The 4 Seasons Residency Program Names Megan Tabaque as 2024/25 Playwright

The 4 Seasons Residency program has selected Megan Tabaque as their 2024/25 playwright. Created in 2020, this personalized, annual residency supports a playwright by offering them the opportunity to engage and benefit from a full year of support that includes a unique residency with each of the 4 member organizations: Ignition Arts (PA), Tofte Lake Center (MN), LAUNCH PAD at UC Santa Barbara (CA), and Seven Devils New Play Foundry (ID).

Based in Los Angeles (CA), playwright and Assistant Professor at the University of California-Riverside, Megan Tabaque, comes to the 4 Seasons Residency after playwriting and teaching stints nationwide. "Having the extended support and resources of the 4 Seasons Residency instills a kind of stability that rarely exists for playwrights," says Tabaque, who is midway through her residency working on her play The Rink at the End of the World, about a synchronized skating team facing a global nuclear apocalypse. "It's meant that I've been able to work with a new sense of purpose, with tangible support in mind. It's been energizing, joyful, and also community building."

Tabaque was nominated for the unique residency by Tofte Lake Center, where Megan had been a previous artist-in-residence. "It's been such a pleasure and gift to extend my years-long collaborative relationship with Megan to an expanded web of support. I've been a fan of Megan as an artist and a human for many years and several states now, and it's an honor to share her work and spirit with my colleagues across the country," said Tofte Executive Director Liz Engelman.

"Working with Megan is a delight," says 4 Seasons colleague and Ignition Arts Artistic Director, Kate Brennan. "She is the consummate theatre artist - collaborative, visionary and interested in asking the big questions. Her work addresses relevant topics with playfulness, precision and uncanny prescience."

A developmental reading of The Rink at the End of the World will take place at The Road Theater on January 28, 2025. The play will have further development as part of the LAUNCH PAD Amplify Reading Series Festival in April 2025. She will finish out her 4 Seasons Residency at the 2025 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in June.

Megan Tabaque

Megan's work has been developed, commissioned, and produced by the Alliance Theater, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Tofte Lake Center, the Workshop Theater, Paper Chairs, and Theatrical Outfit among others. She is a James A. Michener Fellow, Kundiman Fiction Fellow, Sewanee Writers' Conference Scholar, Seattle Public Theater Emerald Prize finalist, Playwrights' Realm Scratchpad Series semi-finalist, a 2021 4 Seasons Residency nominee, and the recipient of the Emory Playwriting Fellowship from 2021 to 2023. She's also written for the immersive weirdos at Meow Wolf, assisted award-winning TV writer Sheila Callaghan, and taught creative writing at Bennington College, Emory University, and UT Austin.

Megan writes to create new mythologies, using pop cultural tropes as accessible entry points for absurd, hot-button, human issues. A decorated playwright, Megan's play Britney Approximately (an adaptation of Medea remixed with the Britney Spears conservatorship) played to sold-out audiences in Atlanta as part of Theater Emory's 2023 season. Only Reason (co-written with Kimberly Belflower) was named Best New Play by Austin's Critic Circle and follows six obsessed teen girl fans when their favorite boy band crashes their tour bus.

Among her other plays are Cycle Play (a two-woman thriller that takes place in a Soul Cycle), Marry Me, Bruno Mars (a caper about a QAnon believer on a rescue mission gone wrong in Atlanta's Asian American community), Decapitations (a haunting Halloween thriller about a Hapa family in South Florida being hunted by a Filipino folkloric monster), Antigone's Last Birthday (an adaptation of Sophocles' text set in a fictional border town in crisis) and Batman Returns Returns (an indie-holiday-musical adaptation of Tim Burton's 90s cult-classic) which she created with installation artist Terror Pigeon at Austin's Museum of Human Achievement (MOHA).

Upcoming projects include a commission from Inner City Arts Work of Arts program in Los Angeles to be present in the Spring of 2025, and a TYA commission from the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.

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