When Plan-B Theatre’s anthology of eight original, full-length plays is published next month by Juniper Press and Oxide Books, the book will be a compelling, vivid testament to the company’s growing influential presence on Salt Lake City’s cultural scene. In fact, Plan-B hardly plays a modest subculture role in the community. The Plays From Behind the Zion Curtain anthology reflects the company’s capacity for expressing the increasingly evident realities of a maturing Utah community that is beginning to come to terms with its history, its spirituality and its diversity.

Certainly, the anthology exemplifies the risks which daring artists often take to start conversations in the community. And, Jerry Rapier, producing director for the company, is justifiably proud of the way in which Plan-B has made it readily accessible — and yes, even pleasantly affordable — for audiences who frequently seek out venues for raising and even challenging the social conscience on everything from religion to homosexuality to artistic freedom and environmentalism and to the basic foundations of human relationships.

Included in the anthology are The Alienation Effekt by Tobin Atkinson, Amerika by Aden Ross, Exposed by Mary Dickson, Facing East by Carol Lynn Pearson, Miasma by Eric Samuelsen, The End of The Horizon by Debora Threedy, and two Radio Hour scripts (Radio Poe adapted from the famous author by Cheryl Ann Cluff and Lavender/Exile by Matthew Ivan Bennett.

The anthology also will be available in local bookstores and at SLAM, during which five 10-minute plays will be created by Utah playwrights within a 23-hour span. The creative results will then be presented during the 24th hour Saturday, May 17, at 8 p.m. at the Jeanne Wagner Theatre in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

As with the anthology, SLAM signifies the testing grounds for Plan-B which always seeks to use the stage as the device to encourage audience members to carry forward their own discussions long after the lights have dimmed at the close of a production. Last fall, in a Q&A interview with this editor, Rapier said, “We do what we do without apology, but also with a tremendous amount of respect. I firmly believe that is what allows us to create theatre that creates conversation. At the end of an evening at Plan-B we want the audience’s experience to be beginning – our hope is that they’ve got something to talk about – conversation.”

Most recently, the emotional carthasis was especially strong in Exposed, an original play by local journalist Mary Dickson exploring the human consequences of the state’s experience with being downwind of nuclear bombs the U.S. government tested in the Nevada desert from the 1950s to the 1990s. “For many people, the theater-going experience presented the opportunity to memorialize those who were impacted directly by the events,” Rapier says, adding that a starting list of 40 people quickly grew fourfold as theatergoers offered names of others affected.

Next season, Plan-B will enter perhaps its most adventurous risk-taking phase in its history since being incorporated as a non-profit in 1995, and since it started offering full seasons of performances continuously since 1996. It will devote its entire season to works by Matthew Ivan Bennett, 30, the company’s resident playwright. Among the productions will be an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which also will coincide with the fourth annual Radio Hour during Hallowe’en; Block 8, a world-premiere account of the Japanese internment experience at Topaz, near Delta during World War II, and Di Esperienza, a world-premiere examination of the dynamics of failure within the oeuvre of Leonardo da Vinci.

However, Rapier assures the company’s distinct voice will resonate just as strongly in these new productions. As usual, the season certainly will strike at the heart of social conscience as well as the larger theme of the artist’s creative process. The company’s risk-taking stance reminds of the simultaneously instructive, enlightening, and entertaining value of new art and the importance of allowing that fresh voice to cure and to be cultivated. In a state where risk-taking entrepreneurship is encouraged and celebrated, Plan-B’s approach is rightly envisioned and applauded.

Rapier and Cheryl Ann Cluff, managing director, also have worked effectively to sustain a community-based theater in a market where even the most firmly established cultural institutions compete quite aggressively to develop fresh audiences for their productions. Plan-B has managed to make its work widely accessible to a diverse audience, strategically keeping ticket prices at an exceptionally reasonable level (generally $18) and ensuring that every audience member will have a seat good enough to get the full impact of live theater. The theater is supported by ticket revenue, which comprises one-third of the budget, and foundation, corporate, and philanthropic support in the remaining proportions.

In addition to SLAM, Plan-B will close out its 2007-2008 season with the Utah premiere of Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part, a one-man production which tells the author’s experience as a teenager who had a sexual relationship with an older man. Moran’s play, written 30 years after the fact, was develped in 2003 at the Sundance Theatre Lab. Although Moran regularly performs the play, the Utah production, directed by Rapier, will feature local actor David Spencer. The play opens May 30 with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Rose Wagner’s Studio Theater. The run ends June 15.

Plan-B also will hold its sixth annual fundraiser — And The Banned Played On — July 21 at 7 p.m. in the Jeanne Wagner Theater. The performance will include scenes and songs from banned plays and musicals. Among the plays featured will be The Importance of Being Earnest, The Drag, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, The Normal Heart, and Romeo and Juliet. Songs from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Mikado, West Side Story, The Who’s Tommy and Miss Saigon also will be featured. The event, which carries a $35 ticket price, will include appearances by many local media personalities as well as every city mayor from the last 30 years.

For more information on tickets and productions, visit here.

Also, in the 2008-09 season, the annual SLAM play competition and the fundraiser — And The Banned Played On — will be combined into a single event — And The Banned Slammed On — on May 30, 2009.