R&D Groups
Current 2024-2025
111 Fires and a Flood at the Guatemalan Natural History Museum
111 Fires and a Flood at the Guatemalan Natural History Museum is an investigation into theatrical truth as told by the fires of a heating planet. The fictional story follows 15-year old Oscar, a teenager on a field trip who'd rather be literally anywhere else, especially at home with his mother Nadia. His father, Dennis, died last month while responding to a fire, and Oscar doesn't understand why he has to go back to school as if nothing happened. During a field trip to the Museum, a jungle rainforest diorama spontaneously combusts, quickly getting Oscar into trouble. Strangely, the pattern of the burnt diorama matches the stories from the field that his father used to tell him, and Oscar suspects something else is afoot....
Woven from interviews with firefighters who braved the historic, 75-all-at-once, 2024 fire season in Guatemala; online comment sections; rumors about government conspiracies; 111 fires... asks what's it like to listen in a catastrophe when the air doesn't let us breathe, let alone speak.
KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE
Khristián Méndez Aguirre is a queer, Latinx, award/winning multi-hyphenate theater artist/scholar. His work weaves theater, academic scholarship, Latinx cultural practices, and environmental justice. He's an ecodramaturg, an arts-integrated facilitator/educator, a prolific grant-writer, and a playwright/director/producer. He's an alum of the Candela Fellowship, Eugene O'Neill Theatre, Double Edge Theatre, Glass Half Full Theatre, College of the Atlantic and UT Austin. His work in theatre and environmental justice is influenced by his background in environmental activism, work at the United Nations, training in contemporary techniques of theater-making, a robust history of arts-based projects for environmental justice, and a global education. khristianmendez.com
Ceasefire Later
Ceasefire Later is a piece of documentary theater attempting to chart the machinations of propaganda that enable and empower the ongoing genocide and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, the latest phase of which began on October 7th, 2023, and is ongoing as of the writing of this sentence on October 21st, 2024.
Bazeed
Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, playwright, poet, performer, editor, curator, masticator, medical school dropout, massage therapist, and very decent cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed on both sides of the Atlantic. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Bazeed curates and runs a performance salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.
Mabel's Mine
Mabel's Mine is a new play about big oil from the perspective of workers, centering the effects of extractive mining in the lives and bodies of two sisters in the Canadian Oil Sands. Placing the explicit female body (menopause, miscarriage and menstruation) next to the hyper-masculine, pollution-heavy oil industry, the play explores the gendered practice of care work and reproductive labour as systems upholding industrial mining and company towns.
LYNDSEY BOURNE
Lyndsey Bourne (she/they) is a queer Canadian playwright, teacher and a birth/abortion doula working with The Doula Project. Her plays have been presented and developed at La MaMa, The Mercury Store, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Ojai Playwrights Conference, New York Stage and Film, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Manhattan Theater Club, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Playwrights Horizons, The Public Theater and others. Lyndsey currently teaches Writing and Devising for Performance at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (NYU Tisch). She practices and co-facilitates beekeeping at her community garden in Flatbush, Brooklyn. They are a New Georges affiliated artist, a member of the New Georges Jam, a 2022 New Georges Audrey Resident, A 2022 Writer in Residence at The Ojai Playwrights Conference, a member of the Obie award winning writers group Youngblood/EST, a member of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the recipient of a 2020 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theater Grant and a 2024-2025 Macdowell Fellow. BFA NYU, MFA Brooklyn College (with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney)
UNTITLED
On May 1st 2024, the NYPD raided CUNY's City College Campus and arrested 173 student protesters as part of an operation to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses citywide. This was one of many violent police raids of student protest encampments throughout the United States. As community insiders, student journalists played an unprecidented role in documenting the events where many mainstream and legacy media outlets were otherwise barred or restricted from reporting on the story.
This investigative theatre project explores student activism by telling the story of the City College police raid through memories of student journalists, activists, faculty, and community members present at the raid that night. The project aims to highlight broader issues of police and militarization of college campuses, academic freedom, the legacy of student activism in the United States, and independent journalism. We are interested in exploring the role of theatre as a living archive to document and record contemporary events.
ASH MARINACCIO
Ash Marinaccio is a multidisciplinary documentarian and visual storyteller working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling that highlights the socio-political issues defining our times. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, Social Practice CUNY, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations-recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc (docbloc.org), committed to bringing artists and journalists across nonfiction genres together for live performance collaborations. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Connect: ashmarinaccio.com and @ashmarinaccio (Instagram).
USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency (USCIS) is the bane of most immigrants’ existence, as it holds the power to allow or deny their presence in this country – and it wields that power within an erratic bureaucracy that taxes their pockets and tests their sanity. But what if, on top of that, it turned out its agents were engaging in fringe science, incepting immigrants with nightmares about being deported to keep them compliant? Conceived by the playwright when he stumbled onto the fact that he was not the only immigrant to have a recurring night terror about being sent back, USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division explores the psychological effects of immigration to the United States through the lens of science fiction and horror.
FRANCISCO MENDOZA
Francisco Mendoza is an Argentinian writer currently living in Brooklyn, NY after spending several years in Brazil. His writing spans theater, prose, audio, and the screen, and he also works as a freelance journalist, teacher, and marketing consultant. He's an advocate for immigrants in the entertainment industry. notrealmendoza.com / itainitiative.org
111 Orchestra Place
"111 Orchestra Place" is a play about the rise and fall of The Gotham Hotel in Detroit, Michigan during the 1950’s. One of the first 5 star luxury establishments for Black folks of its time, it was a safe haven for African-Americans all around the country to be treated with dignity and respect and it was completely funded by the "illegal" Numbers gambling ring. I want to explore the cost of Black ambition in a time when we started winning so the United States changed the rules. For this play Camille will be conducting both oral histories of Black Detroiters and doing archival research at libraries in Detroit.
CAMILLE SIMONE THOMAS
Camille Simone Thomas is a 5th generation African-American Detroiter through her father’s side and a first generation Jamaican through her mothers. She names this because her work most often interrogates cultural legacies, familial healing, spirituality, and the general kicking and screaming of how Black folks get free despite the oppressive forces of colonialism and white supremacy. Her work has been seen at The Connelly Theatre, MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Blackboard Playwriting series, Lime Arts Theatre company, American Slavery Project, Dixon Place, Workshop Theatre, Barter Theatre Company, The Brick, and more! While working on "111 Orchestra Place" with The Civilians she's also fundraising for a developmental production of her play "Sweetblood" coming Fall 2025. If you'd like to support that work financially click this link to donate or feel free to contact her via her website https://www.camillesthomas.com/
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