May 1 - 5, 2024
- featuring -
directed by Brian Mertes
Plague strikes in a city under siege! Certain people are being blamed; other people are blaming themselves. Is it a chance for revolution, or a chance to put on a great show? A dark comedy for bubonic times.
Harley Elias is an Indian-Iraqi-Jewish playwright and performer from New York City. He has been the recipient of residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, with Resonance Ensemble, a Fulbright Grant, two Samuel French OOB Awards, Young Playwrights Award, the Hester-Franklin Prize, and his Play #3 is published by Samuel French. He is currently under commission from Miami New Drama and Theater J. As an actor he has performed in several Broadway shows and national tours. Harley has a BA and MA in History and Art History from Stanford and is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at Brown.
directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy '22 MFA
It’s twilight in Ronald Reagan’s America and the specter of nuclear war hangs over the country – but rent is still due on the 1st. When a prominent Black conservative brings his mysteriously ill wife home to the family roller rink in Upstate New York for Christmas, everyone is thrown into a bizarre maze of Reaganomics, Cold War espionage, capitalist cult predation, and... choir practice. A dark comedic thriller with original music.
Ro Reddick (she/her) is a queer Black MFA playwright at Brown University. Her plays have been read/developed at The Ground Floor, Bushwick Starr Reading Series, and Williamstown Theatre Festival (NYC Reading). They include: Throwback Island (O’ Neill Finalist), ROBAMA (O’ Neill Semifinalist), Cold War Choir Practice, and Miss Black Syracuse, and The History of Black People… Fellowships + fun stuff: Venturous Fellowship Nomination, Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow, La Mama Umbria Playwright Retreat, Miranda Theatre Company Grant, BAI Songwriting Workshop. Degrees: BFA in Acting from Ithaca College, MBA from NYU (which she has no intention of using).
directed by Josephine Miller '24
Maximus and Rex could be porn stars if they could just time their orgasms. Aura’s figured it all out and is finally about to win best female performer of the year. Unaware of each other but locked in the same American house of desire and power, all are haunted by Sambo, star of the old stag film we all pretend to not know. Can two teen activists get us out of this mess? Or is a haint doomed to keep fucking its hauntees?
Dhari Noel is a Queer Black-Caribbean-Harlemite playwright/performer whose work explores the incoherence of race, failures of gender, and inherited performances. Recent conferences include: 2023 Tennessee Williams Scholar (Sewanee Writers Conference), 2023 Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow (Lambda Literary Retreat). Recent plays include: Penguin Sex With Mr. Morgan (ANTfest @ Ars Nova, Brown University), Man Made, Spirit Junkie (Cherry Picking, The Wild Project). Recent performances include: Black Exhibition (Bushwick Starr), In The Penal Colony (Next Door @ NYTW) Dhari is an MFA candidate in Playwriting at Brown University with support by an Adele Kellenberg Seaver 1949 Fellowship in Creative Writing. www.dharinoel.com
directed by Kathy Ng '25 MFA
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!
kathy ng 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): https://kingyam.hotglue.me/
directed by Talley Murphy '23 PhD
Grandmother won’t leave the tub, even though it’s on a fault-line ready to blow. Nat comes home sometimes to give her a bath and keeps vowing to leave for good. They don’t speak the same language but they try to reconcile every death and every word. The world keeps splitting open. They keep trying.
Brian Dang is a Vietnamese/Chinese poet/playwright based in Seattle, WA and Providence, RI. Brian is a proud resident playwright at Parley, a 2021 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and 2023 Lambda Fellow. They are an MFA candidate at Brown. For Brian, writing is an act of envisioning an eventual communing, an opportunity to freeze time as we know it, and a reaching for joy. They really like bread. They are an MFA candidate at Brown. Website: brianeatswords.com
directed by Beckett Warzer, PhD Candidate, and Jimmy Fay '26 MFA
A scarf flaps in the wind at the gay beach. There’s been a catastrophe. Our hero (trans) is dead, and when he gets to heaven, his mom is there. No, actually, it’s his mom’s heaven. And it’s a library. It’s... hell? Maybe, but at least there’s stuff to read?
Jimmy Fay is an MFA candidate at Brown. They are a poet, playwright, director and performer based in Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI. Their plays have been performed at Hunter College, the Davenport Theater, Chain Theater, the Producer’s Club and others. They are the author of the chapbook THE GOD SIZD HOLE, published by SLAB press. Select other poetry publications include Panoplyzine, GASHER Journal, Leak Magazine and Sinister Wisdom. They have been a Mellon Public Humanities fellow and an artist-in-residence at Arts on Site and Beam Center on Governors Island. By day, they are an educator and public historian. They write about queer history and queer future.