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More than any other art form, plays reflect a culture’s current obsessions and worries. David Ivers, artistic director of South Coast Repertory, thinks this year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival is a perfect demonstration of that tendency. The 28th annual festival of new works in readings and staged productions, held May 1-3, includes several plays whose topics often appear to be taken from the latest Apple News feed or TikTok “For You” page.
“Part of the job with these new plays, with any new plays really, is to examine modern society,” Ivers said. “The challenges that are literally being penned by our leading contemporary playwrights are often our most urgent issues. And no matter how niche they seem to be, they explore universal truths.”
Looking back over the last half decade, Ivers sees trends in playwriting that reflect, sometimes obviously and sometimes indirectly, what’s happening in the world around us.
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