Writer Director Lab

About

Instigated in 1998, the Writer Director Lab is an engine for the generation of new plays. The program—a beacon in the city for formally inventive work—supports four projects created by collaborative teams. The Lab culminates in presentations at Soho Rep that are free and open to the public.

Nkenna Akunna & Nana Dakin

If we think of our conditioning as spells that have been cast on our consciousness, what could help us break them? Nkenna and Nana will be working on a piece inspired by the subversive healing practices of astrology and tarot card readings.

Carolina Đỗ & Annie Jin Wang

Using Chekhov’s The Seagull as a point of departure, Carolina and Annie are generating a four-act theatrical investigation-love letter to their families, ancestors, selves, and fellow Asian American community members who have had to sublimate their identities in the pursuit of being understood.

Ran Xia & Risa Puno

Ran and Risa are interested in creating an interactive theatre/game hybrid piece using TTRPGs (table top role playing games) mechanics to generate narratives around the exploration and expression of Asian female rage.

Keenan Hurley & Kedian Keohan

BLUSH

At the center of the Black Hole is the Event Horizon. Crawl inside and save me a dance. Internal transformations become external. Let’s reckon with one another or become unrecognizable. It’s ok if you’re a little smelly.

Talia Paulette Oliveras & Nia Farrell

A Map to Nowhere (things are)

A Map to Nowhere (things are) is a reminder that this is Real Life—and that means there is real hope for tomorrow. It is a chakra-based ritual and abolitionist practice in closing the gap between dreams and reality.

Kate Moore Heaney & Divya Mangwani

Speak American

Speak American is an insider/outsider’s perspective on the disorienting construct that is the American language—hyperlinking to the future (insert emoticon here).

Jeesun Choi & Bryn Herdrich

Bust

Sein fights for the leadership of her Model United Nations team. An economist gives one last lecture. Fish Grandma goes to the bank. Meanwhile, the global market teeters on the brink of collapse. BUST explores the money in our wallets, the illusions it buys, and the future it promises.

Jen Goma & Haruna Lee

plural (love)

“With the performance installation plural (love), Jen Goma & Kristine Haruna Lee flirt with the boundaries of desire, power, and responsibility, building an environment that feels akin to stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. Always written and performed anew based on its audience and physical surroundings (from the NY Hall of Science planetarium, to theatre festivals, to a hotel), plural (love) is an opportunity for Goma and Lee to report their latest findings on love, desire, intimacy, sex and sexuality, and its relationship to transparency, ethics, and equity.

Originally inspired by auto-theorists such as Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, and Roland Barthes, Goma and Lee layer political, cultural, and social theory with their own autobiographical stories as Asian American femme women, and their experiences of desire and being desired. They perform their musings through a pastiche of intricate styles that include pop songs with lyrics by Sartre, femme rituals, live podcasts, intimate humor, radical truth-telling, and community engagement.”

Ann Marie Dorr & Paul Ketchum

Good and Noble Beings

“Good and Noble Beings is a stupid adaptation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The performance is the result of a compilation of bits of language that Ketchum found funny in the post-structuralist text—and that ultimately started to sound like pieces of dialogue between as many people as possible.

Dorr and Ketchum have no idea what they are doing because A Thousand Plateaus is impossible to read—but it seems, to them, that the book is about nonhierarchical structures of being. They are hoping to deconstruct late capitalist notions of hierarchy and structural meaning while simultaneously blowing everyone’s mind. God is a Lobster. Welcome to the Rhizome.”

Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja Feather Kelly

The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente

“Collaborators Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja Feather Kelly were drawn together out of a desire to locate truths, the sublime, and to expand the vocabulary of blackness on stage. Kelly’s artistic practice combines dance, sketch comedy, minstrelsy, and devised theatre; Mubashshir conceived Everyday Afroplay, a daily theatrical writing practice on blackness and the black body that serves as a well-spring of material for her company of collaborators.

Together, they have developed one Everyday Afroplay into the first episode of a larger work—The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente—which centers the experience of two black corporate executives as they navigate climbing the ladder toward financial liberation. In the style of a Post – Black Minstrelsy, Cardigan and Khente’s first question is: Why does success and freedom always come down to “what do they think of us?””

Virginia Grise & Shayok Misha Chowdhury

rasgos asiaticos

“On October 24^th, 1871, 20 Chinese men were tortured and hanged in downtown LA. This mass lynching—the largest in U.S. history—took place on Calle de los Negros, named for its original inhabitants: dark-skinned Californios of indigenous, African, and Spanish blood. This coincidence of space insists: the American story, of migration and displacement, is a palimpsest—a parchment written on, erased, then written on again, the traces of the old words ghosting underneath the new. Virginia Grise’s rasgos asiaticos looks to a history that’s been (imperfectly) erased: Chinese settlement in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It’s about moving bodies and porous borders—How do you make a home in inhospitable country?

rasgos asiaticos is part hybrid-book—comprising drafts of scenes, splinters of text and poetry, as well as non-textual source material—and part multimedia performance—creating a mosaic of layered voices (speaking English, Spanish, and Cantonese), music, and movement. Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury has selected pieces of the book to excavate in this performance about moving bodies and porous borders, which aims to re-imagine how we think about immigration in the US-Mexico borderlands.”

Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey

while you were partying

“Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey take a fantastical approach to analyzing their own histories of aggression, impotence, and mental health with while you were partying. This piece takes the form of a staged reading of a screenplay—a bizarre, self-sacrificing hero fantasy of an aging man-child, whose relationship with his highly supportive mother manifests as a dream ballet with a chilling conclusion.

