Geffen Playhouse’s final 2019/2020 season production announced.

LOS ANGELES (May 7, 2019) — Geffen Playhouse and Audible will co-produce Nightfall for the Los Angeles theater’s 2019/2020 season, it was announced today. Written by Marisela Treviño Orta (The River Bride, Braided Sorrow, Wolf at the Door) as an Audible Emerging Playwrights Commission, Nightfall will make its world premiere in Geffen’s Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater in March and marks the completion of the Geffen Playhouse 2019/2020 season lineup.

In Nightfall, survival becomes the name of the game for Karla and her stepdaughter Olivia when their fraught family camping trip is interrupted by news of a mysterious outbreak causing the humans in nearby San Francisco to become…well, bitey. With little information to go on, the two women must identify the biggest threat to their safety–the supposedly deadly virus, the stranger who stumbles into their campsite or each other.

Nightfall is one of the first 25 commissions that make up Audible’s Emerging Playwrights program, a dedicated $5M fund that enables the creation of original plays driven by language and voice, keeping with Audible’s core commitment to elevating listening experiences through powerful performances and extraordinary storytelling. The production will be released as an audio play simultaneously with its opening at Geffen Playhouse, exclusively on Audible for millions of listeners around the world.

Marisela Treviño Orta is an accidental playwright. Originally from Lockhart, Texas, she found her way to the genre while completing an MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco (USF) where she studied poetry exclusively. While a student at USF, Marisela became the Resident Poet of El Teatro Jornalero!, a social justice theatre company comprised of Latinx immigrants.

Marisela’s first play Braided Sorrow (2008 Su Teatro world premiere) won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama and the 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama. In 2011, she began writing her cycle of grim Latinx fairy tales — fairy tales for adults inspired by Latinx mythology and folklore. Marisela is an alum of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwright Initiative, a founding member of the Bay Area Latino Theatre Artists Network, and a member of the Latinx Theatre Commons’ national Steering Committee. Currently, Marisela is working on a new cycle of worst-case scenario plays — sci-fi thriller plays which include WMB (pronounced “womb”) and Nightfall.

“We are thrilled to team up with Audible on their commission of Marisela Treviño Orta’s wonderfully original world premiere play, Nightfall,” said Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Matt Shakman. “This feels like a perfect match, as both Audible and the Geffen are devoted to bringing new plays and new voices to audiences and the ability to collaborate across mediums is a great step toward incorporating theater into new media. We hope this is the first of many collaborations with Audible.”

Added Kate Navin, Artistic Producer for Audible Theater, “We are excited that Marisela’s surprising play, one of the first commissions to come out of our Emerging Playwrights Fund will premiere on stage and release on Audible simultaneously. We are thrilled to be co-producing with our wonderful friends at Geffen Playhouse as we continue to expand the slate of outstanding theatrical programming that we make available to global audiences.”

Nightfall joins the previously announced Geffen Playhouse 2019/2020 season lineup, which includes the comedies Witch by Jen Silverman and featuring Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory, Florence Foster Jenkins), Skintight by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews, Significant Other), featuring Tony Award winner Idina Menzel, and The Thanksgiving Play by Los Angeles-based playwright Larissa FastHorse. The lineup continues with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Matt Shakman and starring Emmy nominee Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones), and a world premiere adaptation of Key Largo by Jeffrey Hatcher and Academy Award nominee Andy Garcia, also featuring Garcia. Rounding out the season is the comedy Bernhardt/Hamlet by Theresa Rebeck (Seminar), The Enigmatist, a highly inventive, immersive theatrical experience from renowned magician David Kwong, and a world premiere production of Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation, a play with music written by Qui Nguyen (Vietgone), which also serves as the West Coast debut of New York City’s Obie Award-winning “geek theater” Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company.

Additional award-winning and critically acclaimed Audible performances of captivating stage productions starring Billy Crudup, Judith Light, Aasif Mandvi, John Lithgow, Carey Mulligan, Madhuri Shekar, Sharon Washington, and others are available for download at www.audible.com/theater.