The Venturous Play List 2025-27

404 Not Found
by Lucas Baisch

From Julia Izumi: “Lucas is by nature a venturous playwright, consistently pushing the boundaries of how language can live in and outside the body and daring to explore that tender membrane between ecstasy and terror. 404 Not Found is a perfect example of all of that, following three twisted souls in a space and time that never seems to see dawn. One is handcuffed to a window, another is dressed like Freddy Krueger, and the third is trying to construct a virtual utopia—a bold venture in itself! Lucas is a once-in-a-generation voice that American stages desperately need during this ghoulish era, which is something this play both acutely reflects and also breaks free from.”

About the play: We find ourselves on the outskirts—at the back of a clay building which signals “stay awake, stay awake.” Slack and Ro and Cameo divulge into monologue, tracing three pasts, a present, while portending some nightmare future. A lyrical project netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.

About the playwright: Lucas’ plays have been read and developed at the Goodman Theatre, Playwrights’ Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, The Mercury Store, Cutting Ball Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Neo-Futurists, etc. He is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Fellowship, and the Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, Yale’s Theater Magazine, and 53rd State Press. He has held residencies through The Djerassi, Millay Arts, Ars Nova, Page 73, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the LMCC. MFA: Brown University, Playwriting. lucasbaisch.com

 

ALL FALL DOWN
by Lisa Ramirez

From Deepa Purohit: “Lisa Ramirez is one of the most honest, straight-talking beautiful artistic souls I’ve met over the 20 years I’ve worked in theater. Her mind and heart are bold, brave, and determined and they drive the way she’s lived her life and what she creates. ALL FALL DOWN’s innovation is a daring experiment she’s proposed in this play: a realistic family drama that is intercepted by the dance and movement of a chorus that weaves throughout the play, demanding that a family face each other in their deepest grief and the regrets embedded in it. This play is a thrilling mash-up of Lisa’s greatest passions coming to the stage to move the audience—drama and dance/movement that haunt and excavate the buried love of a mother and her children.”

About the play: ALL FALL DOWN is a memory play/dance theater piece that takes place in the abandoned house that Bobby Vargas, a professional ballet dancer, grew up in. On the day of his funeral, Bobby’s mother, Rose, and his sisters, Jackie and Grace, engage in an emotional, high stakes struggle to dominate each other’s opposing versions of the events that lead to their brother’s untimely and tragic death. Amidst the many voices of the Chorus of the Past (a corps de ballet), hovering within and around the house, the sisters are overtaken by memories of their profoundly talented yet fragile younger brother, their absent father, and the family’s legacy of addiction and confused cultural identity, ultimately bringing them full circle and freeing Bobby’s spirit.

About the playwright: Lisa Ramirez’s plays include: EXIT CUCKOO (nanny in motherland), Working Theater, NYC; ART OF MEMORY, 3LD, NYC; Pas de Deux (lost my shoe), Cherry Lane Theatre; TO THE BONE, Cherry Lane Theatre (Pulitzer Prize Nominee, Helen Merrill Playwriting Award); DOWN HERE BELOW, Oakland Theater Project; IN THE MOUNTAINS, The Workshop Theater, NYC; MORE THAN GRAPES, Theatre-First in Berkeley; sAiNt jOaN (burn/burn/burn), Oakland Theater Project; Book of Sand (a fairytale), Oakland Theater Project. In development: ALL FALL DOWN, Center Theatre Group & People’s Light Theatre; SHE SE PUEDE, Oakland Theater Project; UNTITLED Dementia Play, People’s Light Theatre, Pennsylvania.

 

Bad Medicine
by P.C. Verrone

From Vickie Ramirez: “I don’t know why P.C.’s play hasn’t already been produced in multiple venues across the country. Bad Medicine is proof that he is a fiercely talented new voice in Indigenous Theater and a playwright to be reckoned with. Bad Medicine is audacious, funny, and leaves no room for settler agonizing. It tackles risky questions about entitlement, colonialism, and complicity and uses the horror/comedy genre to pose those questions in an entertaining and stealthy manner. Bad Medicine takes the tropes of Indigenous Theater, turns them on their head, and smashes them, which I think is the very definition of a Venturous Play.”

About the play: Native American academics Aislin and Cesar are excited to settle into their new home in Proctor, Massachusetts. But as Aislin becomes aware of strange occurrences surrounding her job at the Natural History Museum, she starts to wonder if there might be something insidious beneath the sleepy town. After Shannon—her only Native coworker—mysteriously disappears, she must overcome deep insecurities around her identity to uncover the town’s horrific secrets.

About the playwright: P.C. Verrone has developed work with AlterTheater, The Blank, Center Theater Group, Custom Made Theatre, EST/Sloan Project, La Jolla Playhouse, NNPN, Native Voices, Primary Stages, and Urbanite Theatre. His writing pulls from his Black, Osage, Kiowa, and Italian heritage and queer community. He won the 2024 Otherwise Award, 2021 Bridport Prize, and WNDB’s Black Creatives Workshop. He received fellowships and residencies from the Playwrights’ Center, Generation Now, Tin House, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. His play Crocodile Day is available from Playscripts. 

 

bean
by AriDy Nox

From Francisca Da Silveira: “The work that AriDy creates, and the spirit in which they create it, is rooted in a genuine desire to understand humanity, divinity, and both the truth and conflict that lies within the intersection of the two. bean is one of AriDy’s Clearwater plays, an epic series that interrogates motherhood, family, and the magical power of the bayou. The protagonist, Amma, is a provider at heart, an anchor in a slightly chaotic home where family and friends are constantly coming and going, venting about their personal problems without realizing that Amma might be dealing with some of her own. bean leads with comedy and wit, which in no way undercuts the heartfelt sweetness at this play’s center, buoyed by the ways in which each character comes to hold one another and Amma in a time of need. What I love about AriDy’s work, and why I think it’s the antidote that the American theater needs in this moment, is the care with which they approach storytelling. Every play they write has the potential to help us as individuals better understand ourselves and gives us the tools we need to deepen our relationships with others.”

About the play: All Amma wants is to cook her gumbo in peace, but with estranged grandfathers, overbearing mothers, flighty sisters, overly ambitious best friends, and precocious unborn children plaguing her every move, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not she will succeed. An investigation of Black motherhood and simple magic, bean is a fast-paced and hilarious installment in the Clearwater triptych, a series of plays that follows the matrilineal line of the Clearwaters and their mysterious connection to Mother Bayou, a deity of great power and equal danger.

About the playwright: AriDy Nox is a multi-disciplinary black femme storyteller who creates out of the vehement belief that a liberated future requires radical imagination. Their tales are offerings intended to function as small parts of an ancient, expansive, awe-inspiring tradition of world-shaping created by black femmes and with black femmes at the center. They have been inordinately privileged to share the workings of their imagination in collaboration with a vast array of inspiring and supportive artists of various radical backgrounds throughout the country.

 

Borrowed Time
by Charles Campbell

From Rachel Jendrzejewski: “In my view, Borrowed Time is the epitome of all the Venturous Play criteria: challenging in form, provocative in subject matter, ambitious in scale, and experimental in concept. It’s about the fragility of democracy and rise of authoritarianism—disturbingly pertinent, epic-in-scope subjects/conversations that (in my opinion) are aching for more venturous, narrative-defying approaches to form in U.S. theater. The ‘script’ for this play is radically brief—just a few pages, even as its realization fits the full-length/45+ minute criteria—because it functions more like a score; yet I would argue that this play absolutely is text- and author-driven, in that the playwright is wielding cutting-edge technology to cull/craft/collage language from real world political-, climate-, and COVID-related big data sources to serve as the driving medium for a unique, powerful, and provocative theatrical experience…one that unfolds differently for each audience member, innately requiring an innovative, venturous approach to ‘scripting.’ I would LOVE to see this (truly ambitious and must-see!) play receive the necessary support to be fully realized in production.”

About the play: An exploration of the fragility of democracy and rise of authoritarianism. In a dark cavernous room, you are led by a mysterious bureaucrat through progressively smaller rooms until you enter an auditory performance experience that takes your mind on a journey through the history of others and into the real world of your today.

About the playwright: Charles Campbell is a co-founder and artistic-managing director of the experimental performance company Skewed Visions and has created multiple original new theatrical works for a wide variety of spaces and formats since 1997. He produced many seasons of Petri Dish (a monthly series of public conversations around art works), 3PLAY (a series of mini-residencies for experimental performers), and is a founder of the experimental performance research space Fresh Oysters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 

But Today I am Fine
by Ying Ying Li

From Rehana Lew Mirza: “But Today I am Fine is playwright Ying Ying Li’s ‘coming-of-age story of her motherhood,’ and what I love most about this play is that Ying is willing to take a subject so universal it’s often missed or dismissed—then goes completely dark with it. This play holds so many truths and complications together; it’s absolutely thrilling and scary the way Ying is willing to go places most people don’t dare express out loud, let alone put in a play. Its vignette-like, dreamscape style is as daring in form as it is in its content. Ying is working on a different wave-length than I’ve ever seen, and hers is a voice that absolutely should be lifted up and elevated.”

About the play: A coming-of-age story of my motherhood. Told in a series of vignettes which are in turns poignant and unserious, but always a little bit…dark.

About the playwright: Ying Ying was born in Beijing and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was a NYTW 2050 Artistic Fellow (2023-2024) and an alumna of The Public’s Emerging Writers Group (2020-2023). She is currently a Colt Coeur Artist Resident and a member of the Paren/Caregiver Playwrights Group. Her plays have been produced and/or developed at The Public, NYTW, Project Y, The Tank, Boomerang Theatre, Rule of 7×7, Decent Company, Yes Noise, The Brick, and on The Highline (so many helicopters, lesson learned). She has two delicious small children.

 

Camping
by Victoria Barclay

From matthew paul olmos: “Victoria Barclay’s Camping is written with the sort of surgical precision which makes you excited about the craft of playwriting again. While the entire play takes place within the confines of a camping tent, Victoria manages to travel us from the naive hope of adolescence through the regret of adulthood; all the while, an imposing outside world is just outside. Told with biting humor and a slang musicality, this two-hander surfaces as a love story but somehow manages to challenge its audience into imagining what it’s every detail represents from the world we live in. This is the sort of storytelling theaters should be inviting their audiences to engage with, and I cannot wait to see how a creative team envisions Victoria’s beautiful theatricalities.”

About the play: This is a love story. It’s hands that smell of Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue after days spent clutching fistfulls of her hair. It’s the rain hitting the earth in a way that reminds you of blood, that makes you think the world’s holding a knife to your underwear. It’s the spins. It’s running out of air because you gulped too much of it while you were sobbing. It’s waking up hot and sticky. It’s desperately falling in love with your best friend inside a camping tent while everything outside rages.

