Alice is thrilled when she lands a summer research position with Viola Vauclain, the legendary entomologist specializing in bees. But as the summer goes on, it quickly becomes clear that the apiarian colonies are not the only thing on the verge of collapse. Accompanied by a band of Beatnik Bees, a wild and surprising new MTC/Sloan commission about science, legacy, and our own animal selves.

Selina Fillinger is an LA-based writer and performer. Original plays include Something Clean; Faceless; Armor Plays: Cinched/Strapped; and Potus: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive. Her plays have been developed at Roundabout Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Old Globe Theatre, Alley Theatre, St. Louis Repertory Theatre, and Northlight Theatre. She’s currently commissioned at South Coast Repertory, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout, and Williamstown. She was a Hawthornden Fellow and a resident of McCarter’s Sallie B. Goodman Artist’s Retreat; Something Clean is the recipient of the 2019 Laurents/Hatcher Award and Cinched/Strapped received the 2019 Williamstown Theatre Festival’s L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. Her farce, POTUS, was on the 2019 Kilroys List. She is currently developing a feature for Chernin and Netflix. Selina is a Northwestern graduate (’16), where she studied playwriting.

Tiny Father
by Mike Lew
directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel
Thursday & Saturday – July 8 & 10 at 7pm ET

A slice-of-life comedy about parenthood: Daniel’s “friends with benefits” relationship comes to a screeching halt when he suddenly finds himself the new father to a months-premature baby. His guide in the strange purgatory of hospital living? A grizzled oversharing nurse named Caroline. Tiny Father began as a commission from the Audible Theater Emerging Playwrights Fund and is loosely based on playwright Lew’s own experience with a NICU baby.

Mike Lew’s plays include Teenage Dick (Ma-Yi at the Public, Donmar Warehouse productions; Public Studio, O’Neill, OSF workshops), Tiger Style! (Olney, Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, and Alliance productions; O’Neill and CTG workshops), Bike America (Ma-Yi and Alliance productions), microcrisis (Ma-Yi, InterAct, and Next Act productions). He is the co-bookwriter of the musical Bhangin’ It (upcoming La Jolla Playhouse; Kleban and Richard Rodgers Awards; Jerome Robbins Project Springboard and Rhinebeck Writers Retreat “Triple R” workshops). He is a Tony voter, Dramatists Guild Council member, and a resident of New Dramatists. Honors include a Mellon National Playwrights Residency at Ma-Yi and La Jolla Playhouse Artist-in-Residence, both with Rehana Lew Mirza and just received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Thirty-somethings Tequi and Cedric move to the Hudson River Valley to fulfill their dreams of a life in the country, following in the footsteps of generations of Black farmers before them. They close the deal on a small cottage with the perfect patch of land for planting and settle into their new home, but their dreams are tested when they discover that their one and only neighbor has an unsettling past— and a taste for fresh roadkill. Tequi and Cedric must confront their deepest fears to hold on to their dreams and to each other.

A romantic thriller, Evans’s suspenseful work is a commission from the Audible Theater Emerging Playwrights Fund.

Amy Evans is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her plays have been produced at TheatreSquared), Finborough Theatre UK, Tricycle Theatre, HB Playwrights Foundation, Soho Theatre UK, English Theatre Berlin International Performing Arts Center, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A recipient of a 2019 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Playwriting, Amy is an alumna of Hedgebrook Women Writers’ Residency, BRICLab Performing Arts Residency and Interstate 73 Playwrights’ Group. Amy holds an MA in Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and she is currently on staff at The Juilliard School where she is assistant dean of Academic Affairs. www.scriptingrage.com

What do you write after you have written the world’s greatest play? Hopefully, not another Timon of Athens. Fortunately for Shakespeare, he is caught in the middle of the pandemic of 1603 and theaters are closed for a year. The plague opens his eyes to the mysteries of life and death when he is quarantined with his pod-companions-in-lockdown – a young Puritan lawyer and a mature streetwise prostitute. Will Shakespeare thrive creatively during quarantine? Will his follow up play be as disappointing as his last? Or will he write his masterpiece? A commission from Florida Studio Theater.

Bill Cain is the author of Equivocation (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); 9 Circles (Marin Theatre); How to Write a New Book for the Bible (Berkeley Rep/Seattle Rep). Stand-Up Tragedy (Mark Taper Forum- six LA Critics Awards, Arena Stage- three Helen Hayes Awards, Hartford Stage and ultimately Broadway- Joe A. Calloway Award). He has twice received the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. For television he was the creator/writer/producer of the ABC series Nothing Sacred, which received both a WGA and Peabody Award. He is the author of the recently published book The Diary of Jesus Christ, available from Orbis Books.