Theatrical Outfit’s Launchpad 2.0 feeds the city’s appetite for new work from local voices

With a successful first session last year leading to continued productions of plays such as Steve Yockey’s Venus, Stephen Ruffin and Filipe Valle Costa’s Mr. Cool and Bridget McCarthy’s Fat Juliet in 2026, Theatrical Outfit’s Launchpad 2.0 will feature developmental productions of four new works made in Atlanta and two public readings July 14 through July 28.

Artistic Director Matt Torney said the festival last year only showed how hungry the city is for new stories from its own voices.

“The biggest takeaway was that there was an enormous appetite for this type of work in the community from artists and new work development focused on productions, rather than just readings in rehearsal rooms with minimal props,” he said in an interview. “This invitation lets them make something more realized that the artists then own [and] can bring on tour doing multiple different contexts. I mean, it worked really well, and every single one of the pieces from last year has had a future life.”

The festival concentrates on shows with smaller casts and minimal technical needs, theater that could potentially be staged anywhere and be remounted easily. Torney said the festival is influenced by the notion of “theater in a bag,” wherein shows are smaller and more portable.

Having developmental productions actually take the stage for a multishow run is what sets Launchpad’s new work development apart from other new work incubators. Torney said the stagings show other interested venues a proof of concept, not just a pitch of ideas and ambitions.

“This year, we invited all the submissions in the fall,” Torney said. “We picked all of our artists at the turn of the year, and then they have six months to make their piece. And then after that, it’s really whatever they want. We very much want artists to dictate the terms of their own work.”

The four plays of this year’s festival are The Penelopes by Kira Rockwell, I An a Mother F**king Superstar by Valeka Jessica, BlerdMan by Thomas Brazzle and Queen (of the American Nail Salon) by Ryan Vo and Corey Bradberry. Each play will have four performances.

Rockwell’s play, directed by Alejandra Ruiz, stars Maria Rodriguez-Sager and Brandy Bell as a grandmother and grown grandchild reuniting for the first time. They find mutual connection and common ground through art and a love of nature, though both also have remaining trauma over the family member who separated them.

“I’m just at a time in my life where I am hungry for elder relationships,” Rockwell said of her inspiration. “I think as someone who is estranged from my birth family, those relationships aren’t as accessible. And so I have to put in a lot of time and intention to develop those outside and have chosen elders. So it truly started there and [with] my own story, too, with my grandmother, who surrendered my father for adoption. And [with] that kind of severed maternal grandmother — we had plans to meet before the pandemic, and we were going to have a one-on-one with each other and get to know each other. She passed before that could happen. And so this whole play is like the conversation that I wish I could have had.”

Ruiz, who appeared in Rockwell’s Suzi Bass Award-winning play Oh, To Be Pure Again at Actor’s Express, is excited to be back at Launchpad, having co-directed a show last year.

“Last year because Launchpad was new and because I was still stepping into myself as a director, it was a bigger learning curve for me,” Ruiz said. “This time around, I feel just so much more ready, so much more able to lead the room, to trust my voice, my eye and my expertise and know exactly what Launchpad has to offer and how to take advantage of it and run.”

Associate Artistic Director Addae Moon developed Launchpad with Torney so that it gave artists the tools to navigate the current climate.

“One of the many inspirations for Launchpad for both Matt and I is that we both started out as theater artists who self-produced their own work,” Moon said in an interview. “And everyone knows that the current ecosystem for — not just for theaters in general but especially for new work — is bleak in this country. And the idea is that these artists now have pieces that they can self-produce and replicate wherever, or they can go the route of Yockey with Venus and have multiple productions. But I think it’s important to provide Atlanta-based artists with this opportunity to self-produce because, honestly, I believe that that’s the future.”

BlerdMan, I Am A Motherf**king Superstar and Queen (of the American Nail Salon) will feature only one person onstage. In each one, Brazzle, Jessica and Vo will be performing deeply personal work with quirky twists.

Brazzle’s play addresses a superhero traveling back in time to find the source of his power. The show is a tribute to his late mother. 

“The basic premise is that a lifelong Black nerd turned hero has to go back in time to rediscover his power, starting from when he was a young boy after getting into a fight with a bully who tells him that there are no such things as Black heroes,” Brazzle said in a statement. “His mother sets him on a lifelong journey to prove otherwise, which opens him up to a world filled with discoveries in history, pop culture, adulthood and his own imagination.”

Meanwhile, Vo’s play will have him occasionally stepping into the role of his own mother, a Vietnamese migrant who moved to Mississippi postwar and adapts to the unfamiliar culture. Much of the play will also deal with their relationship.

“It’s a religious play that deals with Buddhism as well as Christianity being in the Bible Belt,” Vo said. “So it’s not only a clash of my Asian-American upbringing but my mother’s raw Vietnamese upbringing immigrant experience clashing those two ideologies. But also in the play, we deal with some religion. So it’s like my mother, who is a devout Vietnamese Buddhist, and, in my life, I’m not religious anymore, but there was at one point in my life where I was very religious growing up in the South. So we do touch on that in the play, and it’s hopefully layered enough that it is a one-dimensional piece.”

In her play, Jessica will be playing a variation of her past self trying to cultivate a badass identity while emerging from a divorce.

“[There’s] all these things that you have to move through,” she said. “And so then you realize that you have to expand your circle of friends, expand your romantic partners, expand all these things because you start to learn that you’ve been living small in every area of your life.”

Applications for Launchpad 3.0 are set to open in the fall, Moon said, providing more opportunities for Atlanta artists.

Where and When

Tickets for Launchpad 2.0 at Theatrical Outfit are available individually on the Theatrical Outfit website.
84 Luckie St., NW.

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.