It’s 1959 and the new musical West Side Story is a smash hit on Broadway. In their tiny family apartment in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, the young Candelaria siblings dream of glamorous careers in show business. When the opportunity arises for this talented Puerto Rican family to audition for roles in the film version of West Side Story itself, all their dreams seem poised to come true – until a neighborhood-wide eviction abruptly threatens everything they have worked for.
Genre: BIPOC
The Mole Hill Stories
Based on the work of award-winning children’s author Lois Ehlert, THE MOLE HILL STORIES takes you on a journey with Mole as she discovers, with the help of her friends, that there is more to life than one can see at first glance and that our dreams are within reach if we believe.
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 bottle of wine (or two) and a questionable frozen turkey, they dream of Disneyland, learning to drive, and an unknowable future as they share their hopes and fears in making a new home in a new reality.
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 a largely unknown page of Frederick Douglass’ life.
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” stories about her identity. But what, exactly, is her identity? And how can she write about it without selling her own skin?
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 jester named MC Plátano, comments on the action, fills in some of the blanks, and asks us some difficult questions.
The Boy Who Kissed The Sky
Set in the heart of Seattle’s Central District to the rhythms that shaped a generation, THE BOY WHO KISSED THE SKY, is inspired by the early life and influences of Seattle native and musical icon Jimi Hendrix. The early era of rock ‘n roll music sets the stage as a young Black boy conjures his creativity as a budding guitarist. Guided by the spirit of music itself, the boy learns to find harmony inside the challenging noises of his life. Told with vibrant music and daring imagination, this play inspires us to dream big when it matters most.
Zombie: The American
ZOMBIE: THE AMERICAN is a cross between Jacobean tragedy and Dr. Strangelove, a futuristic political satire set in the year 2063. Thom Valentine, the first openly-gay President of the United States, faces a host of problems: an imminent civil war, the threat of an African invasion, an adulterous First Gentleman, and zombies in the basement of the White House! With his power, his marriage, and the nation’s well-being at stake, he must decide what he cares most about saving … and at what cost.
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 takes her with him, and when war breaks out at home, the two near-strangers must decide what to do. The second play in the trilogy, The Vagrant, finds Adham and Abir nearly 20 years later (1982), divorced, him teaching at a humble college in London. Adham’s hopes for professorship are tested when both “homes”—England and Palestine—flare up with political violence, and the compartmentalization he’s built around himself in order to survive starts to crumble. The third play, Urge for Going, finds a completely different Adham and Abir, representing a different fork in the road taken back in 1967. We see them in a modern-day refugee camp in Lebanon, with a daughter (Jamila) determined to break out of the endless stasis of her family’s life.
12 Ophelias
In this play with broken songs, Shakespeare’s Ophelia rises out of the water dreaming of reclaiming her life. She finds herself in a neo-Elizabethan Appalachian setting where Gertrude runs a brothel, Hamlet is a Rude Boy and nothing is what it seems. In this mirrored world of word-scraps and cold sex, Ophelia cuts a new path for herself.