Two School of Theatre and Dance faculty members are participating in the Cleveland Play House New Ground Theatre Festival 2023. Associate Professor of Theatre, Fabio Polanco, is directing a reading of Fade by Tanya Saracho for Latinus Theatre Company as part of the New Ground Theatre Festival at Cleveland Play House. The reading will take place Wednesday, May 10 at 7:30 p.m. in The Helen Lab Theatre. Associate Professor of Voice and Acting, Courtney Brown, is playing a role in a workshop reading of Louder by Caroline McGraw, on Thursday, May 11 at 7:30 p.m. in The Helen Lab Theatre. The honorary producer of the New Ground Festival is Roe Green, an emeritus member of the 5XÉçÇø Foundation board who sits on the boards of the School of Theatre and Dance and Porthouse Theatre and is CEO of The Roe Green Foundation.
About the CPH New Ground Festival
The Cleveland Play House Literary Department each year receives hundreds of new play submissions of extraordinary merit. CPH has the exciting opportunity to share these submissions with the Cleveland theatre community by connecting good plays and talented playwrights with fellow theatre companies who might provide a home for them.
About FADE
When Lucia, a Mexican-born novelist, gets her first TV writing job, she feels a bit out of place on the white male-dominated set. Lucia quickly becomes friends with the only other Latino around, a janitor named Abel. As Abel shares his stories with Lucia, similar plots begin to find their way into the TV scripts that Lucia writes. FADE is a play about class and race, and how status does not change who you are at your core.
About Louder
It’s the fall of 1999 - the eve of Y2K - and the start of another school year at Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In the convent near campus, the sisters await the return of their students. But as fissures in the student body and faculty begin to appear - and the 2000th year since Christ’s birth approaches - five nuns find their ordinary lives suddenly enveloped by a strange uncertainty. For those with eyes open, signs and portents are everywhere. But what they portend, no one knows. Louder is a play about looking deeply, and the enormity within the seemingly quietest of lives