Rogue Theater Festival is Making a Wave

Rogue Theater Festival is back making waves for emerging playwrights in its fifth annual theater festival. Its hybrid theater festival was born out of necessity in 2020, but now it’s here to stay. This hybrid theater festival offers opportunities for playwrights to have live performances this year at Theatre Row in New York City and opportunities for playwrights from around the globe to stream their show via ShowTix4U.

Rogue is a self described ‘mom and pops’ theater festival where the emphasis is always on the playwright and supporting them in the exciting process of putting up a show. Since its inception, Rogue has been able to present over 150 new shows and work with over 500 artists in New York City and around the globe.

This year, Rogue is also incredibly proud to be working in association with the longstanding Abingdon Theatre Company who is committed to presenting brave new work by emerging playwrights. Rogue is presenting 22 brand new shows this year and tickets are on sale now at Theatre Row and ShowTix4U.

Keep reading to get to know a handful of the playwrights participating in person and digitally this year. 

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Heartbreak in Tompkins Square Park

Christine Stoddard

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year? 

I wanted to publicly present "Heartbreak in Tompkins Square Park," which is a new drama of mine. I directed a short play at Theatre Row last year and was eager to bring a full-length work to the stage.

Tell us about you and your work! What inspired you to write it? Have you faced any challenges getting it on its feet? What is your hope for this play? What's next for you?

Broadly speaking, this piece is about family secrets, societal expectations, forbidden love, a marriage of convenience, and taking ownership of our choices. I was inspired to write it because I wanted to write a companion piece to my drama "Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares," which centers on some of the family dynamics and culture on my mother's side of the family. That side is Salvadoran. "Heartbreak in Tompkins Square Park" deals with cultural themes present on my father's side of the family, which is primarily English, Scottish, and very New York. The first challenge for any playwright is that of logistics: getting off the page and onto the stage. I hope to eventually see this play fully produced. Currently, I have a monthly comedy show called "Quail Tales" at The Players Theatre, as well as my touring comedy act Art Bitch coming to venues such as Caveat, The Green Room 42, QED, and elsewhere throughout the summer. My one-woman show "Cleansing/Limpia: A Ritual in Humor & Healing" will come to the Kraine Theater for a one-night performance on May 27th. My drama "Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares" will next be fully staged at The Tank this September. Right now I'm writing my drama "Moon Fish," about two teen girls who fall in love with digital photography and each other in the early 2000s. It's about young love, homosexuality, peer pressure, digital culture, and cyberbullying.

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Sunshine in Every Window

Rex McGregor

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year?

I enjoyed presenting a video of my comedy Tricky Intervention at the Rogue Theater Festival in 2021. I look forward to sharing our new video, featuring a talented cast bringing historical characters to life.

What inspired you to write it?

Sunshine in Every Window was inspired by a challenge from New York's Metropolitan Playhouse in 2017. They asked for plays set in the Lower East Side. My research led me to the extraordinary story of America's first public housing project and its unsung heroine, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch. I enjoyed including Fiorello La Guardia and Eleanor Roosevelt in my dramatization.  

Have you faced any challenges getting it on its feet?

I saw wonderful photos of the Metropolitan Playhouse production in 2017. But that year, I didn't arrive in New York City till a couple of months later, when I met the director and the theatre's artistic director and viewed the empty stage. In 2021, the play was selected for a festival in Canada. But that event was canceled because of the pandemic. I assembled a cast of actors from six locations in the US to produce the Zoom video. We included costume changes and sound effects to enhance the drama.

What is your hope for this play?

I hope audiences will enjoy the superb performances in the video. I'd love to have future productions of the play and see it in person.

What's next for you?

I regularly present short plays at Zoom sessions with actors in New York and other cities. I have upcoming stage productions scheduled in New York, Texas and California.

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Love’s a Thin Diet

Amy Losi

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year?

I've been aware of this festival for a few years and heard great things about it. I was excited that I had just completed this play in time to submit!

Tell us about you and your work.

Most of my plays are supportive of women's issues and I try to write strong roles for women and older actors. I write comedies and dramas--they're not all as serious as this play.

What inspired you to write it?

In college, my professor invited me to his office. He offered me wine and asked me personal questions. He asked me to meet him again but I never did. This play is for the women who did return, and for those who are about to.

Have you faced any challenges getting it on its feet?

Part of the writing process is knowing when something doesn't work. An earlier version of this play was never produced so I kept rewriting it, added scenes and characters, and now-- here it is!

