First Look New Plays Festival

Three plays by three internationally renowned playwrights directed by three leading theater artists will take the stage at American Conservatory Theater’s First Look New Plays Festival.

The festival kicks off January 16 and 17 with Carey Perloff and Val Caniparoli’s The Tosca Project, directed by Perloff. First developed in a series of workshops conducted earlier this year with international actors and members of SF Ballet, The Tosca Project is a groundbreaking blend of theater, movement, and music that toasts the rich history of Tosca’s Café, the famed nightspot located in San Francisco’s North Beach district that has been a favorite of opera singers, Beat poets, Russian émigrés, and other eclectic characters since the 1920s.

On January 19 and 20, First Look presents Brainpeople, the newest play from José Rivera, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries and playwright behind Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Each Day Dies with Sleep and the Humana Festival’s Cloud Tectonics. The play unfolds as a surreal dinner party taking place in an unnamed totalitarian state, where three women reckon with the complexities of their pasts. Brainpeople is directed by Erica Gould.

First Look concludes January 26 and 27 with a sneak peek at Constance Congdon’s world premiere adaptation of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. Set to close A.C.T.’s 40th-anniversary mainstage season June 7 through July 8 in a production directed by Ron Lagomarsino (A.C.T.’s The Gamester), The Imaginary Invalid is a rollicking satire about a hopeless hypochondriac who believes in nothing and no one — except the dubious diagnoses his quack doctors keep delivering. The First Look presentation will provide a glimpse into what lay ahead for A.C.T.’s season-closing production, and it will be directed at Zeum Theater by Lagomarsino.

All presented as script-in-hand workshop productions.

Curtain is at 8 p.m. for all performances.