CYCLE 11 AUDREY RESIDENTS

16 resident artists working on 9 highly theatrical new-play projects over the course of the year! Setting out individually or in a collaboration, they are: Aileen Wen McGroddy and Ro Reddick; Alex Keegan and EllaRose Chary; Kate Tarker; Emma Watkins, Lauren Keating and Doaa Ouf; Lila Rachel Becker and Mel Hsu; Liz Appel and Dina Vovsi; Mia Rovegno; Rehana Lew Mirza and Miranda Ferriss Jones; and Thalia Sablon.

The residencies are named for Audrey Bernfield, Susan’s mom, an innovative mentor and of course a great supporter of our company. Open to New Georges affiliated artists, the Audrey Residencies are our primary program for generating and developing new works. In year-long project-based residencies, residents spend up to 3 weeks of space in The Room working on their project in a process of their own devising; meet monthly with the full resident cohort for a meal and conversation; and have access to whatever additional resources we can muster as needs emerge.

Big thanks to current and prior residents Erin Courtney, Jeanne Dorsey, Minna Lee, Deepa Purohit, Jeana Scotti and Emerie Snyder, who joined Susan, Jaynie, and Sonya for two inspiring conversation sessions with potential residents, hearing all their very very very cool ideas (honestly: it’s our favorite day of the year).

Here are the artists and projects our panelists chose:

Inspired by parlor games and the rising tide of fascism, playwright Ro Reddick and director Aileen Wen McGroddy will create a performance that invites its audience to listen between the lines: The Disappearing Language Project, a battle between the human need to transmit ideas and the state’s imperative to control them, with characters who invent new codes to stay a step ahead of censorship.

For Good Game, a play with movement, playwright EllaRose Chary and director Alex Keegan will theatricalize the rupture over identity politics that strikes the Lakeland Ladies+ softball league when its members—mostly white queer women—discover that their views on restorative justice might be trickier than expected to align.

Playwright Emma Watkins, director Lauren Keating and designer Doaa Ouf will team up on a piece about making darkness, told through constellations and heavy machinery ballets: The Night Custodian, which follows two women as they travel the West Texas desert at night, surveying then decommissioning disused lighting in a quest to create the darkest sky in the lower 48.

Frustrated by the daily creep of tech into their lives, a group of parents unite to set boundaries for themselves and their children. Using interviews with parents, kids and software engineers, director Dina Vovsi and playwright Liz Appel will make a play about what it feels like to grow up alongside this new life form we’re calling AI.

Writer/director Mia Rovegno will build a phantasmagoric scape of words, sights, and sounds exploring the Americapitalistic cannibalization of creativity. Things like infinite scrolls (ancient + digital), insincere emojis, good bad songs, multimedia ghosts, sweeping promises, real time soul analysis, rewilded ears, and/or restorative Karaoke might even conjure a story.

Playwright Rehana Lew Mirza and composer/lyricist/performer Miranda Ferriss Jones will turn unapologetic eyes on marriage and parenthood to create a new musical about mothers fighting to keep their sons “gentle” in our war- and fear-consumed culture—part fairy tale world, part travails of modern parenting, fully inspired by their experience as mothers.

Playwright Thalia Sablon (along with a director, actors, and a drag king) will choreograph time loops that break exhaustion for her play How To Steal Time and Other Important Poor People Skills, which explores time as a classed resource and survival as a collective effort… and teaches you the skills you need to make it through an endless catering shift.