Trinity Theatre New Works Festival in San Diego
- Trinity Theatre Company opens its fourth annual New Works Festival in San Diego on April 30, staging new-play readings by John Busser and James Selledy. - The telling number is 1,011 submissions narrowed to 9 or 10 selected works, with local San Diego directors and actors mounting them over 4 nights. - It matters because Trinity is turning local artists into a development pipeline for new plays, not just a venue. (trinityttc.org)
A new-plays festival can sound niche. But this one is really about how theater gets made before anyone knows whether a script will travel, get revised, or disappear. Trinity Theatre Company in San Diego opens its fourth annual New Works Festival on Thursday, April 30, and the big thing is scale: more than 1,000 submissions came in, and only a small final group made the cut for staged readings over four days. That turns the f(trinityttc.org)ab. (trinityttc.org) ### What is this festival, exactly? It’s a multi-day run of staged readings and theatrical experiments at Trinity Theatre Company’s space in Mission Valley Mall. The company frames it as a festival for emerging playwrights, but the key detail is that these are not polished full productions. They’re early public encounters between scripts, actors, directors, and audiences — the point is to hear the work breathe. (trinityttc.org)estival? Thursday night starts with two plays: *Helping Hand* by John Busser at 7 p.m. and *De La Casa* by James Selledy at 7:30 p.m. *Helping Hand*, directed by Sean Libiran, is a sci-fi-tinged story about officials studying an extraterrestrial being in a secret facility. *De La Casa*, directed by Mia Spencer, shifts hard in the other direction — a domestic drama set during the COVID-19 pandemic, with tensions around class, race, family obligation, and cultural identity. (trinityttc.org) ### What comes after that? Friday brings *Out of the Woods* by Robert Weibezhal and *Date Play* by Ashley Siflinger. Saturday stacks three readings — *Shadows Dark and Deep* by Sara Ilyse Jacobson, *Spin Cycle* by Bill Keenan, and *Moon Rock* by Steven Oberman. The programming is deliberately mixed: speculative fiction, romance, intergenerational drama, and intimate character pieces all sit next to each other. That matters because a festival like this is curating range as much as quality. (trinityttc.org) ### Why does the submission number matter? Because 1,011 submissions is a lot for a small local company. Trinity and outside coverage both describe the festival as a four-night event built from a tiny fraction of that pile — one source says 9 selected plays, another says 10 emerging playwrights. Either way, the ratio tells you the same thing: this isn’t an open-mic situation. It’s selective, and that selectivity gives the festival weight for playwrights trying to get serious developmental attention. (app.arts-people.com) ### Why use staged readings instead of full productions? Because readings are the cheap, fast, brutally useful version of theater development. You hear where the language lands, where pacing drags, and where actors find something the page only hinted at. It’s basically a wind-tunnel test for a play. Trinity’s artistic director, Sean Boyd, has described audience response as part of the process, with feedback continuing after the event rather than ending when the curtain call does. (broadwayworld.com) ### Why is the local angle important? Even though the scripts come from a broader pool, the readings are built by San Diego-based artists. KPBS lists a long cast and creative roster drawn from the local scene, plus Trinity artistic director Sean Boyd and technical director Connor Boyd. So the festival is doing two jobs at once — importing new writing and giving local actors and directors a concentrated place to test their craft on fresh material. (kpbs.org) ### Is there anything confusing about the lineup? A little. Different listings describe the festival as featuring 9 selected plays or 10 emerging playwrights, and one interview page compresses the run dates oddly even while the main event pages show April 30 through May 3. The stable details are the venue, the four-day run, and the named plays on the schedule. That usually means the event is real and current, but some promo copy was updated unevenly. (trinityttc.org) ### Bottom line? What’s happening in San Diego this week is small in scale but real in consequence. Trinity isn’t just presenting plays. It’s building a filter, a workshop, and a local proving ground for what new theater might become next. (trinityttc.org)
