Maia Safani (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based creative producer, education programs strategist, and arts administrator. Her work centers community, accessibility, and collaborative placemaking. She is a former member of Signature Theatre’s artistic team, where she created Signature’s inaugural education program and line produced various artistic productions and initiatives supporting Signature playwrights, including Quiara Alegría Hudes, Dominique Morisseau, and Sarah Ruhl. Prior to Signature, she worked on global programs at The Lark Play Development Center, where she helped produce convenings and staged readings of works by writers from Russia, Mexico, China, Romania, and the Middle East. Beyond theater, she has also produced live music events and supported film and visual arts initiatives. She is currently the Associate Director of Arts Administration at NYU Gallatin. Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.
Danielle Stagger is a playwright and performer from Queens, NY. Her plays largely engage questions of performance, respectability, and shame through the exploration of the appropriate and the forbidden. She prioritizes the authentic presence of Blackness, queerness, and womanhood both on and off stage and, as an artist in practice, works to decentralize and destabilize the product-driven, linear theatrical process. Danielle is the inaugural recipient of the Lily’s Lorraine Hansberry Fellowship, is a two-time Eugene O’Neill NPC Finalist, and was a nominee for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Danielle’s plays have been finalists for the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Ollie New Play Award, and the Lark’s Venturous Playwrights Fellowship. She has been commissioned by Second Stage Theater and Manhattan Theatre Club; she holds a B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University and an MFA in Playwriting from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
Alex Fetchko (Lighting Consultant) NYC-based Lighting Design & *Associate. Recent: Events at The Glasshouse and Cipriani, Camille A. Brown & Dancers (I AM), Westport Country Playhouse (Importance of Being Earnest), Nantucket PAC (What the Constitution Means to Me, Theater People), 2nd Stage Theater (*Lunar Eclipse, *The Apiary), Glimmer glass Festival / Detroit Opera (*Rinaldo), The Public Theater (*Good Bones), TheaterWorks Hartford (Sandra), Company XIV (*Nutcracker Rouge, *Queen of Hearts), Signature Theatre (*Letters From Max). Additional Companies: Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theatre Workshop, La MaMa, Commonwealth Shakespeare Co. Boston University, BFA.
Mary Bacon (Blue) Drama Desk Award for Patti in Coal Country, and Susan in Nothing Gold Can Stay, and her NYC theatre career. Broadway: Rock N Roll, Arcadia. Off-Broadway select credits: DIG, (Primary Stages), Coal Country, (Audible/The Public), Giant; (The Public), Harrison, TX, Roads to Home, Little Women, Happy Now? and Charles Busch’s The Tribute Artist; (Primary Stages), Days to Come, Women Without Men (Drama Desk/Lortel nominations, The Mint), Eccentricities of a Nightingale ( TACT). Recent regional: THE SCARLET LETTER (Two River),SWEAT (Guthrie). Film/TV and more at marybacon.net. Actors Center Member. For Andrew.
Sasha Diamond (Red) (she/her) New York: Regretfully, So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons & WP Theatre), Peerless (Primary Stages), Once Upon a (Korean) Time (Ma-Yi), Teenage Dick (Ma-Yi & The Public), Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout), Significant Other (Broadway), Kentucky (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and others. Television credits include: Mystic Christmas (Hallmark), The Equalizer (CBS), Bull (CBS), New Amsterdam (NBC), NCIS: New Orleans (CBS), Magnum: PI (CBS), Tommy (CBS).
Amy Jo Jackson (Green) (they/she): WP Debut! NYC: Ensemble Studio Theater, Company XIV, Prospect, Red Bull, NY Shakespeare Exchange, Exit Pursued by a Bear. Fav Regional: Singin’ in the Rain (Weston), Fun Home (SpeakEasy Stage), Cabaret (Flat Rock), Little Mermaid (Arkansas Rep), Cymbeline (Opera House Arts), Film/TV: Dicks: The Musical (A24), High Maintenance, and the singing voice of a crab in Under the Boardwalk (Paramount). They won a 2022 Bistro Award for their acclaimed Tennessee Williams solo show The Brass Menagerie (official selection of the 2022 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival and 2023 Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis). Her play You Know What They Say About Scorned Women was a 2024 winner of the Red Bull Short New Play Festival. Their original musical Hatchetation (@hatchetationthemusical) was a 2021 selection at the O’Neill (NMTC) and the 2023 Kilroy’s List/Web. She was a finalist for the 2022 Larson Grant and is the recipient of a 2023 EST/Sloan Commission. Their work as a nightlife artist has found them on just about every cabaret and comedy stage in NYC, with solo engagements at 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, the Green Room 42 and the Duplex. This one’s for Jeff and the fam.
