THE 24/25 EARLY-CAREER WRITERS’ GROUP

Each year we gather eight playwrights over the course of a season to develop work, commune with each other and meet various industry professionals, culminating in a reading series during Summerworks. We’re pleased to introduce you to the writers from the past season and their work. Click the titles to download their scripts. This program is generously supported by The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation and The Barbara Bell Cumming Charitable Trust.

Bradley Cherna is a New York City-based playwright originally from South Florida. Bradley’s playwriting includes All these Activists (commissioned by The Public Theater and developed with Waterwell);  The Plague Plays: Notes from a Pandemic in Progress (published in At the Intersection of Disability and Drama: A Critical Anthology of New Plays); The Ländler (Linnell Festival of New Plays); The Forest of Without (The Drama League DirectorFest); The Scrap Paper Players (Columbia University); The Mixed-Up Letters of Jamie & Claude (Ugly Rhino Productions); and Eggshells on my Back and other fairy tales (inaugural Florida Players New Works Festival at the University of Florida). Bradley is a lab artist in the inaugural AJT New Plays Lab. Bradley works as a director, dramaturg, and producer of projects on pages, stages, and screens. MFA in Playwriting: Columbia University.

Hillary Gao is an NY based multidisciplinary creator, writer, director, scholar, and sometimes performer. She has shown work as at The Brick (Babies on the Street 2024, would you set the table if I asked you to? 2023), Exponential Festival (A Lamb with Spot and Blemish as a part of SalON!), ?! Works, The Tank, IRT Theater, pinkFROG Cafe, and SFPC/CultureHub. She is a part of staffpicks (staffpicks.fun), and is currently in the Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writer’s Group and Theater MITU’s Hybrid Arts Lab.

I want to hold onto something beautiful and empty
[Read this in an “ASMR” voice] Hello. Hellooo, Hello…… and welcome. To your safe. Space. Tonight I’m going to be helping you fall asleep. So relax, and decompress. Close your eyes for me. I’m going to play a few sounds, some things you might enjoy hearing. Some things about an office, about a tennis court, about a grandmother. How exciting. To prepare, think about how it might feel to you. Maybe it’ll feel like a recurring dream. Or a prophetic nightmare. Maybe it’ll feel cold and severe but also cocooned and warm. Maybe it’ll feel like an empty pool. Maybe it’ll feel like a day spent in a Korean spa – where the lights are so relaxing that you lose a sense of time and space. Maybe it’ll feel like right now, accumulated, and seeking history. Maybe it’ll feel like 10 hours of pretty girls trying to do a youtube makeup tutorial. Maybe it’ll feel like time is rubber. Take a deep breath. Feel free to fall asleep. Anything is possible, in this office.

Amanda Horowitz is an interdisciplinary artist working between visual art and theater. She writes and directs performance using experimental and collaborative methods. Recent projects include Bad Stars (Collapsable Hole, Prelude Festival, STARS, 2023–2025), Heavenly Fools (Mason Gross Playwrights Festival, 2023), Bad Water True West (Bad Water Gallery, 2022), Suddenly, This Summer (PAM, 2019), The Plumbing Tree (by Medium Judith, Highways Performance Space and Human Resources LA, 2018/19). She was co-founder and director of Medium Judith (2013–2019), a theater collaboration with Bully Fae Collins. Amanda holds a dual MFA in Visual Art and Playwriting from Rutgers University.

Fashion
It moves like a performance that doesn’t want to end — fractured, seductive, rehearsed, yet unpredictable. The room feels communal, but no one’s speaking. The language is acrobatic, theatrical, half-dreaming and wide-awake — spoken from the 88th floor or maybe the back row of a community theater. There’s shame in the monologue, shamelessness in the text, and something sacred in the way the body tries to hold both. It keeps asking what we owe each other, what we want, and whether it’s okay to want anything at all. It turns over tired phrases to reveal the soft underbelly beneath: “It’s not collapsing, it’s eclipsing.” It flirts with connection but doesn’t insist on resolution. There’s one shared brain, but only one person can use it at a time.

Chad Kaydo is a queer playwright from Ashtabula, Ohio, who writes intimately observed plays obsessed with friendship, mortality, and the existential questions hidden in the quotidian. Recently: I’m Repeating Myself at the Brick, directed by Carsen Joenk, Clubbed Thumb 2024-2025 Early Career Writers’ Group, 2025 Great Plains Theatre Commons. Upcoming: Developing Where Is Miss Stone? with Clubbed Thumb. Chad’s work has also been supported by Fresh Ground Pepper, Playhouse on Park, the Quickening Room, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Theater Masters. As Playwright in Residence at the Brick, Chad produces and hosts Quick + Dirty, a development series for short works by new collaborators. One-fifth of the theater collective The Omnivores. M.F.A., Hunter College.