About the playwright: Victoria’s writing is inspired by her home of Dundee, Scotland and the working class women who raised her. Victoria’s plays have  been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting and the Theatre 503 International Playwriting Prize. She will begin her MFA in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale in the Fall of 2025.

 

Cancelina
by Beth Hyland

From Deborah Stein: “Beth Hyland’s delirious play Cancelina is brilliant, hilarious, dark, and heartbreaking. The play challenges a creative team to invent a physical, gestural, immersive vocabulary to evoke not what the internet looks like but how it feels—creepy, creeping, omnipresent, and ridiculous. In its ingenious form, the play replicates how our present moment is primed to move fast and break things, destroying everything and everyone in its voracious stormy path, leaving the audience breathless with laughter, sorrow, and recognition.”

About the play: Alina Jay is a former tween star turned singer-slash-actress (and actress who sings). When she’s caught kissing her much-older married co-star, the internet turns on her. Now Alina’s team, led by her best friend-slash-assistant, Meg, must do whatever it takes to get Alina back on top. A comedy about fame, cancel culture, and the lengths we’ll go for redemption, Cancelina asks who we really are when everything is stripped away.

About the playwright: Beth Hyland is a playwright and screenwriter based in Southern California. Her plays include SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA (Williamstown Theatre Festival, L. Arnold Weissberger Prize), FIRES, OHIO (Portland Center Stage JAW Festival, Goodman Theatre New Stages), SEAGULLS (Steppenwolf LookOut, Octagon Theatre), and Cancelina. Her plays have been produced and developed by the Geffen Playhouse, Round House Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Provincetown Theater, Know Theatre, The Hearth, First Floor Theater, Jackalope Theater, The Sound, and others. Commissions: Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown Theatre Festival. She is currently a third-year MFA candidate at UC San Diego. bethhyland.com

 

Carla Cooks The War
by Laura Maria Censabella

From Mashuq Mushtaq Deen: “Laura’s bold, genre-defying play Carla Cooks The War is an epic exploration of the effects of war on three generations of women in one Italian/Italian American family told with poignancy and humor, and shows us how to create, as war correspondent Chris Hedges puts it, ‘a common vocabulary and a shared…memory’ so we can move not just towards ‘an absence of war,’ but towards actual peace. As Laura’s characters play out Rashomon-like versions of what happened to them during and after the war in a desperate attempt to unearth the truth before time runs out, the play asks timeless questions through a female lens: What price does a heroine and her family pay for extraordinary feats of bravery and the terrifying compromises of character made during war? And isn’t a mother supposed to protect her children and not fight for other people’s families? Inspired by Italian neo-realist film, Dennis Potter, and Pirandello, this play incorporates elements of cooking shows, film, memoir, and telenovela, and truly defies categorization while remaining always grounded in the deeply human and universal. Winner of the Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Prize and a NYFA grant in Playwriting, Carla has had readings and workshops in the U.S. and Canada and deserves to be produced, especially now, when a play like this can speak both to history, but also—because of the perspective that distance affords—more clearly about the wars that are being waged and suffered through now. This is such an important play, I cannot recommend it highly enough.”

About the play: Carla worked with the Resistance during World War II. Antonia, her daughter, survived the war with her. Olivia, her pregnant granddaughter, tries to survive them both. As Carla struggles to overcome a series of mini strokes, and Olivia struggles to write her grandmother’s story, she interrogates the truth about the cold war between her mother and grandmother. But in a house of such strong-willed women, who will get the last word? Part telenovela and part cooking show, Carla Cooks The War is a genre bending, phantasmagoric comedy-drama-memory play about heroism, betrayals, the costs of surviving a war, gnocchi and the ephemeral nature of truth.

About the playwright: Laura Maria Censabella (she/her) grew up in Brooklyn and Queens first generation Italian American. Her play Paradise (IRNE Award for Best new Play, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Commission, Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award) premiered at Central Square Theatre and received its West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre (Viola Davis/Julius Tennon, producers). She then wrote the screenplay for Vicangelo Films. She won the $10,000 Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Prize for Carla Cooks The War, and three NYFA grants in Playwriting/Screenwriting. Her most recent EST/Sloan commissioned play Beyond Words premiered at Central Square Theatre in 2024 and was a Boston Globe Critics’ Pick. Laura is Director of the EST Playwrights Unit and a graduate of Yale.

 

The Castle of Ghoul Hammond and How It Fell Into The Void
by M Sloth Levine

From Cory Hinkle: “This play is beyond ‘venturous;’ it is epic, ridiculous, and absolutely seeks to push conventional theater to its limits. I imagine it as a Taylor Mac-like poor theater spectacle, staged site-specifically in a gothic castle with a dinner break. Reimagining the tale of Frankenstein to explore themes of gender dysphoria is incredibly smart, and the resulting play is entertaining, emotional, and thought-provoking.”

About the play: A penny dreadful epic in the Ridiculous tradition exploring queer shame, gender dysphoria, mental illness, cannibalism, loneliness, folk religion, oral sex, the rise of cinema over vaudeville, werewolves, biology, masculinity, femininity, exhaustion, confetti cake, chiastic failure, literacy, memory, and death. Ghoul Hammond is a creature born in a castle laboratory, sewn together from 13 corpses and powered by a radio transmission from the void by one Doctor Bartimouse Hammond. We follow Ghoul as it consumes its creator and goes on to become an international star of stage and screen until it ultimately directs a movie musical adaptation of its own life, casting as each other the circle of fiends who surrounded Doctor Hammond while he built Ghoul.

About the playwright: M Sloth Levine (they/them/theirs) is a playwright, director, and designer in New York City. Sloth’s plays have been developed at thousands of coffee shops around the country, Roundabout Theater Company, Company One, Theatre [Untitled], Sparkhaven Theatre, Central Square Theatre, Skidmore College, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and University of Wisconsin Madison. At Hotel MacGuffin was the 2021 Parity Development Award recipient from Parity Productions. The Interrobangers premiered in Boston in 2024 with Company One Theatre and The Theatre Offensive and will be published in the third volume of The Methuen Anthology of Trans Plays. Sloth has served as the Script Supervisor on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella. In 2020 their live web-series Tales from Camp Strangewood was produced with a grant from the Mayor’s Office of Boston. They graduated from Emerson College with a BA in Theatre Studies: Directing & Playwriting.

 

Pigeon/Thunderbird
by Dillon Chitto

From Blossom Johnson: “Chicago: Pigeon is a bold, brilliant Native Queer Odyssey—equal parts heartache, humor, and rebellion. With a fresh take on the trickster figure, Dillon Chitto crafts a chaotic and clever story that reclaims two-spirit narratives while exploring identity, love, and the tension between tradition and assimilation. This is exactly the kind of daring, necessary work theaters should be producing.”

About the play: Situated within the world of Queer Native identity, Pigeon/Thunderbird is the first play in a two-part series centered around a group of Queer Urban Natives residing in the Northside of Chicago. When confronted by a mysterious trickster bearing an unusual offer, the family members find themselves at a crossroads, forced to prioritize either communal bonds or individual pursuits for their survival.

About the playwright: Dillon Chitto is a Mississippi Choctaw, Laguna, and Isleta Puebo playwright from Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, he learned the importance of art, culture, and traditions from his family and members of his community. In his playwriting, he connects these ideas using storytelling techniques learned throughout his life. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. In the past, Dillon has worked with Native Voices, AlterTheater Ensemble, Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Goodman Theatre, Sundance Institute, and was the Literary Manager for BoHo Theatre.

 

Color Boy
by Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel

From a.k. payne: “This play is epic and ambitious in scope and vision and creates a stunning portrayal of a boy’s journey to self and community. Incorporating movement and blending artistic disciplines, this play cracks open space for queer folks of color to imagine worlds and futures where they may be whole and healed. This play ventures into new theatrical landscapes and defies traditional narrative structure by engaging the relationship between characters’ pasts, presents, and futures; I cannot wait to see its world premiere!”

About the play: Miguel is halfway through his first year teaching at a charter school in Los Angeles when he begins dreaming about his long-ago color guard days. The more Miguel rejects the wounded boy in his dreams, the more his present life begins to unravel, until he can no longer look forward without looking back. Color Boy uses Color Guard to ask how time changes memory and how memory changes the future. 

About the playwright: Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel is a trans Guatemalan playwright, born in Guatemala and raised in Connecticut. Her works are spiritual, hyper-theatrical narratives that give Black & Brown Queer/Trans voices a space to interrogate core wounds and offer them a path towards healing. . Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction and Outstanding Achievement in Theater Prize, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship from the Yale School of Drama, and the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference. Her play, Color Boy, received the Kennedy Center’s Latinx Playwriting Award and Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (finalist), an Honorable Mention from the 2024 Relentless Award, a nomination for the 2025 Venturous Playwright Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center, and was named the Connecticut State Winner for the Clauder Prize from Portland Stage. Her play Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams was a finalist for the 2024 Leah Ryan Prize, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Van Lier Fellowship for New Voices at Rattlestick Theater, the Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Lupe Finds Me was developed through New York Theater Workshop’s 2024 Summer Dartmouth Residency, and was presented at the 3rd Annual Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival at Playwrights Horizons. She is a two time finalist for both the O’Neill Theatre Conference and nominee the Ollie New Play Award, a one time nominee for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award at the Williamstown Theater Festival and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and is a contributor to the second volume of Methuen Drama’s Anthology of Trans Plays. This summer, she will be the Featured Playwright-In-Residence for the 2025 Julie Lutz Cold Reads Festival of New American Plays at Syracuse Stage. She is currently a Teaching Artist for the Public Theater, an IB Theater Advisor at Brooklyn Prospect Charter High School, and a Lecturer in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she produced and mentored the playwrights working on the 2024-2025 Carlotta Festival and Langston Hughes Festival of New Plays. BA: Princeton, MFA: Yale

 

Dinner at Asphodel
by M Kamara

From Harmon dot aut: “M Kamara (they/them) is a Black, queer, neurodivergent, Sierra Leonean American playwright. The Spectrum is intersectional and capacious, and in Dinner at Asphodel, Kamara joyfully calls into being their ancestors in a narrative that is both an embrace of personal responsibility and an act of communal care. Set in the Underworld, Mo, our protagonist, journeys to find her dead mother, but she is no callow Orpheus. This is full-tilt playwriting. This is come-as-you-are. This is celebrating your damn self. Folding the Greek and Roman origins of Western theater together with the game-changing legacies of Black queer women, Kamara claims their own space with an innovative, jubilant, profoundly informed voice. This is the gift of Dinner at Asphodel: its Plentitude. Queerness permeates Kamara’s writing, as biological as blood and bone. I admire their swagger, their ready wit, their audacity in exposing the absurdity of hierarchical structures in Western myths. Jumping around from location to location—antic, ribald, cinematic—Dinner at Asphodel is an epic, fantastical adventure where the spirits of our family and forebears tell us the truth about ourselves to our face every single day. Boogie Woogie Landscapes, Shange might call it. Venture Us—indeed!”

