by Mariah Lee Squires & S.W. Jones | directed by Shana Bestock

The year is 1938. Dr. Lawrence Walton, direct descendant of Capt. Robert Walton, has acquired his ancestor’s collected writings; the very letters and journal entries that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, detailing the plight of Victor Frankenstein and his uncontrollable, murderous Creature. Dr. Walton, with the assistance of his wife, Minnie, is determined to rectify the calamitous failures of Frankenstein’s original experiment using modern science and a simple concept… he will tame his Creature by re-animating a female corpse.

Featuring Keller O’Malley as Dr. Laurence Walton, Enza Fammartino as The Creature, Sunam Ellis as Minnie Walton, and Laurence Hughes as Dr. Otto Helston. Stage management by Hazel Rose Gibson.

Content Information: misogyny, violence, death, ableism, grooming, stillbirth, medical horror.

Playwrights

Mariah Lee Squires and S.W. Jones met at Cornish College of the Arts while both enrolled in the theatre department. They kicked off their playwriting partnership with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, titled A Pond as Deep as Hell. Other works include: A Scythe and a Sandglass the Skeleton Bore, Carmilla,  Seven Down, and An Afternoon of Unpaid Sick Leave. They have a keen interest in storytelling that explores theatre of questions and use their writing to, as Cesar A. Cruz said, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

Director

Shana is an artist, educator, and director born and raised in Seattle, WA. For 17 years Shana served as the Artistic and Education Director for Seattle Public Theater, building a unique youth theater program and a home for exciting regional premieres. She has directed over 200 productions with youth ensembles, produced over 120 professional productions, commissioned and directed over 20 new plays, and worked for over 3 decades at the intersections of professional theater, youth development, and social justice.

Shana is the founder and Executive Director of Penguin Productions, a community theater organization dedicated to empowering youth through unique leadership opportunities, professional mentorship, and ambitious creative projects. She currently serves as ACT Contemporary Theatre's Artistic Associate, leading Education, Engagement, and New Works initiatives. Through her creative adventures, Shana strives to increase our capacity for connection, discovery, and ability to forge a more curious, compassionate and imaginative world. www.shanabestock.com

by Nelle Tankus | directed by Zenaida Smith

Animate and Brim have both survived massive loss. Now, they’re in The Hole, literally and figuratively. Animate can no longer feel pain, Brim forgot what happened to them, and The Hole is newborn and has no idea how to even exist. Their old way of living is gone. Now that these three have been thrust together, they must remember who they are, what happened to them, and how to grieve a pain they’ve never felt before. 

Content information: grief, discussions of death and dying.

Playwright

Nelle Tankus (she/her) is a playwright & performer whose work explores queerness, the absurd, and metamorphosis. Her full-length work has been seen in Seattle at Annex Theatre (Tenderness, dir. Grace Carmack and E. Pike), The Umbrella Project (Slack Water, dir. QuiQui Dominguez), and Parley Productions (Yom Kippur, dir. Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth). Her shorter works have been seen most recently at 12 Minutes Max, Parley, and MirrorStage. She was a semi-finalist for the Jerome Fellowship (2021/2022), Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series (2019), and the Eugene O'Neil National Playwright's Conference 2018). Most recently, she was a cohort of the 2021 María Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts. She is based on Duwamish Land [aka Seattle], and is a proud member of Parley Playwrights Group.

Director

Zenaida Rose Smith (she/her) is a freelance producer, director, and actor championing local and Global Majority artists. She is Production Manager at ArtsWest, a Producing Director for MAP Theatre, and serves on the boards of Seattle Open Arts Place and the 14/48 Projects. Directing credits include Matt & Ben (ArtsWest); Bloodletting by Boni B. Alvarez (Pork Filled Productions); adaptations of Koala Lou by Mem Fox, Maybe and Trying by Kobi Yamada (Book-It Arts Education Tours); Three Screams by Vincent Delaney and a white haunting by Brian Dang (MAP Theatre).

by Miriam BC Tobin | directed by Adrienne Mackey

Inside the Head of Mimp is a cheeky lens into the dangers of scientific curiosity and our boundless hunger for knowledge. Framed like a science presentation, we’ll learn all about the Balloonie People of Planet 14.7892, including little Mimp and her wild imagination. But how did Mimp become the last surviving member of her species? And where's the rest of the scientist's entire research team? With themes of colonization and earthnocentrism, this is a play as much about those big dangerous human acts as it is about the small personal ones that make us “human.”

