La Jolla Playhouse to host Latinx New Play Festival in late October

Performers clap onstage during a play reading.

Launched at San Diego Repertory Theatre in 2016, the event was left homeless when the Rep shut down last June

San Diego Union-Tribune

Feb. 13, 2023 4:29 AM PT

When San Diego Repertory Theatre shut down last summer, many of its annual events were left without a home. But the Rep’s Latinx New Play Festival will return in October in a new location: La Jolla Playhouse.

The sixth edition of the Latinx New Play Festival will take place Oct. 27-29 at the Playhouse, and the festival’s founding director, Maria Patrice Amon, has been appointed as the Playhouse’s new artist-in-residence for the 2023-24 season. Amon is a director, producer, professor and former associate artistic director at San Diego Rep. She’s also the co-founder and co-artistic director of TuYo Theatre, a professional Latinx theater company in San Diego.

“We are delighted to have Patrice join us this season as our artist-in-residence,” said Christopher Ashley, the Playhouse’s artistic director, in a statement. “Her vision and fortitude have built the Latinx New Play Festival into one of the premiere events of its kind in the nation, and it’s an honor to be able to provide a new home for the festival this year, with Patrice at the helm.”

Maria Patrice Amon is the founder of the Latinx New Play Festival.

The Latinx New Play Festival celebrates new theatrical work by Latinx playwrights from across the country. Its goal it to expand the presence of Latinx stories and artists on the American stage and spotlight the broad range of today’s Latinx experience.

More than 90 play submissions were received for this year’s festival, from which four scripts will be selected for rehearsal and development at the Playhouse. At the culmination of the process, the plays will have a live public reading at the Playhouse in October. The Latinx New Play Festival is free to attend and will include a a full schedule of in-person readings of new works, panel discussions and other events. The schedule will be announced at a later date on the Playhouse’s website, lajollaplayhouse.org.

The artist residency program offers offers an artist the freedom to focus on their body of work while working within the Playhouse staff on productions, teaching programs and administration. Past artists-in-residence include playwright Kenny Ramos, designer David Israel Reynoso, married writers Mike Lew and Rehana Lew Mirza, Tony Award-winning actor and writer BD Wong, and scenic designer Robert Brill.

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Pam Kragen

Pam Kragen is the arts and entertainment editor, as well as the chief theater, dining and opera critic, for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She joined the Union-Tribune staff in October 2012 after 27 years at the North County Times, where she served as the Arts & Features Editor, as well as the paper’s longtime arts writer and theater and opera critic. She is the co-founder of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Diego State University and completed fellowships in theater criticism at the University of Southern California and opera-classical music criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. And in 2022, she was chosen as one of the fellows in the prestigious National Critics Institute, run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterf, Conn.