About the play: Unable to process the grief of her mother’s death, Mo Lewis travels to the Underworld to find her mom and bring her back. Upon stumbling into Asphodel, the section of the Underworld where the ordinary dead come to live, Mo meets the dead souls of Audre Lorde, Queen Nzinga, and Moms Mabley. Mo convinces the three ladies that they deserve more than to squander in Asphodel for the rest of their undead lives, and so the four of them set out to find Mo’s mom and a way for Audre, Nzinga, and Moms to rest eternally in Elysium.

About the playwright: M Kamara (they/them/theirs) is a writer of many worlds, both real and fictional. As a playwright, M is interested in telling Black diasporic stories that utilize documentary theater tactics and engage history, afro-surrealism, speculative fiction, and various cultural myths. They are currently working towards their Playwriting MFA at Southern Illinois University. They’ve been a two-time finalist for the Playwrights’ Center Core Apprentice, a nominee for the Playwrights’ Center Venturous Fellowship, they were a part of the Kennedy Center’s 2024 Black Playwrights Gathering cohort, and a part of the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s 2024-2025 Confluence Writer’s Project cohort.  

 

DRONE
by Andrea Assaf

From Heather Raffo: “DRONE is a brave and challenging play on all accounts: in concept, theme, and narrative structure. An ambitious cast spans cultures, regions, and race, provoking audiences to understand how desensitization to surveillance and violence (domestic and global) truly impacts us all—no matter if we are victims, survivors, or operating behind a bunker wall. A trans-disciplinary play, weaving poetry, music, and technology within its narrative drama, DRONE explores the effects of remote-control warfare on the human soul and reminds us that with all our advancements, technology still cannot save us from ourselves.”

About the play: DRONE, a contemporary tragedy by Andrea Assaf, follows the story of a U.S. pilot who moves to Las Vegas for a new job—and what this job does to him, and his family. The drone pilot’s story is juxtaposed with three Survivors, based on real witness accounts of U.S. drone strikes, who appear together as a chorus, speaking in multi-voice poetry. On the journey through multiple, intersecting worlds, we meet a host of characters, including a retired Air Force General, a Sex Worker, a Preacher, the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, and multiple Elvis Impersonators. The play explores the drone as a metaphor for how we become desensitized to daily violence (domestic and global), the question of Moral Injury, and the effects of remote-control warfare on the human soul.

About the playwright: Andrea Assaf is a playwright, poet, theatre director, and performer. Original full-length plays include her seminal work, Eleven Reflections on September, DRONE (currently in development), Outside the Circle (co-written with Samuel Valdez), and more. Awards include: 2024 Joyce Award; 2017 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism Finalist; 2010 Princess Grace Award for Directing, and more. She is the founding Artistic Director of Art2Action, co-founder of the National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation, and co-founding Board member of the MENA Theatre-Makers Alliance, and formerly the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists (CAATA). Andrea has a Master’s degree in Performance Studies and BFA in Acting, both from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

 

Fear & Wonder
by Jason Tseng

From Kevin R. Free: “Fear & Wonder is a play set during a Christian Church service that is both a coming-of-age story and romance between two Christian boys who end up leading loving, Christian lives with each other. I grew up in the church, and I was never so transformed by an Easter Pageant as I was by Tseng’s Passion Play.”

About the play: In a forbidden love story, Jabez and Ryan, two boys of color, navigate a Christian summer camp together in the early 2000s. Their friendship quickly grows into a budding romance that they try to keep alive after returning home. Challenged by their parents, the hazards of landline phones, and their faith, they are forced into secrecy. Finding solace in each other and their shared love of music, theology, and Harry Potter; the reality of living in between two worlds threaten to keep them apart as they navigate their blossoming queer identities and teenage angst in their conservative faith communities.

About the playwright: Jason Tseng, a queer, non-binary Chinese-American playwright, has roots in New York City and Washington D.C. Their plays have been presented and developed by various theater companies and festivals across the nation, including Flux Theatre Ensemble, Judson Arts, Mission to dit(Mars), Theatre COTE, Inkubator Arts, Second Generation, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, LA Queer New Works Festival, the BIPOC Playwrights Festival, New American Voices Playwrights Festival (Semi-Finalist), Southern Queer Playwrights Festival (Hon. Mention), Eugene O’Neill Playwright Conference (Semi-Finalist), and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Selected Playwright). Tseng serves as a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Their notable works include Rizing, Like Father, Same Same, Ghost Money, Fear & Wonder, and The Other Side.

 

Feast for the Dead
by Madeline Easley

From Madeline Sayet: “Feast for the Dead is an epic Indigenous post-apocalyptic zombie play that engages with the continuing cycles of violence colonizers have inflicted on Native peoples on American soil, and our unending resilience and creativity. Told in a fluid stream of time, as if around a campfire, it embraces the theatrical potential of the zombie genre to consider futurity, ceremony, transformation, shadow, history, and violence in new ways. Filled with hilarity, absurdism, and joy, this is the future of Native theater, and the kind of play we must tell.”

About the play: After the fall of the Indian Child Welfare Act in the days leading up to the zombie apocalypse, Kay was adopted out of her Tribe by a wealthy family who then abandoned her when they escaped the carnage by sea. Seven years later, Kay is a thriving citizen of a Confederacy of Tribes who took over governance of Turtle Island after the settler government fell. Just as suddenly as they appeared, the zombies disintegrate, and the one percent return from sea, ready to re-colonize. The only solution? Revive the centuries-old Huron-Wendat tradition of holding a Feast of the Dead.

About the playwright: Madeline (Maddie) Easley is an NYC-based, Wyandotte playwright. Her work tells epic, speculative stories to provide a framework for living in decolonial futures. Madeline’s work has been presented at the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP), La Jolla Playhouse, Kansas City Repertory Theater (KCREP), Native Voices at the Autry, the American Indian Community House (AICH), REACH at the Kennedy Center, the TCL Chinese Theatre, and more. She is a 2025 First Peoples Performing Arts Fellow, a 2025 New Harmony Project Writer-In-Residence, a 2025 American Indian Community House – Governor’s Island Artist-in-Residence, the Inaugural 2023 Four Directions Playwright, a 2022 Greenhouse Resident at SPACE on Ryder Farm, a 2022 LA SKINS FEST featured filmmaker, and a 2021 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow. Born in Kansas City, Madeline is a proud citizen of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. Represented by Chris Till – Paradigm Talent Agency. Website: maddieeasley.com

 

The Fifth
by Jenna Worsham

From Martyna Majok: “The Fifth is a Southern memory play that takes us into the contemporary world of rural America and the opiate crisis, through the lens of a man recollecting his past growing up gay in a house of addicts in rural Georgia. I know this to be a deeply personal play for Jenna. It’s written by an artist and citizen who has crossed the great divide between red and blue to paint a complex, dignified portrait of a mourned home. For me, the political through the personal is immensely venturous (and incredibly vital to our culture and country) when it’s as moving, lyrical, rigorous, and smart as this beautiful play.”

About the play: The Fifth is a Southern memory play. Carden Shannahan, the narrator and main character, takes us through the years spanning 1988-2019 as he attempts to take a relentlessly honest look into his past, growing up gay on a horse farm in a house of addicts in north Georgia. Dipped in the sharp wit of Southern humor and drawn through an achingly personal lens, The Fifth gradually unearths a complex, haunted, and often remarkable psychology of contemporary rural America in the age of the opiate crisis. 

About the playwright: Jenna Worsham is a writer, stage director and creative organizer. Recent directing: At The Wedding (Lincoln Center Theater, NY Times Critic’s Pick); Arrowhead (IAMA Theater); Superstitions (New Ohio/The Pool Plays); Siblings Play (Rattlestick Theater); Belleville (Pasadena Playhouse); The Climb (Cherry Lane); Agnes (59E59 Theaters, NYT Critic’s Pick); Street Children (Vertigo Theater, NYT Critic’s Pick). Jenna is the co-founder of New Roots, an LGBTQIA+ artist residency program in Upstate New York. She is the author of four plays: The Fifth, Game, Lacuna, and The Southerner. Game was developed at Rattlestick and INTAR Theatre. The Fifth was a semifinalist for the O’Neill’s NPC and developed in residence at SPACE on Ryder Farm. Jenna is a recipient of a Drama League Fellowship, a Jonathan Alper Award (MTC), a National Directing Fellowship (O’Neill Theater Center), and a Boris Sagal Fellowship (Williamstown).  

 

Free & Proud
by Charles Gershman

From Gethsemane Herron: “I’ve been lucky enough to sit on a few panels in the last year, reading dozens of plays. When this one came across my desk, I found myself riveted, unable to stop thinking about it for months. It both follows and furthers the absent, two-person play happening both in memory and real-time, a la Orlandersmith’s Yellowman. It extends the model to an international, interracial, and queer locus. In doing so to the perennially relevant microcosm of couples, it becomes familiar while centering the under-archived. It is a spectacle of absentia, which demands that my own imagination come alive to meet it. How it plays with and breaks tradition is how I define Venturous. Put it on stage y’all!”

About the play: Hakeem is an immigrant from Nigeria, a driven, loyal, righteous guy who’s worked hard to build a career for himself as a scientist. His husband, Jeremy, is white, privileged, American, unfaithful, unable to grow up, and wracked with guilt. Free & Proud is a new play examining the dynamics of a messy relationship and how sometimes it takes a disaster in order to make sense of the present.

About the playwright: Charles Gershman is a multi-award-winning playwright, filmmaker, and producer. Recent work has been produced, commissioned, and honored by Ars Nova, 59E59 Theaters, The New Group, The Flea, the Black List, BMI, Theatre503 (London), the Orchard Project, and the Edinburgh Fringe. Charles is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow, a Chelsey/Bumbalo Playwriting Award winner, a LABA Fellow, and a Relentless Award semifinalist. In 2021, Charles was a Drama League Award nominee for the digital short Oedipus 2.0.2.0., commissioned by All For One. MFA: NYU-Tisch (chair’s award). Charles leads undergraduate seminars at Wesleyan University on storytelling and narrative forms. www.charlesgershman.com

 

GLASS
by Azure D. Osborne-Lee

From Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi: “Bending and blending genre, Azure’s play GLASS is a literary work dripping in intrigue, tenderness, and sometimes even horror. A thriller from beginning to end, the play may keep you on the edge of your seat wondering ‘well, what happens next?’ Azure’s play utilizes forms of storytelling which explore the use of living allegory and nonlinear time. Sometimes feeling like a novel, sometimes feeling like a movie, sometimes feeling like a play, the script feels like it could be an artistic feast—not only for the actors but for the creative team as well. As I read, I thought how fun it could be to work out the creative rules of the world through movement and design. Epic and Intimate, I believe GLASS could do well with, and that Azure and the creative team could learn so much from, a production process.”

