The Alcove
New Play Development Program
Leap of Faith Initiative
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.
2026-2027
Untitled Labor Play by Claire Crowley
In the office of Big Tech Company, software engineers and product managers participate in “Fulfillment Fridays”, a day where they dress up like warehouse workers. Don’t worry, they call it “honoring working class culture”, and don’t worry it’s really just them dressing “working class chic.” And then, something happens.
mouthfeel by Emma Howard
In a heightened version of reality, four people lurch towards each other in attempts at connection. Yarl and Slab try to date one another. Urdeen attempts to make small talk in public spaces. Customer service workers pour their hearts out to anyone who will listen. People speak their subtext out loud and compulsively confess their most shameful and vulnerable desires. Throughout the play, they find moments of connection with one another, inadvertently saving each other. A lost bird is found.
Symposium for the Beloved, or Twinks in Italy by James La Bella
Symposium for the Beloved, or Twinks in Italy is a performance text interrogating queer desire and transgression via a panoramic look at the history of Death in Venice. The story of Death in Venice stretches from the myth of Ganymede to the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the music scene of 1970’s Japan to contemporary BookTok – collecting figures along the way like Timothée Chalamet, Daphne du Maurier, and Benjamin Britten. Part docudrama, part radical retelling, Symposium imagines a meeting of the parties in positions of lesser power (Plato’s notion of “the beloved”) in a Symposium on love – an attempt to reconstruct and understand the messy underbelly of these stories.
By Committee by Liba Vaynberg
It’s New Year’s eve in 1964, and everyone is drunk. It’s also 2024 on the Transsiberian railroad. By Committee is a freezing, ridiculous Soviet romp through censorship, streaming, and revolution with Leonid Brezhnev, Mickey Mouse, and Julie Andrews.
A Brief History of Terrible Advice Given To and By Me by Annalise Cain
Something happened to Celly’s voice, and the only way she’s been able to get it back is by doing drag as her mentor/father figure/mom’s ex-boyfriend/rockstar/old friend Wardo. Then he shows up on her doorstep, begging her to go back on tour with him. A Brief History of Terrible Advice Given To and By Me is a (mainly) two person, six character show that invites you to look through a broken kaleidoscope of memory and bad advice.
2025-2026
Nelson Diaz-Marcano
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.
Erin Gruodis-Gimbel
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.
Eka Savajol
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.
2023-2024
A.K. Payne
Lisa Sanaye Dring
Minita Gandhi
Matthew Paul Olmos
Justin Sherin
Tristan B. Willis
Vickie Ramirez
Justin Sherin
2022-2023
Jeremy Tiang