Richard Masur (My Dad) Here is a sampling of his 52 year career: Broadway: Prayer For The French Republic, Lucky Guy, Democracy, and The Changing Room; Off-Broadway (partial): Sarah, Sarah, The Ruby Sunrise, Fetch Clay, Make Man, Relevance, The Net Will Appear. He has appeared in over 60 feature films, including Who’ll Stop the Rain; The Thing; Heartburn; Risky Business; Under Fire; My Girl; License to Drive; Another Year Together; Before, During and After; and Hudson. TV series (partial) – The Girls on the Bus, Kaleidoscope, Transparent, Younger, Girls, Bull, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Orange Is the New Black, Red Oaks, MASH, One Day at a Time. Over 40 TV movies including – Fallen Angel, Adam, The Burning Bed (Emmy Nomination), It, And The Band Played On, and 61*. He was most recently seen on the HBO Max series The Girls On The Bus. Former National President, VP and Board Member of Screen Actors Guild & National Board Member of SAG-AFTRA. For a full list of his credits go to imdb.com.
Lakisha May (Me) (she/her) Broadway: Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Skeleton Crew (Manhattan Theatre Club); Off-Broadway: Everybody, In The Blood (Signature Theatre Company), Sojourners (NYTW, Playwright’s Realm), The Miser (Moliere in the Park); Regional Theater: La Jolla Playhouse, American Conservatory Theater, Alliance Theater, Arden Theatre, Marin Theater Company, and others. Film & TV: Historias del Canal, City on a Hill, Boardwalk Empire, Law & Order: SVU, Forever, Blue Bloods and others. Education: MFA, The American Conservatory Theater. BA, Spelman College. Lakisha creates her own work and has produced projects with Nikyatu Jusu, Rashad Frett, Saheem Ali, Monkeypaw Productions, and others. kishamay.com @kisha_may
Constance Shulman (Another Woman): Recent: Summerworks/Winterworks at Clubbed Thumb (Find Me Here/Chairs), The Best We Could, Manhattan Theater Club, Shhhh, Atlantic Theater Company, The Rose Tattoo, Roundabout, Broadway, Bobbie Clearly, Roundabout Underground (Drama Desk Nomination). TV: The Curse, SHO; Orange Is The New Black (three time SAG award for Best Ensemble in a comedy series), DOUG, animated series Nickelodeon/Disney. Film: From Fried Green Tomatoes to Strawberry Mansion.
Mathilde Dratwa (Playwright) is a Belgian playwright and screenwriter based in Brooklyn. Her plays include Dirty Laundry (world premiere WP), which was commissioned and released as an audio play by Audible, for which she won the Henley Rose Award; Milk & Gall (world premiere Theatre503, London, published by Nick Hern Books); A Play about David Mamet Writing a Play about Harvey Weinstein; and Esther Perel Ruined My Life. Her work has been presented by the Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Roundabout Theatre Company, Rattlestick, Berkshire Theatre Group, American Players Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company, the Cape Cod Theater Project, and in London at the Young Vic. Mathilde is an inaugural Powers Playwriting Fellow at the Old Globe, an Affiliated Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, and was recently a member of the Orchard Project’s Greenhouse, a Dramatist Guild Foundation Playwriting Fellow and a member of New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Program. She also writes for film and television; she has developed content for Netflix, FX, Chernin Entertainment, LuckyChap, Endeavor, Dirty Films, Red Wagon, Sony/TriStar and Wiip.
Raul Abrego (Set Designer) is a set designer for Opera, Theater and Television. His work has been seen at The Juilliard Opera Center, The Manhattan School of Music, The Spoleto Opera Festival in Italy, The Rattlestick, Cherry Lane Theater and Intar. Noted Recent projects: Adamandi for Princeton University, book and lyrics by Mel Hornyak and Elliot Valentine Lee Directed by Georgina Escobar, Ain’t Misbehavin’ for Barrington Stage and Geva Theater Center, directed by Jeffrey Page. The Brobot Johnson Experience by Darian Dauchan at The Bushwick Starr, Living and Breathing by Mando Alvarado Directed by Rebecca Martinez for Two River Theater, How to Melt Ice by Amalia Oliva Rojas for Boundless Theater Company and New Perspectives directed by Elena Araoz. Assistant Art Director credits for Television include: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 3 & 4, Ghost (Power Book 2) and John Wick, Art Director for Falling Water (pilot), The Outcasts (film) and Production Designer for 2009 film Cruzando.