About the play: The gods of Life and Death are wrestling for control of their world, trampling anyone who gets in their way. During their reign of terror, a woman refuses to bend to their will and is forced to kill her own children. She retreats from the world to recover from her trauma, but she can’t stay hidden forever. Will she find the courage to stand up to her gods? GLASS is an evening-length fantasia, a creation myth featuring new imaginings of Anansi the Spider, Brer Rabbit, and other iconic Black characters.

About the playwright: Azure D. Osborne-Lee (he/they) is a Black queer & trans dramatic writer from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Azure holds a Certificate in Screenwriting (2025), an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice (2011), an MA in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008), and a BA in English & Spanish (2005). Their play “Red Rainbow” will be published in the forthcoming The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, Vol. 2 (2025). His play “Crooked Parts” was published in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (2021), and produced in 2024 by the Obsidian Theatre Festival. In 2020, their play “Mirrors” received its world premiere at Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop, produced by Parity Productions, but closed early due to COVID-19. It’s now available through NoPassport Press. azureosbornelee.com

 

Harapan
by Rachel Chin

From Nathan Alan Davis: “Harapan is an urgent, bold, political play for our times; it examines Malaysia’s 2018 General Election with insight, playfulness, and intimacy. A heart-centered, clear-eyed, episodic story with an enormous scope, Harapan implores us to take action with hope even against seemingly impossible odds.”

About the play: “Harapan” is a Malay word that means “hope;” a play about the 2018 Malaysian Elections and the historic triumph of democracy as told through the eyes of its everyday citizens. In the face of an alarming global rise in right-wing authoritarianism, how does one nation overcome the divisions of decades-old religious and racial politics to resist the unassailable power of a fascist kleptocracy? A vignette play, a political cartoon, Harapan is about liberty, resilience, and the power of the people.

About the playwright: Rachel Chin is a Malaysian Chinese actor and playwright from Singapore. She was an inaugural resident of the Centre 42 Playwright’s Professional Development Residency, a Veda Mekani performing arts scholarship recipient, and a founding member of the sketch comedy group Otters United FC. Her plays have been produced by the Yale Cabaret, The Theatre of Others, MoreLife Theatre, The Wright Stuff Festival, and the Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA X). Rachel’s work personalizes critical issues like climate change, immigration, and social justice, and has been recognized for its ability to find levity in difficult times. She is pursuing her MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. www.rachel-chin.com

 

Horsegirl & Cowdaddy
by DJ Hills

From Adil Mansoor: “Set in a vast field of corn that grows and is harvested as the play progresses, DJ Hills’ epic Horsegirl & Cowdaddy examines rural trans life with tenderness and pride. The costumes combine kink and craft as Horsegirl transforms in front of the audience. Ultimately, Horsegirl & Cowdaddy opens new space to explore desire, home, and family in a bold script that expands the poetics of the stage.”

About the play: Horsegirl, a trans woman in her thirties, lives a life of routine alongside her father, Cowdaddy, in a forgotten town in Southern Pennsylvania—until she falls in love with Bethel, a new-to-town teacher with a goal of improving the lives of everyone they meet. Over the course of their summer romance, Bethel physically transforms Horsegirl into the person (or thing) they want her to be. Cowdaddy’s attempts to pull his daughter back to him leads to an explosive confrontation, in the wake of which Horsegirl must decide for herself what a happy life looks like.

About the playwright: DJ Hills (they/them) is a cross-genre writer for the page, stage, and screen. Their play Horsegirl & Cowdaddy has been developed with support from The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, Boston Court Pasadena, and Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. Other plays include come straight home (Great Plains Theatre Commons), TRUNK BRIEF JOCK THONG (shortlist, Yale Drama Series), Adult Things (Carnegie Mellon University), and I SWEAR TO GOD (University of California Los Angeles). Fellowships and residencies include the Substratum writing residency, Tofte Lake Center’s National Emerging Artist Residency, and the Horticulture Playwriting Fellowship. www.dj-hills.com.

 

I never asked for a gofundme
by Jayne Deely

From Peter Gil-Sheridan: “Jayne’s play I never asked for a gofundme takes an inventively hilarious look at having top surgery in Alabama! What I love so much about the play is that it explores the crucial differences between coming out as non-binary and coming out as gay and it does so in the context of the South. Jayne turns familiar tropes on their head, though, when the community rallies around the main characters in a stunning act of generosity rooted in misunderstanding. The play’s villain, for lack of a better word, is a stunner. Southern to the core, but ultimately entrenched in her own suffering. It’s humane. It’s funny. But the play is also surprising. What appears to be a realistic play about real people takes us on a journey to hell and back in the most comical of ways. I love it. And I think it would really help audiences understand the cognitive dissonance that queer people face when they intersect with the straight world.”

About the play: It’s March Madness and Millie is back home in Mobile, AL to observe Southern birds at the university. With her is her Nuyorican partner, Avery, who is holed up in their apartment recovering from very recent gender affirming top surgery. When quasi-aunt to Millie and righteous woman of God Teresa eavesdrops on Millie talking to the pharmacist at CVS, she comes to the very wrong conclusion that Avery has breast cancer, spurring her to set events in motion that turn everyone’s lives irrevocably upside down: cue the casseroles, care packages, and checkbooks – a gofundme to SAVE AVERY! I never asked for a gofundme is a new queer comedy about healthcare, family, and religion that asks what it means to be worthy of care.

About the playwright: Jayne Deely (they/them) is a Queens, NY born and bred playwright writing about gray area, lingering Catholicism, and women’s basketball. 2025 O’Neill Finalist for Hiraeth, or when Pluto was a planet. 2024 La Jolla Latinx New Play Festival Selection, O’Neill Finalist, Terrence McNally New Play Incubator Semi-Finalist, and Relentless Award Honorable Mention for I never asked for a gofundme. Jayne’s work has been developed with Breaking the Binary, Fresh Ground Pepper, the New Harmony Project, KCACTF, American Stage, and Renaissance Theatreworks, among others. They are a recent recipient of a 2025 EST Alfred P. Sloan grant to write a play about the James Webb Space Telescope. Upcoming for gofundme: Seattle Public Theatre, Distillery New Works Festival, June 2025, Jungle Theatre, Greenhouse Play Reading Series, January 2026. MFA, Indiana University Bloomington. www.jaynedeely.com

 

imagine sisyphus happy
by Keelay Gipson

From L M Feldman: “I first encountered this play waaaaaay back in the before times (2018, I think?) and was immediately enthralled, gutted, delighted, abashed, and astounded. A large-scale, ensemble-based epic of continual and mythic transformations, the script was still in its nascency back then, and I was certain that it must have completed its development-supported evolution and been produced several times over in the half-dozen years since. But when I asked Keelay about it, I was shocked to learn that it’s not yet found its playmates, its champions, its artistic homes. I hope this nomination can change that. Time, place, character, genre, and form are both layered and fluid in this remarkable (and hilarious) draft about the layered and fluid (and sublime and Sisyphean) act of writing, collaborating, and making theater. It is So Dang Hard to capture this—with all its metatheatricality—in a reflective, observant, honest, vulnerable, contradictory way. This draft is capturing it in ways I’ve not yet seen—and that are at once somehow hilarious and heartbreaking and resonant and profound…and all the while fighting tooth and nail to move the writer, the characters, Black artists, and the American Theater, towards an elusive, impossible, essential, inevitable, radical, liberatory future.”

About the play: After a visit from The Muse at an artist residency, a Writer for the American Theater (capital-A, capital-T) must contend with the Sisyphean task of getting his show done somewhere. Over the course of his journey he navigates Director Changes, Cast Shake Ups, Pushy Donors and Artistic Crises of Faith. 

Will his show get—not just workshopped but—produced…? Is it hard to push a rock up a hill…?

About the playwright: Keelay Gipson is an Afro Surrealist writer and educator whose plays include demons. (Bushwick Starr), The Red and the Black (O’Neill Finalist), #NEWSLAVES (Princess Grace Finalist), and DOT DOT DOT, a new musical based on the NYTimes best-selling Creatrilogy by Peter H. Reynolds (currently on tour with TheaterWorksUSA). AWARDS: NYSAF Founders’ Award, Barrington Stage Spark Grant, Kernodle New Play Award. FELLOWSHIPS: Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble, Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, Lambda Literary New Voices, Playwrights Realm, Dramatist Guild Foundation. RESIDENCIES: MacDowell, City of New York Public Artist in Residence (PAIR), The Hermitage Artist Retreat. His work has also been developed/supported by Roundabout, The Old Globe, Artist Repertory Theater, Ars Nova, National Black Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights’ Theater, Classical Theater of Harlem, and New York Theatre Workshop. www.keelaygipson.com

 

In spite of my ambivalence
by Catherine Yu

From Dipika Guha: “My nomination is Cate Yu for a play called In spite of my ambivalence. It’s a four-character non-naturalistic play which feels like an ongoing conversation. It’s a play about living with trauma. I respond to Cate’s dialogue which has the transparency of Irene Fornés—a kind of subterranean subtext-less mode of language which enables Cate to live at the pace of the characters in relationship to their lives, not at the pace of audience expectation. This is what makes the play feel venturous to me. I hope you enjoy.”

About the play: Lila is haunted by a trauma in her past. She runs across an old friend who gives her an invitation she cannot refuse. A stranger who grew up in a war zone threatens to upend the equilibrium Lila has so carefully calibrated.

About the playwright: Catherine Yu is a writer of plays and librettos. Her plays include In Spite of My Ambivalence (2025 Venturous finalist); Alice Wareham and the Fabulation of Time (2025 Screencraft Stage Play Quarterfinalist); In Love and Friendship (2023 Austin Film Festival Second Round); Le Jeté (2019 BAPF Semifinalist); The Day is Long to End (2018 University of Florida production); and The Sun Experiment (FringeNYC Excellence in Playwriting; Time Out NY’s Top Ten Nightlife and Music Events of the Week in August 2014). She has held fellowships at NYSCA/NYFA, MacDowell, Soho Rep, and New York Theatre Workshop. Catherine was commissioned for librettos by Atlanta Opera and Strange Trace in 2023. She is a resident playwright with Chicago Dramatists. She will be a 2025-2026 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a 2025-2026 Fellow with the Confluence Writers Project in St. Louis. BA: Stanford University. MFA: New York University.

 

Jar of Fat
by Seayoung Yim

From Lloyd Suh: “Seayoung Yim’s hilarious, horrifying Jar of Fat is an absolutely singular piece of writing, filled with pain and rage but also an abiding sense of love and longing. The play is so intimate, and so specific, but Seayoung has scaled it to something epic, ancient, and mythological. It’s not only formally, linguistically, and thematically challenging and adventurous, it is politically and culturally so. Seayoung Yim is a major new voice, and this brutal, tender play deserves to be staged with the same care, rigor, and passion with which it was written.”

