Segal Center's WORLD VOICES Festival Will Host Free Readings of International Plays

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY's Graduate Center will present WORLD VOICES, features five readings of new plays in translation, staged in collaboration with NY-based directors and performers.

This year's playwrights hail from Tuscarora/Canada, Austria, France, Senegal and Germany. Each reading will be followed by a discussion with the playwright and curator Frank Hentschker. Reception to follow.

Yuchewahkenh (Bitter)

Monday, May 4
6:30 pm: Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora/Canada)

When Myra's sister Ellie goes missing after a fight with her unreliable boyfriend, Myra investigates and encounters a wall of bigotry, misogyny, and generational trauma as she tries to find her sister. Enter Bad Mind, the trickster spirit who forces Myra to confront her own biases and inherited trauma as she fights to uncover what happened to Ellie. Directed by OPALANIETET RYAN PIERCE/EAGLE PROJECT.

The Evening before the Ever After

Monday, May 11
6:30 pm: LISA WENTZ (Austria)

A dinner party at a wealthy financier's villa becomes the stage for a slow-burning reckoning: Luca, an ambitious young banker, arrives with his wife Irene to celebrate a career-defining deal with his boss Gabriel — but Gabriel's mysterious new girlfriend Alexandra turns out to be a woman Luca raped five years earlier. Over the course of the evening, as pleasantries curdle into confrontation, Alexandra methodically dismantles the men's world of denial, money, and mutual protection, while Irene — caught between loyalty, fury, and self-preservation — ultimately cannot or will not act. Directed by KATIE BROOKS & KATIANA RANGEL (TBC).

Just the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde)

Saturday, May 16
5:00 pm: JEAN-LUC LAGARCE (France)

Louis returns home to announce his terminal illness, but ultimately leaves without revealing his condition, after his family members respond uneasily to his presence. The characters struggle to communicate, and their exchanges brutally expose them to stark reflections on life, death, and the difficulty of speaking honestly with one another. Louis's return also underscores the social and emotional distance that has grown between him and the modest family upbringing he left behind, giving the play a strong sociological dimension alongside its intimate drama. The stage directions specify that the action takes place “on a Sunday of course. Or maybe over the course of a whole year.” Directed by SYLVAINE GUYOT.

JULIUS

Monday, May 18
4:00 pm: PENDA DIOUF (France/Sengal)

A play about Julius Eastman (1940–1990), an American composer who was among the first to combine the processes of some minimalist music with other methods of extending and modifying his music as in some experimental music. He thus created what he called "organic music". In compositions like Stay On It (1973), his melodic motifs were not unlike the catchy refrains of then pop music.

During the 1970s (and perhaps shortly thereafter), he openly expressed himself in terms of his race, sexual orientation, or both in at least one performance and also in his compositions, including Gay Guerrilla. He experienced a lack of professional opportunities, falling into relative obscurity while struggling with substance use and homelessness in the 1980s. After his early, possibly HIV/AIDS-related death in 1990, Kyle Gann remembered him in a much belated 1991 obituary in the Village Voice. JULIUS is directed by Keith Josef Adkins

ELLEN B.

Monday, May 18
7:00 pm: MARIUS VON MAYENBURG (Germany)

ELLEN B. is a taut psychological thriller about power, desire, and shattered certainties. When Astrid, a teacher, invites her boss home for an informal evening, a troubling allegation surfaces: something happened between Astrid and one of her students — Ellen Babić. As past and present collide, the principal starts to question the nature Astrid's relationship with her younger partner Klara, while Astrid is starting to expose patriarchal structures at work. And the question of what really happened proves impossible to answer. ELLEN B., directed by Whitney White

About The Segal World Voices 2025 Playwrights:

Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora/Canada) is a playwright, director, and co-founder of the Chukalokoi Native Theater Ensemble alongside Cochise Anderson, Irene Bedard, and Steve Elm. In 2009, she became the first Indigenous playwright to join the Emerging Writers Group at New York's Public Theater. Ramirez is part of the Inaugural Indigenous Writers' Collective at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a resident at New Dramatists through 2027.

Her works have been showcased at renowned venues such as The Public Theater, Native Voices at the Autry, and Pershing Square Signature Center. She received honorable mentions from Kilroy's for Standoff at Hwy #37 in 2015 and Pure Native in 2019. Pure Native was also a semi-finalist at The Eugene O'Neill Center's National Playwrights Conference in 2018 and the Bay Area's Playwrights Conference in 2019. Pure Native recently made its East Coast Premiere next at Geva Theater in Rochester.

Ramirez's current commissions include The Ally Project for Seattle Rep and Six Nations: One Fire for the Inaugural Democracy Cycle Commission for PacNYC. In 2020, she won the NNPN's Smith Prize for Political Theater for Yuchewahkénh (Bitter), and she is co-producing Yuchewahkénh in Spring 2026 with Pia Wilson and Mona Mansour as part of Pool Plays 4.0.