Lux Haac (Costume Designer) Broadway: The Thanksgiving Play. Off-Broadway/New York: Manahatta, Mobile Unit: The Comedy of Errors (The Public Theater); Between Two Knees, Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio (PAC NYC); On That Day in Amsterdam (Primary Stages/59E59); 53% Of (Second Stage Uptown); Songs About Trains (Radical Evolution/Working Theater/New Ohio Theatre); Giizhibaa Giizhig | Revolving Sky (Incoming! Under the Radar/The Public Theater); Eureka Day (Colt Coeur/Walkerspace); Ajijaak on Turtle Island (IBEX Puppetry/New Victory Theater); R + J (Hypokrit NYC/Access Theater); ¡Figaro! (90210) (The Duke on 42nd Street). Regional: For the People (Guthrie Theater); The Wizard of Oz (Geva Theatre); Between Two Knees (OSF, Yale Rep, McCarter Theatre Center, Seattle Rep); Espejos: Clean (Hartford Stage, Syracuse Stage); LEAR (Cal Shakes); Kim’s Convenience (Westport Country Playhouse, TheatreSquared); Yoga Play, Ragtime (PlayMakers Repertory Company); Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley (Arizona Theatre Company); Kamloopa (WAM Theatre); I and You, Annapurna (Syracuse Stage); Hear Me Say My Name (Discovery Theater/NMAI); Native Gardens (Syracuse Stage, Geva Theatre, Portland Center Stage). Upcoming: Dial M For Murder (Syracuse Stage). luxhaac.com @luxhaac
Tosin Olufolabi (Sound Design) (she/her) is a sound designer, deviser, facilitator, and performer who received her education at the University of Richmond. After internships at two regional theaters, Berkshire Theatre Group, and Barrington Stage Company, she began professionally designing at SPARC, a children’s theater in Richmond VA. After graduating, she performed and sound designed at Raleigh Little Theatre in Stick Fly and dog & pony dc’s Beertown and later joined dog & pony dc as a company member. Then she was selected as the 2016 – 2017 sound apprentice for Olney Theatre Center where she assistant designed Proof. Since becoming a freelance artist her work includes NYC: Stargazers (Page 73); Bite Me (WP Theater). REGIONAL: The Thanksgiving Play (Steppenwolf Theatre); Gloria (2018 Helen Hayes Nomination for Outstanding Sound Design for a Hayes Production); There’s Always the Hudson and Hi, Are You Single?; Incendiary; The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes (Woolly Mammoth); Ain’t No Mo (Woolly Mammoth/Baltimore Center Stage); Life is a Dream (Baltimore Center Stage); Crying on Television, Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, The Sound Inside, The Chinese Lady, Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Everyman Theater); School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play; it’s not a trip it’s a journey (Round House Theatre); Sense & Sensibility (The Village); Moses, Fires in the Mirror (Theater J); The Thanksgiving Play (Olney Theatre Center); A Wind in the Door (Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences). OTHER: Lovers’ Vows (We Happy Few); My Barking Dog (Edge of the Universe Players 2); She Sings Light, Hatpin Panic, & Shakespeare’s Worst (Capital Fringe); Ties That Bind, Caucasian Chalk Circle, & Antigone (Catholic University); God is Dead & April is Getting Married (Three Muses); Peepshow (dog & pony dc); Abortion Road Trip, & Soldier Poet (Theatre Prometheus); Lela & Co. (Factory 449); Blacktop Sky (York College). Assistant design credits include Sally and Tom, Manahatta, & Plays of the Plague Year (The Public); Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (The Kennedy Center TYA); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest & Baggage (Gallaudet University); Zomo the Rabbit: A Hip-Hop Creation Myth, Thumbelina, Anatole & Davy Copperfield (Imagination Stage); Still Life with Rocket (Theater Alliance); and Proof (Olney Theatre Center). Most of her experience as a performer was in devised shows, such as Peepshow & DISCOVERED! (dog and pony dc), and Treasure Island (We Happy Few). Furthermore, she has designed two short films, Midheaven, an art film about life in Atlanta, and Silver Bullet, a dreamy animation.
