Pittsburgh in the Round: The 28th annual Pittsburgh New Works Festival (PNWF) once again awes with an admirably ambitious line-up. The festival features four programs (A-D) over a three and a half week span. Each program showcases three new one-act plays, each produced by a different local theatre company and if you’d like to know more, check out our preview article.
2 comments:
I am very interested in going to the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. Each play seems amazing in its own right, but the first one, “Survivor”, is especially interesting to me. I took a two week class in Israel last year and was fortunate enough to visit the Holocaust Museum and Children’s Memorial while I was there. There’s no denying the atrocities that took place, yet there are many who are Holocaust deniers. One of the most famous cases was Irving v Penguin books, where David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel. “Survivor” seems like a risky commentary on fake news, as the Holocaust is a very sensitive subject, but I’m excited to see how Gordon Bennett takes on such a relevant take on history. As far as the other plays go, they all seem to rotate around a central theme of oppression, outside or inside forces included, where the characters are able to overcome and become “better versions of themselves”.
Last summer, I interned at New Ohio Theatre (West Village, NYC) for their Ice Factory Festival, which showed seven back-to-back new works. Some were packed with brilliant concepts but felt incomplete in execution, others told thin stories backed by vibrant production value-- the spectrum of success for a first showing of a new work proved incredibly wide. Reading the descriptions for the shows in the Pittsburgh New Works Festival felt very reminiscent of reviews I read of the Ice Factory Festival. The stories and issues that all of the PNWF shows grapple with are refreshing and important. They may not be perfectly executed, but challenging conversations aren’t neat and neither are the people who want to have them. After working on seven new shows and seeing many more at the same festival this past summer, I think that the most important thing is that boundary-pushing artists have supportive outlets that celebrate experimentation. I’m so happy to learn that PNWF exists and I hope to hear more from future iterations of these productions.
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