Enjoy eight world premieres in one night. This event is the latest installment of our renowned annual new play festival. The evening will bring you works by some of the most exciting writers from across the country, penning classically inspired ten-minute plays. This year's festival includes new, commissioned plays by Will Eno (The Realistic Joneses, Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)) and Anna Ziegler (The Last Match, Photograph 51) alongside six plays from up-and-coming playwrights selected through an open submission process: Michael Carozza, Isis Elizabeth, Dana Leslie Goldstein,
August Guszkowski, Amy Jo Jackson, and AJ Layague. Directed by Zoë Adams and Evan Yionoulis.
This year’s theme? DEFIANCE
The 15th Annual Short New Play Festival is made possible by the leadership support of The Noël Coward Foundation.
THE PLAYWRIGHTS
THE PLAYS
The Weight of the Sun
by Michael Carozza
Sisyphus, doomed to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, gets a surprising visit from Persephone, the goddess of The Underworld, prompting them to question if they can break free of their prisons, or if they are prisons at all.
Crown Of Smoke
by Isis Elizabeth
Crown of Smoke is a poetic exploration of identity and self-empowerment. The play follows Uri, a young Black woman who rejects societal pressures to conform to white beauty standards by choosing to embrace her natural hair. As she navigates the weight of family expectations and history, Uri finds strength in claiming her true self. Her grandmother, Mama Ya, embodies wisdom from past generations, while her older brother, Devon, represents the struggles of deferred dreams and fear of change. Through their interactions, Uri confronts the complexities of legacy, family, and personal growth. Crown of Smoke is a powerful celebration of Black resilience and the courage to live truthfully.
The Ending of Lear
by Will Eno
The basement of the theater has flooded, the show is closing, and Cordelia and Lear, sullen and furious, respectively, are miles apart about the meaning of the last scene and almost everything else. And there is their cue.
D.O.J. (not that J.)
by Dana Leslie Goldstein
After the events of their respective Shakespeare plays, Desdemona, Ophelia and Jessica are judged for their actions. Should their stories end with their final scenes, or do they deserve a sixth act?
Kate, Once
by August Guszkowski
Out of concern for the moral rectitude of his students, the dean of an unnamed Massachusetts college has declared a moratorium on male theater students playing women's roles onstage. The student newspaper's arts critic reviews the final act of female impersonation at the college (a production of The Taming of the Shrew) and is caught between his expressed moral values and his feelings for the man who played Katherine.
The Aurora Method
by Amy Jo Jackson
Julie and Eric have been best friends for years, but a mysterious spiritual guru named Aurora threatens to come between them. She preaches the benefits of celibacy and ascending beyond material goods, but Eric insists she's a sex maniac scamming Jules for her money. What will it take for him to get her to turn her back on her teacher? What will it take for her to see Aurora for the con artist she truly is?
Anteros Was Here
by AJ Layague
An Old West retelling of the Greek myth of Meles and Timagoras, narrated in verse by The Cowgirl. Timo and Mel are young cowboys in the 19th century. Timo, born enslaved but now freed, and Mel have been best friends since childhood. When the powerful Big Z has his grandson, Anteros, arrange Olympic-style games, they recruit Timo and Mel for the (almost) no-holds-barred Pankration. The game goes awry when Mel breaks one of the few contact rules, which leads to a confrontation that turns surprising and tragic.
Devil and the Lemon Tree
by Anna Ziegler
A washed up poet meets a mysterious German man who offers him success—and maybe the love of his life—in exchange for the one thing no one has seemed to want anyway: his authorship. A cautionary tale about selling out, starting over, and citrus trees.
Red Bull Theater’s annual Short New Play Festival has generated over 4,000 new short plays of classic themes and heightened language, presenting nearly 100 of them in a one-night-only Festival performance with some of New York’s finest actors and directors. In its first twelve years, the commissioned playwrights have included Larissa FastHorse, Marcus Gardley, John Guare, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jeremy O. Harris, David Ives, Craig Lucas, Dael Orlandersmith, Heather Raffo, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, Anne Washburn, Doug Wright, and winning entries by writers such as Anchuli Felicia King, Patricia Ione Lloyd, Lynn Rosen, and Jen Silverman. Stage Rights has published a 5-volume collection of the plays from the first 10 years of Red Bull Theater’s annual Short New Play Festival as RED BULL SHORTS.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Michael Ferdinando Carozza is an New York based actor and playwright. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University, where he focused on adaptation, new work development, and devised theatre. His work was performed there as part of developmental labs.
Isis Elizabeth is an emerging playwright from Chicago whose mission is to create language-driven plays that elevate the human experience through poetry, complex characters, and reflective questions. She pushes her work to bring forth many topics that in her experience, black American families tend to not speak of. Such as perfectionism, power dynamics, queerness/identity, and more. Her plays have been produced at Pulse Theatre Chicago and workshopped at Definition Theater earning recognition for their bold storytelling and dynamic characters. Her work includes Beneath the Willow Tree, which had its world premiere at Pulse Theatre Chicago and received a Chicago Non-Equity Jeff nomination and Who Is Freedom?, a compelling exploration of how rhythm and rhyme can be more than music. Beyond the writing, Isis is passionate about uplifting underrepresented voices in theater. She has performed in many theaters across the Chicago land area and believes in storytelling as a tool for change.
