R&D Groups
Current 2023-2024
Now in its 13th year, the Civilians’ R&D Group is comprised of writers, composers, and directors who meet throughout a season to develop original pieces of theater through the creative investigation of a pre-selected topic of their choosing. The creative processes may include interviews, community engagement, research, and other experimental methods of inquiry. Led by R&D Program Director Phoebe Corde, the Group shares and discusses their methodologies and the resulting work. This year, the Group will be meeting online. The process culminates in the FINDINGS Series, a works-in-progress reading series.
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The Single Raindrop
When a senior center in Tell-Fara, New York gets a VR headset to stimulate the minds of its residents, everyone seems to love its most popular app: a virtual recreation of the town, as it was in the 1950s. Everyone, that is, except the center’s oldest, and only Black, resident, Noah Franklin. Noah won’t stop jumping into the virtual lake at the center of town and screaming about mermaids. As the senior center tries to calm Noah down, the app's designers are embroiled in a mystery submerged deep in the town’s past.
“The Single Raindrop” is a play about the therapeutic potential of virtual reality for the elderly, as well as the power of technology to dictate our understanding of history. Each character contends with their place in the world: as user and designer, victim and oppressor, censor and historian. None think they are the most important part of their story, but as Douglas Adams said, “The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.”
Zachariah Ezer
Zachariah Ezer is a playwright and dramaturg whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include “The Freedom Industry” (Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, The Playwrights Center, New York Stage & Film), “Address the Body!” (The University of Texas at Austin’s UTNT Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights in Residence), and “Legitime” (Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire), among others. He is the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize and is currently under commission from Theater J. MFA: The University of Texas at Austin. BA: Wesleyan University.
Dominique Rider
Dominique Rider is a Brooklyn-based director and writer whose work seeks to answer the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” while attempting to analyze the layers of anti-blackness that maintain the world we live in. Deploying theatre and performance as tools of Afropessimism, Dominique has developed and staged work with The Park Avenue Armory,Audible, The New Group, NYTW, Roundabout, The Atlantic, Princeton, Rattlestick, BRIC Arts, Two River, Portland Center Stage, and more. Past fellowships/residencies include Hi-Arts, The National Black Theatre, TheaterWorks Hartford, NYSAF, BRIC Arts, Roundabout, and NAMT. Dominique is a producer with CLASSIX.
The Tusk Hunters
Two men in the Alaskan tundra search for woolly mammoth tusks as an alternative to elephant ivory. But their most recent discovery causes their employer to pivot from the ivory trade to a project straight out of science fiction as a means of combating climate change. Inspired by the real-life founding of Colossal Biosciences, The Tusk Hunters explores the morality of de-extinction and the toll that scientifically revolutionary ideas take on those who execute them
Dan Caffrey
Dan Caffrey graduated from UT Austin's M.F.A. Playwriting program in 2020. Before moving to Brooklyn, he taught playwriting at the Alliance in Atlanta. He's been an O'Neill Finalist, Next Forever Finalist (The Civilians/Princeton), Jerome Semi-Finalist, shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship, Princess Grace Semi-Finalist, Resident Artist at Tofte Lake Center, and M.F.A. Scholar at Sewanee Writers' Conference. His work has recently been developed/produced by Think Tank, Atlantic, Concord Theatricals, Hot Playwright Summer, Workshop Theater, American Records, Jarrott Productions, Kitchen Dog, and Pegasus PlayLab. Next up: River Keepers, a new play on the water produced by The Motor Company, directed by Dina Vovsi.
missing people/missing people: An investigation of the many reputed failures of the back-to-the-land movement and/or Do you dream of cabins in the woods and/or When queer left the city and got lost on the Lost Coast*
How wrong does a social movement have to go to make it a failure? How many people need to survive to make it a success?
How do you know?
A few notes on a fragmented investigation towards a theatrical eyeballing of California’s back-to-the-land movement which specifically & pointedly ignores articles whose titles include the word ‘vanishing’, ‘utopia’, or ‘social experiment’.
*This play contains Clowns.
Elizagrace Madrone
Elizagrace Madrone is a writer, theater-maker, dramaturg, and experience designer living in-between Washington Heights and the Northern California backwoods making small strange works in real and unreal spaces. Selected co-creation: Finding Avi (WOW Festival 2022); The Extremely Grey Line (Ice Factory 2021); we need your listening (Ice Factory 2020); Ribbon About A Bomb (Exquisite Corpse Company); the audio-immersive experience Stranger (Columbia Stages); Wool Sucker (debut album: Plastic Wings). Inaugural International Dramaturgy Lab (2020 - 2021). Co-curator, Starr Reading Series. Co-founder, 23.5° Tilt. Dramaturg, Double Feature. MFA Dramaturgy, Columbia University. www.elizagrace.net
Bikini
Emma is unimpressed with her life, her wife, her job, and her body. Malaised by her incessant mediocrity, she’s looking for a rush. She finds it at her New Jersey gym: in sex, in deadlifting, in debt. Set in the world of competitive bikini bodybuilding, this riff on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is also inspired by interviews with real-life competitors, autobiography, and found-texts from the internet.