Brittany Hartman (Hair Design) (she/her/hers) is currently the wig shop manager for Saturday Night Live and NBC studios. Film: Fire Island (Key Hairstylist, Hulu). Broadway: The Thanksgiving Play. Regional: DiscoShow (Speigelworld, Vegas), Rent (Papermill), Camp Siegfried (Second Stage), Wizard of Oz (GeVa), Snow in Midsummer (Classic Stage Company), Ragtime, Secret Garden, The Wiz, Singin’ in the Rain (Broadway Music Circus), Gypsy (Theatre Aspen), A Christmas Carol, La Dispute, Macbeth (Hartford Stage). Broadway (selected associate design credits): Jagged Little Pill, Frankie and Johnny… (2019 revival), Bandstand, Sunset Boulevard (2017 revival), A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, Of Mice and Men (2014 revival), Violet.
Judi Lewis Ockler (Intimacy Director) has had the privilege of collaboration with Classic Stage Company (Snow in Midsummer, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Man of No Importance), Signature Theater (Hot Wing King, One in Two, Jasper), WP Theater/Second Stage/Colt Coeur (Hatef**k, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, Bite Me), Cherry Lane Theater (This Beautiful Future), New World Stages (Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors!, MsTrial), Theater Row (Inheritance of a Long Term Fault, w/Clutch Productions),The Mint Theater (The Rat Trap, US premiere) The Connelly Theater (Persuasion, w/Bedlam; Stargazers, w/Page 73),The Flea Theater, w/TOSOS (Bar Dykes, Rock the Line) and Williamstown Theater Festival (A Raisin in the Sun, A Human Being, of a Sort, directed by Robert O’Hara; Whitney White). Intimacy Coordinator tv/film credits include Out of the Blue, directed by Neil La Bute; Plan B, with Jamie Lee and John Heder, Up Here (Hulu). She teaches and directs intimacy and violence in performance at NYU Tisch, National Theater Institute, Atlantic Theater School, AMDA, The New School, and Sarah Lawrence College. judilewisockler.com
Fran Acuña-Almiron (Production Stage Manager) New York based Stage Manager who has worked with various companies around the city and has worked internationally as a Company Manager for One Year Lease Theater’s Summer Program. She is thrilled to be working with WP Theater for the first time on this amazing production! Endless thanks to Christian who makes it possible for her to continue doing what she loves.
Celina Revollar (Assistant Stage Manager) is a proud Dominican and Peruvian stage manager from New Jersey. She is a graduate from Montclair State University with BFA in Theatrical Production focused in Stage Management. Recent credits include Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella (Broadway), Death Becomes Her (Broadway In Chicago), BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (Off Broadway), Vámonos (Off Broadway), The Hours Are Feminine (Off-Broadway), In Corpo (Off Broadway) and developmental projects for 321 Theatrical and RCI Theatricals.
Spark Theatrical/Laurie Bernhard Laurie is an independent theatrical creative producer concentrating on daring new plays that provide a lens into the condition of being human. Laurie collaborates with playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, actors and designers exploring new work, experimenting and pushing boundaries. SPARK connects plays with non-profits that share a common mission, providing audiences with the opportunity for education and action beyond the play. SPARK Theatrical has multiple projects in development in Los Angeles and New York. Laurie is on the Boards of Ojai Playwrights Conference and Thunder River Theatre Company.
COLT COEUR is a Brooklyn-based theatre company founded in 2010. Their original, story-driven, visceral theatre embraces the power of intimate live performance—it pulls you close and doesn’t let go. Their community of artists nurtures and invests in diverse perspectives to produce work that challenges the boundaries between tradition and experimentation. They embrace the ambivalence, terror and exhilaration of our time with theatre that is an antidote to the pervasive cultural illness of loneliness. They explore themes of coming-of-age, individual and collective identity, nostalgia and history, public versus private, love, lust, and loss. Through their unique collective process, every theatre artist—actor, playwright, designer—takes part in shared invention and collaborative creation; creating heart- and mind-opening audience experiences unlike any other. They nurture the next generation of theatre artists by providing access, education and a professional pipeline, while amplifying voices and perspectives that have historically been sidelined.
Colt Coeur’s 24-member ensemble of actors, designers, playwrights, and directors incubates the next generation of theatre artists through the development and production of new plays—which they create from scratch. Over 14 years, Colt Coeur has produced 17 world premieres, one East Coast premiere, developed nearly 50 plays, and provided free arts intensives for over 200 students. They pride themselves in being a laboratory for exploration while also nurturing the work of emerging artists and providing them a launch pad for their visions.
Colt Coeur has a tremendous reputation among artists and audiences alike. The company is renowned for its high artistic standards, and artists who work with Colt Coeur have gone on to contribute to and excel in every level of the entertainment industry. Colt Coeur has helped launch the multi-faceted careers of Timothée Chalamet, Ato Essandoh, Betty Gilpin, Steven Levenson, Ana Nogueira, and Joe Tippett, among many others.
