Rehearsing for The Austin Latino Playwrights Festival

I come from the land of the ice and snow: Canada – where winter is the season during which you stay inside as much as possible…kind of like summers in Austin, but with more wool clothing. Ah, but spring! No matter where you live, spring brings hope and resurgence and new beginnings and the desire to revel in the wonder of it all.

April showers Austin with creative new works. Two mini-festivals will ask Austin theater-goers to join playwrights in the fledgling stages of the script process.

Teatro Vivo heats things up with the Austin Latino New Play Festival, April 5-7. The festival consists of staged readings of three plays, one for each night of the event. These are not full productions, but performed readings of the new scripts, with props, movement, and possibly some sound and lighting effects. Each night’s presentation begins at 8:00 p.m. at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, 600 River Street. Admission is free to the public and seating is limited. Reservations are recommended. Audience members are requested to stay after the presentation to provide the playwrights with feedback to help their scripts grow. You can get all the information on Teatro Vivo’s site.

Scriptworks’ Out of Ink! Festival will be held over two weekends: April 19-21 and 26-28. The scripts that will be presented were created by Scriptworks members last fall during Weekend Fling, during which writers were given 48 hours to create 10-minute plays. To ensure they were written during that time period, the plays had to incorporate three random elements. Eight plays have been selected to be included in Out of Ink!, which will take place at The Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. For more information, contact Scriptworks.

Happy Spring, y’all!