Rough Draft Festival to Return to LPAC with 3 Works in Development

LaGuardia Performing Arts Center's Rough Draft Festival will bring together artists and producing partners with deep connections to LPAC for four nights of theater still actively in progress. This fall's festival features MAMA/RUN by Lester Eugene Mayers, SKIN TO SKIN by Trixie Ndanu Kioko and Jeremy J. Kamps, and FURBALL by Jeana Scotti, directed by Tara Elliott. Photo at right is from a dress rehearsal of MAMA/RUN.

Rough Draft is free to attend.

Two of the featured projects, MAMA/RUN and FURBALL, return to LPAC after earlier developmental presentations, while SKIN TO SKIN arrives through longtime artistic partner Houses on the Moon Theater Company

“Across the festival, intimate personal stories collide with larger questions about motherhood, race, health, sex, relationships, identity and the body,” said Andrew Ronan, Executive Director, LPAC. “The artists approach those subjects through radically different theatrical vocabularies, from poetry, movement and ritual to sharp humor, uncomfortable questions and the surreal.”

“New work doesn't move in a straight line, and it isn't finished simply because it has been presented once,” said Handan Ozbilgin, Director, Rough Draft Festival. “Artists and companies come to Rough Draft at different points in their creative journeys. What connects them is the opportunity to keep asking questions, take risks, and discover what the work wants to become. There is something powerful about creating a space where artists can return, begin again or take a piece into an entirely new phase.”

Tickets can be reserved with a free RSVP or a $25 Supporter Ticket, with funds supporting the artists developing new work at LPAC. This season, LPAC is also offering a Festival Supporter Pass for $50, which includes admission to presentations on the date/time of the passholder's choice to all three Rough Draft works. Learn more and reserve tickets here.

MAMA/RUN

Written and created by Lester Eugene Mayers, MAMA/RUN returns just months after its first public reading at LPAC this spring, now expanding from the page into a fuller theatrical workshop.

Part poetry, part movement, part ritual, MAMA/RUN journeys into the complicated terrain between mothers and children, where love, abandonment, survival, and memory can occupy the same space.

Through breath, language and the body, Mayers explores what we inherit from our mothers, what happens when care and absence become intertwined, and how the stories carried through a family continue to shape the people left to tell them.

“The spring reading gave me the opportunity to hear MAMA/RUN in the room with an audience for the first time and to listen for what the piece was asking to become,” said Mayers. “This fall workshop allows us to move beyond that first encounter and explore the work more deeply through performance, movement, breath, and ritual. Returning to Rough Draft means building upon what we discovered in the spring while allowing MAMA/RUN to become more fully itself.”

SKIN TO SKIN

Inspired by the true stories of Black mothers and midwives, and the impact of systemic racism in the labor and delivery rooms, SKIN TO SKIN is a new theatrical project led by playwright Jeremy J. Kamps and Trixie Ndanu Kioko, a midwife and birthing justice advocate.

Presented in partnership with Houses on the Moon Theater Company, SKIN TO SKIN puts the experiences of Black women at the center of a theatrical exploration of health, care, and survival.

Moving between the deeply personal and the systemic, the work asks what it means to live in a body whose pain, needs and experiences are too often filtered through institutions and assumptions beyond its control. At once intimate and urgent, SKIN TO SKIN opens a conversation about who receives care, who is heard and what it means to claim authority over one's own body.

FURBALL

Written by Jeana Scotti and directed by Tara Elliott.

FURBALL enters the festival in an entirely different direction: funny, strange, provocative, and willing to follow an uncomfortable question wherever it leads.

Sam has a growing problem—literally. A mysterious furball is forming inside their body, and no doctor seems to have an answer. As the furball grows, FURBALL offers a surreal, hilarious, and unsettling commentary on relationships, bodily autonomy, and the absurdity of modern health crises.

Using humor, absurdity and unexpected encounters, Scotti turns an eye toward sex, relationships and the body, exploring the private anxieties, curiosities and contradictions women carry about themselves and one another.

Previously presented at LPAC in March 2025, FURBALL returns in a further-developed workshop presentation, giving Scotti and Elliott another opportunity to push into the work's comic, intimate and unsettling territory.

“Rough Draft Festival makes room for precisely this kind of unfinished business,” said Ronan. “Since its founding in 2013, the festival has supported more than 100 artists through readings, workshops and performances, inviting audiences not simply to see new work, but to encounter it while it is still changing.”0

2026 ROUGH DRAFT FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Tuesday, October 27

• 7 p.m. — SKIN TO SKIN

Wednesday, October 28

• 2:30 p.m. — SKIN TO SKIN, followed by a talkback
• 7 p.m. — MAMA/RUN

Thursday, October 29

• 2:30 p.m. — MAMA/RUN, followed by a talkback
• 7 p.m. — FURBALL, followed by a talkback

Friday, October 30

• 7 p.m. — FURBALL