PICT Theatre's popular 'Bards from the Burgh' staged reading series is back

For its third year, PICT Classic Theatre will bring back its “Bards from the Burgh” staged reading series at Carnegie Stage in Carnegie.

The series will allow theater enthusiasts to hear four never-before-seen plays read onstage by actors. All four playwrights have connections to Pittsburgh.

PICT artistic director Elizabeth Elias Huffman is excited to bring these plays into the spotlight.

Huffman came to PICT in 2023, during a transitional period for the company. She staged the first “Bards from the Burgh” series that summer.

“It was great — we had full houses,” she said. “In fact, overflowing. And I thought, ‘wow, people really like it.’ ”

One of the plays from that year’s series, “Andy Warhol’s Tomato” by Vince Melocchi, was fully staged by PICT last fall and enjoyed a successful run.

PICT takes full-length play submissions for the series, and Huffman chooses her top four.

“The ones that I could not put down,” she said.

They hire directors and audition actors for each of the four readings. Huffman will keep other submitted plays in mind for inclusion in future “Bards from the Burgh” series. “One of the only ways for writers to really gauge how their play is working is to do play readings,” she said.

The first reading will be held July 8.

“Gloria, Jean and the Sexy Ghost Show” was written by Matt Henderson, an actor and playwright who grew up in Irwin.

“After a while of doing plays, I got the impulse to create my own stories and my own characters,” he said.

The idea for this play formed during the covid-19 pandemic, Henderson said.

“I was inspired by the … kind of boredom and the isolation of that experience and just the experience of binging trashy TV shows, which is something that I did a lot,” he said. “I really got into certain shows that I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be into, but because of what was going on with lockdown, it was a great way to turn your brain off and escape into this weird sort of dumb world, and also work through your own issues and anxiety at the same time.”

The play follows two middle-aged women during a pandemic in the near future who bond over remote watch parties for a CW show about sexy teenage ghosts.

Henderson submitted the play for the first “Bards of the Burgh” series in 2023 and Huffman has remained interested in it since. He hopes to see the play fully staged at some point.

“This is definitely giving me a sense of how it would work onstage and how it might be brought to life by actors,” he said.

The second play in the series is “Run Wild” by Anya Martin, which will be read on July 10. The CMU alum had her first experience writing plays at a religious Mennonite youth camp as a second grader.

Her passion for meta storytelling, using historical primary sources and integrating the voices of rural communities into her work are all on display in “Run Wild,” which is built around a classic Greek trilogy of 10-minute plays with connective tissue in between.

Surrounding the three stories within “Run Wild” is the story of the actresses performing the plays themselves, forcing the confrontation of the role and concept of theater in our world.

“I think what most theater people are asking themselves right now is, why theater at all? How do we keep going? All of the funding is gone,” she said. “Do people really care? We’re talking about these big ideas, but who’s in the audience? That’s a big part of the reason I call it ‘Run Wild’ because the play, it’s a wild piece.”

The play features ancient themes juxtaposed with modern-day events: Persephone and Demeter confronting fracking; Eve and Pandora examining the 2024 presidential election; and words from “The Odyssey” woven through the words of the shooter in the 2009 LA Fitness shooting.

Martin is uncertain about the future of this wild work, but she hopes that seeing it can be a form of catharsis for the audience, just as it was cathartic for her to write it.

“It’s great to use the word ‘catharsis’ for the Greeks. If you are a woman who’s raging, I think it will be cathartic for you.”

On July 12, the reading of “Wanderlust, or the Adventures of the Keystone Kid” will be held. Playwright Wali Jamal Abdullah was born in Homestead and raised at Pittsburgh’s St. Clair Village, and he’s made a name for himself as both an actor and writer. In the past, he’s focused on the stories of Black historical figures in America — ever since he was advised by August Wilson himself to “write what you know.”

Those figures have included Civil War veteran and pioneering Black politician Robert Smalls, and the journalist, physician, abolitionist Martin Delany, who was also the first Black field grade officer in the U.S. Army.

This play focuses on immigrant Joseph Szalanski who, during the Great Depression, decided to travel to all 48 states on just 48 cents.

“He decided to do it mainly because he was a Polish immigrant and if you lived in East Vandergrift and you were a Polish immigrant, you were pretty much relegated to working at the American tin mill,” Abdullah said.

At the time, the job was incredibly unsafe and for poor pay. So “The Keystone Kid” decided to try this stunt — and he succeeded, making national headlines.

Abdullah is fascinated by the interconnectedness of history.

“When you research and you make these connections, you almost get this electric chill,” he said.

Being selected for this reading series has been a great experience for Abdullah.

“PICT is definitely presenting a nice little platform for people to stretch their legs and break some eggs,” he said.

This year’s “Bards from the Burgh” will wrap up on July 13 with “Playboy of Manhattan” by Carnegie Mellon School of Drama professor, actor and playwright Anthony McKay.

“This is unfortunately a real story about a friend of mine who was killed on a bicycle,” he said. “I was suddenly left with … there were three women he was seeing at the time, although they didn’t know about each other.”

The play is about the emotional fallout of suddenly losing a friend and solving the mysteries of their life. “It’s working out his legacy after death with three people who loved him.”

There are two women in the play instead of three, but the impact remains the same. The process of putting the reading together has been interesting, McKay said.

“It’s involved auditions and talks with the director about maybe what to cut, and the play itself. It’s been a very informative process for me.”

“I want to see what it’s like on its feet, and this will be in a real theater with a real audience. Even though it’s a staged reading, it’ll still be something that the audience reacts to,” he said. “So it will give me a good barometer as to how much rewriting is needed, and where to go with it next.”