Press Room - 2024 New Works Festival
2024 New Works Festival: New Voices, New Narratives
Original Plays written and directed by the 2023-2024 Incubator/Mentor Cohort
Press Releases
April 27, 2024 - The Shattered Glass Project Presents the 2024 New Works Festival With Four World-Premiere Plays
The Plays
The Uterine Files: Episode One, Voices Spitting Out the Rainbow
written by Jourdan Imani Keith | directed by Rebecca O’Neil
Note from the Playwright
Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s play, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf and the paranormal government conspiracy of The X-Files. In September 2001, I spent 5 weeks at Hedgebrook writing residency on Whidbey Island using my research on slave narratives from the collection at the Schomburg library in New York in the development of this play. I originally conceived this work as a one woman play, or choreopoem, with this stated purpose: To explore the connections between the stories our bodies tell through us and our histories as women.
The desire to create The Uterine Files Trilogy grew from my experience of being diagnosed with uterine fibroid, the subsequent recommendation for surgery and my journey to Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Africa two years later. I found out that fibroid tumors are present in 40% of American women and that 40% of women in America are sexual abuse survivors. “Fibroids are the number one reason for hysterectomy in this country. Fibroids are three to nine times more common in Black women than Caucasians,” according to Christine Northrop, MD, the author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom. The mathematics of these facts and the disproportionate effect of hysterectomies is staggering.
Episode One celebrates our lives as poetry even in the midst of harm. This is part one of an Afrofuturistic trilogy beginning in 1863.
Note from the Director
The Uterine Files: Episode 1, Voices Spitting Out the Rainbow brings to the stage a generational conversation about love, language, and the embodiment of centuries, days and minutes of trauma. It is a play about the silencing of Black women, about the silencing of their tongues, and the theft of their bodily autonomy, especially their agency and choices about when and why and with whom they have children and build lives and relationships. It represents the sharing of stories in both safe and dangerous spaces, with the people who love us and with people who are either indifferent, ignorant, or both.
Directing this play has been a joyous and challenging experience. As a white woman I have had the privilege and opportunity to learn about the relationships that Black women have with their ancestors, their families, and the world around them. The Uterine Files, Episode 1 is filled with the trauma enacted on Black women by the people who oppress them, but it is also filled with joy, humor, healing and exquisitely lyrical poetry. Working together with two fabulous and talented Black women theatre artists, actor Ziara Greathouse and playwright Jourdan Imani Keith, we have found love in heartbreak and have overcome all obstacles to bring this version of The Uterine Files to the stage. I am immensely grateful to both of them for sharing their wisdom and lived experience with me.
Publicity Photos
Cast and Creative Team
Carmilla
written by Mariah Lee Squires and S.W. Jones | directed by Aidyn Stevens
Note from the Playwrights
Our first encounter with the vampire Carmilla was in a small bookshop on an October morning; S.W. went in to find something sufficiently chilling to read for the time of year, and there she was. A shimmering crimson cover of a girl, next to a handwritten sign proclaiming it a vampire novella 25 years older than Brahm Stoker’s Dracula.
Vampire tales penetrate throughout our culture- Dracula, Nosferatu, Sesame Street, the list goes on, but we were surprised not to have previously encountered Carmilla. Here is a queer coming-of-age story, funny and frightening in turns, that still seems alive even now that the book is as old as Carmilla herself at 150 years since publication.
This play is not the novella- too much of a departure to call an “adaptation,” yet too close to be “inspired by,” so we offer what you experience today as a story “based on” the Victorian romance. It has taken on a life of its own now that the subtext between Carmilla and Laura is allowed to thrive. We have loved workshopping this campy, sapphic horror play with The Shattered Glass Project, and cannot wait to find a home for the full, 90-minute script. Laugh, scream, and enjoy this phantasmagoria of fear.
Note from the Director
Horror as a genre has often been used to explore stories of queerness. Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla is no exception to this. The Gothic novel from 1872 was an epistolary account from a young girl named Laura filled with metacommentary about her world. In Mariah Lee Squires and S.W. Jones’ play inspired by Le Fanu’s story they turn the metacommentary fully queer through camp comedy.
For you watching, Laura’s and Carmilla’s relationship will refuse to be veiled. Their discovery of each other is deeply queer and yet the world around them finds every excuse to ignore it. Not only is the truth of their relationship overlooked but a complex and sinister monster goes unseen. All the while, with each colorful character, joy and horror are revealed.