Her work appears in various publications, including Monologues for Actors of Color: Women, Monologues for Actors of Color: Men, Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, TRW's Short Plays, and Broadway Publishing's Smoke.

Vickie is a member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN USA.

Lisa Wentz (Austria) is a playwright. Born in Austria, she completed her acting training in Vienna in 2017 before going on to earn a degree in Scenic Writing from the Berlin University of the Arts in 2022.

Her work has been performed at leading German-language stages, including the Volksbühne Berlin, the Burgtheater Vienna, and the Theater in der Josefstadt. Her play Aschewolken received a special prize at the German Children's and Youth Theatre Award in 2020, and Adern won both the Retzhofer Drama Prize 2021 and the Nestroy Award for Best Play 2022, with its world premiere at the Burgtheater Vienna. In 2023, she was awarded the Contemporary Arts Alliance Award Berlin for her artistic work.

Most recently, her play Azur oder die Farbe von Wasser premiered at the Theater in der Josefstadt in January 2025, and Verräter had its world premiere at the Landestheater Linz in February 2026. She lives and works in Vienna.

Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957–1995) was a French actor, theatre director and playwright. Although only moderately successful during his lifetime, since his death he has become one of the most widely-produced French playwrights.

Born in Héricourt, Haute-Saône, Lagarce was educated at the Université de Besançon. He was a cofounder of the Théâtre de La Roulotte in 1978, directing productions of playwrights such as Pierre de Marivaux, Eugène Marin Labiche and Eugène Ionesco before beginning to stage his own plays. Some of his early plays were criticized as derivative of Ionesco or Samuel Beckett. Although some of his plays were published by Théâtre Ouvert or recorded as radio dramas, only a few of them were ever staged during his lifetime.

Publishing 25 plays during his lifetime, he died of AIDS in 1995. He also published a volume of short stories, wrote an opera libretto and a film screenplay, and cofounded the publishing company Les Solitaires Intempestifs. He was rediscovered by critics after his death, becoming more widely recognized as one of the most important modern French playwrights. This led to many productions overseas, such as the Brazilian version of Music-Hall by Luiz Päetow, which won the Theatre Shell Award in 2010.

In 2015, film director Xavier Dolan adapted Lagarce's Juste la fin du monde into the film It's Only the End of the World, which won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Le pays lointain was produced at theatre Odeon, Paris in 2019.

Penda Diouf (Senegal/France) is a French playwright, librettist, and actress of Senegalese-Ivorian heritage whose work explores identity, invisible histories, colonial legacies, and ecological themes. Based in Lille, she began writing plays at nineteen, and her very first work, Poussières, was selected by the Comédie-Française in 2010.

Her play La grande Ourse won the Text'avril Festival Jury Prize in 2018, the Collidram Prize in 2021, and was a finalist for the Prix Sony Labou Tansi in 2022. Her autobiographical play Pistes… won the La Chartreuse reading committee prize and the award for best German radio fiction in 2022, and was broadcast on France Culture. In 2023, she received the SACD Prize for Upcoming Talents, and in 2025 she staged Pistes… herself and created a musical performance with composer Cloé du Trèfle.

Her most recent play, Sœurs, nos forêts aussi ont des épines (2024), was staged in 2025 by director Silvia Costa. Also in 2025, her play May Landschaften received its world premiere at Theater Münster in a German translation. Her plays have been translated into German, English, Portuguese, Armenian, Czech, and Finnish, and she has held writing residencies at the Royal Court in London, the Institut Français in Tunis, the Villa Albertine in New York, and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg.

Marius Von Mayenburg (Germany) is a playwright, director and translator. Born in Munich, he studied playwriting at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin. He was a dramaturg and writer in residence at the Schaubühne Berlin. His plays (such as The Ugly One, Fireface, A Piece of Plastic) are translated into more than 30 languages, and have been successfully produced worldwide at the Schaubühne Berlin, the Young Vic, London, National Theatre Oslo, The Royal Court Theatre, Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris , La Scala, Paris among many others and have won several awards. As a translator he has translated works by William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as contemporary plays by writers such as Martin Crimp, Alan Ayckbourn and Sarah Kane into German.

His most recent trilogy consists of the plays Ex, Ellen Barbić and Egal, which have all been premiered internationally at theaters such as Rikstheatre in Stockholm, Sweden, the National Theater of Reykjavik, the Burgtheater Vienna.

As a director, Marius von Mayenburg has worked at the Schaubühne Berlin, Residenztheater in Munich, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Riksteater Stockholm, Nationaltheater Oslo among others.