Colt Coeur Announces 2021-2022 CoCo Residents and New Commissions

For the fifth consecutive year, Colt Coeur has welcomed a select group of emerging playwrights and directors to be CoCo Residents. This year's cohort is comprised of playwrights Lily Gonzales (they/them) and Lizzie Stern (she/her), and directors Borna Barzin (he/him) and Sarah Blush (she/her). The residency program is facilitated by Colt Coeur Artistic Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt and provides an intimate group of playwrights & directors with the invaluable resources of community, space to work, and a stipend. Rather than focusing on a specific piece of theater or output, the residency's intention is to forge deep and authentic relationships which will foster future collaborations as well as greater understanding and appreciation for a variety of artistic perspectives and approaches. Alumni of the program include Will Arbery, Jeremy O. Harris, Danya Taymor, and Whitney White.

On the heels of an ambitious year of virtual programming (seven different shows!), as well as a return to live performance (world premiere of Xandra Nur Clark's Polylogues), Colt Coeur is also thrilled to announce the awarding of two new commissions, and a director partnership on its ongoing commission with playwright Francisca Da Silveira (she/her).

Playwright Kareem Fahmy (he/him) is currently developing Dodi & Diana which finds a couple revisiting a certain Paris hotel room 25 years after a horrible tragedy transpired there, and explores what it takes to make a marriage work. Playwright Natalie Margolin is working on Bed, Bath & Beyond which was inspired by Margolin's experience of sharing a home with her 100 year old grandmother for the past year and a half. The play is about a young woman and her grandma, who teeters between life and death, while each search for steady ground on which to stand and some hope about what's ahead. Both Margolin and Fahmy are developing their projects with Colt Coeur Artistic Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt.

Da Silveira, who was awarded a Toulmin Fellowship last winter, has recently brought on director Shariffa Ali. Da Silveira's project, minor·ity, interrogates the relationship between Africanness, Blackness and Black Americanness, and questions the sustainability of a Black artists' success attained through the white gaze.

Additionally, Colt Coeur, in association with creative producer Emma Orme and director Tara Elliott, is presenting the premiere of Pleasure Machine, a nine-episode audio thriller that collides Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist drama Machinal with adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism. This episodic narrative podcast, conceived by director Elliott and writers Diane Exavier, May Treuhaft-Ali, and Phaedra Michelle Scott, tells the story of one artist's attempt to cultivate authentic experiences of pleasure inside the pressures of 'white and woke' capitalism. Pleasure Machine is available through January 15th, and the final live event for the audio thriller will take place on Saturday, December 11th.