The Outrage was born out of a need for a space where queer writers can be in community, write, and share with one another for intentional and honest feedback. Queer writers are often faced with the challenge of explaining Queerness before receiving tangible notes. The Outrage is an environment for craft exploration providing a safe space for risk-taking and imagination.
Playwright-Performer C. Julian Jimenez, creator/organizer of The Outrage, will be joined by seven other writers working on plays/prose centered around Queer narratives. On April 26th, the artists will share their work, reading excerpts from pages crafted during their residency at NACL.
THE ARTISTS
(L-R) C.A. Johnson, C. Julian Jiménez, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
C.A. JOHNSON was originally scheduled to participate in the residency, but unfortunately will not be in attendance. We look forward to welcoming her at NACL in the future.
C. JULIAN JIMÉNEZ is a Queer, Puerto Rican and Dominican playwright. They hold an MFA in Acting from The Actors Studio Drama School. Playwriting awards include: New Dramatists Residency (Class of 2027), 2019/2020 Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Workshop Fellow at The Lark, 2017 & 2018 Pipeline Theatre Company PlayLab, 2018 LaGuardia Community College’s LGBTQIA+ History Project Grant, 2015 Queens Arts Council Grant, 2009 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, and 2014 Best New Work Motif Award. Productions include: Man Boobs (Pride Films & Plays, 2011), Nico was a Fashion Model (Counter-Productions, 2013), Animals Commit Suicide (First Floor Theater, 2015), Locusts Have No King (INTAR, 2016), Bundle of Sticks (INTAR, 2020), Alligator Mouth, Tadpole Ass (Theatre Rhinoceros, 2020), ¡Oso Fabuloso & The Bear Backs! (INTAR, 2021), Bruise & Thorn (Pipeline Theatre, 2021), and Ronald Reagan Murdered My Mentors (Fuse Theater Ensemble, 2023). They are a co-producer and co-writer of the hit web series, Bulk, and an Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication, Theatre, & Media Production Department at Queensborough Community College.
MASHUQ MUSHTAQ DEEN is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, and First-Runner Up for both the International Woodward’s and India’s Sulthan Padamsee’s Playwriting Prizes. A CORE writer at the Playwrights Center and an alum of New Dramatists, his works include Draw the Circle (InterAct Theatre, PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published by Dramatists Play Service), The Telegram (commissioned & produced by Keen Company), The Empty Place (commissioned by NYU), Flood (world premiere at Kansas City Rep), The Betterment Society (published in the Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays anthology), and The Shaking Earth (covid-canceled world premiere, National Queer Theater, 2021). Deen’s work has been supported with residencies at the Siena Art Institute, Sundance Theatre Institute & the Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, MacDowell (twice), Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Tofte Lake Center, and by foundational grants from Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, NYFA, Bronx Cultural Council, and TCG. The list of theaters that have supported Deen’s work includes The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, New Dramatists, Kansas City Rep, PlayMakers Rep, Keen Company, Target Margin Theatre, NYU, La Jolla Playhouse, New Harmony Project, NYFA, Page73, Ma-Yi, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Dixon Place, Passage Theatre, and Queens Theatre in the Park. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and is represented by the Gurman Agency. Hs is a queer, transgender man, and the child of Muslim Indian immigrants, and writes from the lens of liminality.
(L-R) Dave Anzuelo, Phillip Christian Smith, Flower Estefana Rios
DAVE ANZUELO (he/him/his) is a queer Chicano actor/fight-director/writer from El Paso, TX. Dave is a member of Labyrinth Theater Company, a participant in Donja R. Love’s Write It Out 2023 playwrights’ program for people living with HIV, and is the founder of UnkleDave’s Fight-House: a team of LGBTQ fight/intimacy directors. He lives in NYC with his husband, actor/singer/Fight-House member Sean Griffin. Dave is a 2nd degree blackbelt in Olympic and ITF style taekwondo and fought at the US Open International level for many years. His last fight was at the 2006 Gay Games (Gay Olympics) in 2006. His plays include: Dia Y Noche (full off-Broadway production produced by Labyrinth Theater Company at 59e59 Theater), MinotaurRomance (workshop at the Public Theater w/ Labyrinth Theater), Killing/Play (Published by Cafe Cino Anthology, Issue 2, 2018), Tetralogy (Workshop production, INTAR), Grasshopper (solo-piece workshopped at George Street Playhouse). He has also written 2 monologues for the 24-Hour Viral Monologue series and recently had an essay published for SDC Journal. He’s also a 2018 Innovative Theater Award nominated songwriter and is currently developing a rock/horror cabaret called the KillShow at the Tank.
