MEET THE 21/22 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. We’re excited to introduce you to their work – click the links below to download their plays and click each writers’ photo to link to their website. This program is generously supported by The Barbara Bell Cumming Charitable Trust.

Calley N. Anderson is a Brooklyn-based playwright from Memphis, TN. Her work has been staged at several colleges and 10-minute play festivals around the country, including recent commissions by the Davidson College Theatre Department and the University of Memphis Department of Theatre and Dance. Anderson is currently a member of American Theatre Group PlayLab, Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program, a Fall 2022 MacDowell Residency recipient, and is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellows, Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group, and The Civilians R&D Group alum. Beyond her writing, Anderson was previously the Showrunner’s Assistant for Season 2 of One of Us Is Lying (Peacock) and is currently Program Manager at NY Writers Coalition. BA: Davidson College | MFA: New School for Drama. calleynanderson.com

Interlopers
Today should only be about one thing—Gwendolyn Tarver’s homegoing. But at 11:30am on a Saturday at Seventh Baptist Church, the Tarver family’s attention is fractured once her will is read.

The Story and the Teller
Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and social uprising, The Story and the Teller follows the resident acting company of a fictional Memphis theatre tasked with devising a play about the 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic and its effect on Memphis’s Black, white, and immigrant citizens. Challenging enough on its own, the process is marred by questions and disagreements about history, race, gender, safety and storytelling, issues that played out in both 1878 and 2020 in dizzying ways.

Alisha Espinosa is an Afro-Boricua storyteller and the Director of Education and Outreach for the Latinx Playwrights Circle. She is a 2022 Audrey Resident at New Georges and a recipient of an Artist Employment Grant through the Latinx Playwrights Circle. She was a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group (’21-22), in development at PACE University (The Archive), a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill 2021 NPC (The Language of the Unheard), and commissioned for the 48 Hours in El Bronx 2021 Digital Festival. A selection of her work can be found on the New Play Exchange Network. Select Acting Credits: A Skeptic & A Bruja (Urbanite), Seize the King (Classical Theatre of Harlem), Our Dear Dead Drug Lord (WP Theatre), Hamlet (Stage One), Shakespeare the Remix (Capital Rep), Much Ado About Nothing (KY Shakespeare). alishaespinosa.com | @la.espi | MFA UMKC

The Dirt is Fertile
New York City is the Schrodinger’s Cat of America: simultaneously the greatest and worst place in the world to live, a city of wealth or of poverty, of dirt or of concrete. The only way to know what it’s really like to live there is to be there–whether it’s Five Points in the 1890s, the Queensbridge Houses in the 1940s, or a BBQ restaurant in 2018. Open the city like a dollhouse and witness the ragged cycle for yourself. 

The Language of the Unheard
On the outskirts of a college town, Lucia and Liliana, two sisters, try to live together after Liliana is assaulted by a classmate. Xander Briggs, a local cop embroiled in recent incidents of police brutality, struggles with his responsibilities as an upholder of the law in these times. As she deals with Liliana’s nightly disappearances, Lucia and Xander confront each other on the ground where a boy was recently shot. Meanwhile Liliana has found a way to make her trauma useful, and no one’s prepared for what she has in mind.

Elijah Guo is a playwright/screenwriter, actor/musician and lover of unsung voices in history and literature. He is an alum of the ’21-22 Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers’ Group, winner of the American Conservatory Theater’s David Mamet Playwriting Contest, member of the Harvardwood Jeff Sagansky TV Writing cohort, finalist for the Emmys Screenwriting Fellowship, and attendee of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop. His work has been presented at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and American Repertory Theater. His play Then Time premiered at the Tank in 2019, and his play Beatrice has been produced at Skeleton Rep, CRASH Theater and Modern Voices. His TV pilot My Friend Will (about a reincarnated Shakespeare) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2018 and is in talks for development. Elijah trained as an English/Theater major at UC Berkeley and an MFA actor at Harvard. As an actor, he recurs on High Maintenance (HBO) and StartUp (Netflix) and has appeared in projects including Patriots Day (Lionsgate) and Law & Order: SVU (NBC). His guilty pleasure is definitely Gothic romance. elijahguo.com

sasha / SAPPHO
Sasha is having a rough time. Her wife is leaving, her songwriting career is struggling… and an ancient Greek chorus is following her on a divine mission to reclaim her reincarnated soul. Ugh!

Music & score for sasha / SAPPHO can be found here.

BEATRICE
Beatrice is just another badass girl who plays the flute. Except for the fact that she lives in 13th-century Italy and she’s being followed by this really annoying guy Dante who keeps writing poems about her. Loosely based on Beatrice Portinari, Dante’s “muse” and the figure at the center of Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, BEATRICE is a story of Heaven and Hell, love and loss, a woman ahead of her time, and the number three.

Renae Jarrett is a playwright living in Brooklyn. She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow and a recent graduate from UT Austin’s MFA Playwriting program. In addition to playwriting, she dabbles in arts criticism, gardening, and over-analyzing reality television.

thyme
Winona lures Daphne to live with her in the countryside. A series of disturbing instances and powerful invasions lead Daphne to imagine an escape, but as every possibility tarnishes, she finds herself running out of places to hide.

Jeana Scotti was born and raised in NY and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her plays have been performed at New Perspectives Theatre, Rutgers Mason Gross, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Tank, Theatre for a New City, and Access Theater. She was recently a member of the 2021 New Perspectives Women’s Work Short Play Lab. She is a lecturer at Purchase College and a teaching artist to little humans and bigger humans, helping them tell their own stories. She received her BA in Theatre and Performance from Purchase College and her MFA in Playwriting from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Mondays are for Lunch with the Girls
Four women meet on the first Monday of each month in the same diner, at the same time (when they’re on time) where they complain about the slow service, their dietary restrictions, the latest Real Housewives episodes, bad smelling tuna fish sandwiches, and their college sons’ sexual assault allegations.

The Possessed Girls of St. Mary’s
In 1969, thirteen year old Alex is about to make her Confirmation, but when strange things begin to happen to her body, she believes there can only be one obvious possibility, she’s possessed. This possession starts to spread to the other eighth grade girls and threatens to take over more than just their bodies. 

TyLie Shider Playwright and journalist TyLie Shider is a two-time recipient of the Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center (PWC) and an I Am Soul playwright in residence at the National Black Theatre (NBT). His recent plays include Labor (The Theater Project), Whittier (PWC) and The Gospel Woman (NBT). He holds a BA in Journalism from Delaware State University and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU. A proud member of the Dramatist Guild, he is currently a Professor of Playwriting at Augsburg University, and a staff writer for Minnesota Playlist.

I regret to inform you
When Rachel makes a risky career change, it rocks the world around her. But is there ever a right time to follow a dream?

Whittier
Whittier is a contemporary docudrama following a diverse community of neighbors quarantined in Whittier, Minn., days after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The play is inspired by the graffiti, lawn signs, and murals created in protest of Floyd’s murder. It is adapted from focus groups, interviews, and talks Shider conducted with neighbors, small business owners, and community leaders of faith during the 2020 uprisings in his neighborhood.

Mallory Jane Weiss is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her plays include Big Black Sunhats (The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference 2022; Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission finalist 2020), LIGHTS OUT AND AWAY WE GO (Clubbed Thumb reading June 2022), The Page Turners (The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference finalist 2021), Pony Up (Princess Grace Finalist 2019; SPACE on Ryder Farm semi-finalist 2020), Howl From Up High (in development with Gingold Theatrical Group), Evermore Unrest (Red Bull Short New Play Festival 2020), Dave and Julia are stuck in a tree (Playing on Air’s James Stevenson Prize 2020), and Losing You, Which Is Enough (workshop readings at The Lark and Cherry Lane Theatre). She is a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group (2021-2022), The COOP’s Clusterf**k vol. 2 (2021), Gingold Theatrical Group’s Speakers Corner (2018-2019), and Fresh Ground Pepper’s BRB Retreat (2019). Mallory earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. in playwriting from The New School. She currently works as a Senior Writer for Ethena, where she creates harassment-prevention training in the form of short-form articles, graphic novels, audio plays, and more.

LIGHTS OUT AND AWAY WE GO
Riya, Morgan, and Frites are the only women on the pit crew for Scuderia Pirandello’s Formula 1 racing team. Actually, they’re the only women in all of Formula 1… and it’s not quite how they imagined it.

Bailey Williams is writer of plays and fiction. Her most recent play I thought I would die but I didn’t (dir. Sarah Blush) was produced at The Tank in a New Georges supported production. It was a Time Out New York Critic’s Pick. Her previous play Buffalo Bailey’s Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other: a 90 Minute Timeshare Presentation premiered with the Exponential Festival in January 2018. It toured in August 2018 at The Brick in NYC, The Annex (Baltimore), and The Whole Shebang (PA). The entire show and additional material are available at buffalobaileysranch.biz. Bailey has developed work with Abrons Arts Center, Ars Nova, the Brick, Bushwick Starr, Cloud City, Curious Theatre, Dixon Place, La MaMa, the New Ohio Theater, The Tank, Williamstown Theatre Festival, University Settlement, Vital Joint and more. She has received residencies at Barn Arts, Drop Forge & Tool, and La MaMa Umbria. She is under commission by The Hearth Theater. She recently received a MacDowell Fellowship to work on her upcoming novel. Bailey has also written for a science and technology podcast (“Should This Exist?”) and a gay trivia show (“Hosting” on Scruff). BFA: NYU; MFA: Brooklyn College.

In the Basement
Dingus is disgusting. Her sister Teenie is perfect. Her boyfriend is Jard and Jard is Christian and Jard is also Dad. Mom is Dad too, if that clarifies things. Anyway, Dad and Mom talked and decided the basement is now an office. Don’t go into the basement. Seriously. Final warning.