Pacific Century, East West Players’ National Playwriting Competition, Announces Winners
East West Players (EWP), the Nation’s Premier Asian American Theatre, received a record number of entries to its playwriting competition, Pacific Century.
“East West Players supports the development of plays that writers feel might enlighten and educate audiences about the Asian American experience,” states East West Players’ producing artistic director Tim Dang. “Through competitions like this one we are able to expand the Asian American theatre canon and encourage all types of Asian American plays. The range of materials that were submitted spanned the gamut of Asian American theatre in terms of style, ethnicity and production value. Every contestant should be proud of their work that was submitted. And East West Players is proud to have encouraged over 65 new Asian American works.”
Several of the winning plays will be given a staged reading which will take place on Saturday & Sunday, April 4 - 5 at the David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Exact times TBD. All readings will be free and open to the public.
The competition’s first place winner, and recipient of the $5,000 cash prize, is SUN SISTERS by S. Vasanti Saxena, a playwright of Chinese and East Indian decent. Saxena’s work has been produced or developed in New York at New York Theatre Workshop, The Ensemble Studio Theatre and New Dramatists, in Los Angeles at The Complex, and in Chicago with Chicago Dramatists and Silk Road Theatre Project. Her plays include SUN SISTERS, THE FUN, EVEN THE STONE, BABY BLUE, and SHIFT. She has been a Van Lier Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop, has been commissioned by the EST/Sloan Science and Technology Project and was a finalist for the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission. SUN SISTERS is about a daughter’s love and a mother’s final blessing. Jessica’s homecoming forces past and present to collide as she learns to understand tolerance and tolerate her mother’s lack of understanding. SUN SISTERS is a play about unspoken desires and how even silence cannot prevent their realization.
The second place winner, and recipient of the $2,500 cash prize, is MY MAN KONO by Philip W. Chung, a playwright of Korean descent. Chung has written for theater, film and TV, and is the Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director ofLodestone Theatre Ensemble, a critically-acclaimed Asian American theatre company. His previous plays include THE GOLDEN HOUR, ONE NATION, UNDER GOD and LAUGHTER JOY & LONELINESS & SEX & SEX & SEX & SEX which will be published in the upcoming anthology, Korean American Drama: Twelve Contemporary Plays from the Americas. His latest play GRACE KIM & THE SPIDERS FROM MARS will have its world premiere in fall 2009. MY MAN KONO tells the story of the little-known life of Toraichi Kono. Kono spent 17 years as Charlie Chaplin's personal valet and companion; and later, during the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II, was put on trial for espionage.
The third place winner, and recipient of the $1,000 cash prize, is YEAR ZERO by Michael Golamco, a playwright of Filipino decent. Golamco’s plays been produced at theaters across North America and internationally. His play COWBOY VERSUS SAMURAI received the honorable mention in EWP’s 2005 competition, Got Laughs? and has seen eight productions since its premiere in New York City in 2005, and has been published in part in Smith and Kraus’s The Best Stage Scenes of 2006 and in whole in their anthology New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2006. YEAR ZERO tells the story of Vuthy Vichea who is sixteen years old, Cambodian American. He loves hip hop and Dungeons and Dragons and has thick glasses. He is a weird kid in a place where weirdness can be fatal: Long Beach, California. Since his best friend moved and his mother died, the only person he can talk to is a human skull he keeps hidden in a cookie jar.
An honorable mention goes to CAVE QUEST by Les Thomas, a playwright of Russian, Italian and Welsh descent with a trace of Lenni-Lenape Indian. Les’s playwriting style focuses on the humor and complexity of human relationships. Her absurd comedy MAP OF THE HUM received excellent reviews and had a sold out run at Stone Soup Studio in her hometown of Bakersfield. CAVE QUEST was developed in Richard Steel’s Writing for the Stage workshop at the LAGLC. In CAVE QUEST, Padma is a 40ish American born Buddhist nun meditating in a cave in Tibet who hasn’t spoken to another human for three years. Justin Yi is a 25 year old video game developer that arrives on Padma’s doorstep minutes before a late season blizzard. Justin wants her to share with him the key to enlightenment so he can create a video game that will lead to inner peace and a fat bank account.
The competition had more than 65 full-length plays and musicals with predominantly Asian Pacific American casts and/or themes submitted from all over the country. Over a seven month period, each submission was read by at least two members from the panel of judges which included Julia Cho, Jen Huszcza, Ravi Kapoor, Kappy Kilburn, Chil Kong, Clyde Kusatsu, Dom Magwili, Freda Foh Shen and Judy Soo Hoo.
The Pacific Century Playwriting Competition was made possible by the generous support of the James Irvine Foundation with additional support from ABC Entertainment Television Group, FOX, CBS and NBC.
For more information about the Pacific Century Playwriting Competition and all of East West Players Literary Programs contact Literary Manager Jeff Liu at (213) 625-7000 x27 or jliu@eastwestplayers.org.
