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We are proud to announce the recipient of the 2024-25 Rella Lossy Award. The Rella Lossy Award honors the memory of Rella Lossy, a lifelong champion of the American theatre and playwriting, by honoring the best new full-length script of a play by an emerging playwright that will premiere in Alameda County, Contra Costa County, Marin County, Napa County, San Francisco County, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, Solano County, or Sonoma County in the coming year.

Shipping & handling show graphic. A Black person has their eyes closed, and is surrounded by flowers and a galaxy.

Shipping & Handling

by Star Finch
Produced by Crowded Fire Theater
August 8 – September 7, 2024

Shipping & Handling is a theatrical experience constructed as a night out at the theatre told in reverse. The playwright shuffles chronology in order to scramble our historical expectations around Black plays, and unmap our limited vision of a future AI world. Are creations always a reflection of their creator? Can an AI bear witness to divine prophecy? Shipping & Handling seeks to transmit a signal for locating the tone of what it means to be human in this specific moment, and collectively reimagine our future design.

Black and white portrait of Star in profile, looking up wistfully. Her hair is in braids and she is wearing a plaid button-up.

Star Finch is a San Franciscan trying her best to hold ground amidst the erasure of gentrification. She is currently the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Campo Santo and Crowded Fire Theater and an alumni of the Resident Playwrights Program (2018-2022) at Playwrights Foundation. Finch’s plays include H.O.M.E. [Hookers on Mars Eventually] and BONDAGE (Relentless Award honorable mention). Her multidisciplinary collaborations include Campo Santo’s ETHOS DE MASQUERADE and Crowded Fire’s DEATH BECOME LIFE. Her most recent play, JOSEPHINE’S FEAST, premiered at the Magic Theatre. BONDAGE is available via Broadway Play Publishing Inc.

2024 Rella Lossy Award Panelists

Marie-Claire Erdynast is the Associate Artistic Director at San Francisco Playhouse as well as a freelance dramaturg, director, puppeteer, and movement-based performer. She is particularly interested in developing bold and uplifting theatre. She is very proud to have developed and produced plays like Cashed Out by Claude Jackson Jr and My Home on the Moon by Minna Lee at San Francisco Playhouse, and to have directed and self-produced Red Bike by Caridad Svich at Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival. Look out for her upcoming tabletop and shadow puppet show, The Ground, produced by Odd Savvy, premiering in August 2024. mcerdynast.com.

Min Kahng is an award-winning playwright, composer, lyricist, and creative coach whose works include The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga (BATCC Award, TBA Award), GOLD: The Midas Musical (TBA Award), The Adventures of Honey & Leon, Inside Out & Back Again, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon: A Musical Adaptation, Bad Kitty On Stage!, The Song of the Nightingale and Tales of Olympus. Kahng is a MacDowell Fellow, a Travis Bogard Fellow, an NEA Grant Recipient, a Jonathan Larson Grant Finalist, a Richard Rodgers Award Finalist, and a Dramatists Guild committee member. www.minkahng.com

Sloka Krishnan is a playwright-lyricist interested in magic, extravagance, ritual, camp, and the disavowal of moral purity and coherent identity. Now based in San Francisco, he is a 2024-2025 Resident Playwright with Playwrights Foundation. He was previously a 2020 recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the City of Atlanta, a 2017-2018 Horizon Theatre Playwright Apprentice (Atlanta, GA), and a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting. His work has been developed/performed by Cutting Ball Theatre (San Francisco); Happy Accident Theatre, Horizon Theatre Company, Out Front Theatre, and Working Title Playwrights (Atlanta); Forum Theatre and the Rainbow Theatre Project (DC).

Learn more about the Rella Lossy Award