Stage on the Page: Contemporary Plays and Productions

Through a blend of sketch, satire, avant-garde theatre and a dose of drag, “Ain’t no mo’” answers the incendiary question: what if the United States government offered Black Americans one-way plane tickets to Africa? This unpredictable comedy speeds through the turbulent skies of being Black in today’s America.

A raucous play journeying through big feelings, The Balusters is a modern-day satire about what happens when communities change faster than the people who reside in them.

While Valery fights to prove Ximena isn’t Cuban, Alia has given up fighting that she is Latine. As the women in this play discover the truth about themselves and each other, they also have to face the internal bias that allowed a white woman to be Cuban but didn’t allow a Belizean to call herself Latine.

This anthology, the first in a series of three, brings together three plays from the beginnings of Welsh playwriting in English.

A pair of queer Jewish lovers flees the fascism of WW II and finds resistance buried deep in their respective art forms. Using play-within-a-play and epic storytelling, real-life artists and life partners Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore take the audience through the dizzying romance of their early life together in Paris and then the fracturing of that life with the rise of Hitler and antisemitism during WW II.

This new play by writer, director, actor, and community builder Liliana Padilla explores the intersection of sex, community, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Padilla shows how learning self-defense becomes a channel for these college students’ rage, anxiety, confusion, trauma, and desire. The play examines what one wants, how to ask for it, and the ways rape culture threatens one’s body and sense of belonging.

Two extraordinary plays from a bright new talent in American theatre. Is God Is follows two twin sisters who undertake a dangerous journey to exact revenge upon their father at the behest of their ailing mother. What to Send Up When It Goes Down uses a series of vignettes made up of songs, soliloquies and dialogues that range from the satirical to the sorrowful in order to highlight anti-blackness in American society.

It’s 1970. Somewhere in Ohio, six women meet on a basement basketball court to form a consciousness-raising group, determined to shake up their lives and change the world. Fifty years later, one of their daughters tries to understand where things fell apart.

Written in Russian, this book by Yury Olshansky collects seven cycles of poems and three one-act plays focused on themes of birth, death, and humanity’s continual search for love, beauty, and harmony.

Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. Michael R. Jackson’s blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons – not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head – in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.

Baba Yaga is a legend, usually known as that elderly woman who lives alone in the woods and grinds the bones of the wicked. But what if she was actually a smart, modern woman operating off of morally ambiguous motives?

Part biography, part comic fantasy, Yellow Face is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Henry Hwang’s sendup of anti-Asian stereotypes and the traps he falls into searching for acceptance in a not-so-colorblind world.