Portfolio of Plays
Below you will find synopses, publications & production histories, and downloads of the plays, along with any associated artworks or other materials.
Full-Length Plays
Most Seeming Virtuous Queen
Most Seeming Virtuous Queen is an adaptation of Hamlet in verse, focusing on the interactions we don’t get to see in Shakespeare’s text. It teases out the thread of the theory that Gertrude holds some responsibility for Ophelia’s downfall, and examines the tightening spiral of the enmeshed relationship that leads them there. As Hamlet plays strange and cruel tricks on her, Ophelia is left to put all her trust in Gertrude, under whose guidance Ophelia is led to a tragic end, witnessed by no one but Gertrude herself.
I fancy myself ‘Shakespeare’s Sister.’ This just-barely-modernized Early Modern play is the feminist take on Hamlet you’ve always wanted, that cannot help but make a vexation of feminism in its taking.
Most Seeming Virtuous Queen received one virtual developmental reading with the Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre.
Robin’s Egg
Read a sample of Robin’s Egg on
In little houses on little streets, normal people go about their little lives. A husband looks for his wife; a wife looks for her self; a girl looks for her home; a woman looks for her purpose. All the while, nestled amongst her computers, a scientist finds an answer, and gifts the little world a solution to a problem that not everyone has, a variable that not everyone wanted varied. At once, each person must contend with the new technology shaking their sleepy world — the voluntary element to life, the choice in whether to have ever existed. The little, vasty dramas of the people’s everyday lives forge on as best they can, infiltrated and overshadowed by the weighty knowledge each soul carries of the choice awaiting them, if only they should choose to take it.
Robin’s Egg is my first “full-length” full-length, all grown up and requiring an intermission. It slides the spectrum from prose to poetry, from farce to tragedy, and stops to smell the roses in between.
Robin’s Egg was slated for South Camden Theatre Company’s New Play Reading Series; the reading was postponed due to inclement weather in January 2025.
Cardinal Directions
or: Elevations
Read Cardinal Directions on
Sixteen students, each belonging to a certain artistic major at their high school for the arts, embark on a voluntary field trip to an enigmatic modern art museum during the apex of their senior spring semester. Desperate to have a meaningful artistic experience, the teens (and one precocious tween) contend with their conceptions of what makes for a proper artwork, artist, and person. These casual acquaintances converge by chosen circumstance to forge new connections and perspectives, becoming irrevocably bonded over the course of one fateful, unassuming day.
This play arose out of a setting based on a satirical modern art museum I created in Minecraft during quarantine. Please enjoy a few screen captures of the original museum below.
!["Slime Staircase ([structural] integrity is a lie)"](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62081f05b35a6d2789317e68/87399e7b-04d2-4f54-8c37-748dcbba72ef/slime.JPG)
Beauteous Ganymede
Read Beauteous Ganymede on New Play Exchange
Read the Russian translation of ten selected scenes of Beauteous Ganymede on the online literary journal Literratura
Watch the staged reading at the Independent International Award for Improper Dramaturgy here
A play in stage directions, Beauteous Ganymede features zero human characters and no recognizable human language whatsoever. This evening of theatre comprises a series of vignette scenes and interludes, utilizing puppetry, scenery, projections, sound and music, and more to tell stories and craft moments.
Beauteous Ganymede was developed in independent study tutorial with Anne Washburn, growing out of the most vasty and minute of prompts, and in symbiosis with with an ever-expanding surreal collage project.
Beauteous Ganymede tied for first place at the Independent International Award for Improper Dramaturgy 2021, honoring “a play that no one will ever agree to stage.” Ten of its scenes were translated into Russian and given a staged reading in Norilsk, Russia. A few stills from that reading can be found below (note the projections).
Zack & the Beans
Read Zack and the Beans on
When Zack is presented with a handful of beans, there ought only to be one thing to do with them. However, Zack cannot for the life of him figure out what that is. In a familiar nursery tale entrusted to the wrong character, nothing can go right no matter how hard it may try, unless Zack can discover his destiny in time.
