Victory Gardens Theater has announced its selections for the next edition of its IGNITION Festival of New Plays, taking place August 5–7. Six works in progress will receive staged readings as part of the sixth iteration of the fest.
The Wayward Bunny, by Greg Kotis (the former Neo-Futurist who went on to win two Tony Awards for Urinetown), is an unsettling-sounding story about a mystery writer searching for his missing son; the Goodman’s Henry Wishcamper will direct. Antoinette Nwandu, whose play Pass Over is set to premiere at Steppenwolf next spring, will have a reading of BREACH: a manifesto on race in America through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate, to be directed by Devon de Mayo. Chicago playwright Laura Jacqmin (Look, we are breathing, Dental Society Midwinter Meeting) will develop EOM (end of message), about a group of video game developers working around the clock for a week to meet a vital deadline; Monty Cole directs.
Philadelphia-based actor and playwright James Ijames will be represented by Kill Move Paradise, which combines Greek myth with critique of the “all lives matter” crowd; Marti Lyons is the director. Karen Hartman, who has plays premiering in the upcoming seasons at both Victory Gardens and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, will have Gaza Rehearsal, a comedy centered on a play-within-the-play about the Israel-Palestine conflict that’s staged on a college campus. It’s staged by VG artistic director Chay Yew. And in Girls in Cars Underwater by Tegan McLeod, a newcomer finds community as a shot girl at a rough bar; it’s helmed by American Theater Company artistic director Will Davis.
Several plays that have been selected for previous editions of IGNITION have gone on to full productions at Victory Gardens, including Lauren Yee’s Samsara, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, Sarah Gubbins’s Cocked, Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton and Kristoffer Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.