Asolo Rep Proudly Presents its Fifth Annual New Play Festival: UNPLUGGED, Beginning Sunday, March 23 and continuing each consecutive Sunday through April 13

        Unplugged allows theater enthusiasts to experience brand new plays in their most organic form, stripped of costumes, sets and special effects. Instead, Asolo Rep company members and select guest artists will perform the new plays with scripts in hand – providing patrons with the opportunity to focus solely on the playwright’s story and words. Many of the plays are read aloud for the first time in the rehearsal room, allowing the playwright to revamp his/her piece based on the performance, the director’s notes and, finally, audience reaction. 

        “Unplugged provides an extraordinary platform for today’s up-and-coming playwrights – a chance to have their new voices, ideas and plays heard for the very first time. It exposes this theatre and the Sarasota community to innovative, thrilling plays and artists, and inspires Asolo Rep to explore and embrace the most cutting-edge theatrical works,” said Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards.

        “We’re eager to present four exciting pieces from these incredibly talented playwrights,” said Asolo Rep Literary Manager/Dramaturg, Lauryn Sasso, who is curating this year’s festival. “These politically stimulating, heartwarming and poignant plays resonate with the themes of Asolo Rep’s ongoing American Character Project. Our audiences will really experience something special during the festival.”

        Unplugged is sponsored by the Herald-Tribune Media Group and Holiday Inn Sarasota Airport.

March 30 at 7pm
ASSISTED LOVING
By Bob Morris
Directed By Gordon Greenberg (Asolo Rep’s Working, A Musical and Barnum, both 2008 and Yentl, 2012)

True tales of double dating with your dad
What would you do if your 75 year old father dragged you into his hell-bent hunt for new love? New York Times style writer Bob Morris, a chronically single son, shows us how it happened in this warm, witty, and wacky comedy about a year of dating dangerously.

April 6 at 7pm
GODDESS OF MERCY                   
By Jenny Connell Davis
Directed by Mark Rucker (Associate Artistic Director at A.C.T. in San Francisco, and director of Asolo Rep’s The Constant Wife, 2008; Managing Maxine, 2010; and Once in a Lifetime, 2012)
 
When the personal and political collide
Kate and Mike struggle to hold it together as they try to juggle their relationship and his transcontinental commute. When Mike’s sister Brianna, just back from the Peace Corps and crashing on their couch, finds out Mike’s oil company is sending him to hush up trouble in the same part of Asia she just left, their opposing views provoke an international incident.

April 13 at 7pm
ASK/TELL
By David Bar Katz
Directed by Jeff Calhoun (Asolo Rep’s Bonnie & Clyde, 2010; Noah Racey’s Pulse, 2013)

A quest to know and voice the truth
Set immediately after the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and delving into the mysterious death of a soldier who had recently come out, Ask/Tell explores the hypocrisies – both spoken and unspoken – that accompany intense intimacy between men in a war zone.
 
Unplugged Festival plays contain mature content and language.