The play that granted me admission to Brooklyn College’s MFA playwriting program, Erin Courtney reported that the script had she and Mac Wellman “howling” with laughter. But the most important question remains… do you see the beans?
That Pretty Story
Read That Pretty Story on New Play Exchange
A reclusive female artist strives endlessly to depict a perfect yet abstract feminine form, when just such a seemingly perfect young woman arrives in the flesh. The resulting bond between artist and muse evolves into a tumultuous wrestling over the nature of beauty and perception - and, ultimately, whether freedom and agency will ever be attainable for these two women, within the walls of the studio or in the world beyond.
That Pretty Story is a play about bodies, self-image, dysmorphia, power imbalance, ageism, sexism, perfectionism, and art. It is not in prose.
The play was slated to be read at Brooklyn College in April 2020; the reading was cancelled, and the play has no production history at this time.
Gooseberry Jam
or: the Bake Off Bake-Off
Read Gooseberry Jam on New Play Exchange
The animals are gone from the city, and down in the streets, roving packs of humans seek nobly to fill the roles of the lost species, if only they could remember what animals were. Meanwhile, safe inside her high-rise tower, Dr. leads a self-sufficient life amongst the rituals of her kitchen, when the "animals" begin knocking at her windowpane. In the post-civilization city, how can anyone survive daily existence, connect across species, and most importantly of all, how do we remember what we have lost?
Gooseberry Jam was written as an exercise in crowd-sourced bake-off ingredients.
It received one staged reading at Brooklyn College in early March 2020.
The Wingèd Ones
Read The Wingèd Ones on New Play Exchange
On an otherworldly island where no one comes and no one goes, the rain has not ceased for ten years. With the seas rising and the skies falling, the last remaining residents are ready to say their goodbyes — until one legendary visitor arrives and twists their fates irrevocably. In this verse drama, numerous poetic and dramatic influences converge to form a new tale of tragedy and triumph.
The Wingèd Ones intertwines the art forms of theatre and live storytelling, the stories of The Tempest and Pericles and more, to form an exploration of numerous styles of verse, and explore the questions of who we turn to and who we become, when there is nothing to be done and no one to save us. It was my first just-because play, after which I briefly believed that I had gotten verse out of my system. (I was wrong.)
As a ten-minute version of its future full-length self, The Wingèd Ones received a staged reading with the student theatre group Wig & Candle at Connecticut College in 2016.
One-Act Plays
Gray Play
Read Gray Play on New Play Exchange
This play contains only one speaking character. Their name is Tomcat. Tomcat speaks only four times, in soliloquy. You can find Tomcat’s third soliloquy in Smith & Kraus’s collection, WE/US: Monologues for the Gender Minority.
A bazaar
A circus of perception
The human tragedy
A symphony of loneliness
A life drawing
A piece of realism
A tuesday
Though Gray Play cannot qualify as a full-length play based solely upon its number of pages, I view it, and others in this category, as a complete theatrical experience or “evening of theatre.”
This is a play about isolation that was written days before the pandemic. We have always been lonely.
Because I am also a zine artist, my MFA class asked me to make a zine to accompany the play. The result can be seen below.
Call on the Rotary Next Time
Read Call on the Rotary Next Time on New Play Exchange
Somewhere in this universe or another, a professional pen pal keeps busy at his typing, stone-chiseling, and smoke-signaling, while mourning the disappearance of his dearest and only friend. When the mythical Mailman arrives, the order of reality is turned on its head. In this impossible play, the nature of love, relationships, communication, and physics are called into question; but most importantly — where's Thchrachveldtz?
Though this unwieldy play nearly trips over its own bells and whistles, Call on the Rotary Next Time is, fundamentally, a story about the deep love and longing that stem from true companionship.
This play was a finalist for the Independent International Award for Improper Dramaturgy in 2020. It previously received one staged reading at the Connecticut College New Playwrights Festival.
