Coordinators: Lia Romeo & Liz Appel

This group grows out of the need to recognize and support parent/caregiver playwrights in the unique challenges they're facing. While the focus will be on workshopping new plays, we also seek to create a space for parent/caregiver artists to find community with one another during an incredibly challenging time.

Selected playwrights will meet monthly through September 2022, which will culminate in a series of public readings with industry professionals and artistic collaborators. We will provide a small child care stipend to every writer to offset the costs of child care during meetings.

This group is designed to uphold and elevate a series of diverse voices in the theater community.

LIA ROMEO is a 2021-2022 playwriting fellow at Juilliard. Her play The Forest was developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and was scheduled to receive a National New Play Network rolling world premiere this season (postponed due to the coronavirus). Her play Sitting and Talking, starring Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick, was produced online by companies around the country. Other plays have been produced off-Broadway at 59E59 and regionally, and four of her plays have been recognized by the Kilroys List. She was the winner of City Theatre’s National Short Playwriting Award, and has been a nominee or a finalist for the Heideman Award, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Kesselring Prize, and the Steinberg Award. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Dramatists Play Service, and Smith & Kraus. She is the associate artistic director with Project Y Theatre Company and the founder/coordinator of the Project Y Playwrights Group, and she teaches playwriting at Primary Stages/ESPA and in the M.A. program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She earned her B.A. from Princeton and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Rutgers/MGSA. Proud parent of Gabriel, age two-and-three-quarters, who loves dogs and eating bread.

LIZ APPEL is a playwright originally from Toronto now based in New York. Her play BELLS LIKE HOOVES will be featured in the 2022 Roundabout Underground Reading Series, and she is a 2022 Ucross Fellow. She has been a Finalist for the Princess Grace Award, the Leah Ryan FEWW Emerging Playwright Prize, PlayPenn, BAPF, Ashland New Plays Festival and the Playwrights’ Center’s Core Apprentice Program. She was a winner of the Henley Rose Playwright Competition for Women, and an Honorable Mention for the Annual Parity Commission (Parity Productions), and The Hearth Theater’s Virtual Retreat. Her short play, SNOW, was produced at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London, and her play MOONSHINE, received a staged reading at the Cherry Lane Theater through Primary Stages, ESPA Drills. Her one-act play, REMEMBER, is published in Blackbird. She has developed work at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kennedy Center, the Banff Centre, the Flea Theater, the Tank, and is a New Georges Affiliate Artist. She is currently finishing her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College where she was awarded a Roberts Foundation Fellowship (Dec ’21). She holds an M.A. and MPhil from Yale University (English) and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (European Literature). Parent of Mina (7) and Emmy (5) who get up way too early.

Written & Performed by: Camille Thomas

YoU cAN TaKE Out A pARenT PlUs LoAN is a comedic semi-autobiographical one woman show that combines slam poetry, songs, and monologues to take a critical look at the United States’ student debt crisis, the racial wealth gap, and how to follow your dreams as an artist.

Written By: Beth Golison

––Reader, we are not supposed to be in here––

jane eyre: an autobiography is a new experimental musical adaptation, disrupting the classic novel Jane Eyre. We follow Jane's well-known story as she chooses between facing selfish happiness and unhappy selflessness. We uncover Bertha's lost narrative of disillusionment and transformational healing. This concert performance will invite you to a landscape of folk, jazz, electro-pop, and classic musical theatre, combined to create a dreamscape of feminine love, loss, and fury.