About the play: In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier?

About the playwright: Seayoung Yim is a playwright and educator based in NYC. She is the winner of the 2024 Dramatist Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, the 2022 Yale Drama Series Prize, the Woolly Mammoth x Black List commission, and the Powers Playwriting Fellowship at the Old Globe. She is a member of Clubbed Thumb’s ECWG, the Colt Coeur Residency, a legacy labbie of Ma-Yi, and is commissioned by The Public Theater x CTG. Other honors include: Kilroys Web, Hedgebrook residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference fellowship, finalist – 2024 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. Past teaching: Brown University and RISD. MFA: Brown University. www.seayoungyim.com

 

Karma Sutra Chai Tea Latte
by Aeneas Sagar Hemphill

From Mekala Sridhar: “Karma Sutra Chai Tea Latte is an unflinching examination of the effects of colonialism and capitalism on the South Asian subconscious, spanning the history of the East India Company to present day. A series of vignettes inspired by historical images are woven together through a human embodiment of footnotes, disrupting traditional narrative structure in a way that echoes and illuminates the fragmentation contained in the collective trauma of South Asian history and existence. Sharply humorous and incisive in its rigorous exploration of how whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism have embedded themselves in South Asian identities, this play serves as a vehicle for an all-South Asian ensemble to come together and further these conversations around what it truly means to be post-colonial and anti-imperialist.”

About the play: Welcome to the fun-house of the colonized South Asian mind. An ensemble of South Asian performers takes you on a nightmare journey through British colonialism past, present—and future. Will we find a way out?

About the playwright: Aeneas Sagar Hemphill is a bicultural South Asian American writer and performer. A genre chameleon augering through crossings of the intimate and systemic and historic like tree roots, scraping like tectonic plates, to urgent truths about our world. www.aeneas-hemphill.com

 

KIN
by Gethsemane Herron

From Andrew Rosendorf: “Gethsemane’s play KIN bursts open like an emotional bomb, grappling with the impact of sexual assault with great care, complexity, and sensitivity. The play has a constantly changing form to grapple with the ripples of trauma through the life of the main character. It’s stunning. Simply stunning.”

About the play: As a family celebrates the return of their imprisoned son, father, and partner, GHC reveals her worst secret via the internet. Years later, GHC considers that action as her body falls ill in violence’s aftermath. KIN is an investigation of the rippling effects of sexual trauma, memory, disability and violence’s reach through time.

About the playwright: Gethsemane Herron is a poet-playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with Ars Nova, The Fire This Time Festival, The Liberation Theater Company, Playwrights’ Center, Roundabout Theatre Company,  Mosaic Theater Company, Classical Theater of Harlem, True Colors Theater Company, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and WP Theater, amongst others. She was a ‘20-‘22 member of Ars Nova’s Play Group, a ‘20-‘22 member of the WP Lab, and a ‘21-‘22 Jerome Fellow/‘22-‘23 Many Voices Fellow/‘23-‘24 McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center. Gethsemane is a winner of the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series, a winner of the 45th Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, a recipient of the 2022 Helen Merrill Award, a 2025 O’Neil Conference finalist and a member of the 2023 Kilroy’s Web. She received her MFA in Playwriting in 2019, studying under Chuck Mee, Lynn Nottage, and David Henry Hwang.

 

MASCOGOS
(Mahs-KO-gohs)
by Miranda Gonzalez

From Joel Ulloa: “Miranda Gonzalez’s MASCOGOS is an exciting new ‘venturous’ story that explores the little-known underground railroad from the United States into Mexico. Gonzalez’s play is boldly bilingual and excitingly non-linear as it follows the parallel worlds of 16-year-old Jamari in 1864 northern Mexico and Chicago’s contemporary West Side. Gonzalez seamlessly balances these two distinct worlds through the eyes of a teenager and asks profound questions about the meaning of freedom in the painful past and the imperfect present.”

About the play: Does history always repeat itself? 18 yr old Jamari is fighting an unknown illness that takes him through worlds he’s never seen before, 1864 Mexico and today’s west side Chicago, leaving him unsure of where he belongs. Is it deathly or Is it the devil? Trapped in a historical cycle, Jamari and his loved ones seek answers both spiritually and scientifically trying to break free from the shackles of time. Through the untold stories of Mexico’s underground railroad we reveal the connection between our past, our present, and the fight for ancestral history. 

About the playwright: Miranda Gonzalez is a Blaxican and Chicago native writer, director, and producer, currently the Producing Artistic Director at Urban Theater Company (UTC), a founding ensemble member of Teatro Luna, and has devised and developed plays since 2000. In 2020 recorded a TEDx talk, “The Fear of Decolonization.” Recently a part of the Disney Live Entertainment Imagineering 2024 Creative Cohort. Produced works include: Back In The Day: an 80’s House Music Dancesical, Remote Learning Curve with Albany Park Theater Ensemble, Crossed, GL 2010, F.O.P., and Crime Scene Chicago with Collaboraction, and the web series Ruby’s World Yo, created by Marilyn Camacho. Recipient of the Diane Rodriguez Teatrista Award, Leaders for a New Chicago Award,  3Arts Award ,  International Centre for Women Playwrights 50/50 Award. Visit https://linktr.ee/chiblaxican to learn more! 

 

Miss America Pretty
by Iraisa Ann Reilly

From Migdalia Cruz: “Iraisa Ann is a venturous, adventurous, and very talented writer. Her Cuban-Irish heritage is a rich place from which she mines all her work, but especially in Miss America Pretty. I mentored her play through the Latinx Playwrights Circle and I found her playing with form, space, and characters truly exciting. I cannot resist a play with a talking horse who also dives and lives in an imagined Atlantic City of the past. This is a play about female image, sea goddesses, magic, and the death of a loved one. It is also about the death of Atlantic City and its forgotten residents. As the main character mourns for her mother, she also competes for an imagined title in the Miss America Pageant. The main character, Cristina, yearns to represent an America that refuses to represent her mixed race heritage. All she writes is truthful, heartfelt, and surprising. Please consider her fervently for this fellowship.”

About the play: It’s 2016, and Cristina Morales is mourning the death of her mother and working at a casino on the brink of bankruptcy in Atlantic City. Feeling trapped by life and the barrier island she calls home, Cristina is visited by the ghost of Miss America Past, who promises to turn her into a pageant queen. Can Cristina become Miss America without losing herself in the process?

About the playwright: Iraisa Ann Reilly is a writer, actor and educator originally from New Jersey. Her plays reflect the communities and spiritual realities that she calls home. Her work has been developed and recognized by Teatro del Sol,  Simpatico Theatre Company, the Yale Drama Series, La Jolla Playhouse, Two River Theatre, Lucille Lortel Theatre, Arkansas New Play Festival, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, Sol Project, Theatre Exile, ArtHouse Productions, Texas A&M University, Michigan State, and Latinx Playwrights Circle. She is currently under commission with Arden Theatre Company and is a Soho Rep Writer/ Director Fellow 2024-2025. MFA in Dramatic Writing, NYU. BA in Theatre, University of Notre Dame. iraisaannreilly.com 

 

monster SLAYer
by Blossom Johnson

From Katie Ka Vang: “This play is poetic, funny, yet grieves the lost, the born, the unborn. This play summons the life force that lies beneath…that’s forgotten. This play releases the should’ves and the shouldn’ts—and this play is a vessel to speak with those from within, above, below, beyond the veil.”

About the play:  A family awaits the birth of twins as they mourn for a daughter and sister. Pregnant Isabella, an author, and her brother Jaiden, an artist, conjure sacred beings Spider Woman and Horned Toad as they create a superhero comic to navigate loss and hope. monster SLAYer is a story of grief, rebirth, and resistance.

About the playwright: Blossom Johnson is a Diné playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include Red Running Into Water, monster SLAYer, Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or, A Boarding School Play, Our Legendary Mother, K’é, Dark Earth and ayóó’áníínísh’ní. Her work has been developed and presented by Bag&Baggage and Native Theater Project, Alternative Theater Ensemble, La Lengua, Mixed Blood Theater, Durango PlayFest, and Pillsbury House Theatre (CAP). Additionally, she has been supported by Willowtail Springs in Mancos, CO, Alternative Theater Ensemble’s AlterLab, First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship, La Lengua/ Alternative Theater Ensemble’s Decolonization Stories Commission, The Playwrights’ Center’s Jerome Fellowship, Netflix Animation Foundations Program, UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, and the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals. Her play, Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or, A Boarding School Play, made the Kilroys Web, and had a World Premiere with Bag&Baggage and Native Theater Project in the Portland Area. As a dramaturg, Blossom has worked with the Guthrie Theater, Native Voices at the Autry, UCSB Launch Pad, PlayPenn, Urbanite Theatre, and Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Blossom was in the Librettist cohort for the 2024 Nautilus Music-Theater’s Composer-Librettist Studio. She is currently the Education & Engagement Associate at the Guthrie Theater. She is proud to announce she is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. She holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and a BA in Theatre from Arizona State University. 

 

Nan
by Noa Gardner

From Kit Yan: “Noa’s window into the working class lives of local people in Hawaii brings nuance and deep story that not only shows the complexity of local lives, but tackles race and wealth in a way that is fully human.”

About the play: Nan centers on the lives of three Hawaiian women in a small family. Alice’s mother gives her an impossible task which forces her to come to terms with her life and relationship with her mother.

About the playwright: Noa Gardner is a Native Hawaiian playwright born and raised in Kaimuki on the island of O’ahu. He graduated from the MFA Dramatic Writing program at the University of Southern California (2020). He is the recipient of the Elizabeth George Commission and his play The Staircase was developed with the Pacific Playwrights Festival (2023) and will premiere at South Coast Rep in May 2025.

 

Night Cities, A Bayard Rustin Ritual
by Roger Q. Mason

From Jahna Ferron-Smith: “Roger’s writing is transcendent. Their work often explores challenging emotional and/or sociopolitical issues through a uniquely vibrant and remarkably engaging poetic lens. The worlds they create for the stage are powerful, unapologetic, and tender, filled with boundless passion and rigor to render each story’s truth. They write with a seemingly fearless vulnerability that defies any label, box, or container. To get to experience Roger’s work is a spell-binding treat.”

About the play: A young Bayard Rustin—before Civil Rights Movement fame—must choose between his private desires as a queer black man and his public calling as an agent of social justice and civic change. Set against the vibrant labor movement of the 1930s and 40s, this piece embraces the musicality, dream imagery, and liberation of jazz playwriting to explore one man’s quest for complex humanity in a world that limits who we are to how we can be used for the good of others. 