PHILLIP CHRISTIAN SMITH is a member of New Dramatists (class of 2030) a Fire This Time Festival Playwright, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee (current staff), a Playwrights Realm and Lambda Literary Fellow, a Winter Playwrights Retreater, and an O’Neill, PlayPenn, Trustus, and BAPF Finalist. Co-Literary Director of Exquisite Corpse Company, he teaches acting at Pace University and playwriting at Hunter College. BFA UNM; MFA Yale School of Drama; MFA Hunter College. He is currently working on a Roe Green Commission with The Cleveland Playhouse. phillipchristiansmith.com
FLOWER ESTEFANA RIOS is a Trans and Chicana writer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY! Originally from Laredo, Texas, she arrived in NY ten years ago to pursue a BA in English with a focus in Dramatic Writing from Pace University. Previous theater training includes LAB’s Intensive Ensemble and Breaking the Binary’s Musical Theater Intensive. Some of Flower’s writing has been presented with The Playground Experiment, a home for artists to build new work and foster community. Flower strives to tell stories from the many different intersections of her life! Follow her at @mxflowertortilla on insta or her website flowerestefanarios.com
(L-R) Mona Mansour, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Laura Thoma
MONA MANSOUR grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Her earliest obsessions included the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst and the various battles of World War II. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War. She studied acting as an undergrad, but in her senior year a class in improvisation led her down that path; she then studied at Second City Chicago and was a member of the Groundlings Sunday Company, which gave her a visceral first taste of writing. Her first play was Me and the S.L.A., where she turned a childhood obsession into a solo play about a kidnapped heiress, urban terrorists, and the nature of brainwashing. Her commitment to theater deepened after a move to New York City in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. At this point, the Middle Eastern theater community was ascending, fired up by an urgent need to change the narrative around Arabs and Arab-Americans. Within that community Mona began to write into her bicultural existence. This awakened in her a deep desire to create complicated and difficult roles for Middle Eastern performers, who especially then, but still now, often play only cab drivers, imams, bodega owners, and terrorists. Questions around her own father, who left Lebanon by choice, led to her visiting his village in Southern Lebanon and examining the “villages'' next to it — the camps Mieh-Mieh and Ain El Hilweh, where thousands of Palestinians live in stasis, stuck in place since 1948. This notion of displacement became a central theme she began to explore and inspired her to create the play Urge for Going in what would ultimately be The Vagrant Trilogy. Urge for Going garnered her a spot in the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group in 2009 and had productions at the Public Theater (dir. Hal Brooks) and Golden Thread (dir. Evren Odcikin). The next piece in the trilogy, The Vagrant, was commissioned and developed by The Public as part of the Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowship and workshopped at the 2013 Sundance Theater Institute. The Hour of Feeling (dir. Wing-Davey) premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and an Arabic translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi as part of its Arab Voices Festival in 2016. This work received a finishing commission from the Public Theater in 2017, and the entirety of The Vagrant Trilogy made its premiere at the Mosaic Theater in Washington, D.C. in June 2018 (dir. Wing-Davey). In April 2022, The Vagrant Trilogy finally made its New York City debut at The Public Theater (dir. Wing-Davey), after being postponed due to the Covid-19 shutdown. The New York Times wrote, “Woven of poetry and politics, threaded with comedy, it’s Stoppardian in its intellectualism and doesn’t shy from poignancy.” In 2019, Mona formed the theater company SOCIETY, with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai. The aim was to create a company where work could be created, joint stock style, with improvisation, research, and discussion that involves every company member. Their first production, Beginning Days of True Jubilation, was performed entirely on Zoom in August 2020. The play, with its cast of 10, explores the absurdity, chaos and psychic cost of a fictitious start-up. The play was remounted in person in July 2022 at the New Ohio Theatre. Her play Unseen ran at Mosaic in April 2023, directed by Johanna Gruenhut. Of the production, The Washington Post said: “Unseen gracefully turns its lens on stirring themes: human connection and betrayal, cross-cultural friction and understanding, and the cost of seeing suffering — and of looking away from it.” Prior to that, the play made its West Coast debut at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in spring of 2022, directed