The Orchard Project Reveals 2024 Episodic, Audio, and Greenhouse Labs

The Orchard Project has announced the artists and companies selected to participate in its 2024 Episodic, Audio, and Greenhouse Lab programs. Between the three labs, which join the over 16 projects already receiving support in its Performance Lab, The Orchard Project selected 30 projects and artistic teams from a competitive group of more than 1,000 submissions. The Orchard Project's Labs supporting artists creating work for audio and TV will be hybrid, split between virtual workshops and programming in New York City and Los Angeles, allowing the Orchard Project to accelerate the work of innovative playwrights, screenwriters, and theater companies from a breadth of geographic locales. The Orchard Project's annual Greenhouse program, supporting development by a group of multidisciplinary artists in various areas of live performance, will take place year-round in New York City.

“The Orchard Project's unwavering support for artists makes a difference across the cultural landscape, whether you're watching TV, listening to your favorite podcast, or going to a show. There is currently at least one Orchard Project alum involved in every single new play or musical on Broadway — and we can't wait for this year's Orchard Project artists to create with us and then share their stories with the world,” said Ari Edelson, The Orchard Project's Founder and Artistic Director. 

The Orchard Project will host three labs in addition to its annual Performance Lab:

• Episodic Lab (television)
• Audio Lab (audio)
• Greenhouse Program (cross-genre)

2024 EPISODIC LAB

“The 2024 Episodic Lab brings together a new cohort of writers pushing the boundaries of narrative form and seeking unique ways to explore the human experience in the television medium. Be it the struggles of growing up, the struggles of living your own life or the struggles of reckoning with the end of that life, the 2024 Episodic Lab artists find new ways to express our shared humanity on the screen with joy, with pathos and with honesty.”
– Maija Gustin and Jennifer Chambers, Episodic Lab Program Directors

• LIANNE WALDEN, The Pleasure Gap: A queer intimacy coordinator and college professor launches an escort service for women, inciting both liberation and outrage.
• ELISA MANZINI, The End-All: After helping her terminally ill boyfriend end his life, a shattered but determined medical director opens an illegal assisted suicide clinic that pits her against big pharma and politicians, and she's forced to flee to Europe after killing the wrong person.
• HELENE TAYLOR, Chronicles of a Radioactive Girl Scout: After a childhood glance at the afterlife an unorthodox physicist is driven to prove its existence the only way she knows how: through science. But the closer she gets to the truth, the closer others get to uncovering a secret that will destroy everything she's built.
• CAREY CRIM, Triggered: A talented young psychotherapist, who survived a school shooting as a teenager, finds herself experiencing PTSD when she tries to help a new teen patient with the potential to be a school shooter himself.
• JORDAN OBEY, Gumshoe Brooklyn: An aging private detective and the estranged son of his late partner work together to keep a failing investigation practice alive by solving oddball cases brought to them by the residents of Brooklyn, New York.
• Katasha Acosta, Miami Rising: A trailblazing millennial Black LatinX woman takes charge of her family's hotel empire, navigating a high-stakes expansion and a racial profiling scandal that threatens their legacy – and may compel her to confront her hidden identity.
• LISA DENG, Death Metal Demon Hunters: When a small town girl unearths her unexpected destiny as the descendant of the Chinese God of Music, she must learn to use the power of death metal to combat the horde of demons that have escaped from the hellmouth behind her house.
• KELBY GUILFOYLE, Happy House: The adventures of a motley crew of puppet orphans growing up in a puppet orphanage
• AMBER MCCAIN, The Vulture Club: A desperate surgeon is pulled into the lucrative and dangerous world of alternative healthcare.
• Robert Cunningham, Laurels: A serialized half-hour comedy about a washed up, former child star who uses his con-artist younger cousin and a ragtag group of Chicago community college performers to help reignite his career.
• NICOLE MARTINEZ, Questing: An unlucky-in-love Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast dating in the big city vows to lose her virginity before her rapidly approaching 30th birthday.
• JOSE SEBASTIAN ALBERDI, Fenny Snake Flats: A trio of witches navigate daily life in an American frontier town all while the newly appointed sheriff will stop at nothing to make sure they're dead. 

2024 AUDIO LAB

“This year's Audio Lab participants are thinking deeply about ways to move audio storytelling forward. It's a quickly evolving medium, and these innovative artists have a keen sense of where it can go next. I'm looking forward to working with them and seeing how their ideas unfold.”
– Jerry Ruiz, Audio Lab Program Director

• LIZ SALAZAR, Clandestine: A 2nd-person audio drama that unfolds in motion, inviting you to immerse yourself in the role of a spy on covert missions while on a walk in the real world.
• Stephen Trask & Aurin Squire: American Shtetl: A narrative podcast with music that follows David, a journalist who delves into his past when he goes home to his mother after his father passes away. On his journey he encounters ghosts, a history of New London he never knew, and secrets of his grandfather's past that completely alter his understanding of his own life. Written by Stephen Trask and Aurin Squire with music by Stephen Trask.
• AUDREY KAUFMAN, bitches: When a woman switches bodies with her boyfriend's new puppy, the trio's lives are upended amid questions of ownership and obedience. It'll take really wanting to be herself, in spite of all the thorns, and maybe even without her man's love, to switch back.
• MATT HARRY, Codex Arcanum: After helping a hungry wendigo, a bubbly but impatient teenager is pulled into a secret war between sorcerers and anti-magic mercenaries.
• MAX YU, Tankie Today: Set in a world where China's Cultural Revolution didn't end in 1976 and instead continues into 2030, Tankie Today is an intercom program in a Chinese re-education camp that instills socialist values while guiding prisoners through morning exercises.
• SHOSHANAH TARKOW, The Untitled Ether Music Project: A true story of scientific inventions, music, love, spycraft, and resonance; spanning from secret Soviet laboratories, to sold-out concert halls in New York City, and told through the otherworldly music of Leon Theremin's “Etherphone”.
• WESTON Eric Scott & Chris Lambert, Milkshake Duck: When a no-name, daydreaming duck gets catapulted to unintentional internet stardom, he strives to keep it at any cost before ensuring his cataclysmic fall.

The annual Audio Lab will again be facilitated by Jerry Ruiz.

2024-2025 GREENHOUSE LAB

"This year's Greenhouse Lab cohort is an exciting mix of multi-disciplinary creators and groundbreaking storytellers, and I can't wait to see how they learn from and inspire each other and grow together over the course of the year."
– Ramona Rose King, Greenhouse Lab Program Director

• Daniella De Jesus: playwright, actor/performer, puppeteer, puppet designer, teaching artist
• ALICIA CARROLL: playwright, screenwriter, educator
• CLARIVEL RUIZ: writer, director, actor
• LANXING FU: theater artist, writer, performer 
• LILY HAJE: deviser, director, dramaturg, and puppet enthusiast
• NINA KI: playwright, aerialist, drag king, maker of things
• David Rosenberg: writer and actor
• Milo Cramer: writer
• JAYMES SANCHEZ: playwright, actor, educator
• GRACE GOHEEN: playwright, director

The Greenhouse Lab will be facilitated by dramaturg Ramona Rose King and Gaven Trinidad.

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