About the playwright: Roger Q. Mason (they/them) is an award-winning writer, performer, and educator who satirizes and revises history to disrupt the biases that separate rather than unite us. Their playwriting has appeared on Broadway; Off/Off-Off-Broadway; and regionally. Their recent productions have garnered five Barrymore Award nominations in Philadelphia, a Jeff Award Recommendation in Chicago, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s prestigious Datebook Pick. Mason received 2024’s Playwrights’ Center McKnight National Residency and Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, a Lucille Lortel commission, a Kilroys List nod, and the Chuch Rowland Pioneer Award. Mason holds degrees from Princeton, Middlebury, and Northwestern.

 

A Plausible History of Xicotencatl II
by Jaymes Sanchez

From Franky D. Gonzalez: “A Plausible History of Xicotencatl II by the immensely talented Jaymes Sanchez is like much of Latinidad. It is rooted in contradiction where fact and fiction blend to create unproven but completely undeniable truth, where one is both abuser and abused, comedic and tragic, where the past becomes both present and uncertain future obscured by the constantly shifting answer to the ultimate question: what am I? Through the relationship of Xicotencatl II and Genevieve through time, dream, memory, life circumstances, and carving one’s own path, we get closer to solving the unanswerable question. Ultimately, then, what could be more worthy to be seen on the American stage than a play such as this?”

About the play: Xicotencatl II, an indigenous military leader from (the lands that are now called) Mexico, has been reliving his execution at the hands of Spanish colonizers for the last 500 years. When a cynical college student in present-day Texas connects with Xicotencatl II in her dreams, she begins to question everything she thought she knew; as her obsession with the people and events in her dreams grows, her grasp on reality weakens. She begins to wonder if offering the old gods a sacrifice could break Xicotencatl’s death loop and save her world from fascism, climate change, and the doom she can sense lurking around every corner.

About the playwright: Jaymes Sanchez is a Texan playwright, actor, and educator living in Brooklyn. Jaymes’s plays have been developed with The Lark, Latinx Playwrights Circle, The Orchard Project, Broadway Podcast Network/Rattlestick Theater, the Ucross Foundation, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Company One, Teatro Vivo, and The Barn at Lee. He was an Inaugural Candela Summer Fellow in 2023, and is one tenth of the Diez Collective, which received an Artist Grant from The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC). Jaymes received the 2020 Keene Prize for Literature. MFA: The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

powpowpowpowpowpowpowpowBANG
by Utkarsh Rajawat

From Haruna Lee: “In powpowpowpowpowpowpowpowBANG, Utkarsh defies linguistic gravity and downright revolts against our conceit of an ‘American Play.’ Utilizing action movie genres—from Old Westerns to Star Wars to Samurai films to Bollywood to out-of-body AI sentience—two characters, WITHIN and WITHOUT, who have been infinitely and archaically at odds with each other, duke it out in a fast draw, a duel, a dance, a romance, a ritual, as their conversation sparks a civilization’s worth of themes to contend with. Utkarsh masterfully spins us into the tizzy of colonization, fascism, imperialism, capitalism, Americanism, Asian tropes, and the archetypes of Good and Evil with such effortless and profane humor, poeticism, and a dash of literary avant-garde that, simply put, is mesmerizing. I can’t wait to see this play staged and fully produced.”

About the play: A gun-slinging western, Papa Roach, and sissy porn collide in a two-person duel that leaps through genres and your computer screen to determine the root of all evil.

About the playwright: Utkarsh Rajawat is following the call of Rasha Abdulhadi, who they know of through “Notes on Craft” by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, to use their bio to uplift resistance efforts against the US-sponsored, Israeli genocide of Palestinians. You can contribute to the movement by donating food baskets, e-Sims, supplies, endorsing PACBI, attending an action, engaging in BDS. I hope more institutions are moved to full-throated support, with their words, their resources, their (divestment from Israeli) money, as Palestinian people like those of The Freedom Theatre have been asking for. You can contact PACBI@wawog.com if you have questions or concerns, including legal ones, about your cultural or academic organization’s commitment. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

 

Proximity
by Harrison David Rivers

From Mathilde Dratwa: “What I love so much about this portrayal of partnership and parenthood is how it weaves together collective and personal trauma. The story is both funny and deeply moving, and it resonates on a deeply universal level, capturing the complexity of human connection and (mis)communication. It’s the only pandemic play I’ve found truly inspiring—I use the shouting scene in my class about theatricality as a prime example of the visceral, vital power of live performance.”

About the play: Newly divorced and sheltering at home with her two children, Ezra hasn’t been touched by another adult in eight months. When she’s introduced to Irie, a charismatic fellow single parent, at a virtual PTA meeting, their immediate attraction causes Ezra to reconsider the limits of her Covid-bubble.

About the playwright: Harrison David Rivers is an award-winning playwright, librettist, and television writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. His works include The Salvagers (Yale Rep), the bandaged place (Roundabout), we are continuous (Williamstown), This Bitter Earth (TheaterWorks Hartford, InterAct, About Face, Penumbra, New Conservatory Theatre Center), Last of the Red Hot Mamas with Sue and Lloyd Ecker (Bucks County Playhouse), and We Shall Someday with Ted Shen (Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Theater Latté Da). His television credits include Peacock’s “One of Us is Lying,” HBO’s “The Nevers,” and Amazon’s “Wytches.”  harrisondavidrivers.com

 

prunin, hoein n cuttin grapes
by Nissy Aya

From Ife Olujobi: “Like no other play I’ve read, prunin, hoein n cuttin grapes creates a space for the active imagination of the reader/viewer alongside and intertwined with the story. You have no choice but to bring your whole self to the experience of this play, because the dreams and desires of the real-as-hell characters in this tender and meditative afro-futurist fantasia are your own: to be seen clearly, to be loved fully, and, vitally, to enjoy life. To eat good, to fuck joyfully and unabashedly, to find and be affirmed in yourself and your needs, and to play like it gives you life, because it does. With precise vision and the artistry of a poet-scholar, Nissy Aya explores how the giving of pleasure is an ethic and a calling by crafting an elaborate fantasy world for the providers of our deepest fantasies, one which aims to liberate both client and hoe from trauma and shame in pursuit of ecstatic, world-making, time-warping connection and release.”

About the play:  In the highly regimented XXXXXXX, we witness the lives and lessons of a community of femmes assigned to teach the tools of sexual intimacy and pleasure to others. Led by Alpha and her right-hand, her beta, Bilinda, this proud community of hoes carries on just them and their chil’ren. But with the pressures of a Choosing looming, the community deals with an unexpected and daunting assignment.

About the playwright: Nissy Aya (nissy; she/ze/we) is a Black femme from the Bronx. She and all her younger selves tell stories and tall tales — while helping others to do the same. As a cultural worker and writer, we believe in the transformative nature of storytelling, rehearsing revolution (quiet, world-ending, and otherwise), and examining how we move forward/shape new worlds through healing justice, Afrofuturist frameworks, and tenderness/intimacy/practices of feeling good. Zir creative work reflects those notions while exploring the lines between oral history, archives and memory, detailing both the absence and presence of love, and giving all the life (and then some) to queer Black Femmes. Nissy’s work has been supported and/or developed with Breaking the Binary, SPACE on Ryder Farm, New York Stage and Film, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Lambda Literary to name a few. Nissy is a 2023 recipient of the Dramatist Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award. former member of The Public’s Emerging Writers Group, former New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Artistic Fellow, and a finalist for the Hermitage Major Theatre Award. 

 

Quand tu sors du feu
Or Wakteli tokhrij mil nar
Or When You Leave the Fire
by Ella Boureau

From MJ Kaufman: “To me this is a Venturous play because…ghosts, fire, queer lineages of Maghreb, braided story, structural adventures, live band, metatheatricality, multilingual, a delicious dance of truth and fiction, history and present moment, I had never seen anything like this play in form or content and it was a story I was desperately hungry for. When I saw the reading at Noor theater, the audience jumped in singing and clapping with a level of engagement I have NEVER seen from an audience before. I saw such a perfect relationship between writer, play, and theater community on that night.”

About the play: Quand tu sors du feu is a three-hander that is equal parts 1930s cabaret, andalusi music, and téléphone arabe. Ella and her ghosts—the Tunisian Jewish vocalist Habiba Msika and her French-Algerian painter grandfather, André—move through time in many combinations, exploring the violence and pleasure of their close relationships, each shedding light on the dark corners of the other, whether they want that light shed or not. For some, intimacy is less a pure pleasure and more a midnight haunting.

About the playwright: Ella Boureau was born in New York City, raised in the same Pennsylvania stone barn as her mother, and has roots in coastal villages in France and Algeria. Upon reaching the age of consent she immediately returned to New York City, allegedly to study poetry at The New School, but secretly to people-watch and be gay. Ella writes about sex, mediterranean myths, and female dirtbaggery. She is interested in rage and grief: when they are funny, when they are scary, when they are heartbreaking, and when they just get so twisted up that they break into something else entirely. Her plays include: FUCKING AJAX!: An Appalachian Gay Soul Suicide Musical (Zarkower Award for First Year Playwriting, Leah Ryan Fund Honorable Mention, Dramatist Guild Fellow Semi-finalist); CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS, CLAMS (O’Neill Playwriting Conference semi-finalist); and Helps to Hate You a Little: a Lovestory (Cloud City, Dixon Place, Fresh Fruit Festival @The Wild Project). She has an MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College.

 

REWOMBED
by Nikki Brake-Sillá

From Sharon Bridgforth: “In this play, Black people lovingly/courageously/tenderly navigate the fine lines between science and religion, sacrifice and partnership, denial and dreams…as a woman seeks medical support in getting pregnant. This play feels dangerous and timely as it unearths deeply emotional, terrifying truths that many have had to navigate but are rarely given space to speak about. Having this play produced opens vast possibilities for healing, support, and much needed collective reflection.”

About the play: REWOMBED is a 3 actor play (with a gospel choir) that provides a unique look at the intersection of faith and family planning. The action bounces back and forth between an OBGYN office and a church, as Pastor Rachel Johnson, enrolls in a uterine transplant trial in hopes of bearing a child, despite the serious risks. What happens when her unwavering faith that God will give her a child, comes up against her husband’s vow to protect his wife, and her doctor’s vow to do no harm?

