by Ayesha Siddiqui Outdoors where I live there is an overgrown orange tree. The tree has likely not been pruned in many years, judging by the amount of growth on the branches, the offshoots like spiderwebs, crisscrossed limbs holding an overabundance of oranges that fall to the earth too soon or too late, the fruit collected never ready. Once I volunteered to prune trees in a garden. An arborist led us through determining what to remove, finding the nodes, and the angle to cut away anything no longer serving the tree. We removed competing branches and sliced back anything beyond the most promi ..read more

by Leelee Jackson I don’t want to be a playwright. I am a playwright.  I don’t need to write more.  I benefit from reading what I’ve already written.  “Forgotten so soon?”  Comb Your Hair (Or You’ll Look Like a Slave)  The Shit Show: An american Allegory or The House Across the Street Yo Mama’s a Crackhead Critical Race Theory  What’s Love Got  To Do With It Losing It Ex-Factor Honorable Mention I’ve written some good ass plays. Still, I get real anxious sometimes if I’m honest. Wondering if I’m not writing good enough. Fast enough. Interesting enough for m ..read more

by Alison Minami As a mother to a young child, I often think of the lessons that I want to teach my daughter. I think about how I can instill in her the spirit of creative risk-taking. I want her to be willing to fail, to fall flat on her face and still get up. I was always inspired by the story that Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx shapewear, shares from childhood when her father would require her and her brother to report back their failures at the end of every week. He wanted to instill in them a willingness to try new things despite the fear of failure. He was not interested in their easy or ..read more

by Constance Strickland I received a message last week from a friend who resides between Chicago and New York. She is a playwright, poet, performer, a brilliant witty woman who tells layered stories. You can imagine how it broke my heart to read her words:  “I’m tired. The limit does in fact exist and I feel like I’m at mine. It just feels too hard and like it’s impossible to change anything. There’s just no money and I don’t know how to sustain any of this.”  It has been over three years since the pandemic, We See You White American Theater and the righteous fight for justice in the ..read more

by Kitty Felde Some say the greatest joy of writing is that feeling of being in the flow, creating that first draft. Words fly across the page, almost by magic. Characters come to life, dialogue sparkles, telling details come instantly to mind. And then you’re left with a mess. I’ve been wrestling with the third book in my Fina Mendoza Mysteries series called “Snake in the Grass.” It’s about partisanship on Capitol Hill, as seen through the eyes of the 10-year-old daughter of a congressman. I pounded out 207 pages, printed it out, and stared at a catastrophe. There was no structure, entire ..read more

by Chelsea Sutton I can remember almost every moment when someone has made me feel small and stupid for writing what I want to write. These moments live rent free in my head, every time I sit down to the blank page. At a writing workshop, a faculty person told me I was “putting on” a “quirky” sensibility, play-acting a quirky writer who writes quirky things, and that I would never succeed with this act. Men have told me that things my female characters want don’t matter or the “stakes aren’t high enough” because the characters are unmarried and/or without children. I’ve been told that a black ..read more

by Carolina Pilar Xique Whoever is still saying that “Theatre is Dead” in 2024 needs to come have a serious talk with me – because theatre is and always has been alive and well, and the reason for such lives solely within the determination of theatre-makers like Beatrice Casagrán. Producing Artistic Director of Ophelia’s Jump Productions (OJP), Beatrice Casagrán dives headfirst into 2024 with a whopping 7-show season that is “guaranteed to entertain with compelling stories and educate current and new generations of theatre lovers.” And I am certain 2024’s season will do just that – their thea ..read more

by Cynthia Wands The program of ADRIFT A WAYWARD MEDIEVAL FOLLY by Happenstance Theater at Theater 59 in December 2023. It wouldn’t be the Middle Ages without a hellmouth, demons, and angels. This past December I traveled to New York to spend the holiday with family, see some theatre, and pause the grief that I’m living in. I had a wonderful visit, was enveloped in love and care with my family, saw some marvelous plays, and the grief came along as an uninvited companion. Grief doesn’t take kindly to holidays. Actually, let me rewrite that ~ grief becomes an especially noisy companion at holid ..read more

by Ayesha Siddiqui Lately I’ve been steeping in the details of setting. The shocking cold of a marble floor even in the height of summer, the joy of lightning bugs on their first flight of the season as the sticky humidity holds you up and the sun departs, the sound of a call to prayer, the song of cicadas in the morning dew. Give me the plays and the fiction where the setting is alive. Characters find themselves being pulled along in ways they don’t even realize by mother nature or guided by the house they’re in. Give me tiny apartments and big sprawling spans of memories. Give me snowstorms ..read more

Where do ideas come from? I realized after I had completed my plays, it was time to start a new one, but I was at a loss. Previous plays had begun with a project I wanted to submit to that gave me a place to start from, an idea to build on. But it wasn’t until there was no specific project to write for, did I realize I was out of ideas. Well, not necesszrily out of ideas, but no idea where to start. And that had me thinking, where do ideas come from? Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash Do you make a wish for potential story lines and ideas? Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash I never thought of ..read more