Diverse playwrights Represent! at festival at ACT

A diverse group of dramatists have works developed and presented in Seattle theaters. But it's been a long time since there was a festival here devoted to scripts by playwrights of color.

Seattle Group Theatre initiated an ongoing fest of this sort in the 1970s. And a dozen years after the Group's 1998 demise, several Seattle organizations are uniting to create Represent!: A Multicultural Playwrights' Festival, Tuesday-Sunday at ACT Theatre.

ACT and two companies under its wing, The Hansberry Project and eSe Teatro, are joining forces with SIS Productions (a purveyor of Asian-American plays) and Pratidhwani (a group devoted to Indian culture) to stage readings of three full-length new works, and to showcase excerpts from plays by six local authors (LaChris Jordan, Reginald A. Jackson, Danielle Villegas, Lonnie Tristan Renteria, Kathy Hsieh and Maggie Lee).

Represent! will also host a panel on the role of "ethnically specific" companies in the development of new plays.

"We're very excited by the energy that is being generated by this new collaboration," said Hansberry Project artistic director Valerie Curtis-Newton, in a prepared statement. "Our hope is that Represent! will become an annual event."

The three staged readings:

"The Final Days of Negroville," a Keith Josef Adkins drama about a black middle-class community "fraught with dysfunction," and a mayor caught up in a series of events with broad repercussions for the present and how the past is viewed. Curtis-Newton directs.

"The Land of Corn and Power," by Joann Farias, a collision of cultures between a Mexican-American anthropology student, and the shamans he meets in Mexico while studying Mayan religious beliefs. Directed by Arlene Martinez- Vickers.

"Samsara," Lauren Yee's comedic look at an American couple who travel to India in search of a surrogate to carry their child. Directed by Agastya Kohli.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com