Ensemble Studio Theatre Announces 2024 FIRST LIGHT FESTIVAL
The 2024 First Light Festival will run from April 25 to June 13 and include six public readings and two closed readings for internal development.
By: A.A. Cristi Mar. 12, 2024
Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have announced the line-up for the 2024 First Light Festival, part of the EST/Sloan Project to develop plays exploring science and technology.
Every year, the First Light festival shares a first look at projects commissioned and currently in development under the EST/Sloan Project. This year's line-up includes new works by Karina Billini, Meghan Endres Brown, Sandra A. Daley-Sharif, Allyson Morgan, Jacquelyn Reingold, Jacob Marx Rice, Melisa Tien, and Zhu Yi.
The 2024 First Light Festival will run from April 25 to June 13 and include six public readings and two closed readings for internal development. All First Light Festival presentations are free and will be held at Ensemble Studio Theatre (545 W. 52nd St., 2nd Floor). Reservations are required and can be made at www.ensemblestudotheatre.org/firstlight.
Since 1998, the EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project has developed hundreds of new plays that challenge and broaden the view of science in the popular imagination. Over the past 25 years, the EST/Sloan Project has fostered over 300 plays about science and technology, leading to productions across the country. Each play's life onstage begins with the First Light Festival, an annual presentation of new readings, workshops, and productions. Nelson Diaz-Marcano's Las Borinqueñas, this season's mainstage production premiering in April, was originally commissioned and developed through the EST/Sloan Project and was part of the First Light festival in 2022 and 2023.
2024 FIRST LIGHT FESTIVAL:
Binding Energy
by Jacob Marx Rice
Thursday, April 25 at 3:00 pm
Four high schoolers trapped in a study group quickly discover that science is the least of their problems as they fight to survive the emotional hurricane of being seventeen.
Jacob Marx Rice is a playwright and screenwriter based in Queens, New York, whose plays have been seen at theaters around the world in over a dozen cities on three continents. He has been produced and developed by theaters including Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Finborough Theatre in London, The New Ohio, The Flea Theater, Atlantic Theatre Stage 2, and others. He has won the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center, the Faculty Award from NYU/Tisch, and a Sloan Commission from the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Jacob was a Playwright Observer at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He has also been a finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Lark Playwrights Week, and the Princess Grace Award and his plays have been nominated for four of London's prestigious Off-West End Awards.
Orva and Nadine
Thursday, May 16 at 3:00 pm
When a woman with no fear, meets a neuroscientist studying fear, an investigation begins. Fear, fearlessness, friendship, and the crazy struggle to survive.
Jacquelyn Reingold is a playwright, TV writer, teacher, and advocate. Her plays have been seen in New York at EST, MCC, Naked Angels, at Actors Theater Louisville, Portland Center Stage, PlayLabs Minneapolis, at other theaters across the country, and in London, Dublin, Berlin, Belgrade, and Lima. Honors include: a Lilly Award, the Kennedy Center‘s Fund for New American Plays, EST/Sloan Foundation Commissions, MacDowell Fellowships, and a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist. She's published in Women Playwrights: Best Plays, several Best American Short Plays, by DPS, French, Smith & Kraus, and a collection of her one-acts called Things Between Us. Several short plays have been recorded for podcast/radio by Playing-on-Air. TV credits include "The Good Fight," "Grace and Frankie" and "In Treatment." Jacquelyn is a member of EST, an alum of New Dramatists, and a founding member of Honor Roll, an advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40, whose goal is inclusion in theater. She developed this play in the EST Playwrights Unit and worked on it at The Hermitage Artists Retreat.
Disrupted
by Melisa Tien
Thursday, May 23 at 3:00 pm
In the male-dominated tech arena, two women join forces to create a brand-new app—one that tracks the menstrual cycle—and form a partnership that is tested to its limits.
Melisa Tien is a playwright and librettist invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work. A resident of New Dramatists, she is the author of the plays Best Life (JACK, 2021), Yellow Card, Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), Refrain (Wild Project, 2011), The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare; librettist of the operas Forever (Washington National Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Houston Grand Opera/Asia Society Texas Center, 2024), Family Heirloom (Experiments in Opera, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera/Arts Brookfield, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023), lyricist for the song cycles Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving, co-creator of the podcast/auditory experience Active Listening, and creator of the theatrical experiences Untitled Landscape and Community Forest. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021), and has authored essays for New Music USA and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance. She is currently a librettist for the American Opera Project's Composers & the Voice program, and a recent member of Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera's Writers' Room, and The Assembly Theater Project's Deceleration Lab.
Amma's Wit
by Sandra A. Daley-Sharif
Thursday, June 6 at 3:00 pm
An homage to the "Granny" midwives.
