About
the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab Collaborators and Their Projects

Jen Goma &
Kristine Haruna Lee

plural (love)

Saturday, January 19, 3pm

Sunday, January 20, 7:30pm

With the performance
installation plural (love), Jen Goma &
Kristine Haruna Lee flirt with the boundaries of
desire, power, and responsibility, building an environment that feels akin
to stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. Always written and performed
anew based on its audience and physical surroundings (from the NY Hall of
Science planetarium, to theatre festivals, to a hotel), plural
(love) is an opportunity for Goma and Lee to report their
latest findings on love, desire, intimacy, sex and sexuality, and its
relationship to transparency, ethics, and equity. 

Originally inspired by
auto-theorists such as Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, and
Roland Barthes, Goma and Lee layer political, cultural, and
social theory with their own autobiographical stories as Asian
American femme women, and their experiences of desire and being desired.
They perform their musings through a pastiche of intricate
styles that include pop songs with lyrics by Sartre, femme rituals, live
podcasts, intimate humor, radical truth-telling, and community engagement.

Ann Marie Dorr & Paul Ketchum

Good and
Noble Beings 

Saturday, January 19, 7:30pm

Sunday, January 20, 3pm

Good and
Noble Beings is a stupid
adaptation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The performance is the result of a
compilation of bits of language that Ketchum found funny in the
post-structuralist text—and that ultimately started to sound like pieces of
dialogue between as many people as possible.

Dorr and Ketchum have no idea what
they are doing because A Thousand Plateaus is impossible to
read—but it seems, to them, that the book is about nonhierarchical structures
of being. They are hoping to deconstruct late capitalist notions of hierarchy
and structural meaning while simultaneously blowing everyone’s mind. God is a
Lobster. Welcome to the Rhizome.

Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja
Feather Kelly

The
Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente

Wednesday, January 23, 7:30pm

Saturday, January 26, 7:30pm

Collaborators Daaimah Mubashshir
& Raja Feather Kelly were drawn together out of a desire to locate
truths, the sublime, and to expand the vocabulary of blackness on stage.
Kelly’s artistic practice combines dance, sketch comedy, minstrelsy, and
devised theatre; Mubashshir conceived Everyday Afroplay, a daily theatrical
writing practice on blackness and the black body that serves as a well-spring
of material for her company of collaborators.

Together, they have developed one
Everyday Afroplay into the first episode of a larger work—The Chronicles
of Cardigan and Khente—which centers the experience of two black
corporate executives as they navigate climbing the ladder toward financial
liberation. In the style of a Post - Black Minstrelsy, Cardigan and Khente’s
first question is: Why does success and freedom always come down to “what do
they think of us?”

Virginia Grise (writer) & Shayok
Misha Chowdhury (director)

rasgos
asiaticos

Thursday, January 24, 7:30pm

Sunday, January 27, 3pm

On October 24th, 1871, 20
Chinese men were tortured and hanged in downtown LA. This mass lynching—the
largest in U.S. history—took place on Calle de los Negros, named for its
original inhabitants: dark-skinned Californios of indigenous, African, and
Spanish blood. This coincidence of space insists: the American story, of
migration and displacement, is a palimpsest—a parchment written on, erased,
then written on again, the traces of the old words ghosting underneath the new.
Virginia Grise’s rasgos asiaticos looks to a history
that’s been (imperfectly) erased: Chinese settlement in the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands. It’s about moving bodies and porous borders—How do you
make a home in inhospitable country?

rasgos
asiaticos is part hybrid-book—comprising
drafts of scenes, splinters of text and poetry, as well as non-textual source
material—and part multimedia performance—creating a mosaic of layered voices
(speaking English, Spanish, and Cantonese), music, and movement. Director Shayok
Misha Chowdhury has selected pieces of the book to excavate in this
performance about moving bodies and porous borders, which aims to re-imagine
how we think about immigration in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Peter Mills Weiss & Julia
Mounsey

while you
were partying

Friday, January 25, 7:30pm

Saturday, January 26, 3pm

Peter Mills Weiss
and Julia Mounsey take a fantastical approach to analyzing their
own histories of aggression, impotence, and mental health with while you
were partying. This piece takes the form of a staged reading of a
screenplay—a bizarre, self-sacrificing hero fantasy of an aging man-child,
whose relationship with his highly supportive mother manifests as a dream
ballet with a chilling conclusion.

Weiss and Mounsey began working
together after noticing their shared interest in speaking directly to audiences
as “themselves” in a way that complicates identity and authenticity. Their
work, like [50/50] Old School Animation (which will be performed at
Under the Radar at The Public Theater this January 2019) places audiences in
uncomfortable spaces as it gets at the heart of challenging moral questions.

About the Lab Artists

Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja
Feather Kelly

Daaimah Mubashshir is
a playwright based in New York City. Awards include a 2018 Audrey
Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Forklift Residency,
and a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Selected full- length
plays include The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole
Press), Room Enough (Magic Time @ Judson Church, Clubbed Thumb), There
is Something About a Clock Face (The Kilroys, JACK, & Fire This Time
Festival) and Rum for Sale. Upcoming: a new
musical, Emily Black is Total Gift, in development with
New Georges. 

