Work in progress

River Stage wraps up its Playwrights Festival of New Works next week with a staged reading of Green Man, a play in development about “love, loss and gargoyles.”

Brooklyn playwright Jim Knable offered this teasing description of the four-actor script: “Painter Abigail’s model is a naked man painted green, and her architect husband Ronald’s new intern bears a striking resemblance, though he’s clothed. Their new acquaintance, Genice, is a stone sculptor of gargoyles whose musician fiancé appears in the same hue.” The play’s themes include grief, creation and human connection.

Knable’s previous plays have been produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Soho Rep, the Playwrights Project in San Diego, Yale University and elsewhere. He is a three-time winner of the California Young Playwrights Contest.

River Stage artistic director Frank Condon will direct the reading. At a previous Playwright’s Festival, Condon helped Mark Medoff (Tony Award winner for Children of a Lesser God) develop Gunfighter: A Gulf War Chronicle, which later was fully mounted in Sacramento and elsewhere. Much of the fun of these staged readings is watching the actors, director and playwright find out what works (and what doesn’t) as the script is presented to the audience. Very often, overnight revisions are made between the two performances.