What is your hope for this play?

I hope this story empowers women and helps them find the strength to say no -- and to speak out.

What's next for you?

Keep on writing! I'm halfway through a new play and doing the research for another one. I'm also an actor, so I try to balance my time on and off stage.

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Abandon All Hope

Peter Fenton

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year?

I think the thing that attracted me to participate in Rogue was the idea that this was an opportunity to showcase both my chops as an emerging playwright and as an emerging theater producer on the most important stage of my career thus far. I've been doing so much work in growing my skill and passion as a screenwriter and producer of film in the last couple of years, but my first love is the stage.

Tell us about you and your work!

I'm a freelance writer and producer of both theater and film based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (roughly halfway between Philadelphia and New York City). Currently, I teach theater classes for Bucks County Playhouse and I got my start working professional theater in my apprenticeship with Walnut Street Theatre in Center City Philly. I'm most interested in creating quick-witted satire, redemption arcs, and re-imaginations of well-known stories. I like to say if my work made you laugh or think, then I did my job.

What inspired you to write it?

College was hell. Living in the dorms was hell. I'd never shared a bedroom in my life before college and I think you become aware of yourself in some pretty uncomfortable ways when you start sharing space with somebody. A lot of my own personal reckoning of understanding who I really am happened in a dorm room, and that's exactly what happens in Abandon All Hope. I also took a lot of inspiration from the very conservative, very evangelical Christian environment I grew up in. My experience of organized religion fundamentally changed when someone looked me in the eyes and told me that I'm going to Hell, and it inspired this very play.

Have you faced any challenges getting it on its feet?

When I first wrote the script in the spring of 2020, my thought was "oh, when the world goes back to normal in two weeks, I'll stage this in the Philly Fringe Festival" ... suffice to say, the world did not come back to normal in two weeks. I then focused my efforts on my film work and started my producing partnership with Atlanta-based actress Avery Kellington in 2021 as I adapted the stage play script for a potential film. After a successful staged reading, we started planning to shoot the feature film for the summer of 2023, but ran into lack of money to do the show and do it right. We went back to the drawing board around Christmas and decided to prioritize getting the stage play produced in 2023—and here we are! Debuting Off-Broadway! Avery will be starring in the show as TERESA.

What is your hope for this play?

As Writer of Abandon All Hope, I hope this play makes people laugh and think. I hope I am able as playwright to find representation and start getting my name and work in front of people who have the power to get me to wherever my next project is.

As Producer of Abandon All Hope, my hope is that we will be able to catapult our production to have a run somewhere—Regional, Off-Broadway, Broadway—anything would be fantastic. I hope a producer sees what we're doing, recognizes we have a nearly fully-equipped production all ready to go up on someone else's stage, and can help us do what needs to be done to get there.

What's next for you?

Right now I've got a psychological thriller film, Night Voices, that I co-wrote and produced out on the film festival circuit and I'm onto Draft 3 of a new dark comedy/drama retelling of the Peter Pan story and lore titled I Think We're Lost.  At some point soon, I'm hoping to make the leap from serving part-time and writing/producing with most of my remaining time to just working on theater and film productions full-time. The time and money both have to be just right. What a time to be alive. 

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This House is Not a Home

Kyle Thomas

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year?

I am so excited to participate in the Rogue Theatre Festival again this year! Allison Hohman is nothing short of amazing, and she and her team gave me my first real shot last year. It was a wonderful experience and has opened so many doors for me, so it's immensely gratifying to get the chance to participate again this year.

Tell us about you and your work!

I am a playwright from Tennessee. My passion for theatre began at a very young age when I discovered my father's cast album of Phantom of the Opera. I wrote a handful of screenplays over the past few years -- even being dubbed a "writer to watch" by The Black List -- before returning my writing energy to my first love: the stage.

What inspired you to write it?

My play that has been selected for the 2023 Rogue Festival is titled This House Is Not a Home. I wrote this play because I wanted to explore the idea of two characters who know each other intimately but ultimately do not know each other at all. This play has gone through several workshops, but this is its first production. My hope for this play is that the audience will connect with these characters and their struggles, and understand the fact that we all tell the truth very slowly. As the plot and characters descend and unravel, it is my hope that it will be a visceral experience for the audience.

What's next for you?

Up next, I have another play, titled Clocks Are Like Angels, that has been selected as a finalist in the Appalachian Playwriting Festival in North Carolina. There will be staged readings of the finalist plays in September, during which I have also been asked to conduct a playwriting workshop.

