Readings

Playwright: Ladd R. Sullivan
Director: Elizabeth Herron

1640: A producer hires his favorite prostitute to play
Juliet in a revival of Romeo & Juliet. The Director has
two weeks to turn a Woman of the Night into a sweet,
demur, innocent Juliet. What could possibly go wrong?
How about a rebellion by the actors?
Or a very outspoken leading lady?
Or the being thrown into prison for this stunt?
If Shakespeare saw this play … he would laugh.

WRITTEN BY MEGAN TABAQUE
DIRECTED BY COURTNEY ULRICH

When an entire country club of athletes get taken out by a rogue bout of covid, a motley crew of mall-rink figure skaters find themselves on a flight to Croatia to compete in the World Synchronized Figure Skating Championships as first-alternates. As they train, complain, destroy, and rebuild each other on their quest to achieve the impossible, something darker looms on the edges of the global stage: a nuclear arms race. The Rink at the End of the World is a comic experiment in synchronization, surreality, and apocalypse using the high stakes emotional drives of teen girls to capture the contemporary sense of doom younger generations might feel living in a world uninvested in its own future and instead invested in its own demise.

Featuring:

Christina Carlisi, Julia Manis, Tally McCormack, Bebe Katsenes, Jacquelyn Ferguson, KevinMcCorkle, Naomi Rubin and Lauren Schaffel

WRITTEN BY KIM YAGED
DIRECTED BY CHRISTINA CARLISI

Un-Motherhood, a one-person show with more than one person, traverses the highlights and lowlights of parenting while not admitting you’re a parent. This raw, biting, comedic tour-de-force delves into the world of losing the kids you never knew you wanted and finding yourself in the process.

Featuring:
Presciliana Esparolini
Lilli Passero
Stephanie Erb

WRITTEN BY JOHN ANTHONY LOFFREDO
DIRECTED BY SIMON J.O.MARTIN

FEATURING:  Amir Levi, Loa Valdez, Brandon Bautista

A glimmering lake. Four naked men giggling. Each of them surviving off of sweet fruits and thick honey. Everything is wonderful until…from the depths of the water, emerges a man covered in sludge! This gay oasis becomes something of a nightmare as the four men disagree over what to do with this filthy stranger. But none of them are sure where he came from, not even the Sludge Man himself. All he knows is…that he’s been lusting after them for a while. the freedom from everything rotten dares us to imagine a gay community untouched by sex…until it is.

WRITTEN BY MALIQUE QUINN
DIRECTED BY DESTINEE STEWART

FEATURING:  Rogelio Douglas III, Alex Smith, Noelle Mercer, Moe Irvin and Inger Tudor

A young, charismatic, and curious Benjamin Banneker navigates grief, vices, and love when he is left with the responsibility of taking care of the family farm. However, when he decides to pursue a new vision that will change America forever, he is forced to deal with a new kind of warfare, beyond what he, or any of his family has faced before.

WRITTEN BY GREY SMITH
DIRECTED BY RU KAZI

FEATURING:  Jessica Jade Andres, Krishna Smitha, Jordan Moore

Lyssa is making a podcast about Danny's new solo show. Ian is getting engaged to Tara. Ian and Danny used to be roommates. Danny and Tara are blowing up on TikTok Danny thinks Ian is gay. Tara wants to be famous. Danny wants to be loved. Ian wants what he wants. Lyssa wants to tell the story.

WRITTEN BY Michael Meija
DIRECTED BY

Maria and Chris’s lives collide when they uncover chilling similarities between the unsolved murders of their brothers. After years of relentless searching, their journey for answers leads them believe they have found a potential serial killer – a retired business man named Richard. Now Maria and Chris must decide if they will pursue justice or exact revenge. Are Maria and Chris about to catch a monster, or are they losing control of the case…and their minds?

WRITTEN BY RACHEL BORDERS
DIRECTED BY CARLYLE KING

FEATURING:  Blaire Chandler, Kate Huffman, Nick Apostolina, Paige Simunovich and Alaska Jackson

A family is surprised to learn their patriarch is dying and even more surprised to find he hired a Death Doula to assist them through the transition. A dark comedy about death, inheritance, and the decisions that define our legacies.

WRITTEN BY STEVE HARPER

DIRECTED BY ANDRE G. BROWN

FEATURING:  Jon Gentry,Gerard Joseph, Patrick Zhang and Steven B. Green

When Mark, an Ivy League grad looking for love, meets Kyle, a free spirit with a wandering eye, they forge a complicated relationship with an uncertain future. After a steamy video with a porn star unearths hidden truths and forces a painful confrontation, Kyle goes missing. Mark is desperate to track him down. Along the way, morality wavers, monogamy blurs, and every choice carries the weight of no return. True Adventures for Men is a provocative and unexpectedly funny exploration of love, identity, and self destruction, where nothing is ever as simple—or as innocent—as it seems.