The Ace Ish:
An LGBTQIAce Revue
Read The Ace Ish on New Play Exchange
Read The Ace Ish on the Reminder Plays Project Queer Plays Database (and check out their other offerings while you’re there)
An exploration of one person's experience of asexuality, told through seven voices. As the characters perform poetry and burlesque, attend a rave, battle through conflicting ideologies, and confess their deepest secrets, we gain a collaged portrait of an asexual individual.
The Ace Ish was, quite literally, adapted from The Ace Issue of a zine I had made, as well as other collage work. Using passages of verbatim text from the zine, as well as original scenes written for the stage, The Ace Ish is a play by and for asexual people. It was, and is, featured by the Reminder Plays Project as a queer play by a queer playwright (but now exists in an updated and expanded version on NPX).
Please enjoy a few pages of the original zine below.
every second HALF THE TIME.
Read every second HALF THE TIME. on New Play Exchange
In the Sadlands desert, under the gaze of a silent god, four lovers are trapped within their own drama, unable to leave unless they break free of their heartache - and their keepers are not immune either. Described as No Exit meets Beckett meets Midsummer meets Caryl Churchill meets Life is a Dream, as painted by Dali and written by Moliere, this short evening of theatre has only one rule: Don't sink.
This is an example of a one-act play that can serve as a full theatrical experience unto itself. In case you are curious, the descriptions and comparisons listed in the above synopsis are those that have been voiced to me repeatedly and independently, so I decided to make them canon.
This play was written based on a collage project which I had previously completed, which can be seen below.
Happy Enough
In the Archive, the Archivist and the Robot work tirelessly and contentedly at their job of receiving and cataloguing all of the things. Living in one room, processing the remnants of everyone else's lives, sifting through their detritus and reminiscences, the Archivist and Robot do their best to pluck out moments of meaning for themselves. When human and robot begin to share stories and memories from their own pasts, the two are able to catch a glimmer of what their futures might be — if ever they can find it within themselves to leave the Archive behind.
Read Happy Enough on New Play Exchange
This play was originally written as part of an octology, entitled "The Complete and Indisputably Correct and Nice Summation of All Things,” of which it was the seventh, and penultimate, piece.
So Be It
Read So Be It on New Play Exchange
On a small planet that has built up over time out of Earth's detritus, humans of different ages must cope with a world that is at once nascent and dying. Status and societal positions dissolve as the inhabitants learn from each other and a new social order emerges out of the dust.
This environmentalist play draws heavily on The Little Prince to create a post-Earth world in which every discovery is new again, and hope is not impossible.
So Be It was shortlisted by Talos Theatre Festival for their Hopepunk Scratch: A Night of Hopeful Theatre new play festival in 2019. It received one staged reading at Connecticut College’s New Playwright’s Festival.
Ten Minute Plays
Bestest Bitches Till We Die
Read Bestest Bitches Till we Die on New Play Exchange
Two young women get together to rekindle their relationship as frenemies and besties, but each arrives with an agenda — and a gift that is not what it seems. When unrequited love meets long-hidden betrayal, and truth serum meets love potion, the night boils over to become an entirely different beast. In this verse drama, can the women's relationship survive the unsurvivable?
This play was written for the 2022 Short New Play Festival at Red Bull Theater. The theme was “alchemy,” the style was “heightened language and/or classically inspired,” and the result was Bestest Bitches.
Not Nothing
On a street, on a sidewalk, stands a sign. By that sign, stand two men. One a writer, one a curious disciple, the two bond over their reactions to the sign above, a call for memorial donations in lieu of flowers. Once they begin to talk, they discover the things that they can learn and teach, barter and trade, & share and give with one another. Though the city and its people move past and move on, these two unassuming men foster an unwitting friendship that spans minutes and lifetimes.
Read Not Nothing on New Play Exchange
This play was originally written as part of an octology entitled "The Complete and Indisputably Correct and Nice Summation of All Things.” Some of the writing advice contained within it is even good.
