WP Theater presents The Pipeline Festival 2024, the fifth biennial showcase of the artists in its celebrated WP Lab for playwrights, directors and producers. The festival is the culmination of the renowned two-year WP Lab residency, providing a unique opportunity for audiences to see five new works in various stages of development, ranging from staged readings to full-length workshop productions—presented over a span of several weeks. The festival, true to its name, serves as a pipeline to funnel the work of talented Women+ artists to the forefront of American theater. Each play is created and produced by collaborative writer/director/producer teams from the WP Lab residency program.
Malicious Compliance
By Amara Janae Brady
Directed by Julia Sirna-Frest
Produced by Praycious Wilson-Gay
April 4-6
Mo and Yuri sit under an almost non-existent potted tree named Beckett, waiting impatiently for the next phase of their career—the next part of their journey. Delores sings a song about the blood the land craves, a callous warning that the blood is the only thing that will allow them to ascend to the glory Mo and Yuri believe is possible. Inspired by Waiting for Godot, Malicious Compliance tells the story of two artists desperately waiting for a change that may cost more than they’re willing to give, or worse may never come.
OK
By Christin Eve Cato
Directed by Jordana De La Cruz
Produced by Barbara Samuels
April 11-13
A cast and crew of Latine performers prepare for a non-union bilingual production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, playing at a regional theater in Oklahoma. When one of the leads discovers she is pregnant and gets her abortion appointment canceled, they band together as they navigate a post-Roe America. In their dialogue comes revelations about their careers, their personal lives and their relationship with a society that has become desperate to discount their own humanity.
Blackbirding
By Queen Esther
Directed by Lorna Ventura
Produced by Alverneq Lindsay
April 18-20
Accompanied by banjoist/guitarist Ayodele Maatheru (Paradise Square, Shuffle Along, Lackawanna Blues) Blackbirding—a solo show steeped in lost history, ephemera, ghost stories and folklore, storytelling and original reclamation-driven Americana—is a requiem for America’s neverending Civil War and the promise of Reconstruction, tangled in a Southern Black feminist vernacular.
When the Other Mary Celeste Sank: A Strange and Umweltian Tale
By Amina Henry
Directed by Ran Xia
Produced by Emma Orme
April 25-27
Marooned on the coast of an island after a shipwreck in 1894, five women must work together to survive in a strange, new world. As they hunt for food and water while battling the relentless insects, each woman develops a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Some of the women want to build a boat so they can attempt to go home; others want to build a shelter in what they consider their inevitable new home. A conflict over a knife leads to a startling conclusion, one that causes nature itself to take notice. When The Other Mary Celeste Sank: A Strange and Umweltian Tale is a theatrical fairy tale that uses language to explore what it means to be brave, what it means to be strong and what it means to human.
The Cause
By Else Went
Directed by Dina Vovsi
May 2-4
In this house of mirrors, a group of actors and a director gather at newly formed artist residency, The House Upstate, for a week-long workshop development of The Cause, a new play about a group of actors and a director who gather in a house upstate for a week to shoot The Cause, an experimental film adaptation of Othello. As daily rewrites from an absent playwright elevate coincidence to paranoia, jealousy and desire fill the rehearsal room thick as the nightly mist in this quiet, empty town.
