The Inspiration Behind our Festival-Winning Plays

In 2017 for our first new play festival we received almost 800 submissions. It was an overwhelming response to kick off a brand new event. For the second year of the festival we limited submissions to Texas playwrights. This new focus creates opportunities to work more closely with the playwrights and support the creation of these amazing new local plays. We're thrilled to present Austin audiences with staged readings of these three winning plays! We spoke with the playwrights about the inspiration for their plays. Join us April 27 -29 for the festival!

Reina Hardy, playwright of Eidophusikon
Staged reading Friday, April 27, 8pm

The Eidophusikon is a real thing! Philip James de Loutherberg was a real person! He created the Eidophusikon because he wanted to create lighting effects that weren't yet possible on a full-sized stage. I was very interested in his project of aesthetic rapture and transport. I became obsessed with it for two reasons: (1) No one knows how he did it. There are these glowing contemporary reviews, but the machine is long destroyed and no one has ever found the plans. (2) The Eidophusikon was about the size of a decent flatscreen television. We have obviously outstripped De Loutherberg's ability to achieve his own goal of perfect verisimilitude inside a box. What continues to fascinate us about the Eidophusikon is its distance from verisimilitude; its toy-ness; its tackiness. All of this is to say, when I first came to Austin I shopped a lot at a store called Texas Thrift. The store (where I bought ceramic unicorns and 80s pointy-toed shoes, and yes, souvenir prom glasses) somehow got connected in my mind with the Eidophusikon - a thing which is lost, dead, broken, trashy, out-of-date by centuries and yet still very important somehow.

C. Denby Swanson, playwright of Nutshell
Staged reading Saturday, April 28, 8pm

Nutshell is about the life of Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress born in 1878 who built the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of exquisitely precise 1 inch to 1 foot-scaled miniatures of crime scenes. She created them for Harvard University, where she had endowed the Department of Legal Medicine, as a way to train detectives how to investigate homicides. Eventually, the Nutshells wound up at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland, where my friend and director Elissa Goetschius saw them. She posted an article on Facebook, which another friend made sure I saw, and I was immediately entranced. I knew there was a science play in there. And a play about women’s forgotten history. And a play that invited theatricality. Then in 2016 I received a commission to write a play from Ensemble Studio Theater / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project.

Lisa B. Thompson, playwright of Monroe
Staged reading Sunday, April 29, 7pm

Monroe is inspired by my family. As a child I was fascinated about them moving from Louisiana to California during the Great Migration. My father is from Lake Charles and my mother is from Monroe (hence the play’s title). I was curious about their decision to leave the south for the west coast instead of relocating to a northeastern city or the midwest like the majority of African Americans during that period. The drama is also inspired by a conversation between my parents about a lynching down south. During breakfast one Sunday morning my eight year old self was captivated by their serious yet matter of fact tones. The details of the story evade me but the tenor of it remains. A bit of my innocence died on that morning. Recalling that conversation makes me think of all the black children around breakfast tables now who are overhearing their parents discuss the repeated killings of unarmed African Americans by the police. In time we will see what their imaginations produce to cope with their loss of innocence.

Austin Playhouse Festival of New Texas Plays
April 27 - 29, 2018
Austin Playhouse at ACC Highland
512-476-0084
www.austinplayhouse.com