Following a successful inaugural year, Corkscrew Theater Festival will return for a second season this summer. Over four weeks, the festival will present five world premieres and four readings performed in repertory at the Paradise Factory.

Corkscrew Theater Festival will run July 9–August 5. The lineup covers a range of intimate stories playing out across a wide swath of human experience: from the eve of the attempted 2016 coup in Turkey, through multiple generations in San Francisco and the Bronx, and among sisterhoods at a magical pie shop and a failing mermaid theme park.

“This year’s plays come from a place of real vulnerability,” comments Artistic Director Thomas Kapusta and Associate Artistic Director Alex Hare in a join statement. “Vulnerability is essential to artistic collaboration, and unique, surprising, and robust collaborations are at the heart of all Corkscrew’s work.”

The festival's mission, parallel to providing early-career theatremakers with a high level of production support, is to give special attention to artists who are developing work through robust and innovative collaborative models.

Check out the festival lineup, as billed by Corkscrew, below:

The End of Mermaids
By Anya Richkind, directed by Allison Benko, produced by Alexandra Cadena
Welcome to Mermaidland, Florida, the only place on earth where mermaids are real! Join us for our afternoon special starring Mermaid Bee, Mermaid Vana, and our newest princess of the deep, Mermaid Marie. Reawaken your childhood fantasies. Revel in the death-defying underwater dances. Soak in the impossible beauty. And please disregard the alligators. There is nothing to worry about.

Field, Awakening
By Melis Aker, directed by Tatiana Pandiani, produced by Mei Li Heman
After ten years of self-imposed estrangement from her country, Rana reunites with three old friends on a soccer field in Istanbul on July 15th, 2016—the eve of the attempted coup d’etat in Turkey. As the night progresses, the foursome realizes how brutal nostalgia can feel when the distance between them widens, when life in the present implicates them in political turmoil and places them under surveillance. Spanning across the surreal events of one evening, Field, Awakening is not a homecoming: it’s the tale of a stranger in a strange land, searching in vain for home amidst a landscape of fleeting familiarity.

Pie Shop Play
By Alice Pencavel
A lattice come crumble, stone fruit in the eye, a berry and a hatchet baked into a pie... Agnes and Kitty -- the pie shop sisters – have big dreams. But when a pipe bursts, leaking toxic unknowns that flood the shop and rob them of coherent speech, they are forced to contend with a past that still haunts and divides them (lest they drown). Culminating in a dramatic stand-off played out through an original language of gibberish and jumbled English, Pie Shop Play reveals the havoc that trauma brings down upon all who work in the name of pie.

Desarrollo
By Juliany Taveras, directed by Manny Rivera, choreography by Ian Fields Stewart
As kids growing up in New York City, Nelly, Alaida, and Sol spent hot summer days daring, dancing, and documenting their way across boroughs, rivers, and storefronts. Ten years later, time has seemed to warp everything, from their once-indestructible friendship to the landscape of the streets they used to call home. Desarrollo is an unraveling—a discovery—of what happens to the people and the places we love when put under pressure; like film developing in the dark, their stories are ones of transformation, of capturing the moments that change us.

delicacy of a puffin heart
By Stefani Kuo, directed by Theo Maltz, produced by Catherine Woodard
In a small San Francisco apartment in the 1990s, Meryl and Ana Sofia, a lesbian couple, attempt to conceive a child through in-vitro fertilization while managing Meryl's bipolar disorder II. Two decades later, in the same apartment, their daughter Robyn and her roommate Hadley are forced to navigate their friendship through Robyn’s cancer treatment. As they struggle to take control of their lives, all four come to experience the unique weight and loss of female friendship. A wrenching, tender portrait of characters who are complicated the way real women are, delicacy of a puffin heart considers what it means to love someone honestly even when they are incapable of telling the truth.

Corkscrew Theater Festival will also present free readings of four new plays, presented in semi-staged format at the Paradise Factory: Heart & Soul Yoga Studio Beirut by Olivia Clement, directed by Emilyn Kowaleski; Our House is Haunted by Ankita Raturi, directed by Charlotte Murray; Milk and Gall by Mathilde Dratwa, directed by Jen Wineman, and featuring Carrie Heitman; and Craters, or the making of the making of the moon landing by Elise Wien, directed by Deby Xiadani.

Tickets to the festival will go on sale in late May. Visit CorkscrewFestival.org to learn more.