Three Weeks : Three Playwrights : Three Plays

The LAUNCH PAD Summer Reading Series invites professional playwrights to join the UC Santa Barbara community as artists-in-residence as the main component of a summer course (THTR 146). The collaboration between LAUNCH PAD Artistic Director Risa Brainin, a team of undergraduate students, and the playwrights provides the experiential ground for professionals and students alike to participate in the creative process as it's happening. In addition to acting, students explore stage management and dramaturgy as well as lighting, costume, sound, and scenic design, offering ideas to the playwright as the script evolves. The week-long collaboration culminates in a public reading. Students learn the vital and specialized skills of working on plays in the earliest of stages of their development and as staged readings.

Save the dates for this year's summer readings!
Free and open to the public.

Thursday, June 26 ~ Thursday, July 3 ~ Thursday, July 10

UCSB Studio Theater

The Plays...

June 26
GREEK TRAGEDY
by Lia Romeo

Anna is a famous and fabulous influencer. Jennifer is her drab best friend. But Jennifer is the one who's been writing all of Anna's content, while Anna spirals into addiction and out of control. And now Jennifer's the one who's writing this play. A story about telling stories... and about how to live our lives online.

Lia Romeo is a recent graduate of the Juilliard playwriting program. Her plays have been developed at the O’Neill, La Jolla Playhouse, the Lark, and elsewhere, and have been produced at companies such as Colt Coeur, Dorset Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, Unicorn Theatre, Project Y Theatre, and New Jersey Repertory Theatre. Four of her plays have been recognized by the Kilroys List. Her plays are published by TRW, Broadway Licensing, and Broadway Play Publishing. She is the associate artistic director of Project Y Theatre, a company member with Colt Coeur, and the co-founder of the Parent-Caregiver Playwrights Group. She teaches in the M.A. program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Melinda Lopez (she/her) is thrilled to return to LAUNCH PAD with Standing Still. (Her play Power Trio was featured in the 2023 Summer Series.) Melinda is a multiple award-winning playwright and performer. She is the recipient of the 2019 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Achievement, recognizing her 20-year career as and playwright, performer and educator. She was a member of the Mellon Foundation’s National Playwrights Residency Program and the Playwright-in-Residence at the Huntington Theatre Co. from 2013-2023. Some plays include: Stir (Writer/Performer, Old Globe Theatre), Mala (Arts Emerson, The Guthrie Theatre, the Huntington Theatre Company, Old Globe, and others), Mr. Parent (Geva Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse and others), Becoming Cuba (Huntington Theatre Co) and Sonia Flew (Huntington, Steppenwolf, Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, and many many others.) Currently she is working on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night blending Spanish and English, for Play On!

Melinda is also an actor, and appeared most recently as Mrs Warren in Mrs. Warrens Profession at the Central Square Theatre, Cambridge, and as Mariana in her own play Stir,  at the Old Globe, San Diego. Melinda sometimes appears as a meme (from Fever Pitch), cheering for the Red Sox. She lives in the Boston area with her family, giant yellow dog and other critters, and occasionally sleeps on the ground in the American Southwest. She has run two marathons and plays a little ukulele.

Louis Bayard In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” His acclaimed novels include The Wildes, chosen as one of the year's top 10 historical novels by the New York Times, The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the highly praised young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes.

His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Salon, and he is a contributing writer to the    i. A former instructor at George Washington University, he was the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.