About the playwright: Nikki Brake-Sillá’s full-length plays include INVISI(BILITY) (Bechdel ROO Residency), REWOMBED (Baldwin Fellow, MAP Fund, EST/Sloan Commission), Finalist (BAPF46, WP Theater), Semi-Finalist (Premiere Stages); TROUBLE OF THE WORLD, Finalist (Terrence McNally Award, Lark Apothetae, SPACE on Ryder Farm – Family Residency), Semi-Finalist (Princess Grace, O’Neill, Bay Area Playwrights Festival); DEAR ANN, Residency (The Mitten Lab), Semi-Finalist (Premiere Stages); IN DEFENSE OF OURSELVES (MadCow Women’s Voices Play Festival); GTFOH (The Kilroys Web, Orlando Shakes Play Fest), Finalist (Hedgebrook, SPACE on Ryder Farm – Family Residency), Semi-Finalist (Princess Grace, Terrence McNally Award, Ars Nova); SAY IT AIN’T SO (Princess Grace Special Project), Finalist (DG Fellows), Semi-Finalist (Irons in the Fire). ginifilms.com

 

Sean’s Story
by Khiyon Hursey

From Mona Mansour: “In Sean’s Story, writer-composer Khiyon Hursey explores the coming-of-age of a young gay Black man in a time of endless police brutality: America, now. We are told up front that this play is ‘haunted by Tony Kushner—and Beyoncé,’ and then taken to a world both intimate and epic, one that zooms from a Black college students union to sidewalk demonstrations to the literal center of the universe, complete with restorative justice angels who hover over all. This musical is hugely ambitious and very worthy of all the amplification this award would give it.”

About the play: Sean’s Story follows Sean, a young Black queer man navigating love and loss for the first time. As he is thrust into this journey of self assurance and acceptance, he discovers that he is destined to lead an order of Black magical angels, a powerful group who travel throughout the universe to maintain time and order and holds the key to ushering in a new age of humanity.

About the playwright: Khiyon Hursey is a writer and composer. He recently finished co-penning songs with Oscar and Grammy winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Lala Land, Dear Evan Hansen) for the major motion picture SPIRITED starring Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell, and Octavia Spencer. The song “Good Afternoon” from the film was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Khiyon is also collaborating with Pharrell on a Netflix movie musical produced by Chernin Entertainment. Since getting his start as the music assistant on the off-Broadway and Broadway productions of HAMILTON, Khiyon has since worked with Universal Studios, HBO Max, Netflix, Apple, Nickelodeon, Andre 3000, and Kevin Hart on various film and television projects. He is based in Los Angeles and New York.

 

Sick Day
by Avery Deutsch

From Eboni Booth: “Sick Day is ostensibly about pulling yourself through the muck of our current medical systems, but it’s also a very humorous and very empathetic look at how community arises out of need. A formally innovative portrait of a friendship on a hot day, Sick Day finds its fun and pathos in life’s in-between moments. The play also provides a perfect match between form and content — understanding the pitfalls of modern medicine couldn’t be more daunting, and perhaps the only way to approach the issue is through an experimental side door that reveals a world as inane and insane as any attempt to make a doctor’s appointment or get an insurance claim paid.” 

About the play: Sick Day is the story of two girls traversing the New York City Medical System on one very hot day. You may have seen them, at Urgent Care, at the Eye Doctor, in the Ambulance, squeezed into a single bed in the ER, talking loudly and laughing loudly too. Inspired by a real day, Sick Day tells the story of two dear friends, performing for strangers, themselves, and each other, trying to keep reality at bay.

About the playwright: Avery is a playwright and actor from Katonah New York. Her plays include The Age of Mary, Three Exorcisms and The Winter Guard Play. She is the winner of Clubbed Thumb’s Biennial 2022 commission, The Hearth’s 2024 Virtual Retreat, and a recipient of a 2023-2024 EST/Sloan commission. She just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is received an MFA in playwriting.

Sky Rats
by Kathy Ng

From Lisa D’Amour: “The fearless Kathy Ng shows us what the American Theater can be: a young, brave, self-aware cry to experience the adventure of our lives with every single f*$king cell of our bodies. Get ready to crush out on Tiff, Eddie, and Bonespants in their quest for love and realness in a world trafficking in hate and deepfakes. This play dares audiences to keep up with its linguistic triple backflips, pop culture freestyle, and Matrix supersour easter eggs. Kathy is a vibrant and generous presence in the rehearsal room – I know that theaters would love collaborating with her on the premiere of this wild and wondrous play.”

About the play: Society wants to fake us out, but Tiff, her Nonna, and her f*up friends are gonna put a stop to all that. Part ‘90s hacker thriller, part slacker makeout dream, rife with hallucinogenic OTC meds, militant pigeons and rats, if you ever had a crush on the entire cast of The Matrix, this play is for you.

About the playwright: Kathy Ng (she/they) writes plays and makes crafts. She’s from Hong Kong. Her work attempts to create stretchy human-adjacent spaces that are also construction sites for new alien languages. Recent works include bacon sausage veggie noodles (Clubbed Thumb Reading Series) and happy life (O’Neill Finalist ‘21, The Hearth). happy life received its world premiere production at Walker Space in the summer of 2022. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writers’ Group. BA from Brown and now she’s back pursuing her MFA in playwriting. Website (warning, work in progress): kingyam.hotglue.me

 

STAINS
by Sarah Cho

From Shannon TL Kearns: “STAINS is a gorgeous play about identity, growing up, and figuring out our place in the world. This play is venturous because it messes with form, includes magic, and reinvents a beloved television show. A powerful exploration of what it feels like to want to fit in, of loving and struggling against a family who doesn’t quite know how to support you, and in the end figuring out how to make your own sense of home.”

About the play: A young girl’s first period can bring complicated emotions. However, for Korean American teenager Christine Park, it could also mean burdening her impoverished family. She finds support where she least expects it: from a ‘90s pop-culture icon who serves as her ‘“period guide.” A coming-of-age comedy about growing up poor, female, and Korean American in the late-‘90s Los Angeles, STAINS moves from grounded reality to flights of adolescent fancy while exploring a painfully awkward rite of passage.

About the playwright: Sarah Cho writes plays without the help of A.I. Cho’s plays have been developed/presented by Ashland New Plays Festival, Great Plains Theatre Commons, IAMA Theatre Company, Jungle Theater, Moving Arts Theatre Company, South Mountain Community College and The Vagrancy. She was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship, the Richard Maibaum Playwriting Award, and Kennedy Center’s Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award. Her play “stains” was named a finalist for the 2023 Jane Chambers Award and received a Workshop Production, produced by Great Plains Theatre Commons (May 2025). In comedy, Cho has performed at Green Gravel Comedy Festival, Laugh Riot Grrrl Festival, and has written for house sketch teams at the Pack Theater. She writes for the late-night-style podcast The Dump and co-host the “very interesting” playwriting podcast Beckett’s Babies with Sam Collier. You can catch her doing stand-up at open mics, but only if they wrap before bedtime. Sarah earned her BA in film and theater from UC Santa Barbara and her MFA from Iowa Playwrights Workshop. And yes, despite how this bio might read, Sarah wrote it all by herself without ChatGPT.

 

Teresa
by Isaac Gómez

From Noelle Viñas: “Isaac has created a complex, provocative play that speaks to how the most devout are also often the most competitive. They are unafraid to be irreverent with a major religious figure (Mother Teresa), but rather than attempt a biography for the stage, they speak of her disciples and the complex relationship between passion, suffering, and pain in the disciples’ attempt to grapple with her legacy. It is my honor to nominate a playwright audacious enough to explore these issues in the American Theater and bold enough to imagine this play, one that speaks to those of us drawn to religion and power. Isaac’s most audacious act is to queer the storytelling through comedy, common vernacular, longing, and modern music.”

About the play: “Love, to be real, has to hurt.” Following the death of one of the most iconic women in history, the nuns she left behind struggle to keep her legacy alive without destroying everything she’s built to get them there. One part ghost story, another part femme fatale, Teresa is a meditation on sin, penance, and the great cost of trying (and failing) at being the greatest living saint the world has ever known.

About the playwright: Isaac Gómez (they/them) is an award-winning Chicago and Los Angeles based playwright and screenwriter originally from El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. They identify as na’wi—the third gender marker of the Rarámuri, a Mexican Indigenous community in northern Chihuahua, of which they’re a direct descendent. They’re currently under commission with LCT3, Steppenwolf Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, and Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Their plays have been produced and/or developed by Audible Theater, Center Theatre Group, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Primary Stages, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Goodman Theatre, the Alley Theatre, Seattle Rep, and many others. Their television credits include the Netflix Original Series Narcos: Mexico, the upcoming Apple TV+ Limited Series The Last Thing He Told Me, the second season of Paramount TV+’s Joe Picket, amongst others. They have sold pilots and features for development with MRC Entertainment, FX, Focus Features, among others. They strive to tell underrepresented stories across all mediums.

 

Tha Chink-Mart
by Ray Yamanouchi

From Vichet Chum: “Tha Chink-Mart takes on the coming of age, AAPI diasporic, early aughts experience with side-aching comedy and enormous pathos. Too often, structure and form are elevated as the highest markers of adventurous work, but I would contend that when a storyteller achieves a kind of messy, unapologetic, profoundly deep honesty, that should be celebrated, if not more. This play is undeniable.”

About the play: In a small, suburban town in Long Island, New York, five Asian American teenage friends battle through high school—where they’re marked as Asians—and their home lives—where they’re too American. Finding solace only amongst each other, they attempt to define for themselves what it means to be an Asian in America… For better or for worse.

About the playwright: Ray Yamanouchi was born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and received a BA in film and theater from CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan. His plays include Tha Chink-Mart (PlayPenn 2018), Impact (Semi-finalist, National Playwrights Conference 2017), and The American Tradition (New Light New Voices Award 2018). He has developed work with WT Theatre, The Blank Theatre, Rising Circle Theater Collective, The New Harmony Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, PlayPenn, Mission to (dit)Mars (Propulsion Lab), Ars Nova (Play Group), and Playwrights’ Center (Core Writer). He has been commissioned by Ars Nova and Cygnet Theatre. (rayyams.com)

 

Too Close to Earth
by Marvin González De León

From Jessica Huang: “In Marvin’s stunning Too Close to Earth, we experience his vision for the future over the next hundred years. His craft is excellent—funny, biting characters, surprising reversals, fully rendered worlds created in just a few lines—and his vision is the definition of venturous: including a formally adventurous structure that catapults us forward as it tethers us to two families fighting for their ideals; an epic scope that invites designers and directors to create wildfires, floods, and a cathartic, emotional herd of buffalo 100 years in the future; and ever-bold investigations of climate, legacy, class, and human nature (in part, as programmed into AI). I’ve admired Marvin’s writing for years, and am honored to advocate for this moving, funny, powerful play that teaches us how to be in community with each other and with the planet.”

About the play: Set in the near future—and spanning 100 years—Too Close to Earth explores the transformation of two Mexican American families as their lives intersect across generations at a seaside home in Southern California. Drawing on the traditions of speculative fiction, the play examines our changing relationship with nature and technology, and also the role art and religion play in sustaining hope and balance in a world in crisis.

