PlayCo Names Kate Douglas as Resident Artist & Sala Beckett Playwright Residency Exchange

PlayCo has named writer, composer, and performer Kate Douglas as the resident for the second iteration of the PlayCo & Sala Beckett Playwright Residency Exchange. From July 2-23, Douglas will be in residence at Sala Beckett in Barcelona.

This opportunity, for which PlayCo began accepting applications last December, was open to U.S.- based playwrights under age 40. During the second week of her residency, with an international cohort of fellow playwrights, Douglas will participate in Sala Beckett’s annual Obrador d’estiu (Summer Workshop), coordinated this year by British playwright Alistair McDowall. Throughout her three weeks at Sala Beckett, she will have the opportunity to attend local performances, and will have meetings with Sala Beckett staff and members of the local theatre community as well as independent time to write and sightsee. In its last week, the residency will culminate with a staged reading of a full-length play of Douglas’s, translated into Catalan.

Douglas’s Off-Broadway debut, 2024’s The Apiary at Second Stage Theater, was met with acclaim. In a New York Times Critic’s Pick review, Jesse Green called it “a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut.” 

Douglas said of the residency, “I am thrilled for this opportunity to be in dialogue with other artists from around the world about what theatre can do and be in these strange times. I hope this is only the beginning of meaningful global exchange in my career, especially around themes I continue to return to over and over: awe, interconnectedness, and estrangement from the natural world.”

The PlayCo Sala Beckett partnership was the germ of a larger ongoing residency program that now includes six additional theatres, opening crucial dialogues in our era of eroding free expression and heightened xenophobia—and countering American theatre’s own insular tendencies. Made possible with a generous new grant from the Venturous Theatre Fund of the Tides Foundation, the initiative includes partnerships with other theatres including Center for International Theater Development (CITD) in Budapest, Centre 42 in Singapore, Laznia Nowa Theatre in Krakow, Nalanda Arts Studio in Bangalore, Prologue Center in Taipei, in Barcelona, and Švanda Theatre in Prague. PlayCo launched the full program in December 2025, being uniquely positioned (given its development and production of 47 new works from 15+ countries since 2001) to act as a creative home and nexus for exchange of artistic and intellectual ideas around the globe. 

The collaboration between PlayCo and Sala Beckett began in October 2023, when—with funding from the Institut Ramon Llull—PlayCo hosted Catalan playwright Josep Maria Miró for a three-week residency in New York. The following summer, with funding from the Venturous Theater Fund, U.S. playwright Yilong Liu spent three weeks in residence at Sala Beckett. As is the model for the residencies across the next two years, the organizations’ mutual goal was to create lasting relationships that would go beyond the time artists spent in their respective new communities. PlayCo is now developing a new production of Miró’s play The Nicest Body Ever Seen Around These Parts, which they presented in a public reading during his New York residency, for a U.S. premiere. Sala Beckett's Catalan translation of Liu’s play We Borrowed Brokenness, which they presented in a public reading during his Barcelona residency, was published there in 2025.