R&D Groups
Current 2025-2026
Disco Demo
On July 12, 1979, Chicago erupted in what some call “the day disco died”. At Comiskey Park, the “Disco Sucks” movement’s record torching publicity stunt turned into a riot, destroying thousands of disco records. Just a few blocks away, in a fictional South Side discotheque, a group of regulars dance, celebrate, and fight to survive as the city’s cultural fabric is torn open. Disco Demo is an interview-based musical that shifts the spotlight from the spectacle to the people who lived it. Drawn directly from the voices of patrons, DJs, and club owners, it’s part oral history and part found-text theatre, sharing a portrait of the Black, Brown, and queer Chicagoans who found solace in a genre that championed joy and liberation.
Adam J. Rineer
COMPOSER & LYRICIST — Adam J. Rineer (they/xe/he) is a composer, writer, and music director focused on interdisciplinary performance. Adam's musicals include THIRD SEX: 1930S TRANSVESTITE LIEDER (Ars Nova, HERE Arts Center, Musical Theatre Factory, The Makers’ Ensemble) and A TRIP TO THE MOON (HERE Arts Center, PRISM Festival at Judson Memorial Church, The Parkside Lounge, The Maas Building, Temple University, CAP21). They’ve music directed for institutions like Goodspeed Musicals, MCC Theatre, NAMT, and TheatreWorks Hartford. Adam is a co-founder of the UNTITLED Musical Project, holds an M.F.A. from Temple University, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Pace University. https://www.adamjrineer.com/ @adamjrineer
Composer & Lyricist
Jason Aguirre
LIBRETTIST & DIRECTOR — Jason Aguirre (he/him/el) is a queer, Mexican-American director, book writer, and choreographer. He has developed and presented work at Ars Nova, HERE Arts, Vineyard Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Roundabout Theatre Company, EST, and Musical Theatre Factory. He is a Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) Fellow, mentored by Susan Stroman, an alumnus of the Directors Group at Roundabout Theatre Company, a graduate of the George and Joy Abbott MFA in Musical Theatre Collaboration at Temple University, a member of the BMI Workshop, and the recipient of the Boris Sagal Fellowship at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Jason is the Co-Artistic Director of UNTITLED Musical Project and the Associate Artistic Director of Vineyard Theatre. j-aguirre.com @jasona57
Librettist & Director
JANUARY IN NEW YORK
January in New York is about the line between freedom and responsibility and the endurance of a marriage. Generated through a series of interviews with the writer’s own parents, this multimedia piece traces the real couple’s relationship during a period of ideological certitude. Impossible expectations reveal deep wounds and regrets that give way to dignity and the resilience of the individual. With music composed by Robert M. Johanson, films by M Sharkey and Stepan Liubimov and performances by Marianne Rendón and Robert M. Johanson.
Andromache Chalfant
Andromache Chalfant is a Brooklyn based artist, designer and writer raised in New York City. Her ongoing generative projects fuse set design, performance, music and film with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary collaboration. She is co-founder of Coffey Street Studio which provides an artistic laboratory to artists of all disciplines for experiments in performance. Design credits include sets for: the Greek National Opera in Athens, Greece, The Public Theater, The Vineyard Theater, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center Theater, BAM Fisher, The Atlantic Theater, HERE, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others.
Jumpers
Jumpers is a theatrical investigation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster told through the overlooked lives of contract workers cleaning the site. At its center is Astro Girl—a cartoonish, trickster narrator who disrupts the action with unreliable commentary and shifting genres. Blending documentary and absurdity, the play exposes the human cost of technological progress while questioning how disasters that are ongoing, politicized, and obscured can ever be fully represented.
HyoJeong Choi
HyoJeong Choi is from Seoul, Boston, and a few other places across the globe. She was an aspiring nuclear physicist until she realized she was spending more time in the theater than in her lab. Her play based on this experience, On Epistemological Problemsin Atomic Physics, was selected for Rattlestick Theater’s inaugural Terrence McNally New Works Incubator program. Her works have also been seen/developed at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Workshop Theater, Central Square Theater, Apollinaire Theater, and Harvard. She is currently a member of the New Georges Jam. MFA, Carnegie Mellon; BS, MIT.