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Senseless

Wayne L. Firestone

What made you want to participate in the Rogue Theater Festival this year?

I first previewed a scene from this play at Rogue’s Shorts Festival at Player’s Theatre in spring 2021 when Allison Hohman read my script and introduced me to Director Marcus Gualberto. After the disruption of live theatre, which many took for granted, it was exciting to feel the energy and presence of the actors and the masked audience. This inspired several backstage discussions with Marcus and one of the actors— Robert Maisonett, about a longer work I had been thinking about which  further empowers two of the characters—Blind Girl (who could see the injustices of January 6th on the steps of the Capitol) and Fallen Man (a POC veteran who escapes to Central Park after a false accusation of murder). I am excited to continue the collaboration with Marcus and Robert and other theatre artists who have since encouraged me to flesh out all five senses in this first workshop performance as a full length. 

Tell us about you and your work! What inspired you to write it?

As a “citizen artist,” I am committed to helping expose societal injustices pre and post- pandemic. The play is not a description of any lived experiences about specific loss of senses or disability but rather the metaphor of humanity losing senses both individually and collectively. The Blind Girl of Justice statue begins the journey in solitude, darkness and silence and ends the play empowered, embraced and flooded in light. During my playwriting sabbatical in Puerto Rico this past year, I wrote a new scene from the perspective of two mosquitos during the pandemic. It’s a lighter parable, but—spoiler alert—the females do kill a few billion people along the way.

Have you faced any challenges getting it on its feet? 

I recognize in several of my plays the theme of healing from personal or collective trauma. I am told that people have had it with the pandemic and therefore want to escape or avoid plays about climate and political polarization. But escape to where?  Senseless is a modest attempt to allow people to lean into the pain and trauma in a different way by being open to all of our senses— including but not limited to their sense of humor. I am trying to imagine a world where everyone in the audience can acknowledge some culpability for damage to the earth and non-human species. I am continuing to research different healing customs from around the world to inform my plays.

What is your hope for this play? 

I write plays set in very dark moments of the past and present that allow audiences and theatre artists to discover together the possibility of healing. I believe in the power of intergenerational learning and teaching to help transmit wisdom and comic relief —both ancient and streetwise. This intergenerational connection has the audacity to imagine that future generations can help repair deep wounds from the past and not merely seek revenge.  

What's next for you?

I am completing two new plays inspired by my time in Puerto Rico. One play reimagines Columbus’ two-day visit to Puerto Rico in 1493. Another, an eco-fable set on the island after a hurricane in the near future, was developed as part of a workshop with Caridad Svich at ESPA and recently had a table reading at La Goyca Community Center in San Juan with local actors and theatre artists. The play was largely written at and inspired by La Goyca, which was revitalized after Hurricane Maria and reclaimed by local artists, performers, and trauma healers. Their performances celebrate Caribbean heritage and invoke a music, dance and story-telling tradition called Bambas. I’m not a great dancer but I think we all need to get up and shake it out a bit now and then—in the theatre too. I am interested in theatre-making that challenges audience members to get out of their seats for more than ovations or quick exits.

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Tickets are on sale NOW! Come see shows live at Theatre Row or stream them on your couch at ShowTix4U.

Rogue Theater Festival exists to provide an opportunity for new and seasoned artists alike to present their work in a professional and theatrical environment. We are dedicated to equality and created this company with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists and stories in mind. Our space is open and supportive of all artists and their unique life experiences. We love working with early career artists and artists who've been around the block a time or two, so however you identify... we have a space for you. Rogue has had the pleasure to work with over 100 playwrights and hundreds of artists in its five years of programming. We accept works of all kinds into our festival and pride ourselves on the individual support and love we provide for all of our participants.

Established over 30 years ago, Abingdon Theatre Company develops and produces critically acclaimed brave new works. Most recently, ATC produced the New York Premiere of Queens Girl in the World which was nominated for Outstanding Solo Performance for the Vivian Robinson Audelco Recognition Awards for Excellence in Black Theatre. Other recent productions include the NYT Critics' Pick, Get on Your Knees, written and performed by Jacqueline Novak, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Abingdon Theatre Company’s One Night Only Series has showcased work such as Alex Edelman’s Just for Us which went on to receive Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations and The Prompter starring Oscar-winning actress Estelle Parsons, among others. For more information, head to www.abingdontheatre.org