JAGfest 4.0, Feb 7-9 , Briggs Opera House, WRJct, VT
JAGfest 4.0 Begins Feb 7!
Every February for the past three years, JAG Productions has invited African-American theatre artists to spend a week in White River Junction, Vermont to further the development of a new play or solo performance. Over the course of the one-week residency, three-five projects receive an intensive workshop, constructive feedback, and a staged reading for the public at Briggs Opera House!
Presented February 7-9 at Briggs Opera House in WRJ & Bentley Theater at Hopkins Center for the Arts – the weekend-long festival of staged readings brings 30 Black theatre artists to the Upper Valley from across the nation for a week-long JAG experience! JAGfest 4.0 will include five staged readings over the course
of three days, each featuring a post-show conversation with the artists following each reading.
Admission is $25 per performance! For more information and to buy tickets to the plays go to https://www.jagproductionsvt.
The 2020 Playwrights:
–Isaiah A. Hines creates poetic works that consider interstitial space: loopholes, thresholds, intervals, and quietudes of the black mundane and queer quotidian. Their practice can be understood as a kind of welding together of text, performance, installation, video, and found objects. Ongoing experimentation with gesture, sound, and site, these kinetic/zoetic works offer pathways for rethinking routine scenes of stillness, silence, and repose.
–Jeremy O’Brian is a Mississippi-born, Brooklyn-based playwright who currently teaches writing and dramatic literature at The New School’s Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College and New York University. His plays include: egg; or anythin’ dipped in egg gone soft (Development: Athena Theatre), a curious thing; or superheroes k’ain’t fly (Development: American Academy of Dramatic Arts), and under one roof (Development: Liberation Theatre Co.).
–Johnny G. Lloyd is a New York-based writer and producer. As a playwright, his work has been produced by and developed at The Tank, The Corkscrew Festival. Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency. Johnny was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Open-Application Commission at Clubbed Thumb and the 2017-2018
Shubert Fellow for Playwriting at Columbia University. He is the producing director of InVersion Theatre. jglloyd.weebly.com
–Sheldon Shaw is a playwright, screenwriter, and actor living in NYC. Recently Sheldon’s play “Jailbait” was part of the Emerging Artist Theaters New Works Festival. His play “Clair” had a reading by the Classical Theater of Harlem as part of their “Playwrights Playground.” “Clair” was a Second
Rounder of The Austin Film Festival and Writers Conference. Sheldon’s play “Baby Starbucks” was winner of The Playwrights on Parade yearly competition, North Carolina.
–Keelay Gipson is an Activist, Professor, and award-winning Playwright whose plays include imagine sisyphus happy (Finalist; Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, P73 Summer Residency at Yale University), #NEWSLAVES (Finalist; Princess Grace Award, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils Playwright Conference), CRH, or the placenta play (Semi-Finalist; The O’Neill, Bay Area Playwrights Conference,
AADA Main Stage Live!), Nigger/Faggot (Downtown Urban Theater Festival), The Lost, Or How to Just B, What I Tell You in the Dark (Finalist; Premiere Stages), and Mary/Stuart, a dramatic queering of friedrich schiller’s classic play (BAM Next Wave Festival, partnership with Wendy’s Subway and Lambda Literary).