Sandra Daley-Sharif is an Afro-Caribbean writer for Theater and TV living in Savannah, GA. She is a Professor of Dramatic Writing at SCAD University. Sandra is also a highly-sought-after dramaturg and collaborative deviser of new works. She is an OBIE Award winner and a recipient of the Josephine Abady Award, commending her for her contribution, as a producer, of Diversity to the American theater landscape. Two of her plays made it to the Kilroys List.
Apple Bottom
by Karina Billini
Thursday, June 13, 3:00 pm
When a humble neighbor, Andrea, and a high-strung influencer, Belinda, arrive as patients for their post-BBL recovery, Apple Bottom Spa struggles to keep both women afloat.
Karina Billini is a Dominican-American playwright, poet, and educator from Brooklyn. She is a first-year playwright in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting program. She is a current member of The Public Theater's 2023-2025 Emerging Writers Group. She is a proud alum of the New Harmony Project Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, Pipeline PlayLab, Gingold Theatrical Group's Speaker's Corner, among others. Her plays have been workshopped and/or produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Alliance Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New Harmony Project, Fault Line Theatre, Teatro Vivo, among others. Her play, Apple Bottom, is a recipient of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission.
BIGFOOT
by Meghan Endres Brown
Monday, June 17 at 3:00 pm
A darkly funny high-stakes suspense play about sibling rivalry, quantum physics, and the terrifying power of a good story.
Meghan Endres Brown writes about dangerous women. She is an award-winning playwright, librettist/lyricist, and screenwriter based in Pasadena, California. Her theater work has been performed or developed at institutions across the United States, including Lincoln Center, Portland Center Stage, Geffen Playhouse, Victory Gardens Theater, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Villa. Favorite plays include The Tasters, The Pliant Girls, Untuned Ears Hear Nothing But Discord, EMMA: No One But Herself, I KILLED A TIGER, Perfect Teeth for Crocodile Land, and This Is Happening Now. She is a co-writer of the Lionsgate/Buzzfeed Studios comedy-thriller F*** Marry Kill, which will be released Fall 2024. Current theater projects include EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project commission BIGFOOT, astronaut murder mystery play A Seam (developed in The Geffen Playhouse Writers' Room), sex tragicomedy/Much Ado About Nothing riff What Happened While Hero Was Dead, supernatural feminist rage musical These Girls Have Demons, and Hedy, a spectacle-forward German-language musical about Hedy Lamarr.
BY INVITATION ONLY:
Teenage Huntress
A prehistoric teenage huntress. A contemporary female graduate student. Both extraordinary, yet underestimated, women search for meaning in what others cannot see.
Allyson Morgan is a writer, producer, performer, and the founder and Executive Director of the award-winning film and theatre collective F*It Club. Her first short film Need For Speed (Dating) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, while her next short, Sitting, made its world premiere at SCAD Savannah Film Festival and won "Outstanding Narrative Short" at Tallgrass Film Festival. First Date, her newest short film produced by 20th Digital Studio, is currently airing on Hulu in their "Bite Size Halloween" series. Allyson adapted First Date into a feature film for Hulu, titled Jagged Mind, which the LA Times called “edgy” and “powerful.” She has also been selected for the New York Stage and Film Filmmakers' Workshop, been awarded “Best Teleplay” at Omaha Film Festival, twice been a top ten Finalist for Cinequest, a Finalist at Stowe Story Labs, and a Semi-Finalist at Austin Film Festival. Additionally, she has been awarded an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Commission, an NG Art Creative Residency in France, a Monson Arts Residency in Maine, a Wassaic Project “Haunted Mill” residency, and multiple Juno Leadership Residencies through the Omega Institute. Allyson was a part of the Webby Award-winning producing team for Dave Holstein and Alan Schmuckler's musical podcast “Wait, Wait, Don't Kill Me,” and she also co-created and produced “Ghosted,” an AR experience which was awarded “Most Innovative Immersive Experience” at North Bend Film Festival. She has written two original novels for Tapas media, Don't Want to Remember You and The Perfect Place, reaching almost 400K views online.
Frozen: The Egg Freezing Musical
Written by Zhu Yi & composed by Yoonmi Lee
To counter their ticking biological clocks, two women, worlds apart, turn to the modern "ice magic,” venturing into the murky waters of reproductive justice and business.
Zhu Yi is a New York-based playwright from Shanghai. Her work has been performed and published in various languages around the world. She is an alumni of NYTW's Emerging Artist Fellowship, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb's Emerging Playwrights Group, a member of Ma-Yi Writers Lab, a member of The Royal Court Theatre's International Playwrights Programme. MFA in playwriting, Columbia University. Stage plays include You Never Touched the Dirt (Clubbed Thumb, NYC; Edinburgh International Festival, UK), I Am a Moon (National Performing Arts Center, China; Theater Emory, Atlanta, GA), I Know You (National Theatre of Ireland), How Time Flies (National Theatre of China), A Deal (Urban Stages, NYC),
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