WRITTEN BY Fiona Gorry-Hines
DIRECTED BY

Following the untimely death of their recently-retired coworker, a small group of employees at Libirdy Farms, a massive poultry producer, gathers to stage their late friend’s musical adaptation of the German fairytale, “The Brementown Musicians.” As they prepare to present the play at The Roost, Libirdy’s annual company picnic, and as news begins to circulate about the circumstances surrounding its author’s death, the ensemble begins to question their loyalty to the company.

WRITTEN BY CAMILLE SIMONE THOMAS
DIRECTED BY INGER TUDOR

In Detroit’s opulent Hotel Gotham enterprising hotel owner John J. White is willing to do keep his dream alive while co-owner Irving Roane isn’t too sure that every end is worth the means and doesn’t know what to dream for anymore.

In Detroit’s opulent Hotel Gotham naive but ambitious June Gholston dreams of becoming a lawyer to take care of her people in a city under attack while lounge singer Delores Miggins dreams of touring internationally and only taking care of herself

In Detroit’s opulent Hotel Gotham dreams are inflated, popped, and patched back
together year after year but, just how many times can a dream be deferred until utter
destruction?

A speculative historical fiction play based on some very real events from 1957 – 1963.

WRITTEN BY LOUISA NICKEL

DIRECTED BY
In 1978 over 900 members of The Peoples’ Temple ingested poison in a small isolated promise land in South America. Only three people were found with gunshot wounds, their leader Jim Jones, my second cousin Annie Moore, and their beloved pet chimpanzee Mister Muggs. “MISTER MUGGS” is a partially verbatim play that retells the downfall of the people of Jonestown from the perspective of an undercover chimpanzee television host, Mister Muggs. In a reverse National Geographic this nihilist
reality show uses primary documents to uncover the line between dreamers and extremists.

WRITTEN BY Robert Axelrod
DIRECTED BY

Featuring Carlyle King, Taylor Gilbert

Desperate to get his life back on track, a depressed gay thirty-something returns home
for the summer, where he winds up taking a job as an unconventional sober companion
to his alcoholic former neighbor as she attempts to make it to 90 days of sobriety.

WRITTEN BY PETER PASCO
DIRECTED BY

Some plays are about grand questions: love, tragedy, or loss.  Some plays are educational and teach you about a time in history or important figure.  Others fill you with joy with catchy, heartfelt music.  This play does none of that.  This play is about how are people supposed to literally deal with life when everything feels like it’s falling apart around them.  Alan Garcia, a mid thirties Latine male, is about to get married and start a more adult chapter of his life only to discover there is a lot he needs to understand before he can do that.

WRITTEN BY SAM MUELLER
DIRECTED BY GARRETT BAER

Mountains. Wyoming. Big game hunting season. Brothers Caleb and Cain are reunited to hunt a Bighorn Sheep during the day and go through their deceased father’s extensive record collection in the evening. Lurking outside in the darkness is something caught somewhere between a man and an animal. Could it be possible that the Bighorn they’re trying to hunt is actually hunting them?

WRITTEN BY DOM MARTELLO
DIRECTED BY JACOB DAVID SMITH

POW POW POW KABOOM! Or, How Do We Get People To Care follows a focus group reviewing reality TV pilots that struggle to see eye to eye, being followed by a presidential candidate as she gets frustrated with her chief of staff because he isn’t collecting data fast enough, being followed by a group of mysterious entities who get to decide the fate of life as we know it. This political satire is a case study cracking open the absurdity of the mass consumption of (and indifference to) violence, catastrophe, and loss of human life.

WRITTEN BY  KAYLIN JONES
DIRECTED BY

In 1922 Louisiana, the Claibornes, a prominent Creole family, sit atop a social hierarchy where segregation is reimagined. Led by the patriarch, The Blue Vein Social Society is a club exclusive to a great caliber of college educated Black men with skin color no darker than a brown paper bag – the same prerequisite dictating the marriage arrangement of the society president’s docile daughter, Catherine. But when Catherine meets the opposing Pearlie Morrow, a stranger she’s meant to hate, a stranger she has loved and has known many lifetimes before, her reality shifts.

WRITTEN BY EMMA SCHILLAGE
DIRECTED BY

In a small Louisiana mobile home park, best friends Wren and Lylah play games of chicken, hide in the trees, and share scary stories about Mae, a reclusive widow who only leaves her house to take out the trash. But when a Star crash-lands on their dead end street in search of a lost love, the lives of Wren, Lylah, Mae, and the Star are thrown together unexpectedly. As Mae takes in the Star, Wren and Lylah find their evolving relationship strained, confronting what it means to grow up and navigate new feelings for the first time. Together, they embark on a journey of self-discovery, sparking an exploration of identity, friendship, gender, sexuality, beauty, and the weight of expectations. GROSS! explores the beauty and cruelty of nature and the ways we struggle to be seen and understood.