The Apple Corps
Read The Apple Corps on New Play Exchange
In a wannabe-military operation that polices the nutrition of school cafeteria food, a rogue clue leads to new mutiny with an old rival and former ally. Can the Corps regain their authority and their craisins? You'll just have to read and find out.
The Apple Corps is a rapidfire farce based on an overheard conversation between school district cafeteria administrators and spun wildly out of hand. This was my first play, written when I was seventeen.
It received a staged reading with Wig & Candle in 2016, and was a finalist for the Emerging Playwrights Festival at Phillips Mill in 2018.
a healer of birds
Read a healer of birds on New Play Exchange
They need healing. He's a healer. But what are their ailments, and can they be cured? What is healing, what is medicine, what suffering and relief is real and what imagined, and how can we discern the difference?
A healer of birds is Beckettian play, exploring questions of nebulous melancholies, affirmations and denials of such complaints by healers, and whether prescribed antidotes are arbitrary or miraculous.
Wild, Magic Solitude
Read Wild, Magic Solitude on New Play Exchange
Oscar Wilde was a writer and the champion of the Aesthetic movement in the 1800s when he was suddenly convicted of indecency and homosexual conduct. While his work played every night at the Theatre Royal, he found himself trapped in jail. This play is an exploration and a reimagination of that moment, posing the question of what must happen when an irrepressable artist is kept captive.
Wild, Magic Solitude is a fictitious imagining of a glimpse of his factual jailed experience, consisting of an allegory between Oscar, the sultry fairy who is the magic of his artistry, and the poor orphan boy who is the powerlessness of his imprisoned solitude.
This play was named a finalist at Cultural DC’s Source Festival in 2017.
Didi and the Poet
Read Didi and the Poet on New Play Exchange
Watch the recorded performance of Didi and the Poet, as staged by the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, here.
A poet is left to their own devices to carve out a space in the empty world — until the love of their life returns, breaking apart the structural illusions of the world on which they had been operating. In this play, poesy meets absurdism by the side of the road, and neither will ever be the same.
Didi and the Poet is a tribute to Waiting for Godot, intertwining verse with prose and companionate friendship with romantic love.
The play was performed as a staged reading in the Allentown Art Museum, by Allentown Public Theatre, in 2017. It was produced by the Philadelphia Dramatists Center as part of the ten-minute play festival “Nowhere / Now Here” for Philly Theatre Week 2022. Photographs of that performance can be seen below.
Unless You Remember
(originally titled “Falling Upward”)
Read Unless You Remember on New Play Exchange
“Falling Upward” (Unless You Remember) performed at PDC’s Guaranteed Overnight Theatre by playwrights Marjorie Bicknell and Dina Issakova, a few of whose ad-libbed lines made it into the final script.
Rest in peace, Marjorie. You will be remembered.
Alcesta and Ambrosine are sisters, either by birth or because they have been isolated for so long that they have forgotten that they began as anything else. While they wander for years through a decrepit labyrinthine estate, this play provides a glimpse of their struggle to maintain a grasp on the realities of their past and the world beyond. Are their recollections real, or has their isolation consumed all hope of holding onto their memories of life outside the walls?
Written the day after a visit to a Victorian estate, this playful, haunting, unhinged human dollhouse is home to the most delicious of imaginative games and stories, but the sisters cannot forget themselves — remember themselves? — forever.
Unless You Remember was originally titled “Falling Upward,” written for the Philadelphia Dramatists Center’s 24-hour Guaranteed Overnight Theatre event, where it was performed in August 2021.
)Lunalae(
Read )Lunalae( on New Play Exchange
A lone woman reads and seeks to write, drawing upon the musings of Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley in the hopes of building and fulfilling a room of her own. Dreams and nightmares infiltrate her space, and through them, the woman forges and flexes the wings she has been waiting for.
A play in which a woman builds herself her dreams from the ground up and ascends before our eyes.