About the playwright: Marvin González De León writes plays that incorporate a myriad of genres—from sci fi to horror—anchored in the traditions of Latin American literature. His work has been produced and developed at Arizona State University, Texas State University, Teatro del Pueblo, Repertorio Español, Round House Theatre, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Playwrights Realm, Page 73 Productions, Playwrights’ Center, The O’Neill Center, and Berkeley Rep. Previous Fellowships: 2022 Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship, Jerome Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, Many Voices Fellowship, and Playwrights’ Center Core Writer. González De León received his MFA in Dramatic Writing in 2017 at Arizona State University. marvingonzalezdeleon.com

 

Tugs O’ War
by Samantha Godfrey

From TyLie Shider: “Sam Godfrey’s Tugs O’ War is a brave, heartfelt depiction of the challenges immigrants of color face in pursuit of the American Dream. We don’t get to see these people on stage enough.”

About the play: When Kay, a sharp and self-possessed Jamaican woman, agrees to a green card marriage with an American man to secure a shared future with her long-distance British boyfriend Nick, the borders between love, survival, and performance begin to blur. What starts as a calculated step toward stability quickly spirals into an emotional standoff between three people caught in a tug-of-war across continents, cultures, and conflicting desires. Set between Florida and the UK, Tugs O’ War is a darkly tender exploration of immigration, intimacy, and the cost of believing in systems that were never built to hold you.

About the playwright: Samantha is a first-generation West Indian American of Jamaican descent, a writer whose work blends a poet’s sensibility, an activist’s urgency, and a relentless curiosity for her roots. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Baltimore, her storytelling draws from a rich heritage that spans the West Indies, the UK, and Canada. She writes with deep reverence for immigrant culture, the working class, and the untold costs of migration in pursuit of the fractured American Dream. Her honors include being a 2022 published playwright in the anthology 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival, a 2020 finalist in the Cinequest Screenwriting Competition, a 2020 semi-finalist for The Future of Film is Female, and a 2019 semi-finalist for the Playwrights Realm Fellowship.

 

Twelfth
by Rachel Lynett

From Jacqueline Goldfinger: “Unruly and Remarkable, Rachel Lynett’s plays brim with humor, honesty, and grace. Her new play Twelfth is a rollicking explosion of form on an epic scale that requires the support of a large-scale development opportunity like the Venturous Fellowship. It centers the stories of Non-Binary and Trans characters in a dreamscape that bends time and space. Its raw, uncomfortable truths crackle with humor that makes this challenging play more accessible to audiences who might otherwise shy away from its difficult conversations. For me, it lives in the same universe as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—plumbing the depths of the American experiment through the lens of characters whose stories are often ignored and forgotten.”

About the play: At the end of the world, or maybe the start of a new one, V falls in love with both Orlando and Liv. Soon they all will have to decide what kind of love they want and who (and how) they want to love and be loved. Twelfth is an adaptation of both Twelfth Night and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 

About the playwright: Rachel Lynett (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latine playwright, producer, and teaching artist. Their plays have been featured at  San Diego Rep, Magic Theatre, Mirrorbox Theatre, Laboratory Theater of Florida, Barrington Stage Company, Theatre Lab, Theatre Prometheus, Florida Studio Theatre, Laughing Pig Theatre Company, Capital Repertory Theatre, Teatro Espejo, the Kennedy Center Page to Stage festival, Theatresquared, Equity Library Theatre, Chicago, Talk Back Theatre, American Stage Theatre Company, Indiana University at Bloomington, Edgewood College, and Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.  Rachel Lynett is also the 2021 recipient of the Yale Drama Prize for their play, Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson). Lynett was  2021 recipient of the National Latinx Playwriting Award and the runner-up for the 2022 Miranda Family Voces Latinx Playwriting Competition for their play, Black Mexican. Their play, Missing Socks and a Line of Coke was also a 2024 Blue Ink Award finalist and their play #NoSabo was a semi-finalist for 2025 O’Neill Playwright Conference. Lynett has received commissions from Barrington Stage Company, Florida Studio Theatre, and Yale Rep. Recently,  Lynett was a staff writer for The Winchesters and is working on an upcoming feature.

 

Untitled E-Waste Play
by Lucas Baisch

From Caridad Svich: “Lucas is a wonderful theater-maker; the play in process is big in scope and functions as a cross between theater and visual art installation. It addresses the climate crisis in a unique and brave way, connecting the paths of trade, geopolitical pathways, and what happens in times of extinction.”

About the play: Untitled E-Waste Play charts out the Silicon Valley’s electronics industry by reaching back into California’s timeline of extraction. Through the supernatural and the strange, missionaries, gold miners, farmers, and programmers can all rest on the same idea: “history” is forever speculative.

About the playwright: Lucas’ plays have been read and developed at the Goodman Theatre, Playwrights’ Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, The Mercury Store, Cutting Ball Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Neo-Futurists, etc. He is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Fellowship, and the Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, Yale’s Theater Magazine, and 53rd State Press. He has held residencies through The Djerassi, Millay Arts, Ars Nova, Page 73, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the LMCC. MFA: Brown University, Playwriting. lucasbaisch.com

 

Virgo in Playback
by é boylan

From Roger Q. Mason: “This play defined the contemporary queer aesthetic for me by instilling that performance time and script time are not the same. It is a bold vision of how physical storytelling transcends traditional boundaries of theatrical narrative. It should be produced because it is a true PLAY—a blueprint which needs to be embodied to be fully comprehended and appreciated.”

About the play: When their boyfriend pressures them to go all the way, a naive Virgo replays their favorite childhood memory to escape the present, only to get stuck in the Playback. A multimedia poem and queer self-love story, Virgo in Playback explores the intimacy of recollection. How can a memory liberate us to be loved?

About the playwright: é boylan (they/them) is a NYC-based director, creator, and composer developing new work towards trans liberation. Selected honors include: New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, Musical Theatre Factory Makers Cohort II, 2022 Jonathan Larson Grant (Finalist), 2022 Relentless Award (Honorable mention), 2023/24 NAMT Fall Conference (Finalist), 2024 Polyphone Artist, 2024 MacDowell Fellow, 2023 SPACE on Ryder Farm Creative Resident, 2018/21 O’Neill Resident Artist, 2019 Trans Lab Fellow, 2019/20 Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellow, 2021 Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriter, 2021 Prospect Musicals Lab, and 2020/22 Roundabout Theatre Co. Directors Group. Graduate of The University of Chicago and NTI. www.eboylan.com

 

The Wee Hours
by Preston Choi

From Ankita Raturi: “Like so much of Preston’s work, The Wee Hours lives concurrently in the world of folklore and fairy tale as well as in the world of bitter and plainly stated reality—a duality Preston carries consistently through his quickly-paced dialogue and scenic imagination. A kaleidoscopic requiem: two birds evade a hungry cat until one ends up headless, two friends in Chicago avoid a goodbye before one moves across the country, two parents try to adequately celebrate their child’s eighteenth birthday while one faces his own relentless aging, and a hungry ancient rabbit in a waxing moon boat laments the impending closure of his favorite Chinese bakery—all in the wee hours of the morning, when it is arguably still night. A poem on change yearning to be theatrically realized.”

About the play: Before the dawn breaks on a cold winter’s morning…a beloved baker preps for Lunar New Year, as a rabbit on the moon wanes from hunger, as a couple panic over their child’s birthday, as a pair of drunk friends try to get home, as a volatile rideshare driver overshares, as one cat and most of two pigeons traverse rooftops, as a series of public transportation conductors offer directions, as the guy who salts the icy roads delivers ominous warnings…lives are woven wearily, whimsically, wistfully, and wonkily in the wee hours.

About the playwright: Preston Choi is a U.S. playwright from all over the place currently based out of Los Angeles whose work focuses on social science fiction, Asian American/mixed race/queer lives, and the horror of being alive. His plays include This Is Not A True Story, limp wrist on the lever, Happy Birthday Mars Rover, performing class, and The Migratory Patterns of the North American Monarch Butterfly the Development of Fatherless Sons or A Great Migration. He received a BS in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Playwriting from UC San Diego.

 

who hurt you?
by Katie Đỗ

From Julián Mesri: “who hurt you? is a fascinating work of theater that is part actor’s worst nightmare, part meta-theatrical exploration of TV writing, part racial interrogation, all in a freely-flowing time and screen-jumping play that feels deeply of our moment but also lifts it into something wholly its own. Katie’s gift for real trenchant dialogue and a willingness to delve into the most sensitive of wounds—of family, culture, and friendship—a piece that looks at insecurity from so many lenses (both literal and fictional). It’s a piece I was lucky enough to see grow in the Emerging Writer’s Group and am so excited to see how Katie continues to refine and challenge herself with this piece. I am absolutely thrilled to recommend it.”

About the play: Ellie Nguyễn, an ambitious Vietnamese American actor, contends with her dreams, identity, and lovelife as she loses everything she’s ever wanted to a Half-White/Half-Vietnamese actor. As Ellie tows the line between victimhood and agency, her downward spiral forces her and her loved ones to uncover a new world where they could all either thrive, cease to exist, or both. who hurt you? is a dark comedy about the subtle harms we endure in deep relationships, what it means to truly be seen, and the cost of life imitating art.

About the playwright: Katie Đỗ is a Vietnamese American woman with a mouth from New Jersey. She’s a proud alum of the Sống Collective’s Việt Writers Lab and the Public’s Emerging Writers Group. Đỗ is also the inaugural recipient of Merrimack Repertory Theatre’s Sokhary Chau Playwriting Fellowship. Her plays have been developed by South Coast Repertory (Pacific Playwrights Festival), Atlantic Theater Company (MixFest), The Sống Collective, The Public Theater, Orlando Shakes, and Artists at Play. love you long time (already) is also featured on the 2023 Kilroy’s Web. She also wrote on the Netflix show Partner Track and is in development with MACRO. She is a first year MFA Playwriting candidate at UCSD.

 

Zeus 4
by Lauren Holmes

From Shayok Misha Chowdhury: “In Zeus 4, Lauren Holmes brings to life a group of dog owners in a dog park in Boston with empathy, humor, and uncommonly precise observation. The play does two of my favorite things: 1) presents an impossible theatrical challenge, i.e. do a play about dogs without any actual dogs; and 2) reminds us that humans are difficult, social animals that do weird, unpredictable things.”

About the play: In a park in Boston, dog owners gather regularly to let their dogs run around off leash—against park rules. As the seasons pass, they all must overcome constant threats to their dog park society—from other park goers, from park rangers, and from each other. With mimed dogs and the repetitive motions of care turned into dance.

About the playwright: Lauren Holmes is a playwright and producer from Dedham, Massachusetts. She’s the recipient of the 2024 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting/New Dramatists Residency, a Venturous Playwrights Fellowship 2025 nomination, and a 2024 Woodward Residency. She recently adapted Olga Ravn’s novel The Employees for a production at Theaterlab. Her work has been developed and performed at Theaterlab, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Pace University, and The Brick.  Before becoming a playwright, Lauren worked on political campaigns, in the private sector, and for the United Nations in Italy and New York. She draws on these experiences to write dark, comic plays about work, class, families of happenstance, and seekers of hidden knowledge. MFA in playwriting from Hunter College. Founding member of The Omnivores. laurenholm.es