Playwrights On Our Country's Future Features Readings Of New Dramatic Works

On Monday, April 22, in celebration of T Magazine's annual culture issue, BAM and T present an evening of dramatic readings which look five years into our country's future. Three of today's leading playwrights-Jackie Sibblies Drury, Adam Rapp, and Celine Song-expound on the theme America 2024 in new works that range from the utopian to the dystopian, from the fantastical to the very real. The readings are followed by a discussion with the playwrights led by moderator Kurt Soller, articles editor of T Magazine.

Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her plays include Marys Seacole, Fairview, Really, Social Creatures and We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. Drury's plays have been presented by LCT3, Soho Rep., Berkeley Rep, New York City Players, and Abrons Arts Center; Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Company One, and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at The Bellagio Center, Sundance, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, The Civilians, PRELUDE, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, The Bushwick Starr, The LARK, and The MacDowell Colony. She has received many awards, including The Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and a United States Artists Fellowship, and The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her play Fairview will return to New York to Theater for a New Audience this June, and will be presented at the Young Vic in London this November.

Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, which include Nocturne (A.R.T., New York Theatre Workshop), Finer Noble Gases (26th Humana Festival, Rattlestick, Edinburgh Fringe, Fringe First Award), Essential Self-Defense (Playwrights Horizons), The Metal Children (The Vineyard), The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick), The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois (The Atlantic), and Red Light Winter (Steppenwolf, Scott Rudin Productions at Barrow Street Theatre), for which he won Chicago's Jeff Award, an OBIE, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. His most recent play, The Sound Inside, premiered last summer at The Williamstown Theater Festival, and was named one of the Best Productions of 2018 by The New York Times. His playwriting honors include The Helen Merrill Prize, The Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Award.

Celine Song's play Endlings received its world premiere in 2019 at American Repertory Theater. It was selected for the 2018 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and it was placed on the 2017 Kilroys list. Celine is a member of The Public Theater's 2016-2017 Emerging Writers Group, Ars Nova's 2014-2015 Play Group, and The Orchard Project's inaugural NYC Greenhouse 2018. She was a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow from 2017-2018, a 2014 & 2016 Great Plains Theatre Conference Playlab Playwright, and she was a 2017 semifinalist for the P73 Playwriting Fellowship. Her play Tom & Eliza was a semifinalist for the American Playwriting Foundation's 2016 Relentless Award. Song has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and commissions from MTC/Sloan, Sundance, the Millay Colony for the arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia. Song is currently a staff writer on Amazon's The Wheel of Time, and she is developing a project for television with Diablo Cody and Beth Behrs.

T Magazine, edited by Hanya Yanagihara, is The New York Times's fashion, culture, and style magazine devoted to telling today's most interesting stories from around the world. It is distributed in The Sunday New York Times and The New York Times International Edition in Europe. T was recently nominated in three categories for the 2019 ASME National Magazine Awards- in the Single-Topic Issue category for "New York City: 1981-1983," and for General Excellence and Design and Photography in the Service and Lifestyle category.