Starr Reading Series to Feature Six Playwrights at The Bushwick Starr

The Bushwick Starr will present the plays & playwrights of our Starr Reading Series for the 2026-27 Season. This year’s series features new work by b Dang, Salwa Meghjee, Lisa Clair, Lily Haje, AliCHE Kabia, and Mya Ison.

The Starr Reading Series (SRS) is a way for The Bushwick Starr to expand its community while celebrating and exploring the plays of the city's most exciting playwrights. SRS features the work of a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers who are approaching writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. As the curatorial team puts it “We continue to carve out a special place for artists to explore and develop their raw ideas and impulses. The Starr Reading Series is centered on adventure, exploration, mystery, risk and discovery. We are passionate about giving artists support and room to do their thing-- whatever that ‘thing’ is.” We are proud to continue to offer this ongoing series to our audiences FREE of charge!

Starr Reading Series Curators:  Elizagrace Madrone, Jehan O. Young, Machel Ross & William Burke

Lisa Clair

Lisa Clair is a New York based playwright and performer. She makes work under the name Lisa Clair Group, a collective of performers, musicians, and designers who collaborate across disciplines to create live, experimental performance. Lisa is The Associate Artistic Director of Immediate Medium and a New Georges affiliated artist. She co-runs a residency and performance barn in the Catskills called Space Commander. Her work has been presented at kUnST fEsT, MITU580, Target Margin Theater, SPRING/BREAK art show, The SFX Festival, The Bushwick Starr Reading Series, Ars Nova, Dixon Place and The Performance Project at University Settlement.

b Dang

Brian Dang (they/she), or simply “b,” is a Vietnamese/Chinese poet/playwright and teaching artist. Her plays are a mixture of devised and scripted elements, often about the political domestic. Her plays include Grandmother/Bathtub (Theater Mu New Eyes Festival, Yale Cabaret, O’Neill Finalist ’25, Sparkfest Finalist ‘24) and This time (Undermain Fund for New Work, O’Neill Finalist ‘22, Many Voices Fellowship Semi-Finalist ‘22) and their poetry work includes 49 words I wish I could write in my family’s language, a collaborative translation project. They are currently a 2025-26 Core Apprentice at the Playwrights’ Center. They really like bread. MFA: Brown University. 

Lily Haje

LILY HAJE is a New York-based theater artist and scholar interested in research-based, devised performance and puppetry. She creates original works of puppet performance as The Last Days Puppet Co. and works as a freelance dramaturg. Lily holds an MFA in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism from Yale, where she is now writing a dissertation about the use of puppetry in apocalyptic performance, and teaches at Pace and Queens College. Recent creative projects as a lead artist include adapting and staging The Light Bearer, based on the life and writing of Marguerite Porete, a 13th century mystic (New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival); translating and performing Sponsus, a puppet performance based on the medieval music drama of the same name, built into an opening altarpiece (Object Movement Puppetry Festival); translating and directing Maurice Bouchor’s 1889 Symbolist puppet play Tobie; and co-curating Love Songs, a multi-part digital project based on a poem by Mina Loy (Yale Cabaret).

Mya Ison

Mya Ison (she/her) is an actor/playwright currently studying as a 2nd Year MFA Playwriting candidate at Hunter College! Her plays are a relentless search for Black voices in the places where they’ve been erased: in the ordinary, in the future, and in the archive. Select Playwriting credits: I'm a Really Good Swimmer (Venturous Theatre Fellowship Nominee), crawlspace (Reading/Residency at The Cell 2026, Workshop @ The Flea 2024), Fruit Fly (Liberation Theatre Company Reading/Residency ‘24-25), Laure (Lanford Wilson Festival Finalist 2026 O’Neill New Playwrights’ Conference Finalist 2024, BAPF Finalist 2023). Her plays have been workshopped at NYTW, The Cell, The Flea, Liberation Theatre Company, and The Tank. Select Acting credits: Theatre- Adia & Clora Snatch Joy (Huntington Theatre Workshop), Cowboy and the Moon (Atlantic MIXFest), According to Howard (York Theatre Co.), Little Shop of Horrors (Virginia Theatre Festival); TV- Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV). BFA, Boston University. Learn more at myaison.com