Content information: colonization, genocide, scientific method, cultural insensitivity

Playwright

Miriam BC Tobin (she|her) is a Seattle-based playwright, theatre artist, and educator. She has performed on stages and taught drama across the US and Europe. Honors & awards include a Hedgebrook residency, PEN Writing Scholarship, and London Dramatic Academy Fellowship. She is a resident writer with the Seattle Public Library and an associate artist with The Shattered Glass Project. Miriam also runs SCRiB LAB, a playwriting organization aimed at community and connection. www.mirbct.com

Director

Adrienne Mackey is a director of theater and games. Past directing includes SURVIVE!, a 22,000 sq-ft installation about the cosmic scale; THE BALLAD OF JOE HILL, a play at Eastern State Penitentiary about the famed labor icon; and THE STUPIDEST, SCARIEST TIME, an interactive comedy about American productivity. She’s also created works like TRAILOFF – a mobile app that uses GPS to embed stories onto nature trails and THE END – a month-long game exploring mortality played via text.

by Carolynne Wilcox | directed by Zanne Gerard

Two strangers  wake up in an unfamiliar and unsettling place that keeps changing as they try to figure out where they are, what they’re doing there. Every shift is a small clue…if they can stop arguing long enough to figure it out. As they travel through the nightmare landscape, with help of two ciphers who take on different aspects from both their pasts and the landscape, they slowly begin to figure out the puzzle of where they are, and more importantly, who they are to each other.

Content Information: accidental death, mass casualty events, unrequited love, ladders

Playwright

Carolynne Wilcox (she/they) is a bilingual, Latine theatre artist based in Seattle. Their playwriting work has been seen on stages both locally and throughout the US. Recent performances include Warwick in Henry VI, Parts 2 & 3 with GreenStage (2024), Manuel in Miss You Like Hell at Strawberry Theatre Workshop,  Doña Dede in In the Time of The Butterflies at Book-It Rep (2022), and Ana (understudy w/performances) in The Book Club Play at Village Theatre (2022).

 Also a world traveler from birth, Caro is an avid student of world mythology, and a kick-ass home chef with a BFA in Acting from United States International University in San Diego, CA and an MFA in Theatre/Original Works from Towson University in Baltimore,MD. More info available at www.carolynnewilcox.com.

Director

Zanne Gerrard (she/her) is honored to collaborate with Carolynne Wilcox again, twenty years after she directed the staged reading of one of Carolynne's first scripts, Apres: The Story of Solange, in the Live Girls! Playwrights Festival. Since then, Zanne has directed productions and staged readings for GreenStage, SIS Productions, Edmonds Driftwood Players, the Mae West Fest, and Erinys Productions. She received a B.A. with honors in Theatre from Wesleyan University and an Executive MPA from the UW Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.

by Brittney S. Harris | Director to be announced

On the eve of her execution at Jasper Heights Women’s Correctional Facility, Victoria Brown—Inmate 1688—grants a final interview to aspiring writer Ami Wallace. What begins as a formal exchange soon unravels into a web of secrets, blurring guilt and innocence, truth and fiction. The Request (or Prison Fan Fiction) interrogates power, legacy, and the cost of remembrance in a race against time for justice—or a deeper reckoning.

Content information: forthcoming

Playwright

Brittney S. Harris, M.F.A. (she/her) is an internationally recognized professor, director, and performance-based activist specializing in Race and Performance, Performance as Activism, and Devised Community-Engaged Theatre. Her plays have been featured in festivals nationwide, including The Workshop Theater (NYC) and Fade to Black Theatre Festival. She also tours solo works The Intersection: The Sandra Bland Project and Being B.A.D., exploring social media’s impact on violence, cultural resilience, and social justice reform.

Director

by Zoe Barker-Aderem | director to be announced

Iris and July are in love and having an impossible baby as Iris’s brother’s flair for conspiracy theories grows darker. Oh, and there’s a pandemic. What does family mean when the world turns upside down? How do we find each other again when we don’t exist in the same reality anymore?

Content information: miscarriage, transphobia, political and social family disagreements, pandemic conspiracy theories.

Playwright

Zoe Barker-Aderem is a playwright whose work has been produced by theaters in Seattle and Los Angeles. Besides plays, she writes creative nonfiction and occasionally catches a poem. As a visual artist, she works mostly with mixed media and sculpture. She considers teaching part of her artistic practice: for the last ten years, she has taught creative writing in the King County Jail as part of the Golf Pencil Group. Her day job is fundraising and capacity building, including organizations building piped water systems, community for new parents, trauma-informed programming in prisons, and affordable housing.

Director