Thank you audience for letting Carmilla into your world. While you watch, I invite you to consider what happens when obsession turns into love?
Publicity Photos
Cast and Creative Team
On the Train
written by Lisa A. Price | directed by Christie Zhao
Note from the Playwright
On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent, overruling Roe v. Wade.
The results of these restrictions will disproportionately affect low-income people of color, immigrants, and non-English speakers, and have the potential to exacerbate already existing racial inequities in maternal and neonatal outcomes. The United States is facing a Black maternal health crisis where Black birthing people are more than twice to three times as likely to experience maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity compared to White birthing people. Historical legacies of institutionalized racism and bias in medicine compound this problem.
According to the CDC, Black women are over three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication than white women are. And in some parts of the country, this disparity is frighteningly worse. A report by the District of Columbia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, for instance, found that Black people accounted for 90% of pregnancy-related deaths in DC, despite constituting only half of all births there. On top of this Black women are also at higher risk for pregnancy complications and postpartum issues, such as pre-eclampsia and eclampsia. These disparities are race based and not affected by class.
The Trump campaign ushered in what is called ‘The Trump Effect: rhetoric encouraging open prejudice and bias particularly by political elite. The effect resulted in a decrease of constraint by the general public to express prejudice. Thus those holding those prejudices were emboldened to not only express them but also to act upon them.
This is unacceptable.
Publicity Photos
Note from the Director
When Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, I found myself bewildered. As a Chinese immigrant who has lived in Seattle for six years, I initially couldn't grasp how unelected judges, appointed for life, could profoundly alter the lives of so many across the United States. The image of America broadcast to the world has always been one of elections, democracy, and freedom. Honestly, that’s what I genuinely believed before coming here.
The first play that truly transformed my perspective was Line in the Dust by Nikkole Salter. It was relatable yet revealed depths of systemic racism I had never fully understood. Although outside my own lived experiences, I found myself deeply emotionally connected to the story, and it fundamentally altered my worldview. This profound impact is essentially why I am driven to make theatre.
I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to direct On the Train. When I first read the script, it elicited a strong emotional response and sparked my curiosity to explore the themes it touched upon. It reminded me of how the Chinese government is also concerned about the “population problem” and is implementing policies to control women’s bodies. It educated me that abortion is not a homogenous issue, and highlighted the disparities targeting Black and Brown women.
Directing this play is both a challenging and enlightening experience for me. It requires an understanding of areas foreign to me—American media, journalism, American internal politics. It involves confronting the realities of the country we live in today. It compels us to step out of our isolated bubbles and engage in dialogue. It challenges us with the question: What will work? How can we actually make a change? Thanks to our open, dedicated and supportive cast, designers, and our playwright Lisa, we are able to collectively present to you our version of On the Train.
Cast and Creative Team
Out of Time
Written by Rachel Atkins | Directed by Divya Rajan
Note from the Director
What would matter the most to us, if death were to stare right into our eyes and opting to live wasn’t a choice?
Out of Time is a thriller about six women whose destinies are intertwined through their trysts with loss, grief & death.
Just like so many of us, except these women are running out of time. Working on this play; and engaging with these six women has compelled me to ask questions of myself – of baggage I carry, of things that matter, of fragility of life, of its impermanence, of what I have gained and of what I have lost. In a very surreal way, how I ended up directing this play itself is a story of intertwined destinies.
Out of Time is a reminder that the only time we have is right here, right now.
What would you do if your destiny is intertwined in ways you don’t know with strangers in this room, just like the six women you are about to meet?
Note from the Playwright
Ironically, Out of Time has been a slow burn of a play. It began as a 10-minute script in an all-female weekend for 14/48: The World’s Quickest Theatre Festival, a response to the question “How will I survive?” That play, called This Is Not September 11, is now Part 3 of the show you’ll see here. (Thanks to Wesley Frugé of Forward Flux Productions for the current title.) I’m grateful to the many other, mostly all-female companies, directors and performers who have helped shepherd that original piece through readings, workshops, and development over the years into a full-length one-act (and this shortened festival version), including this artistic team.
Who are we when situations strip us bare of everything but the essentials of what makes each of us, uniquely, ourselves? How do we connect with other people in those moments? What are the threads tying us to those who come before and after? How will we survive? In today’s world, maybe more than ever, those questions still resonate for me.
Publicity Photos
Cast and Creative Team
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