Playlabs 2008

This week's public reading series at the Playwrights' Center is the 26th annual festival pursuing the particular mad scientist's alchemy of new work (where do we go, in other words, in a form that is primordially old, yet always new). The five offerings here are Trista Baldwin's Forgetting, a story of three women weaving through a city on the edge of violence; Allison Moore's Slasher, about a girl cast in a horror flick whose mother will stop at nothing to prevent it; Shigefumi Fukatsu's Notari Notari (Slowly, Rolling), a dissolute love story set by the sea; Mother Earth by Andy Bragen, the story of an ecological crusader in Manhattan; and Stephanie Fleischmann's The Secret Life of Coats, a riff on class set in a coat-check booth. This is world-class stuff, presented in raw and immediate fashion—nothing less than a potent art fix dropped into the middle of summertime languor.
July 16-19, 8 p.m.; July 17-19, 5 p.m.; July 18-19, 2 p.m.; Sun., July 20, 1 & 4 p.m., 2008