AliCHE Kabia

Che Kabia (They/Them) is an [anti]disciplinary artist, and a trans child of immigrants. Che’s work celebrates identity, play, and cross-cultural connection. Currently they are a member of the Mercury Store Acting Pool, a research assistant on Theater MITU's development of 'The Ones', and a collaborator on Desiré Graham’s 'Song Research Project' with The Theater Offensive. Che was recently a ‘25-‘26 Folger Shakespeare Library Artist Research Fellow. They have a BFA from Boston University. Acing credits include 'BOIDs' (Breaking the Binary), 'Ghoul Hammond' (Ars Nova), and 'Twelfth Night' (Folger Theatre).

Salwa Meghjee

Salwa Meghjee is a Muslim-Indian-Floridian writer. She is a graduate of the Playwrights Program at Juilliard, and holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Northwestern. She has developed plays with her and collaborator Sarah Marlin’s production company Pizza Party Press, as well as Soho Rep, Playwrights’ Center, The New Victory, Pipeline Theatre, and more. She is an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, and by day she is the Partnerships Associate at Play On Shakespeare. Her plays are surreal, darkly comic, lean into the serendipity of live theater, and illuminate the big unnameable feelings we all experience. They have fun titles such as Love Jihad <3 (Clubbed Thumb Biennial Semi-Finalist), U-Haul Mesbians, Ender’s Gay, D-Wording (EnActe NYC New Works Incubator Winner), Partners (Exponential Fest 2027), Never Forget That Jasper Cullen Was a Confederate Soldier, and, written with her twin sister Samah, The Better Banana™ (Brooklyn Publishers).

November 30: The Universe is Finished! by b Dang

Flask might want to die and Stubb keeps staring at her through the window. Ish is illiterate and Queequeg finds him hitchhiking off the highway. There’s some other people -- they’re tying each other up I think? Hey! We’re all singing songs! Suspended in an alternate universe where Moby-Dick by Herman Melville becomes the basis for a new American religion, The Universe is Finished! charts the emotional landscape of an assortment of people for which the text contains everything they might ever need.

December 1: Make Believers by Salwa Meghjee

Twin A and Twin B are identical. Twin B is depressed. Twin A is not depressed. If they do a twin study, sit back-to-back, delve into the past, reveal secrets, and crack some eggs, maybe they can figure out why.

December 2: Jackie/Jacquie by Lisa Clair

Two women both named Jackie or was it Jacquie (? !) And the center of them the Medias Res is also a planet in outer space, a planet inhabited by the Cecropians of Cecropia, an interstellar race of ass-faced beings !!! GET IT ?!

December 7: The Fifth Plague by Lily Haje

Do you know about the cows? Do you know what’s out there? During the 1970s, thousands of cattle mutilations were reported across the American Southwest. These cases were as gruesome as they were hard to explain. Animals found with missing organs or flayed with surgical precision. No trace of a culprit, no signs of scavengers, no footprints to be found. Is this simply an impossibly improbable coincidence of nature? Too many unexplained details. The work of cultists? the deep state? cryptids? aliens? Too crazy to believe. And yet… How can you live with not knowing?

December 8: The Haunting of ecila: A Clown Show by AliCHE Kabia

ecila inherents a f-ing beast of a ghost, who just so happens to be well-versed in Shakespeare's Canon. Within the ridiculous that changes the capacity of sense, and the sense one must make. In the space between dreams, and the hum of a changing channel comes a fabulation of classic proportions. What happens when a shipmmate, tied to Shakespeare’s colonial legacy, is cursed to haunt a people? To travel with them through the crimes they do not speak of? Whose crimes deserve to be recorded, and whose crimes deserve to be remembered?

December 9: I’m a Really Good Swimmer by Mya Ison