The Coconut Grove Theatre Festival returns next week with a fresh lineup of original plays performed over four days, including two plays written for children and presented back-to-back in a Saturday afternoon matinee performance.
When playwright Lori Felipe-Barkin was a high-school student in South Florida, a hurricane knocked out the power in her house. Bored, she sat down and wrote her first play. The effort didn’t go unnoticed. The play won an award.
Today, Felipe-Barkin is living in New York and still writing, with a strong connection to South Florida. Strong enough, in fact, to give her new play “Ama. Egg. Oyá.” a featured spot in this year’s Coconut Grove Theatre Festival.
Felipe-Barkin is one of eight playwrights whose work will be performed next week at the festival during four days of staged readings at the Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove.
A staged reading is like a rehearsal, where actors perform on stage, but the performances don’t include lighting, staging, or costumes.
For aspiring playwrights, a staged reading can provide valuable feedback, Felipe-Barkin says. “Readings give playwrights good insight into what’s working and not,” she says.
“Ama. Egg. Oyá.” – a play about Ama, a Cuban-American woman in Hialeah and her experience with infertility and the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria – has been read in major cities around the country, but this is the first time the work will be performed in Miami.
“For me, that’s really exciting, and it’s going to be a big test,” says Felipe-Barkin, whose home away from home is her grandmother’s house in Hialeah. “But it feels very special for the first time now, to have the audience I was always writing for (to) actually be there.”
The play will be directed by Sara Jarell, a theater teacher and the artistic director of Main Street Players, a professional theater company in Miami Lakes. The Grove festival matches playwrights with directors through a sort of speed-dating process.
The festival’s other seven plays include a family drama from the early 1900s, the bizarre tale of an English woman who gave birth to rabbits (or claimed to), the adventures of a hippo named William, and a memory play about an African-American theater company.
Felipe-Barkin’s play is the first bilingual work in the festival and the first to feature a live musical performance. The play will be orchestrated by Afro-Cuban roots duo OKAN.
Festival founder and artistic director William Hector saw the duo – violinist Elizabeth Rodriguez and percussionist Magdelys Savigne – perform in December at the Cuban Heritage Collection at University of Miami.
“Bringing OKAN together with this play feels like an amazing pairing,” he says.
Hector loves a good collaboration and is creative and strategic about how the festival engages the community. This year, former Miami Herald food writer Carlos Frías and Camille Marchese, executive director of the Coconut Grove Art Festival, will act as stage direction readers at the festival.
Also new this year: a Saturday matinee with two children’s plays, “William’s Great Adventure” written by Brandon Urrutia, and “What the Bread Says,” a musical directed by Grove resident Victoria Collado and written by her business partner Vanessa Garcia.
“William’s Great Adventure” follows William the Hippo on his journey from New York to Egypt. “What the Bread Says” tells the story of Garcia’s grandfather who fled oppressive governments in Spain, then France, then Cuba.
Hector says the addition of a children’s matinee takes him back to his roots in theater.
“The Coconut Grove Theatre Festival really began with my time as a summer camper at the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s musical theater camp, and with the elementary school plays I was able to do as a student at St. Stephen’s,” he says.
“So, bringing children’s theater to the festival feels like a deeply important addition,” he added. “Our hope is these shows will inspire joy, imagination, and the next generation of theatregoers and theater-makers in Miami.”
Coconut Grove Theatre Festival. April 16-19 at The Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove, 2985 South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove. Tickets are $25 ($15 for kids). To see the full schedule and purchase tickets, visit https://www.cgtfest.com/schedule-tickets