#s
#’s is an existential office comedy (with math) about a group of coworkers who must rate their colleagues (and themselves) with numbers from 1 to 12 by EOD. As they struggle to define a scale that keeps changing—testing their friendships, their egos, and their patience—how will they hold on to the jobs they hate?

Anike Sonuga: Born in the Bay, brought up in Baltimore, now based in Brooklyn. Anike is a writer, actor, director, and anything else she ends up doing. She graduated from NYU Tisch’s Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, where she directed numerous shows at Playwrights Downtown (así, alone in my room,  a very special episode). Her writing has been featured at The Brick (god and all her children 2023), The Tank (girls! girls! girls!, god and all her children 2025), and the inaugural RE/VENUE festival at the Paradise Factory (god and all her children 2024). (also, it’s pronounced uh-nee-kay sho-noo-gah)

Liahona
Welcome to Camp Liahona, an LDS Girls’ Camp! Sweat, hormones, discharge secreting through the landscape. Teenage girls learning about rules in a world that isn’t really built for their actual desires. Its world is full of rules and people who seem to choose which rules to follow, and when to hide or reveal which rules they follow. Leaders with no followers, followers with no leaders. There’s a sinister presence behind the singing, the stickers, the fun—is it God? Who’s going to betray who? Who wants to kiss who? Who wants in, who wants out?

Eliana Theologides Rodriguez is a writer and dancer whose plays include Indian Princesses (2025 World Premiere at La Jolla Playhouse; 2026 Co-Production with Atlantic Theater Company, Rattlestick Theater, and the Terrence McNally Foundation), Poor Queenie (2025 World Premiere at Subtext Studio), Marble Rooftop (2024 O’Neill NPC Finalist), and Angels Just Like You (Clubbed Thumb Summerworks Reading! :). Eliana is a current member of EST Youngblood and a proud alum of the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship and the Terrence McNally New Works Incubator. She is currently under commission at South Coast Repertory. www.elianatheologidesrodriguez.com

Angels Just Like You
Delilah hosts a beach vacation for her three best friends at her sugar daddy’s beach house in upstate New York. As objects appear out of nowhere, doors latch themselves shut, and the lines between reality and their subconscious blur, the girls are left wondering how they got there, who they can trust, and whether they can ever go home.

Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke is a Sri Lankan playwright, actor and director. Notable works include Paraya, Only Soldiers and, The One Who Loves You So, for which he received the Gratiaen Prize for Literature. He received the Judith Champion Launch Commission from the Atlantic Theatre for his play The House is Burning, he is a member of the Clubbed Thumb Emerging Writers Group and the Page 73 Writers Group. His play The Present was performed at the Roundabout Underground Readings Series, he received the John Golden Playwriting Prize from NYU Tisch School of Arts. His work focuses primarily on queerness, class and our relationships to national histories. ​

Hide
Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. I woke. What beasthood skin he made me take? When Umair and Ben host a cocktail party for their closest friends, Umair is thrown for a loop by the presence of a new plus one, Amandha, and the frisson between two very different types of migrant leads the night into absurdist, psychological terror. Drives, urges, and confusion – the libidinal, bodily process of forgetting and consuming—lead to a deliberate and violent hollowing out. Curiously squishy and then suddenly jagged with restrained rage veining out from under the surface, it is swimming in shame. A play about skin-suits, gay guys in bk, and immigration as a transformative act.

Seayoung (SHEE-young) Yim is an NYC-based writer and educator originally from Seattle. She is the winner of the Dramatist Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, Yale Drama Series Prize, and People’s Choice Award for Outstanding New Play at The Gregory Awards. She was selected for the Kilroys Web, a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, second place for the Kennedy Center’s ACTF Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award, and a semi-finalist for The Relentless Award. She is currently a resident with Colt Coeur and a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. She has received the Sewanee Writers’ Conference Playwriting Fellowship, a Hedgebrook residency, and the Stephen Sondheim Graduate Fellowship in Theater Arts. Seayoung‘s commissions include the Powers Playwriting Fellowship at the Old Globe, the Woolly Mammoth x Black List Playwriting Commission, and a commission with The Public Theater + CTG. Seayoung has worked with Ma-Yi Writers Lab, Theatre Battery, The Brown Arts Initiative, UW School of Drama, SIS Productions, and Pork Filled Productions. She taught Playwriting and Screenwriting at Brown University and Playwriting at RISD.

Lloyd/Llwyd
Marge and Millie’s lives revolve around the mall past its prime, landing at a dead end. They wonder how they let themselves get abandoned here. Lloyd and Llwyd turn up to disrupt their reality and reveal that everyone is honest, but no one is telling the truth. Can we fix things by shopping? Is this meat real? Why do we want all these things? Will anyone ever save us? How about a trip to Paris? God, is that you? Or is it a coupon for a new life? Lloyd/Llwyd loop in a playful agony while scratching all your secret itches.