In recognition of its 10th anniversary, UCSB’s Launch Pad series, which gives playwrights the space to create new work for the audience’s benefit, has brought in multiple award-winning playwright Yussef El Guindi, the British transplant whose plays have long documented the immigrant experience both in America and the UK.
“The Talented Ones,” which opens this Thursday for a five-show run, is a play in progress, but this is no table read. Launch Pad gives playwrights much more.
I liken what we do to making a sand mandala,” says stage director Shirley Jo Finney. “You spend all this time making this wonderful, beautiful creation and then, with one breath, it disappears. But then it makes room for something new.”
Her upcoming production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “In the Red and Brown Water” marks the second time she has worked on this play, the first of a trilogy of plays featuring the same characters from this exciting new voice in theater. But where she mounted a successful five-month production at Los Angeles’ Fountain Theater, working with professional actors, this production comes out of her residency at UCSB’s Theatre and Dance Department, and uses 10 student actors.