Corinne Jaber (Playwright) is of Syrian/German heritage and was born in Munich and raised in Canada and Germany. She is an award-winning actress as well as a writer/director/ She has been part of many international theater productions in English as well as in French, such as – to name but a few – Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata, A Dybbuk For 2, by and with the late Bruce Myers, Irina Brook’s Beast on the Moon (for which she obtained a “Molière” the best actress award in France) and more recently Oh My Sweet Land, a monologue which she conceived and co-authored together with together with Amir Nizar Zubai as well as acted in. For many years she has worked with Afghan actors in Kabul on Shakespeare. Their work culminated in production of Comedy of Errors at the “Globe to Globe Festival” for the Globe Theater in London. Her play The Bus That Didn’t Stop On the Partition of India has now developed into her very first film which she also produced and directed. She is currently in the process of post-production. Munich Medea: Happy Family, her most recent play, will premier in New York in 2024.
Lee Sunday Evans (Director) is a two-time Obie Award-winning Director + Choreographer and the Artistic Director of Waterwell. She most recently directed the acclaimed production of Heather Christian’s ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS and was just announced as the director of a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of A WRINKLE IN TIME. She is developing a TV project for A24. Notable credits include DANCE NATION by Clare Barron, DETROIT RED by Will Power, SUNDAY by Jack Thorne, IN THE GREEN by Grace McLean, MILLER, MISSISSIPPI by Boo Killebrew, and HOME by Geoff Sobelle. She also directed THE COURTROOM by Arian Moayed (NYTimes Best Theater of 2019) which she just directed as a feature-length film that premiered in the 2022 Tribeca Festival.
Crystal Finn (Caroline) is thrilled to be working for the first time with WP, and to be back working with PlayCo. after performing in their production of one of her all-time favorite plays Villa, by Guillermo Calderon. NY theater includes many world premieres at Playwright’s Horizons, Roundabout, MTC, 59E59, Fulcrum, and Clubbed Thumb where she is an affiliated artist. In 2022 she made her Broadway debut in Birthday Candles, by Noah Haidle, for which she won a Theater World Award. She is also a writer and is working on a solo show about Wittgenstein and a book of essays about acting.
Heather Raffo (Alice) is a singular and outstanding voice in the American theater whose work has been championed by the New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. Having helped forge a new genre of Arab American theater, she’s spent her career writing and embodying stories of Iraq: from the lives and dreams of Iraqi women in her seminal work 9 Parts of Desire (2003), to the suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the opera Fallujah (PBS film 2012), to the restless longings of an Iraqi refugee architect, in Noura (2018). A film adaptation of Nine Parts, released on PBS in 2023, is a radical reimagining of her groundbreaking play from the vantage point of 20 years after the war. A recent Creative Capital, NPN and APAP grantee, Raffo is currently building an ambitious new theatrical platform following migration and the global economy which aims to be the first ever-evolving, multi-locational theater platform.
Kurt Rhoads (Father) Broadway: Julius Caesar. Off Broadway: Off Peak by Brenda Withers, 59E59 St Theatre; Fashions for Men, Mint Theatre; Othello, The Good Natur’d Man, Pearl Theatre; The Case of Kaspar Mayer, Ubu Rep, Americana Absurdum, Present Company. Regional: Arena Stage, How I Learned to Drive, Agamemnon and his Daughters; Everyman Theatre: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Sweat; Old Globe: Fiction, Dinner with Friends; Denver Center: Book of Will. 25 seasons of acting and directing at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Video Games: Red Dead Revoler, Redemption, GTA San Andreas, III, Bully. 73 plays with his wife, Nance Williamson. Education: University of Chicago, DePaul University.
Kristen Robinson (Scenic Design) is an award-winning designer, artist, and educator. Her work ranges from experimental opera to regional theatre and everything in between. Select design credits include: with WP Theater, [PORTO], Drinking in America (Audible Theater), Don Giovanni, (Wolftrap Opera), Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things (Ars Nova), In the Green (LCT3), Heart of Darkness (Baryshnikov Arts Center), Minor Character (Under the Radar Festival), Everybody Black, The Thin Place (Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville), graveyard shift (Goodman Theatre), Familiar (Steppenwolf Theatre), Ethel (Alliance Theatre). She is the Assistant Professor of Scenic Design at Purchase College. A Princess Grace Fellow, she holds her MFA from Yale University and is a proud member of USA 829. You can view her work at kristenrobinsondesign.com.