This play was placed on a “very short” shortlist for Everyday Inferno’s “If On a Winter's Night…” festival in 2018.
Hide and Jo Seek
Read Hide and Jo Seek on New Play Exchange
Two strangers with the same name meet briefly in the woods. One innocent hiker, one enigmatic fugitive — is something sinister afoot, or could they just be joeshing around?
A jovial exercise in silliness, this play was written for Wig & Candle’s 24-hour Plays in a Day festival, where it was performed in 2018.
Short Plays & Microplays
Patience is for Poltoons !! : A Play-ful Poem-ful Performance Piece
Read Patience is for Poltoons !! on New Play Exchange,
or watch the playwright’s performance here.
“Patience is for Poltoons !!: a Play-ful Poem-ful Performance Piece” is an embrace of the arbitrary nature of syllables and sentiments; of signs, signifiers and signifieds; of technicalities and traitorous truths. The piece draws upon archaic words and contemporary echoes in a mad dash toward a conclusion, any conclusion, that might result from such exploration. It is the ultimate exercise in existentialism, and its success is dependent on our faith in the exercise itself.
Is it a metaphor? No. Perhaps, if it must be, but it musn’t.
Patience is for Poltoons !! is a manic seven-minute monologue of freely associated words, sounds, and sentences, starring a character called the Sad Little Mad Little Man.
It was debuted live by the playwright on Volume 11 of the virtual microfestival Out of an Abundance of Caution in 2020. A few stills of that performance can be seen below.
The Home Gardening Network
Scarlett vacuums in a vacuum. She gardens in a garden. She lives in a living room. All the while, she pitches us the deeply, unsettlingly true reasons as to why we should do as she says: buy telephones for the dead, give potted flowers to the living, plant gardens that can be seen from space, and more. Tune in to Scarlett's segment on the Home Gardening Network today. You may never be the same.
Read The Home Gardening Network on
This play was originally written as part of an octology entitled "The Complete and Indisputably Correct and Nice Summation of All Things,” of which it was the opening piece. (That ought to let you know how authoritative Scarlett is. You should listen to her.)
Hello TODAY !
Read Hello TODAY! on New Play Exchange
A short play in ironic housewifery, in which two women show us how it's done, in the style of a 1950s instructional video.
Over the course of five pages, two housewives at the end of their ropes try to demonstrate the instructions of the male voiceover artist, but there’s only so long that can last.
The play was adapted from a collage project, a few closeup photos of which can be seen below.
Cohabitation
Read Cohabitation on New Play Exchange
When an unwanted inhabitant invades the home Mel shares with her partner Dee, her sense of comfort and ownership in her space is forever overthrown. Where did the interloper come from? Is it the only one? Will Mel ever be safe in her own house again? Was she ever? A short, creepy play written in Halloween season, vibing with the tradition of the Yellow Wallpaper.
This play runs under ten minutes, though precise running time will be determined once staged. A play about perception, and whether or not we can trust our own minds and senses.
The Honor System
Read The Honor System on New Play Exchange
We wait for the time to arrive, and then it does.
A one-page voiceover play.
A climax worth waiting for.
Eyes & Lashes
Read Eyes and Lashes on New Play Exchange
Order must be maintained - after all, everyone is watching.
A silent one-page play.
A peer pressure cooker.
NOBODY BREATHE
Read NOBODY BREATHE on New Play Exchange
Go on, go to the supermarket. It's probably fine. I swear.
Go on. People who run errands usually return.
A nonverbal short play written for the Quarantine Playwriting Bake Off.
Last
Read Last on New Play Exchange
Two old friends discuss the concept of Earth's last words, as one tries their hand at writing them.
A microplay containing a microsonnet.
A #1MPF Coronavirus Play Project creation.
U Good?
Read U Good? on New Play Exchange
A new iMessage sonnet saga microinstaclosetdrama.
A visual written piece in text messages, exploring the tension and necessity of staying in touch without touching.
Written for @contagious_closet_dramas on Instagram.