Untitled Statelessness Project
A play about statelessness that examines the potential for the American identity to shift through displacement, from the lens of a speculative future where Americans are forced to be refugees. How does Americanness hold up psychologically outside of its context? How will our language(s) shift under duress? How are borders, nations, and alliances stages for the performance of self within the context of a collective tribal or national identity? When the collective identity of nationality is stripped, what parts of the self are destroyed?
Nazareth Hassan
Nazareth Hassan is a writer, director & musician. Plays & performance works include Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), Bowl EP at The Vineyard Theater, VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stuckemarkt in Berlin, Security Theater at Judson Church, Slow Mania 009 at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their first collection of poetry and photography, Slow Mania, will be published in 2025 by Futurepoem. They have composed music and sound for artists including Malcolm-X Betts, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Agnes Borinsky and Tina Satter. In 2022, they were the dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Upcoming: Practice at Playwrights Horizons. @naznaznazznaznaznazz @paratheat.er
Saved, Part 2: Thanksgiving
Saved, Part 2: Thanksgiving is the second play in a two-part drama about the South Korean adoption industry, from its Cold War origins to its transformation into a lucrative business empire built by systemic fraud and negligence. Three epic stories spanning six decades across Oregon, Washington DC, Vermont, Seoul, and Jeju Island, SAVED explores what happens when we kill the parents and raise the children. Saved, Part 1: The Girl and the Sky introduces the origins of industrialized adoption – Thanksgiving dives into the consequences.
Jesse Jae Hoon (윤재훈)
Jesse Jae Hoon (윤재훈) is a playwright, organizer, and occasional actor. He’s developed work with The Public Theater (EWG ’23-25), New York Theatre Workshop, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Rattlestick Theater (’24 Terrence McNally New Works Incubator), Ma-Yi Theater Company (’22-’24) resident playwright), Yangtze Rep (Project YZ ’26), The Playwrights Realm (’22-23 fellow), Theater J, Egg & Spoon Theater Collective, The Parsnip Ship (’23 Radio Roots fellow), and more. 2023 Ollie New Play Award; 2024 MacDowell Fellow; 2025 Yaddo Residency. MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College, BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch. jessejaehoon.com
Untitled Tsunami Project
At some unknown point, the geological activity in the Cascadia Subduction Zone of the Pacific Northwest will trigger large tsunamis that will devastate the region, which is already suffering from droughts and fires caused by climate change. The impact on vulnerable communities will be staggering and longer-term issues with nuclear and toxic afterlives will be a certainty. Places have knowledge. This region bears the marks and stories of previous tsunamis–physical clues in the land and native oral histories that went unheeded until recently. Like the evidence of climate change, which continues to be downplayed even though it affects all regions of the world, these long-overlooked indicators of tsunamis make me think about comprehension as a skill beyond Western logic, involving profound forms of mis/understanding one’s place in a world.
This experimental performance responds to this set of circumstances using sound/music that relates to geological activity, language pulled from climate/geosciences research, oral histories and bureaucratic tape.
Jeanine Oleson
Jeanine Oleson is a research-based visual artist/performance director/writer who often brings narrative and physical tools together in stagings, performance-driven video/films, and sculptures that are often objects for use in stagings. She makes sets with a sculptor’s eye and writes performances with an interest in sensory experience, often working with music and voice in experimental ways. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University. Oleson has exhibited and performed at venues including: The Kitchen, Cubitt Gallery, London; Hammer Museum, LA; Commonwealth & Council, LA; Coreana Museum, Seoul; SculptureCenter, NY; New Museum, NY; Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY. Oleson has been in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Macdowell Colony, Hammer Museum, New Museum, Smack Mellon Studio Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Oleson also published three books: “What?” and “The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse” both in 2012, and “Conduct Matters,” published by Dancing Foxes Press in Spring 2020. She is also a lead collaborator since 2013 on a participatory project, Photo Requests from Solitary that provides images to people held in solitary confinement in US prisons. Oleson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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