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This week, I'll once again be participating in the Out of the Hat Festival, produced by the good folks over at The Workshop Theater! This is my second year being a part of it, and I really appreciate being invited back. Just like last year, the company has selected 31 playwrights and paired them each with two actors. Based on a prompt (this year, it's the word "magic"), the playwrights create a new short play for their respective performers, and the whole shebang goes up over one week in December. I was paired with two wonderful performers: Clew and Kalonjee Gallimore. We've got a lonely yet hopefully funny playlet coming your way called "Carapace". It goes up at Houghton Hall Arts Community (22 E 30th St), alongside five other short plays on this Thursday, December 5th. You can check out all of the plays on various nights between December 3rd and December 7th, with showtimes all at 7 p.m. Get your tickets here for just $10 and learn more about the other artists involved. Come check us out! 
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Matawan, my play about the Jersey Shore Shark Attacks of 1916, is getting its New York premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company's Acting School! Directed by Nicky Maggio, this will be the fourth production of the show and features conservatory students Josh Bloom Garrett Hannigan, David Najam Liskow, Zoe Loveless, Jack Lyme, Eli Nuss, Alfredo Reyes, Kate Sweitzer, Nhat Trinh, and Bar Zivlin. It runs October 3rd through 8th at the Atlantic's Stage 2 space (330 W 16th St). I don't want to spoil anything here, but Nicky's concept for the shark and the humans she encounters is truly unique and evocative. I can't wait to see it. Click here for tickets, and come say hi after the show!  Last year, I was lucky enough to see my play The Amphibians selected by Think Tank Theatre down in Florida as part of their TYA Playwrights Festival. The script received a wonderful reading, and I got to spend a fun-filled week in Tampa, right near where I grew up. Now, I'll be headed back in a few weeks for Think Tank's full production of the show, which is going up as the featured mainstage in this year's festival! I love everything about Think Tank, and can't wait to see the show fully realized in the community where I was raised—and where the play itself takes place. The Amphibians runs August 22nd–25th at JCC On the Cohn Campus. You can find more info on showtimes, tickets, and the stellar production team here. I'll be down there all week, so if you're in the area, come on by and say hi. And be sure to check out the work from the other awesome playwrights in the festival, including Baylee Shlichtman (who I've written alongside at The Workshop Theater), Gwyneth Strope, and Larry Rinkel. See you soon, Florida!  I'm once again honored to be a Finalist in The Next Forever, a commission created by The Civilians and Princeton University's High Meadows Environmental Institute to create dramatic works that address the climate crisis. This time around, my collaborator Dina Vovsi and I applied with an expansion of River Watchers—the play we created last year with Jens Rasmussen on a moving, 14-person Langley canoe in Brooklyn's Newtown Creek. Our idea is to develop new site-specific plays on various waterways throughout the United States. With each script customized to address the water's unique history, struggles, and communities, we're calling the initiative The American Canoe Play Project. We're hoping to have some additional exciting news about it in the near future, so stay tuned! Big thanks to The Civilians for recognizing our work. They've quickly become one of my favorite companies in town and some of my favorite people to work with. And huge congratulations to this year's commission recipients, Kate Tarker and Kate Douglas, as well as the other Finalists and Semi-Finalists!  A couple big pieces of news for my play The Amphibians! First, the production at Sundown Collaborative Theatre in Denton, Texas, has been moved to July of 2025 due to unforeseen circumstances outside of the theatre company's control. They—and I!—very much look forward to bringing it to you next summer. Second, the show is getting a third production from Cypress Productions in Lexington, Kentucky! They did a truly bang-up job with my short play "A Seed," and I can't wait to see what they do with one of my full-lengths. The puppet design really is something else, as is the below poster created by Claire Thompson. It miiight be my favorite marketing image from any of my shows, ever. We run August 15th–17th at the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center. Click here for tickets. Big thanks to Joan and their team for treating my work with such care and ambition. And watch this space for some more amphibious news very soon...  I'm late on posting this, but tickets to The Civilians' staged reading of my play The Tusk Hunters are FREE and live on the company's website. You can reserve them using this form. We go up tomorrow, June 17th, at 7 p.m. at 520 8th Avenue (ART/NY's Leynse Studio on the third floor). This is the culmination of my time developing the play through The Civilians' 2023/2024 R&D Group. It's been a blast, and colossally helpful for the script's growth. I feel like I have a solid draft to keep sharpening as the play hopefully finds a home. Directed by Dina Vovsi, the reading features Pete Bradbury, Savidu Geevaratne, Michael Markham, Brooks Laney, and Evan Moore-Coll, with puppetry consultant Betsy Rosen. Also, be sure to check out the other R&D projects from my incredible colleagues, presented through the Findings Series. Hope to see you there!  For the past seven months or so, I've been working on my play The Tusk Hunters with The Civilians as part of their 2023/2024 R&D Group. They asked me to write an article about the script's development for their online journal, Extended Play, and the post just went live. You can check it out here. The journey to a coherent, completed draft of The Tusk Hunters has been a long one, so it felt good to look back on it and reflect how both my process and the script itself have changed. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the public reading of The Tusk Hunters during their Findings Series next month. Stay tuned for details on tickets, time, and location!  A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to travel to Ogden, Utah, for the world premiere of my play The Amphibians at Weber State University. The production exceeded my expectations in every way imaginable—the acting, production values, dramaturgical support, all of it. But equally as moving as the show itself was the students' passion for environmentalism, and how the themes of the show could extend to their rehearsal and production process. Everything—from the creature to the set to the costumes—was created through reused, upcycled, or in-stock materials, resulting in a zero-waste production that looked, sounded, and felt incredible. Megan Swann of The Signpost wrote a wonderful, informative article on the entire process, and you can also check out the online program for more info on all the amazing artists behind the show. Lastly, head on over to the The Amphibians' page on my website for a look at some of the production photos, captured by David Daniels of dav.d photography. Huge thanks to all the good people at Weber State for bringing my work to such vivid life. And there's more in store for The Amphibians this year, including its next production from Sundown Collaborative Theatre in Denton, Texas this July, and a few other things I can't talk about just yet. Hope to see you at the theater!  My play The Amphibians is enjoying its world premiere next week at Weber State University! The cast and crew have thrown their all into this show, and I couldn't be more excited to fly to Utah and see their work. dav.d photography took some really lovely publicity images for the play. The below one, in particular, really captures the energy and friendship between the characters of Bryn and Simone. Just as exciting, the Weber State premiere is a zero-waste production, which keeps with the play's examination of the climate crisis and how it might affect the emotional state of future generations. Read more about it in Weber State University's sustainability newsletter. Click here for tickets, and if you're in the Salt Lake City/Ogden area, come by and say hi! I'll be there opening night (Friday, February 23rd), with a talkback taking place afterward. Can't wait!  I'm so excited to announce that my play The Amphibians is getting its second production next year, this time in Denton, Texas with Sundown Collaborative Theatre! It's being directed by the wonderful Erin Malone Turner and will be part of the theatre's sweet 16th season in July. Stay tuned for specific dates, casting announcements, ticket details, and more. In the meantime, enjoy the killer teaser image that Sundown cooked up below!  |