SheNYC is the City’s premier festival showcasing new, original works by women, trans, & non-binary writers & composers. This year's lineup features:
The Angel Makers
By Amanda Freedman (Book & Lyrics) and Lorenzo Pipino (Music & Lyrics)
A new musical based on the true story of the Hungarian women who took justice into their own hands to escape abusive marriages. Suzannah, a midwife, arrives in Nagyrév, Hungary at the end of the Great War. When the men return home from the battlefield, they bring the war’s violence with them and domestic abuse becomes rampant. When one woman desperately seeks Suzannah’s help, she teams up with the coroner’s wife, Júlia, to run an operation designed to keep the women safe and earn back their freedom. But as the women gain power in their town—and the men grow terrified—the lines between evil and justice become blurred.
The Bookstore
By Nancy Marie
The greatest weapon against ignorance is a book. Mark Lee Johnson’s attempt to fulfill his dream of meeting Malcolm X and getting his autograph leads him to the bookstore of Sister Ura Shazad in Harlem, and an immediate and seemingly unbreakable bond forms between them after they witness Malcolm’s assassination. But three years later, Mark Lee returns to the bookstore—this time, as an inside agent in the COINTELPRO operation launched against Black-owned bookstores. How long will Mark Lee last before he’s caught by those who thought they could trust him? This play is loosely based on and in memory of Sister Una Mulzac and the Liberation Bookstore.
Borderland
By Natalie Elizabeth Weiss (Book, Music and Lyrics)
A dark comedy about Ida C. Craddock, a real-life 19th-century sexologist who claimed to be married to an angel. The first person to put the words “female orgasm” in print, Ida had a bone to pick with Victorian America’s view of sexuality. Enlightened by supernatural sex with her heavenly husband, Ida empowered other married couples through a mail-order sex education program. However, when her educational literature was discovered by postal inspector Anthony Comstock, Ida was charged with “obscenity” under his namesake law: The Comstock Act. Equal parts DJ set and opera, this unorthodox musical explores Ida’s struggle for liberty and reveals surprising similarities between the polarizing politics of the 19th century and the world we live in today.
Fish Meat
By Esmé Maria Ng
An examination of the fraught intertwinement of labor, sexual violence and the complex beauty of marine biology. Fish Meat braids the lives of Mingzhu, a 14 year old girl on a boat going from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1890, and Ro, a PhD candidate studying marine biology in present-day California. Merging marine taxonomy, Lewis Carroll and histories of immigration and exploitation, this heartfelt play explores how our care for others can reveal the care we deserve for ourselves and asks: How do we categorize sexual violence?
Mere Waters
By Jillian Blevins
A Jewish abortion play about mothers, daughters, faith and survival through the Holocaust. In 1944, Gynecologist Gisella Perl arrives at Auschwitz and is assigned to work as the camp doctor. She has no tools, no antiseptic, no water. Guided by two bickering biblical prophetesses, Gisella treats prisoners who have fallen pregnant; some have been assaulted, some have traded sex for life-saving goods, others just wanted to feel something aside from pain. When she realizes the scope of evil being perpetrated in the hospital, she undertakes a spiritual mission to ensure the safety and survival of the women in her care by performing secret, life-saving abortions.
Mud; or when things get messy and how we live with it.
By Camille Simone Thomas
A play about surviving bi-polar disorder and coming together as a family. After having a bipolar disorder-induced psychotic break during the lockdown of 2020, 19-year-old Zuma is the newest resident in the hospital’s psych ward. While she struggles to come to terms with a previously unknown mental illness, her siblings point the blame at God, themselves and each other. As she vacillates between clarity and chaos, her siblings must come together and work through shame, secrets and strife to discover what it really means to be a family.
The Station
By Maggie Cregan
A darkly comic drama about the reality of a conspiracy theory. A young woman must take desperate measures when a QAnon-like conspiracy theory starts wreaking havoc in her small town. As a practicing hypochondriac and an adulterous born-again Christian, gas station cashier Davina entertains a few delusions of her own. But she can only watch incredulously and argue fruitlessly when the strongest person she knows, her foster mother, starts painting over windows and drinking urine. As her relationships with her foster mother, foster sister and (secret) boyfriend hang in the balance, Davina resolves to track down the mastermind behind the mysterious posts…and then must decide what to do with the culprit.
Dead Air
By 2024 SheNYC Resident Playwright Kristen Milburn
This production developed with the support of 59E59 Theaters. October 23, 1962: Four days until Michael Zann’s Halloween party. Also, the world might be blown to smithereens in a devastating nuclear war. The girls in the Reading High School Radio Club didn’t plan on entering a radio competition at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but push ahead with their broadcast as they contend with what it means to have a literal way to use their voices while stumbling through girlhood and impending destruction.