Cat Rodríguez
Cat Rodríguez (she/ella) werqs in theater + new media, serving collaboration, community, and lqqks. Cat wears many wigs: she acts, directs, and dramaturgs. Cat’s a co-foundress of the queer collective Fake Friends and recently performed in the company’s co-created Off-Broadway production of Circle Jerk (Obie Award, 2022; Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2021). A "people person" with a politic and a love for the Ridiculous, she’s all about bringing critical rigor, playfulness, and specificity to process. Black / Latinx feminisms as well as collectivist organizing experiences fundamentally inform her artmaking and pathtaking. Cat lives and labors in english y español, talks with her hands, and also anda con ganas. A freelancing nomad based in New York, Cat names New Orleans and Nicaragua sus casas de corazón. Latine Fellow, Sundance Institute, 2022; Art of Practice Fellow + Community Leader, Sundance Interdisciplinary Program, 2021. As Fake Friends: CultureHub Resident Artist, 2022; Mercury Store Resident Artist, 2022.
Michael Breslin
Michael Breslin is a New York-based playwright, director, and performer, originally from New Jersey, who is obsessed with collaboration, experimental theater, and pop culture. He is a co-creative director of Fake Friends. His play Circle Jerk, co-written with Patrick Foley and developed with Cat Rodríguez, Ariel Sibert, and Rory Pelsue, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist and won an Obie Award. Michael most recently directed Invasive Species by Maia Novi, and is developing a new musical (book, music, and lyrics with Foley). Other credits: This American Wife (FourthWall Theatricals, NYTW, “Best Theater 2021” LA Times and New Yorker), Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical (Actor’s Fund, Webby Award), A Doll’s House Part 3 (Exponential Festival). DFA, Yale School of Drama.
Melt.Punish
Melt.Punish is an investigation of contemporary American attitudes on media and justice via one central question: What happened to the villain from your favorite movie as a child? A chilly performance piece comprised of surreal confessional, found text, and verbatim interview material. An American doomscroll and semiotic deconstruction thinking about images of violence, images of justice, and the stories hiding in the stories we tell children.
James LaBella
James La Bella is a writer and dramaturg who creates text and performance. His writing has recently been seen onstage at The Prelude Festival, Life World, WNYC's Greene Space, The Brick, The Kraine, The Tank, Art Bar + Cafe and in print in The Washington Square Review. He was a 2023 Lambda Playwriting Fellow and a semi-finalist for Ars Nova’s Ant Fest and The Bay Area Playwrights Festival. James currently works in the literary departments of Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons and is on commission with the Civilians. Jameslabella.com @James.La.Bella
On the Edge of Preservation (the parking lot play)
In October 2000, the government’s continued commitment to crack down on “serious crimes” birthed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which subsequently introduced the “U nonimmigrant visa” as a possible pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who had been victims of violent crimes in exchange for their corporation with law enforcement. On the Edge of Preservation (the parking lot play) unveils how a promise-of-protection that hinges on blurred guidelines of subjectivity can only result in the institutional exploitation of victimhood— through a collection of interviews and the weaving of personal & capitalist timelines, we uncover how a parking lot on the edge of a nature reserve came to be, how a community of immigrants thrived and died for it to exist, and how traces of it are preserved between the pavement and the trees.
Leonardo Gonzalez Dominguez
Leonardo Gonzalez Dominguez (@ieodejesus) is a Queer Mexican-Indigenous writer & performer. They originate from Guanajuato, Mexico, and Greenville, South Carolina, where the former birthed them and the latter shaped them. An undocumented upbringing in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains continues to influence their work on the deconstruction & reconstruction of space, time, and progress as they search for possible utopias in the stillness of today. They have been developed & workshopped by New York Theatre Workshop, PEN America, National Queer Theater, IATI Theater, & The Workshop Theater. They have been a finalist for the Dramatist Guild Foundation’s DGF Fellowship, a semi-finalist for Breaking & Entering’s 2023/2024 season, and shortlisted for NYTW’s 2050 fellowship. Their prose “I was going to write a play...” was published by PEN American in their 2022 anthology of migrant writers, DREAMING OUT LOUD. Leonardo is a graduate of the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
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