The 2022 BIWOC+ Reading Series

Playwright: Ai Aida

Director: Keiko Shimosato Carreiro

March 7 

Brava Theater Center

 2781 24th Street , San Francisco

March 21

Aurora Theater Company

2081 Addison Street , Berkeley

Playwright: Alejandra Maria Rivas

Director: April Ballesteros

April 4 

Brava Theater Center

 2781 24th Street , San Francisco

 April 18 

Aurora Theater Company

2081 Addison Street , Berkeley

Playwright: Tracy Baxter

Director: Cat Brooks

May 2 

Brava Theater Center

 2781 24th Street, San Francisco

May 16

Aurora Theater Company

2081 Addison Street, Berkeley 

Never Mind

Stuck with a crazy monk. Haunted by grandpa's ghost... This is not what she signed up for!  

Ai Aida is a Japanese-born playwright, poet, illustrator and multidisciplinary theater-maker who is a winner of the Austin International Poetry Festival and the Leonard Isaacson Award Browning Monologue Contest and a semifinalist of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Beverly Hills Julie Harris Playwright Award Competition. Ai's plays have been produced or staged-read at the Shelton Theater, Exit Theater, San Francisco Olympians Festival, Z-Space, Piano Fight, Theatre of Yugen, Fringe Festival, Breach Once More, 9x9 Festival and GreenHouse Festival; and poetry, short stories and illustrations have appeared in various literary magazines as well as in National Geographic, which published Öyku Denizi/The Sea of Stories, a children’s book she wrote and illustrated. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from San Francisco State University.

La Paloma

Father. Daughter. Mexican. American. Familial bonds are tested and linguistic lines broken in this fascinating take on a magical journey into the afterlife. 

Alejandra Maria Rivas (she/they) is a Mexican-America non-binary femme theatre artist hailing from the San Gabriel Valley of California, currently living in the Bay Area. They are a writer and producer (La Paloma, Magic Fruit, Curly Fries, Collective Rage), a director (Late: a cowboy song, 365 Days/365 Plays, The Clean House, This is Modern Art), a stage manager (A One Man Show, PussyGrabbingRevenge, Collective Rage), intimacy choreographer (School for Lies), performer (amémonos, The Oresteia, Sabz, Measure for Measure, In the Heights, Cabaret, Twelfth Night, Lysistrata, Impure Thoughts…), teaching artist (Cal Shakes), and arts administrator for American Conservatory Theatre and the Bay Area Women’s Theatre Festival. She is a company member of TheatreFIRST and studied Performance, Theatre Studies, and Psychology at Saint Mary’s College of California. They like to read lots of books and eat lots of food.

Kudzu 2012

All the spades-playing, weed-smoking, fish-fry-having Warfield family wants is to live out their ordinary lives in the working-class community they've always called home. But an energy drink-chugging tech "visionary" is determined to reinvent their neighborhood using a people-curation app he built, and the powers that be--from the mayor to the media--are on his side. Who'll be left standing?  And what the hell is in that smoothie, anyway?

Tracy Baxter is a working writer based in Oakland. KUDZU 2012 is her first play