PlayGround Launches Theatre Arts Summer Camp!

Posted by on March 24, 2022

This summer, PlayGround is excited to introduce a new theatre camp housed at PlayGround’s state-of-the-art performance venue, Potrero Stage, and structured around PlayGround’s award-winning model of playwright and play incubation and innovation. Under the coaching of leading local professional theatre artists, campers (ages 7-18) will learn playwriting, directing, and acting skills, write short plays in response to a prompt, and direct and act in staged readings of these new works in a showcase at the end of each session, open to friends and family. Registration is $1,000 for each 2-week session (full and partial scholarships available) and capacity is limited. Register at PlayGround | Upcoming Events (https://tickets.playground-sf.org).

Each session, up to 25 campers will learn and produce their own shows in PlayGround’s beautiful Potrero Stage over the course of two weeks, Mon-Fri, 9am-3pm. In their classes with professional theater artists, campers will have the opportunity to explore various facets of theatre production, from playwriting to tech design, acting, directing, and beyond. Outside of their classes, campers will participate in theater games (focused on improvisation, memorization, and storytelling) as well as other group and physical activities. The camp will be led by a faculty of five leading local teaching artists and counselors, with a 1:5 ratio of adults to students. Campers will be organized by age cohort (7-10, 11-14, 15-18) for most activities and lessons, with opportunities throughout each session for cross-age learning and community building. Pre- and post-camp care may be available upon request.

The 2022 session dates will be as follows:

Session 1: June 13-24
Session 2: June 27-July 8 (no camp on July 4)
Session 3: July 11-22

Camp registration fees are $1,000 per two-week session ($0-$1,500 sliding scale available with a limited number of slots for costs below $1,000 per session). PlayGround is committed to providing equitable access to theatre education. Following a long lineage of social justice-oriented educators such as Britt Hawthorne and AORTA, PlayGround aims to use a sliding scale as a means of continuing our work of rectifying historical and ongoing inequity within the American theatre. To this end, we prioritize our low-cost rates for those who have been historically marginalized, underserved, and/or underrepresented within the American theatre industry.

PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’ and now New York’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 300 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,100 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 34 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. In 2017, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs (including the PlayGround Solo Performance Festival and Innovators Showcase) and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-eight years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.

For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org or call (415) 992-6677.