Arkansas New Play Festival is June 17-26 in Northwest Arkansas

Produced by TheatreSquared (T2), the Arkansas New Play Festival set for June 17-26 in Fayetteville and Bentonville is the premier celebration of new works for the American stage.

TheatreSquared (T2) Artistic Director Robert Ford and Executive Director Martin Miller recently revealed the festival lineup. The festival’s fully staged workshop production will be Andromeda by Gayle Pazerski in a limited run featuring Natalie West (Roseanne) and Joslyn Jones. New plays featured in staged reading performances will include The Champion by Amy Evans; A Little War in Little Rock, written by David Eshelman, with original folk music by Charley Sandage and Charlie T. Crow; and Tectonic Mélange by Deborah Yarchun. With support from a major grant from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Arts, the theatre will also feature the first staged reading of Romeo and Juliet: Damascus, a new adaptation based on the play by William Shakespeare directed and co-adapted by Kholoud Sawaf, the first step in a three-year process leading to a full production. For a synopsis of each play, visit http://arkansasnewplayfest.com.

A special performance at the festival includes the Arkansas Young Playwrights Showcase, which features one-act scripts by Arkansas high school students across the state. The top submission will be selected for mentorship from a professional playwright and a public reading at the Arkansas New Play Festival.

Performances will be held in Bentonville at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and in Fayetteville at the studio theatre in Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios. New Play Passes, granting access to all Northwest Arkansas performances, are on sale now for an early bird price of $40 through May 31 ($45 after June 1). Passes can be purchased at the Walton Arts Center Box Office and by calling 479-443-5600 or visiting arkansasnewplayfest.com.

TheatreSquared is Northwest Arkansas’s professional regional theatre, offering an intimate live theatre experience for 35,000 patrons each year. In 2011, TheatreSquared was recognized by the American Theatre Wing, founder of the Tony Awards, as one of the nation’s 10 most promising emerging theatres. TheatreSquared has experienced remarkable growth in recent seasons, expanding its audience tenfold in the past five years.