The New Works Festival launches with a special dinner and conversation featuring Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, left, and Rajiv Joseph on Aug. 11. David Henry Hwang photo courtesy Matthew Murray; Rajiv Joseph photo courtesy Rohit Chandra.
For the 2023 edition of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s annual New Works Festival, the Tony Award-winning company is cooking up generation-spanning stories and offering audiences a healthy helping of tasty tales.
“The theme is ‘Feed Your Soul,’” said TheatreWorks’ newly appointed Artistic Director and longtime Director of New Works Giovanna Sardelli. That theme refers not only to the fact that some of the plays in this year’s festival are set in the kitchen, and all four works involve food-centric moments in some way, Sardelli explained, but also because feeding the soul “is what theater does.” And the New Works Festival, she said, “feeds the soul of theater.”
Two special fundraising events will also be held in conjunction with the festival. On Aug. 11, playwrights David Henry Hwang and Rajiv Joseph (both Pulitzer Prize finalists whose work has been produced at TheatreWorks, with Sardelli serving as one of Joseph’s longtime collaborators) will be in conversation, following a dinner party including Hwang, Joseph and all the festival’s featured writers. “They’ll be sharing stories from their lives in the theater,” Sardelli said. “Nothing is better than writers asking each other questions.”