QSTC Names Five Playwrights for Michael Bradford Residency

QSTC has revealed their 2026 Michael Bradford Residency Playwrights. Named in honor of Michael Bradford, UC Davis vice provost and dean for Undergraduate Education. Bradford is an award-winning director, producer and playwright, he has staged plays across the world, from New York City to the United Kingdom, Romania and Spain. He is a 20-year member of the Dramatists Guild of America and Treasurer of the University Resident Theatre Association board. Finalists will spend four days at a lakeside retreat while developing their new works.

Calley N. Anderson

Hot Seat

Can you really redress harm? A group of unnamed ex-associates gather for a restorative-adjacent circle with their former tormentor to find out. They’ve all signed an agreement before entering the space–which includes taking a turn in a “hot seat” at the circle’s center–but finding stable footing while standing on quicksand proves challenging.

LaRaisha Dionne

An American Coup

Braids three timelines into one theatrical event: 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, where a white supremacist mob destroys the nation's only Negro daily newspaper and overthrows the elected government in America's only successful coup d'état.

Rebecca S'manga-Frank

Valence

The play is about sex, death, and intimacy through the lens of intersecting identity, power, dependency, liberation, love, and "the unknown."

Reynaldo Piniella

Black and Blue

A solo show about a Black boy living in a society that doesn't like it when Black men show vulnerability, and this sensitive boy learns to bottle up his feelings and internalize his trauma.

S. Tyrone Williams

Compromise (with a D)

A two-person drama set in 1835 St. Louis about a freed Black man who sued for wrongful enslavement.

Synopsis: When his best line of defense against a misdirected lawsuit becomes the argument of slavery, John Berry Meachum, a freed Black man, must decide whether to compromise his core beliefs to win the case.