The Alcove
New Play Development Program
LEAP OF FAITH SESSIONS
Leap of Faith Sessions
Discretionary support for artists and/or projects that are in the research and development stage and/or in a position to benefit from developmental support.
2025-2026
Radio Bemba Presenta… The Ambassador or the 51st State Episode is a high-stakes, real-time drama set during a live podcast where two estranged cousins—one a radical host, the other a rising politician—clash over the future of their home. Trapped in a studio, their fiery debate unravels into a hilarious and raw reckoning with family, betrayal, and the effects of colonization. What starts as a chance to reconnect spirals into a fight over identity, memory, and the power to define home.
So much of the chronic illness/disability experience starts with learning the limits of your body, which might be new or counterintuitive. I want to use the space and time generously provided by the Lortel to be working on the physical aspect of MAiD in America, primarily finding compelling stillness amidst the pain of movement.
I aim to further develop The Apologetics and its companion play through workshop and investigation with fellow trans and queer community members.
2024-2025
Lake Mead by S.T. Brant
In his new play, Lake Mead, A barrel containing a human body is discovered in Lake Mead in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2022, the water level has dropped significantly, bringing to the surface many of the city’s past sins. As the water levels continue to deplete, reaching alarming lows each year, tensions arise over ancient water rights that see have Nevadans receiving a paltry percentage of water from their own reserve along with the mysteries about the city’s dark beginnings that continue to be unearthed as more bodies are discovered.
Extraordinary Machine by Allyson Dwyer
From the days of mailing lists and message boards to the now seamless world of iPhones and social media, Extraordinary Machine is an intimate three-act examination of computer programmer and activist Aaron Swartz’s relationship with technology, and how his story mirrors the arc, and ideals, of the Internet.
UNNATURAL CAUSES by Christine Toy Johnson
UNNATURAL CAUSES is the story of two life-weary friends racing against the clock and a former mentor-turned-politician as they fight to save what has inspired the world’s great works of art, and their own American history from extinction. A modern-day yet time bending horror story about climate change, censorship, and the fight for narrative justice.
Gloria Oladipo
Gloria Oladipo’s untitled play follows a white couple on a dysfunctional vacation that unknowingly stays at an AirBnB, a home where others were once trapped amid deadly, rising flood waters. Based in a southern city, the play uses archival 9-1-1 calls to explore questions of gentrification, white banility, and who is most vulnerable within the climate crisis.
SMOKE by Drew Woodson
In SMOKE, It’s a hot and dry summer in Lake County in the summer of 2018. And a Native family living in the small town of Upper Lake, CA, are about to have their worlds demolished when the Mendocino Complex Fire touches down. The youngest son returns for their first year of undergraduate school at UC Davis, and quickly realizes the approaching threat the fire presents. However, the patriarch of the family, a bullish old Native man set in his ways, refuses to evacuate his home that’s been in his family for generations. With the fire fast approaching, the family only has a matter of days to try and convince their father to leave his family home in order to save himself.