Foundry Talks: Luis Alfaro & Jon Robin Baitz
Foundry playwrights (top, l to r): Anna Ziegler, Bill Cain, Gideon Jeph Wabvuta, Samuel D. Hunter (bottom, l to r): Jon Robin Baitz, Liza Powel O’Brien, Luis Alfaro, Franky D. Gonzalez
THE OPC FOUNDRY PROJECT IS UNDERWAY!
We're off and running with passion and purpose with the OPC Foundry Project, our new online play development program supporting eight visionary playwrights.
For three months the Foundry Project playwrights, directors, dramaturges and OPC artistic staff gather twice weekly in the Zoom Room to read each new play and provide valuable feedback, dramaturgical inspiration and supportive community. In addition, the playwrights meet regularly with their director and dramaturgical team to work more intensely on their individual projects.
While not quite the same as meeting in person in the beauty of Ojai within the welcoming embrace of the generous and loving Ojai community, the Foundry Project has been fulfilling and fruitful as OPC artists connect in the building of compelling new plays for the American theatre.
To share our process, and provide artistic inspiration and human connection during these unsettling times, we are launching the Foundry Talks series. First up...interviews with Luis Alfaro and Jon Robin (Robbie) Baitz.
LUIS ALFARO - MY FATHER’S HOUSE
A renowned Los Angeles born and raised Chicano writer known for his work in poetry, theatre, short fiction, performance and journalism, Luis was Playwright-in-Residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013-2019 and a member of the Playwrights Ensemble at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater from 2013-2020. He has had productions at the Magic Theatre in SF, The Public Theater in NYC and Playwrights' Arena in LA. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, his plays include Electricidad, Oedipus el Rey, Mojada, Delano and Body of Faith. Luis has been associated with the Ojai Playwrights Conference since 2002.
In his new play, MY FATHER’S HOUSE, a young man goes in search of himself and discovers a religious order in the Central Valley of California. Lost in the new ethic of the Catholic Church, these devout Christian brothers struggle with adapting to the modern world. The young man helps this ancient order come to terms with change. He forms a bond with an orphan who has been raised in this once cloistered sect. There is a confrontation with what truly makes a person of faith. It is a dramatic journey rich in humor, a sense of the mysterious and an embrace of California history.
WATCH INTERVIEW
JON ROBIN BAITZ - I’LL BE SEEIN’ YA
Regarded as a preeminent dramatist of the personal and public moral compromise in contemporary America, Robbie’s plays include Pulitzer Prize Finalist A Fair Country along with Pulitzer Prize Finalist Other Desert Cities, The Paris Letter and Vicuña, all three developed at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, and produced at Center Theatre Group. He is the creator of the long running ABC drama Brothers & Sisters and The Slap, a limited series for NBC. His screenplays include The Substance of Fire, based on his play, and Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall.
In his new play, I'LL BE SEEIN' YA, a retired makeup artist in a Los Angeles apartment during a pandemic, terminally on hold at her pharmacy, is trying to procure both concealer and psych meds before curfew, during protests targeting her usually quiet, ‘white' neighborhood. Police sirens and helicopters echo over the maddening, anodyne ‘old' music on her speakerphone, as she tries to make sense of all that has gone wrong, the missed loves, the broken psyche and her utter aloneness. Life has stalled, and confined to her 500 foot studio in the fifth month of a pandemic, time has become a mirage. The young pharmacist, also scared of gathering protestors or ‘rioters’ as the authorities call them, occasionally returns to the line, increasingly unsure of what he is dealing with, as he learns more about his desperate customer. “I’ll Be Seein' Ya” is a portrait of lives in the grip of forces only dimly understood, but deeply inevitable.