Venice Playwrights Festival Selects 9 New Plays Out of 500 Submitted for Performance

The Venice Playwrights Festival sounds like a perfectly good name for a new play series--except for one small hitch. It’s not made up of playwrights who live in Venice. And the festival itself isn’t in Venice.

“Well, if you have dinner at the Rose Cafe and then walk down the street to the Powerhouse, you will have been in Venice,” suggested Michael Lilly, who is co-producing and directing two plays in the festival. For the second year in a row, the Powerhouse Theatre (on the edge of Venice, but technically in Santa Monica) will play host to a series of new works, nine one-acts--divided into three programs--that will run in repertory.

Earlier this year, ads for the festival ran in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles, resulting in almost 500 play submissions. “Many of them were unproduceable: Some were too big, some were just rotten,” said Lilly, 38, who also runs the New Works writers program at Actors Alley. “When the plays started coming in, I started calling directors at all of the theaters I know around the city. So we have a director from Theatre West, one from the Cast, one from the Grove. . . .”

In some cases, the plays Lilly offered the directors weren’t the ones they ended up doing. “Some of them came back with a piece they’d been working on but didn’t have a place to put up,” he said. “It happened with Bob McCracken, who brought us the Murphy Guyer play. But the most exciting thing has been working with all of these different people from all of these different places, getting ideas from here and here and here. You never know exactly what’s going to happen. But that’s fine. Theater should be about the moment.”

Last year--the festival’s maiden outing--Lilly received praise for his direction of Jill Maynard’s “Caffeine Society” and Tom Huey’s “The Man in the Bright Nightgown.” This time out, he is staging Huey’s “Life After Thought 19,” plus Sybil Rosen’s “Curves.”

“ ‘Curves’ is about two women who’ve been in a relationship--on-and-off sexual--for 14 years,” he said. “The title refers to the twists and turns of a relationship that’s pretty much come to the end of the road. One of the women has moved in with a man; the other has fallen in love with another woman.” In the solo “Thought 19,” Jacqueline Scott plays a woman “who’s barely off the streets, culling rags for Goodwill and talking to herself, because she has no family, no friends, no one else to talk to.”

Local playwright Bill Shick is wearing two hats: overseeing the premiere of his “Seekers” (“When it’s a new play, I want to be there all the time.”) and playing one of the roles. “In a nutshell, it’s about two men searching for the meaning of life and finding hot water--literally, but it’s also a metaphor,” he said. “Wayne and Arnie have broken into an apartment and are searching for something; in the course of the play we find out what that is. It’s a play about enlightenment, awareness and expectation.”

The festival is the brainchild of actor-producer Howard East, 28, who began laying the groundwork for the event when he was still living in New York but planning to relocate in the West. “I thought, ‘Anybody can do one play; why not do 10?’ ” he recalled. So he put a couple of ads in the Writers Guild and Dramatists Guild magazines. “And the next thing I knew, I had 500 scripts,” he said. The only criteria was that it be new work or work that had had a limited run. “I didn’t care if they were 10 minutes or an hour,” he added. “It just had to be good.”

The Venice Playwrights Festival is composed of Series A: “Evening Class” by Tim Reilly, “The Secretary” by Bruce Feld and “Curves” by Sybil Rosen; Series B: “Seekers” by Bill Shick, “Bare-Handed Catch” by Bill Strieb and “Coming of Age in Samoa” by Murphy Guyer; and Series C: “Life After Thought 19” by Tom Huey, “The Fight Call” by Michael Folie and “Driving” by Wendy Meyers.

Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m., through Dec. 8. On Nov. 17 and Dec. 8, all nine plays will be performed, beginning with Series A at 2 p.m., Series B at 5 p.m. and Series C at 8 p.m. There will be no performances Nov. 27 and 28. The Powerhouse Theatre is at 3116 2nd St. in Santa Monica. Admission to each series: $10. (213) 466-1767.