Will Eno is a Fellow of the Signature Theatre, which premiered his play Title and Deed in 2012, and The Open House, in 2014 and Wakey, Wakey in 2017. Will’s play The Underlying Chris premiered at 2nd Stage Theatre in October 2019, and The Plot premiered at Yale Rep in November 2019. The Realistic Joneses, directed by Sam Gold, appeared on Broadway in 2014, where it won a Drama Desk Award, was named USA Today’s “Best Play on Broadway,” topped the The Guardian’s 2014 list of American plays, and was included in The N.Y. Times’ “Best Theatre of 2014.” The play was recently included in “25 Significant Plays of the last 25 Years,” in The New York Times. The French premiere, Juste Les Jones, will be directed for the Paris stage by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. Wakey, Wakey was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, was directed by the author, and starred Michael Emerson. The Open House won the 2014 Obie Award, the Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, and a Drama Desk Award, and was included in both the Time Out New York and Time Magazine Top 10 Plays of the Year. Title and Deed was on The N.Y. Times and The New Yorker magazine’s Top Ten Plays of 2012. Middletown, winner of the 2011 Horton Foote Award, produced by the Vineyard Theatre, Steppenwolf, and dozens of other American theaters. The Canadian premiere, at The Shaw Festival in 2017, received a rapturous response and was remounted in 2018 in Toronto. Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It was performed by Michael C. Hall in a sold-out revival at the Signature Theater in the fall of 2018. The L.A. premiere was performed by Rainn Wilson at the Geffen Playhouse in 2016, and a film was made from those performances, directed by Will and Oliver Butler. In spring 2019 Will wrote the book for the hugely successful ad campaign Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical, which also starred Michael C. Hall. In March 2020 Gnit, Will's adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, directed by Oliver Butler, had its New York premiere. Gnit will appear at The Shaw Festival in 2025. The BBC Radio play Life is a Radio in the Dark, starring Toby Jones, was a finalist for both the 2022 Tinniswood Award and the BBC Audio Drama Award for Original Drama. Will teaches playwriting at Princeton University and is currently working on several television projects, including Lambie, a dark comedy starring Michael C. Hall, which has been optioned by LIONSGATE. Will is also working on a musical for kids based on the book Lilly and the Pirates, along with several other theater projects. An essay on Thoreau appears in the book Now Comes Good Sailing, published by Princeton University Press.
Dana Leslie Goldstein is a playwright, lyricist and librettist who has won the New England New Play Competition, Harold and Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Prize, Different Voices New Play Award, ACTF New Play Award, Henry Hoyns Poetry Fellowship, AWP Intro Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize and numerous development grants. Her work has been seen at Manhattan Theatre Club, Cherry Lane, Culture Project, Women’s Project, The York, Theatre80, Theater for the New City, New Dramatists, Center Stage, BMI, Vineyard Playhouse, Pulse, Theater Row Theatre, Gene Frankel Theatre, The Barrow Group, Acorn Theatre, The Lark, Beckett Theatre, Neighborhood Playhouse, The Workshop Theater, Torn Page, Nuyorican Poets Café, Estrogenius Festival, Brave New World Rep, Axial Theatre, Players Club of Swarthmore (PA), Ensemble Theatre of Chattanooga (TN), Clamour Theatre (FL), American Stage Company (FL), Left Edge Theatre (CA), PAN Theater (CA), Spooky Action Theatre (DC), Rainy Day Artistic Collective (Seattle, WA), Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate NY, Pacific Theatre (Vancouver, Canada), TischAsia (Singapore), Red Brick Theatre (Manchester, UK), Baggage Productions (Melbourne, Australia), at the Columbus Black Theatre Festival (OH), the New York Musical Theatre Festival, on Ellis and Liberty Islands, at the U.N. and on Equity TYA tours. Dana’s plays are published by Next Stage Press, Smith & Kraus, Applause Books and Palmetto Press. Dana is a librettist in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, a playwright member of PlayGround-NY, Brave New World Rep and The Workshop Theater, and an alum of the Playwrights Lab at Women’s Project, NewShoe and DVRF. Dana holds MFAs in Playwriting and Poetry, both funded by full writing fellowships. Dana is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.
August W. Guszkowski (he/they) is a librarian, playwright, and occasional translator from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has been produced in collaboration with the Boston Theater Marathon and Broadway Bods, and he is a founding participant of the Parish Players' One Night Only festival.