by Odcikin. The Ashland News hailed it as “thought-provoking, challenging and complex. Those attributes alone make ‘unseen’ worth seeing, but it’s all that and more.” Mona’s other credits include: The Way West (at Labyrinth (dir. Mimi O’Donnell), Village Theater (dir. Christina Myatt), Steppenwolf (dir. Amy Morton), and Marin Theatre Company (dir. Hayley Finn)) and We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War, which premiered at SF’s Golden Thread in 2018 (dir. Odcikin). With Tala Manassah she has written Falling Down the Stairs, an EST/Sloan commission. Their play Dressing is part of Facing Our Truths: Short Plays about Trayvon, Race and Privilege, commissioned by the New Black Festival. Other commissions include works for Playwrights Horizons and La Jolla Playhouse. In September 2020, Mona received the prestigious Kesselring Prize, awarded by the National Arts Club to one playwright a year. She was nominated by Seattle Rep for her play The Hour of Feeling. Other awards and fellowships include: Award in Literature (Academy of Arts and Letters), Helen Merrill, Whiting, Middle East America Distinguished Playwright, MacDowell, and New Dramatists Class of 2020. Mona was a writer for NBC’s long-running series New Amsterdam and is currently creating a series for Waleed and Joana Zuaiter’s FlipNarrative.
DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES is an Afro-Panamanian American writer. His plays have received productions or readings at the Kennedy Center for the Arts American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), The Brick Theater, Kitchen Theater Company, Pregones Theater/PRTT, Primary Stages, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, Civilians R&D Group, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Workshop, and other groups. His play, Starry Night, was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference and the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting. His play Bayano was also a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. His most recent play, Black Feminist Video Game, was produced by The Civilians for 59E59, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Center Theater Group, among other theaters and venues, and won an inaugural Anthem Award. He is the founder of the Greater Good Commission and Festival, a festival of Latinx short films. Holnes is the author of Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022), the latter of which won an International Latino Book Award. He is the recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. For more information, visit darrelholnes.com.
LAURA THOMA is a trauma-informed, late-bloomer playwright and theatremaker originally from Tidewater, Virginia, whose work is published internationally. Laura began her artistic career as a dancer and choreographer, dancing with people like Fernando Bujones and at places like The White House. As a choreographer, she worked with The Second City and innumerable regional theatres nationwide. Laura was a faculty member and department liaison for Columbia College and Roosevelt University in Chicago. After suffering a career-ending injury, it was through playwriting that she eventually and gratefully found her way back to her sacred place, the theatre. As someone who has never fully seen herself represented on the stage, it is essential for Laura to explore and write women-centric stories of identity, mental health, queerness, and intergenerational connections. She recently finished a week-long development workshop and public reading of her play, Yours in Words, through GreenStage Guilford Live Arts Festival and is excited to have her play Writer’s Block featured in The Bechdel Group Fall Reading Series at The Tank in NYC. Laura is an alum of the Desert Playwrights’ Retreat, an LGBTQ writers space, as well as the National Playwrights Symposium and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. In 2022, her monologue turned short film, Me, Myself, and I, written at the beginning of the pandemic and starring Broadway veteran Erin Stoddard, garnered 18 awards from short film festivals around the globe, including London, Paris, and New York. In 2019 Laura was a playwright in residence at Pawling Theatre Exchange (now CTE ) where she developed her play Magpie. Many of her short works, including Meet Me in the Lobby, Heartache Tonight, Rowan's Final Bow, and Apples, Peaches, and Prose have been featured in regional new work festivals. Laura is a Co-Founder of Shoreline Playwrights, a partnership that develops and produces new works. She has developed her work with GreenStage Guilford, Cape May Stage, Legacy Theatre, Chicago Dramatist, Chestnut Street Playhouse, Marist College, Drama Works Theatre, The Blackstone Library, and Theatre Odyssey. She is a member of HonorRoll!, AEA, The League of Professional Theatre Women - CT Chapter, The Dramatist Guild, and The Playwrights Circle. Laura lives on the Connecticut Shoreline with her bookish wife, Chris, and their two dogs, Buddy Fitzwilliam and Beatrice Dashwood.
THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED BY THE FOLLOWING AMAZING LOCAL BUSINESSES:
