwartz
Jenny Schwartz’s plays include God’s Ear, Somewhere Fun, and Cause For Alarm. Somewhere Fun will receive its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre in the spring of 2013, directed by Anne Kauffman. God’s Ear was produced in New York by New Georges and the Vineyard Theatre, also directed by Anne Kauffman. God’s Ear has been produced nationally and internationally from Lisbon, Portugal to Boise, Idaho to Sydney, Australia.
Jenny is the 2012 recipient of the Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theatre for the development of her musical Iowa, which she is writing with composer Todd Almond. Iowa is being developed at Williamstown Theatre Festival and Sundance/MassMoCA. Other awards and honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award in Drama, a Kesselring honor, two Susan Smith Blackburn special commendations, two grants from Lincoln Center’s Lecomte du Nuoy Foundation, and Soho Rep’s Dorothy Streslin Playwriting Fellowship.
Jenny received an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University and is a graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program.
Lauren Yee | 2024-2025 Featured Playwright
About Lauren Yee
Lauren Yee is a playwright, screenwriter, and TV writer born and raised in San Francisco. She currently lives in New York City.
Her CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND, with music by Dengue Fever and others, premiered at South Coast Rep, with subsequent productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Victory Gardens, City Theatre, Merrimack Rep, and Signature Theatre. Her play THE GREAT LEAP has been produced at Denver Center, Seattle Rep, Atlantic Theatre, Guthrie Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Arts Club, InterAct Theatre, Steppenwolf, Pasadena Playhouse/East West Players, and Cygnet Theatre.
Lauren Yee’s play KING OF THE YEES premiered at The Goodman Theatre and Center Theatre Group, followed by productions at ACT Theatre, Canada’s National Arts Centre, and Baltimore Center Stage. Other plays include CHING CHONG CHINAMAN (Pan Asian Rep, Mu Performing Arts), THE HATMAKER’S WIFE (Playwrights Realm, Moxie, PlayPenn), HOOKMAN (Encore, Company One), IN A WORD (Young Vic, SF Playhouse, Cleveland Public, Strawdog), SAMSARA (Victory Gardens), THE SONG OF SUMMER (Trinity Rep, Mixed Blood), and THE TIGER AMONG US (Mu).
She is the winner of the Doris Duke Artist Award, the 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, New Dramatists member (class of 2025), Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab member, former Princeton University Hodder fellow, and Playwrights Realm alumni playwright. Current commissions include Arena Stage, Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Center Stage, Second Stage, South Coast Rep.
