SheNYC is the City’s premier festival showcasing new, original works by gender-marginalized writers, composers & directors. This year's festival features:
0874: A Filipino-American Love Story
Book, Music & Lyrics by Alexandra Palting
Music co-composed by Baz King
0874 is a musical about Alexandra Palting’s grandparents’ courtship and immigration as told through their 874 love letters. At the beginning of letter one, Palting’s grandmother, Paz, wanted to be a nun in Manila; by the last letter, she traveled across the world to start a new life with her husband Jun. The story oscillates between the world of the letters and the present, the Philippines and the United States, and explores truth’s relationship to time, distance and intimacy within the context of family, and the courage to grow up with another.
Bloom
Book, Music, & Lyrics by Gillian Fox Orwoll
Book & Lyrics co-written by Grace Lazos
In a city where Gods lord over mortals, an ambitious young woman stands alone as she attempts to start a revolution. Bloom tells the story of a close-knit community tyrannized by the cruelty of the Gods, and one young woman who continually tries to inspire her people to revolution. When Arachne, our revolutionary idealist, claims to be a better weaver than the goddess Athena, Athena challenges her to a weaving contest, with the fate of the village hanging in the balance. Will the villagers gain the courage to support Arachne and finally revolt against their oppressors?
Chasing Grace
Book, Music, & Lyrics by Elizabeth Addison
A meta-musical about learning to love your younger self by writing her a new narrative and reclaiming her dreams. Inspired by writer Elizabeth Addison’s time in treatment and chasing her own Broadway dreams with her musical This is Treatment, Chasing Grace is an immersive, meta experience taking place in the mind and memory of both The Writer of Treatment and Grace, her main character. The musical explores identity, addiction, recovery, trauma, the weaponization of our dreams and how learning to face your past and love yourself can help you rewrite your narrative and reclaim your dreams.
Finding Olive
By Samantha Stone
A play about how memory jogs stories, and stories jog memory. Narrated from the present and taking place in the early 2000s, Finding Olive tells the story of a teenage girl who embarks on a school trip to an educational wilderness facility, just days after she was sexually assaulted at a party. Olive is randomly placed in a small group with her abuser and while she aims to free herself from the burden of her trauma, she becomes forced to face the consequences of something she never asked for in the first place.
First Sight: A Queer Indonesian Love Story
By Dena Igusti
A play about love when everything else gets in the way. 1997 Jakarta, Indonesia. Sari is an aspiring singer hoping to achieve stardom through amateur performances at her best friend Fina’s parties. Her song leads to a chance encounter with Lisa, a determined journalist, and the two become a hot item in Jakarta’s lesbian party scene. But when Sari is forced to flee from the aftermath of Suharto’s dictatorship, the two must adapt their love to conform to the pressures of survival and migration. Eighteen years later, Sari’s daughter Diah must navigate the residual trauma of Sari’s past as it is projected onto her own relationship with her girlfriend, Melli.
It’s a Free Country
By Leigh Flayton
A new play about how the coarsening of American society affects a famous writer and her fractured family. Louisa “Lou” Clay is the author of a cult classic feminist novel that is now a hit TV series, compelling the ever-reclusive Lou to hunker down in her country house. Following her is a slew of unintended consequences, owing to America’s current political climate and the rage against the patriarchy that is the hallmark of the show. So, when a death threat arrives at Lou’s apartment, her niece, Ramona, and Lou’s agent and friend, Nell, join Lou in the country, where they try to ascertain the severity of the threat — and evade any attempts on Lou’s life.
The Moss Maidens
By S. Dylan Zwickel
Inspired by the true events of a group of teenage girls who flirted with Nazis, lured them into the woods for a romantic walk and murdered them. The year is 1941 and five ordinary teenage girls living in a midsized Dutch town spend their days gossiping about their classmates, dreaming about their futures and trying not to catch the eye of any of the Nazis that have taken up residence in their town. But when Rini, the romantic of the group, takes a walk in the woods with a Nazi and sort-of-accidentally ends up killing him, the girls discover that they’re the last people anyone would ever suspect when harm befalls members of the invading army, and a new branch of the Resistance is born.
Radio Man
By Sarah Groustra
A post-apocalyptic coming of age story. After a climate crisis decimates civilization as we know it, two sisters trek across the post-apocalyptic wasteland with only an eccentric voice on their transistor radio for company. When another young girl stumbles upon their campsite, they must decide whether or not the newcomer can stay. Longing, reminiscence and a desire for their past life bond the women together, while the looming dangers of the natural world threaten to take their lives.
