Smile Lines

This groundbreaking and emotionally charged play immerses you in the fervor, intensity, determination, and selflessness of the Silent Sentinels protest at the White House in 1917. A century later, do we appreciate the sacrifices and convictions made by those brave individuals? SMILE LINES delves deep into the National Woman’s Party’s historic protests, connecting them to […]

The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin

During the Chinese Exclusion Act, Harry Chin, a Chinese national, entered the U.S. by buying forged documentation. Like other “Paper Sons,” Harry lived the rest of his life keeping secrets—even from his daughter. Told through the eyes of a middle-aged Chin, THE PAPER DREAMS OF HARRY CHIN reveals the complicated loves and regrets of this […]

295N

Six young Northern Virginia students find themselves thrust into a complex world, a world made of poetry, reenactments, the guiding words of Frederick Douglass, and the personal experiences of the students themselves. The heart of this complex world is the death of Freddie Gray, an event that forces each of these students to confront their […]

The Heart Sellers

Jane and Luna run into each other in the grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973 and discover they have much in common: they’re both 23, recent Asian immigrants, homesick and lonely with hardworking absentee husbands, and adjusting to a new country surprisingly filled with as much political uncertainty as the places they’ve left. Over a […]

An Eloquent Fugitive Slave Flees to Ireland

Inspired by his 1845 trip to Ireland. AN ELOQUENT FUGITIVE SLAVE FLEES TO IRELAND is a fictionized account of Frederick Douglass’ voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on the steamship Cambria. Exploring themes of racism, sexism, and freedom, AN ELOQUENT FUGITIVE SLAVE FLEES TO IRELAND uses dialogue sprinkled with rap to give enhanced contemporary resonance to […]

The Broken Machine

In this climate-chaos comic-tragedy, a burnt-out coder has become a hermit in the wilderness, nursing a broken arm and making lists from memory—of endangered species, moments of Lost Time, Incorrect States of Mind—in company with her only friend, a gray fox with a bad attitude. When wildfires approach, they flee through the wilderness to the […]

Four Children

Four teenagers who lived thru genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Sarajevo and the Holocaust tell their stories in the diaries they kept, curated to to convey the tragic similarities between them. Diary entries are read by the actors, accompanied by solo cello. Adapted from When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him (Cambodia), The Diary of Dawid […]

Endlings

On the Korean island of Man-Jae, three elderly haenyeos—sea women—spend their dying days diving into the ocean to harvest seafood. They have no heirs to their millennia-old way of life. Across the globe on the island of Manhattan, a Korean-Canadian playwright, twice an immigrant, spends her days wrestling with the expectation that she write “authentic” […]

Hold On!

HOLD ON! is about the struggle for democratic rights which took place in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The heart of the play is a complex struggle between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson set against thunderous, fast-moving events. Both brilliant leaders at the peak of their powers, their personal battle — like the battle […]

Quarter Rican

A young father in the playground, eleven-month-old baby in tow, engages another parent in the park in a conversation about neighborhoods, parenthood, and culture, processing some of his traumas and insecurities along the way as he tries to predict the factors that will shape his child’s Latinx identity. Meanwhile, his alter-ego, a swaggering hip hop […]

The Vagrant Trilogy

THE VAGRANT TRILOGY consists of three plays: The Hour of Feeling, The Vagrant, and Urge for Going. In part one, The Hour of Feeling, (1967) we meet Adham, a hot young scholar back from university in Cairo, readying himself to go to London to give a talk. He marries a girl from the village and […]

Two Degrees

Emma Phelps is a paleoclimatologist, focusing on ice in Greenland. In drilling and studying ice core samples, she sees first hand the symptoms of our changing planet, which makes the need to act all the more crucial and urgent. In addition, Emma, as a recent widow, experiences grief that compounds itself with each passing month. […]