Promising premieres: TheatreWorks returns with a vibrant New Works Festival

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s annual New Works Festival will return this month, featuring four in-progress works that offer audiences a unique look at readings of new plays and musicals. And for local actor and writer Molly Bell, this year’s festival is a special one.

“I started working at TheatreWorks, specifically as a part of their New Works Festival, when I was just 24 years old,” Bell said. “Now, after 20 years of working at the New Works Festival as an actor, I’ll be going in my first time as a writer. It’s such a full circle moment for me. It feels really full circle to come into my writing voice as an artist now, in my 40s, and get to present that authenticity at this festival.”

Bell has been a part of the New Works Festival across its over-20-year history as an important incubator for plays and musicals in the Bay Area. The festival has presented readings of numerous soon-to-be hits, including Joe DiPietro’s “Memphis,” later debuting on Broadway, playing there for almost three years and winning the Tony award for best musical in 2010.

This year’s festival, curated by TheatreWorks Artistic Producer of the New Works Festival and local theater artist Jeffrey Lo, promises to be an exciting look at a diverse array of new works. The lineup features Bell’s one-woman musical “Molly Bell’s Hysterical,” new musical “5 & Dime” based on the play and film “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” Vichet Chum’s poignant play “Liebling,” and local playwright Jordan Ramirez Puckett’s “A Driving Beat.”

With “5 & Dime,” audiences will also get a sneak peek at a show that will be part of the TheatreWorks’ next season, as it’s slated to close the company’s 2024-25 season in June 2025.

“One of the really big traits of a show that will really resonate with the TheatreWorks community is shows that are full of heart, and shows that are about the human experience, and shows that really celebrate both who we are when we are at our best, and who we aspire to be,” Lo said. “I think that these four plays all do that. These are all plays from very specific communities that are about people finding themselves and finding who they are in different ways. And I think through them, we can celebrate our best selves and the even better selves we aspire to become in our future.”

Bell’s “Hysterical” is certainly this, a deeply personal autobiographical work that both tells Bell’s story, as well as serves as the culmination of years of trying to find her authentic voice as an artist.

“I have a pretty major immune deficiency,” Bell said. “And so I spent about 20 years, from like age 17 through 30-something with an illness. But I didn’t know what it was. I just kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker. When you have an invisible sort of illness that doctors don’t know that much about, you start to think that you’re a little crazy. Once I found out what was wrong with me and put all the pieces together, I decided that a part of the process for me to heal from all of this would be to write a show about it, about facing mortality in the middle of your life, and being a mother who chose to give up her dreams of being on Broadway, and growing older, and all of those ideas culminating into a crisis of sorts.” 

For Bell, the COVID-19 pandemic was an incredibly fruitful time creatively for this project.

“During the pandemic, lots of stand-up comedians started making solo specials online,” Bell said. “This project was inspired by that, but my version of it: a full musical. It’s a full 80- to 85-minute show where I play all the different characters in my life: all my different doctors, my therapist, and myself. It was really important to me that even though the work is about the ins and outs of chronic illness and mental health problems, it’s still very light hearted and fun and meant to inspire.”

For Lo and TheatreWorks, presenting works like Bell’s that tell stories of the present and continue to push theatrical performance forward is central to their work as a presenter, and central to theater’s purpose as an art form in today’s world.

“This is the lifeblood of the theater,” Lo said. “This is the excitement. We love new works. There’s always beauty in reimagining classics and looking at plays that we know and love, but really, for me, the thing that excites me the most is the creation of new stories. What are the new stories that need to be told? What are the urgent stories that want to be told? … We at TheatreWorks want to invest in writers that are writing the next generation of plays and musicals, because we believe that theater is how we understand the world that we’re living in. Today’s world, especially in this country, is so challenging and so confusing and it’s so hard to make sense of. And we believe that plays and these writers are helping us better understand the world and better understand ourselves.”

The New Works Festival runs Aug. 9-18 at Lucie Stern Theatre, ​​1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Festival passes are $65. Single event tickets are $25. theatreworks.org.