Choreographer/Director Raja Feather
Kelly is artistic director of of the feath3r theory, a
Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company. Theatre Credits include: The
Sandbox Drowning, Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Death of
the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and Everybody (Signature); Fairview
(Soho Rep.); Everyday Afroplay (JACK); GURLS (Princeton
University); Lempicka (Williamstown Theatre Festival); The House
That Will Not Stand (NYTW), and Fireflies (Atlantic Theatre
Company), and more. Upcoming Choreography includes Hurricane
Diane (NYTW), If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, and A
Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons). Awards include two Princess Grace
Awards, the inaugural Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award, the Solange
MacArthur Award for New Choreography, the 2018 Stage Directors and
Choreographers Foundation Breakout Award, and more.

Virginia
Grise & Shayok Misha Chowdhury

Virginia Grise
is a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, Princess Grace Award in Theatre
Directing and the Yale Drama Series Award. Her published work includes Your
Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University
Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of
Texas Press), and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations
with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). She earned her MFA from the California
Institute of the Arts.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is
a queer Bengali director, writer, and performance-maker. He is a Resident
Artist at Ars Nova, a member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, a Resident
Director at The Flea, a Director-in-Residence at The Drama League, and a recent
New York Theatre Workshop Directing Fellow. His work has also been
developed and seen at Signature Theatre, SPACE on Ryder Farm, HERE Arts Center,
NYMF, Vineyard Arts Project, New Orleans Film Festival, and the Hemispheric
Institute of Performance and Politics. He is working on upcoming
collaborations with Aleshea Harris, Virginia Grise, and Kameron Neal. Misha’s
poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Asian
American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is a Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Williams College Department of Theatre.

Jen Goma
& Kristine Haruna Lee

Kristine Haruna Lee
is a theater maker navigating non-linear playwriting and the construction of
visually rich performance landscapes with her company harunalee. Recent plays
with harunalee include Memory Retrograde (The Public’s Under The Radar
Festival), to the left of the pantry and under the sugar shack (La MaMa
Club), and War Lesbian (Dixon Place). Her play Suicide Forest
directed by Aya Ogawa will premiere at the Bushwick Starr in February 2019.
She’s a recipient of the MAP Fund Award, the Lotos Foundation Prize for
Directing, New Dramatists Van Lier Fellowship. She is an affiliated artist with
New Georges and currently a member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. Lee has
taught at NYU Experimental Theater Wing, Playwrights Horizons Theater School,
and PACE University, among others.

Jen Goma is
a self-propelled multi-media artist—a performer and maker of music, videos and
live shows. A member of the bands A Sunny Day in Glasgow and Roman à Clef, Goma
is currently working alongside Kristine Haruna Lee in the Soho Rep.
Writer/Director Lab, and recently finished composing/sound designing
harunalee’s Memory Retrograde (Under the Radar Fest: Incoming, Ars Nova)
and Built for Collapse’s Danger Signals (New Ohio.) As Showtime
Goma, her album Smiley Face was released in June of 2017 and
Rolling Stone placed it on their list of “Albums to Stream Now.” A
member of People Get Ready, she has collaborated on mounting shows at NY
institutions like The Kitchen and New York Live Arts.

Peter Mills
Weiss & Julia Mounsey

Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey
collaborate on works for the stage. Their work has been presented at Under the
Radar at The Public Theater, La MaMa, JACK, Ant Fest at Ars Nova, CATCH
Performance Series, and Little Theater at Dixon Place. Peter has performed
for or collaborated with artists such as 600 Highwaymen, The Wooster Group,
Richard Foreman, and the Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project. Julia has
worked with New York City Players, Soho Rep., The National Theater of Hungary,
and was an Assistant Director on Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. Both
Peter and Julia are members of the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group
at The Public Theater. 

Ann Marie
Dorr & Paul Ketchum

Ann Marie Dorr often
works on big-little shows with adventurous and ambitious ideas including
her explorations of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon (Target
Margin Theater Lab at The Brick), William Burke’s Untitled American
Flag Craft Project, and Landspace Mechanical by Sarah
Loucks (Museum of Human Achievement, Austin TX). Upcoming:
continued exploration of How To… amongst other projects
with Paul Ketchum and new plays and performances with Sarah Loucks in
Austin, TX. She is a proud Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater and
a long time collaborator with Minor Theater. 

Paul Ketchum
is a playwright and performer. You may have seen his plays the Harper’s Play
at JACK, the Dangers of Croquet at the Bushwick Starr Reading Series, or
various iterations of his How To Series (w/ Ann Marie Dorr). Paul also once ate
an onion on stage while handing out very nice scotch. He has performed in plays
by Ari Stess, Jordan Baum, and Stephen Charles Smith. He has forgotten
everything he learned in his MFA program (Brooklyn College).