In Process

In 2011, a group of private school boys in New York City gather on an apartment rooftop to help a friend through his first break-up. Seven years later, the same group finds themselves on the same roof dealing with what actually happened all those years ago. Rats When It’s Night Out examines guilt, complicity, male friendship, and the possibility of accountability without performativity.

Max Wolf Friedlich ‘17 is a writer from New York City. His play JOB (Outer Critics Circle Award nominee, Off-Broadway Alliance Award nominee), after two sold-out runs off-Broadway, opened at the Hayes Theater on Broadway in July 2024. He has been in residence/developed work with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, New York Stage and Film, IAMA Theater, Huron Station, Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College, The Silver Sun Foundation, Less Than Rent, New York International Fringe Festival, and IRT. In TV/film, he is currently developing new work with Jesse Eisenberg, Crunchyroll/SONY Animation, Harris Dickison's Devisio Pictures, Scott Free, 2am, and Marc Platt Productions.

Michael Herwitz directs plays and musicals in New York City and beyond. He is the director of JOB, which recently concluded its Broadway run at the Hayes Theater. He is currently developing new plays for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Powerhouse Theater, and Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse. For more information, please visit www.michaelherwitz.com.

When an indie theater adaptation of The Seagull is derailed mid-performance after an actor suffers an aneurysm onstage, the cast and audience grapple with twin crises of purpose and powerlessness while waiting for updates on their friend's condition. what if everyone lives? is a play about being a doctor, and being an actor, and being a witness to a tragedy, and being capable and knowledgeable and helpless.

Ryan Dobrin ’18 is a queer and biracial director and producer of musicals, plays, and digital collaborative work. He facilitates work centered on otherness, emotional growth, and connection through dramaturgy, text study, and intentional conversation. In 2025, Dobrin was included on the Theatrely31: Class of 2025 list comprised of “theatre makers poised for a meteoric rise,” and received a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience as director of the world premiere of Billy McEntee and Grier Mathiot’s The Voices in Your Head , which was also on Theatrely’s Best of 2024 List. His world premiere production of Ryan Drake’s you don’t have to do anything was on Vulture/New York Magazine’s Best Theater of 2024 List. As a producer with The Movement Theatre Company, he was nominated for a 2021 Drama League Award. For more information, please visit ryandobrin.com.

Sophie McIntosh is a New York–based playwright and theatermaker. Her writing gives voice to women and queer folks, examines life in the small-town Midwest, and explores how our interactions with animals reflect back our own humanity. McIntosh is the co-founder of Good Apples Collective, a developmental orchard for new theatrical works that she co-leads with her frequent collaborator Nina Goodheart. Recent productions of McIntosh’s work include the world premiere of macbitches ( New York Times Critic’s Pick), the premieres of Road Kills (recommended by The New York Times and The New Yorker), cunnicularii, and cityscrape with Good Apples Collective, and Eleven Weeks of Nuclear Summer at Notre Dame University and the University of Michigan. For more information please visit www.sophiemcintoshwrites.com.

What happens when a basic fish shows up to shul (synagogue) instead of the hillazon, the keeper of Tekhelet—the sacred blue dye in Judaism? Song of Sardine is a solo performance navigating the thin line between humor and grief, chronicling the life of Isador, a sardine rumored to have blocked the Port of Marseille. Packed with protein yet seemingly disposable, Isador gathers wisdom from years navigating the sacred seas—from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic—wrestling with ideas of holiness, extraction, love, collective action, and diaspora. Blending theater and queer performance art with expanded concepts of “wisdom literature” and Torah study, the piece unfolds through diary entries, poems, sketches, and songs, all centered around the question: what does an ordinary fish have to offer in this moment?

Sacha Yanow is an actor, performance artist, and organizer. Yanow’s performance practice draws on theater, dance, queer performance, and Jewish cultural traditions to reckon with ancestral trauma, gender and sexuality, anti-Zionism, and assimilation. Since 2015, Yanow has created a trio of solo performances based on familial archetypes—Dad Band (2015), Cherie Dre (2018), and Uncle! (2024)—embodied portraits which act as an entry point to discuss broader social issues, and connect to estranged personal and cultural histories. Yanow’s work has been presented by venues including The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Joe's Pub, and the New Museum in New York City; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival/Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and Festival Theaterformen in Hanover, Germany. They have received residency support from Baryshnikov Arts Center, Denniston Hill, LIFT Festival UK, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mass MoCA, SOMA Mexico City, and Yaddo. For more information please visit www.sachayanow.com.

Nemuna Ceesay is a New York-based artist. Select directing credits include The Kitchen (Uncle!), Playwrights Horizons (Amusements), 66th Obie Awards, and Associate Director of A Strange Loop (Broadway). Ceesay was the 2022 Clubbed Thumb New Play Directing Fellow. Select acting credits include New York Theatre Workshop (Here There Are Blueberries), Actors Theatre of Louisville (Loving and Loving), The Shed (Straight Line Crazy), Second Stage (Patience), and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2015/2016 seasons). Ceesay received an MFA in acting from the American Conservatory Theater. For more information please visit nemunaceesay.com.

In collaboration with Hanoi-based musicians Thuy Linh Vu (vocals, phách percussion instrument) and Dinh Hoang Pham (đàn đáy plucked lute) of the Ca Tru Phu Thi Ensemble, choreographer Anh Vo explores the sensual and controversial legacy of Ca trù—a northern Vietnamese chamber music form once persecuted for its historical associations with prostitution and opium smoking. Song and Sex listens to what official history has silenced, attuned to the murmur of desire that once animated Ca trù’s singing houses of the 1920s and 1930s. Through live music and movement, this work collaborates with celebrated Ca trù practitioners to imagine the traditional artform as a living, transgressive practice, vibrating between counter-memory and speculative imagination.

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work is situated in the unlikely convergences between downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Described by The New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their choreographic work has received critical recognition for its research-driven and boundary-pushing formal investigation. Significant fellowships and grants include a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, Dance/NYC Disability Dance Artistry Fellowship, a USArtist International grant, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, Brooklyn Arts Council grants, and FCA Emergency Grants. For more information, please visit www.anhqvo.com.