Amy Jo Jackson (they/she) is a performer, playwright, composer/lyricist and labarettist. Their original musical Hatchetation made the 2023 Kilroys List, and has been developed at the National Music Theater Conference at the O’Neill. Their verse play Viola (or: that genderqueer sequel to Twelfth Night) was a finalist for the Stanley Award and the Ashland New Play Festival. Bistro Award Winner for her Tennessee Williams cabaret act, The Brass Menagerie. Her play You Know What They Say About Scorned Women was a 2024 winner of the Red Bull Short New Play Festival. Their pop-history comedy Peggy (& Ben) was the inaugural play in Greenwood Lake Theater’s New Works Series. Larson finalist and EST/Sloan Commission recipient. As an actor, Amy Jo has appeared Off-Broadway in Dirty Laundry (WP Theatre), The Triple Threat (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Nymph Errant (Prospect), and has sung in multiple shows with acclaimed burlesque theatre Company XIV. Regional: The Old Globe, Weston, Flat Rock, TheaterWorks Hartford, Syracuse Stage, Ark Rep, and many more. Film/TV: Dicks the Musical (A24), And Just Like That, High Maintenance, and the singing voice of an animated crab in Under the Boardwalk. BFA Boston Conservatory.
AJ Layague Filipino American playwright/composer (she/her/hers) has degrees in music from Stanford University, CalArts, and UC San Diego, and studied playwriting at East West Players in Los Angeles. Her play Cowgirl Katarungan’s Recipe for Adobo received a 2022 Finalist Prize in the FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language Competition at Synecdoche Works as well as a 2023 Larking House Theatre Company Playwrights Intensive workshop and reading, and was a finalist for the 2024 Judith Royce Award for Excellence in Playwriting, and a semi-finalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She was a 2023 Puffin Foundation Artist, a four-time semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference, and premiered new work (all in rhyming verse) at the 2023 PanAsian NuWorks Festival in NYC. Her musical Lucy Larcom was a finalist in the 2024 New Musical Project and had a staged reading in August 2024 in Boulder Colorado, and she was awarded a 2024 MAP Fund grant for her collaborative musical, A Good Boy.
Anna Ziegler’s plays include PHOTOGRAPH 51, which starred Nicole Kidman in an acclaimed West End run (WhatsOnStage Award, Best New Play), also on Audible and in Bloomsbury’s Modern Classics series; THE LAST MATCH (Roundabout, Old Globe); ACTUALLY (Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown, Geffen Playhouse, London’s Trafalgar Studios; L.A. Ovation Award for Playwriting), BOY (Outer Critics Circle Gassner Award nominee); THE WANDERERS (Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play), and A DELICATE SHIP (NY Times Critic’s Pick). Anna Ziegler: Plays One and Plays Two are published by Bloomsbury. She has developed TV/film projects with HBO Max, Apple, AMC and CBS Studios, among others. In the 2024-2025 season her new play THE JANEIAD will be premiered by the Alley Theatre and The Old Globe.
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS
Zoë Adams creates theatre to spark imagination and open hearts to the magic of transformation. Her eclectic body of work includes: The Christine Jorgensen Show, Wizard of Oz, The Historical Range of Ursus Americanus, Sister Act, Meltdown: A live-action game about Climate Change, In the Name of Us (Best Short Play at DUAF), The Cherry Orchard, Not Clown, Skin Flick City, Stacked at the National Theatre of Croatia, and the immersive supper club Krāv. She is the proud recipient of the 2024-2026 Drama League Stage Directing Fellowship. MFA, Directing, Columbia University; SDC Associate.
Evan Yionoulis is an Obie award-winning director and nationally recognized teacher of acting, is Juilliard’s Richard Rodgers dean and director of the Drama Division. She came to Juilliard after 20 years on the faculty of Yale School of Drama, where she was a professor in the practice of acting and directing and Lloyd Richards chair of the department of acting from 1998 to 2003. She has directed new plays and classics in New York, across the country, and internationally, including Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (world premiere) and Ohio State Murders (Lortel Award, best revival) for Theatre for a New Audience, Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour (Broadway), Three Days of Rain (Obie for direction, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater), and, during her 20 years as a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, productions including Shakespeare’s Richard II and Cymbeline, Brecht’s Galileo, Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss. With composer/lyricist Mike Yionoulis, she is developing the multiplatform project Redhand Guitar, about five generations of musicians across an American century, and The Dread Pirate Project, about identity and anonymity across the digital and natural worlds. She is a Princess Grace Award recipient and serves as president of the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Together with Stage Rights we've published five collections featuring the best of our annual Short New Play Festival. This ongoing series features 10-minute plays of heightened language and classical themes by today’s hottest writers, including commissions by established playwrights such as John Guare, David Ives, Regina Taylor, and Anne Washburn, and winning entries by writers such as Mike Anderson, Sam Lahne, Lynn Rosen, and Jen Silverman–-all chosen from a competition that receives nearly 300 submissions each year. In the hands of great playwrights, the 10-minute play is a highly entertaining dramatic form. This collection offers the most delectable of these delightfully compact works – some downright silly, and others powerfully moving.