The Playful Substance Story...
Playful Substance's mission is to elevate and support community interaction through story.
Our name is both mission and vision; substantive work created and shared with joy, cooperation, empathy and humor.
Playful Substance was founded in 2007 by Circle in the Square Theatre School graduates, Bree O'Connor and Ben Perry. Ben and Bree were looking to build a creative space that would provide a joyful place to play while also making room for the realities of their lives outside of the theatre.
Playful Substance's first production was Adventures in Mating by Joseph Scrimshaw, a choose-your-own-adventure-style play that followed a couple on a first date. Adventures in Mating had over 60 possible combinations of scenes, 2 rotating casts, and ran weekly for nearly a year and a half in an East Village bar.
In 2008, Playful Substance went dormant after the birth of Bree's second child and Ben eventually married, moved to the Pacific Northwest, became a nurse and started a family of his own.
Playful Substance was revived in 2014 after Bree joined the LAByrinth Intensive Ensemble and met a new cohort of like minded theatre artists and began producing readings, then eventually full productions. Once the Writers' Group began meeting regularly in the fall of 2017, a new Playful Substance began to take shape. Today, Playful Substance stands as a welcoming and flexible development company that believes every artist deserves a space to work at a high level with joy and respect both for the work of the artist and the life an artist maintains outside of the theatre.
To date, our Writers' Groups have fostered well over 30 new works including stage plays, screen plays, books, series pilots, short stories and one acts, and countless short plays, sketches, outlines, monologues, treatments, and even a few songs!
Playful Substance's first production was Adventures in Mating by Joseph Scrimshaw, a choose-your-own-adventure-style play that followed a couple on a first date. Adventures in Mating had over 60 possible combinations of scenes, 2 rotating casts, and ran weekly for nearly a year and a half in an East Village bar.
In 2008, Playful Substance went dormant after the birth of Bree's second child and Ben eventually married, moved to the Pacific Northwest, became a nurse and started a family of his own.
Playful Substance was revived in 2014 after Bree joined the LAByrinth Intensive Ensemble and met a new cohort of like minded theatre artists and began producing readings, then eventually full productions. Once the Writers' Group began meeting regularly in the fall of 2017, a new Playful Substance began to take shape. Today, Playful Substance stands as a welcoming and flexible development company that believes every artist deserves a space to work at a high level with joy and respect both for the work of the artist and the life an artist maintains outside of the theatre.
To date, our Writers' Groups have fostered well over 30 new works including stage plays, screen plays, books, series pilots, short stories and one acts, and countless short plays, sketches, outlines, monologues, treatments, and even a few songs!