Weiss and Mounsey began working together after noticing their shared interest in speaking directly to audiences as “themselves” in a way that complicates identity and authenticity. Their work, like [50/50] Old School Animation (which will be performed at Under the Radar at The Public Theater this January 2019) places audiences in uncomfortable spaces as it gets at the heart of challenging moral questions.”

Jacob Perkins & Jaki Bradley

Where Have You Gone

(Writer Director Lab 2015/2016)

Tony Meneses & Michael Leibenluft

Clinton Hill

(Writer Director Lab 2015/2016)

Stephanie Del Rosso & Zi Alikhan

Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill

(Writer Director Lab 2015/2016)

Catherine Yu & Tiffany Nicole Greene

Le Jeté

(Writer Director Lab 2015/2016)

Milo Cramer & Benjamin Kamine

Cute Activist

(Writer Director Lab 2014/2015)

Jordan Seavey & Hannah Wolf

November 4, 2008

(Writer Director Lab 2014/2015)

Kate Benson & Will Davis

Desert (For Now)

(Writer Director Lab 2014/2015)

Dipika Guha & Andrew Neisler

Unreliable

(Writer Director Lab 2014/2015)

Clare Barron & Louisa Proske

You Got Older

(Writer Director Lab 2013/2014)

Jiehae Park & Lilian Meredith

Untitled High School Macbeth

(Writer Director Lab 2013/2014)

Amelia Roper & Knud Adams

Everything is Nice

(Writer Director Lab 2013/2014)

Jerry Lieblich & Kareem Fahmy

D Deb Debbie Deborah

(Writer Director Lab 2013/2014)

Evan Twohy & Jess Chayes

Permission

(Writer Director Lab 2012/2013)

Max Posner & Jesse Jou

Judy

(Writer Director Lab 2012/2013)

Anna Greenfield & Mary Birnbaum

This Is Gonna Be Great

(Writer Director Lab 2012/2013)

Tracy Thorne & Kristan Seemel

The Nature of Things

(Writer Director Lab 2012/2013)

Elizabeth Irwin & Sarah Krohn

My Mañana Comes

(Writer Director Lab 2012/2013)

Trish Harnetiaux & Jeremy Bloom

How To Get Into Buildings

(Writer Director Lab 2011/2012)

Joshua Conkel & Jen Wineman

Sprawl

(Writer Director Lab 2011/2012)

Peter Gil-Sheridan & Anna Brenner

Cockfight

(Writer Director Lab 2011/2012)

Jackie Sibblies Drury & David F. Chapman

Really Really Really Really Really

(Writer Director Lab 2011/2012)

Lloyd Suh & Sarah Rasmussen

Fort Lee

(Writer Director Lab 2010/2011)

Andy Bragen & Mike Donahue

Loop Tape

(Writer Director Lab 2010/2011)

Susan Soon He Stanton & Alice Reagan

Takarazuka!

(Writer Director Lab 2010/2011)

Michael Yate Crowley & Rachel Chavkin

The Dead, Inc.

(Writer Director Lab 2010/2011)

Jess Barbagallo & Meghan Finn

I'll Meet You in Tijuana

(Writer Director Lab 2009/2010)

Amy Herzog & Pirronne Yousefzadeh

4000 Miles

(Writer Director Lab 2009/2010)

Matthew Korahais & Michael Silverstone

Trigger Warning (NSFW)

(Writer Director Lab 2009/2010)

Kate E. Ryan & Mia Rovegno

Science Is Close

(Writer Director Lab 2009/2010)

Janine Nabers & Adam Greenfield

Welcome to Jesus

(Writer Director Lab 2009/2010)

Jonathan Bernstein & Katherine Kovner

The Children's Employment Commission

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Sylvan Oswald & Rafael Gallegos

Sun Ra

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Kate E. Ryan & Stephen Brackett

Him

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Susan Tenneriello & Jerry Ruiz

Mirage

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins & Shoshona Currier

The Change

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Gregory S. Moss & Arin Arbus

Orange, Hate & Grace

(Writer Director Lab 2008/2009)

Mike Daisey & Maria Goyanes

The Moon Is a Dead World

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Maller Avidon & Jose Zayas

The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: (Very Personal) Maps of Seattle

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Amber Reed & Alec Duffy

Apocope

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Madeleine George & Miriam Weiner

Precious Little

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Dan LeFranc & Linsay Firman

In the Labyrinth: A Spectacle with Stories

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Deron Bos & Jimena Duca

Putting the Days to Bed

(Writer Director Lab 2007/2008)

Scott Adkins & Kenn Watt

Running Commentary NO. 4

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Tommy Smith & May Adrales

White Hot

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Annie Baker & Debbie Saivetz

Nocturama

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Kristen Palmer & Awoye Timpo

The Melting Point

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Karinne Keithly & Maria Goyanes

Do Not Do This Ever Again

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Jason Grote & Brooke O'Harra

Maria / Stuart

(Writer Director Lab 2006/2007)

Thomas Bradshaw & Mallory Catlett

Purity

(Writer Director Lab 2005/2006)

Jenny Schwartz & Sarah Cameron Sunde

Somewhere Fun

(Writer Director Lab 2005/2006)

Heidi Schreck & Sarah Benson

Creature

(Writer Director Lab 2005/2006)

David Adjmi & Shana Gold

Marie Antoinette

(Writer Director Lab 2005/2006)

Jason Grote & Maria Goyanes

Hamilton Township

(Writer Director Lab 2005/2006)

Kate E. Ryan & Evan Cabnet

Brian

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)

Anna Ziegler & Maureen Towey

BFF

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)

B. Walker Sampson & Josh Hecht

Alcestis

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)

Mat Smart & Ellen Beckerman

Telescopes

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)

Jason Grote & Liesl Tommy

1001

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)

Erin Courtney & Sarah Benson

Quiver & Twitch

(Writer Director Lab 2004/2005)