PLAYWRIGHTS' PLATFORM to Take Place at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park Festival

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park will present Playwrights’ Platform on Saturday, September 5, 2026 at 1PM on the outdoor Meadow Stage and at 3PM in the Black Box Theater at 120 Broadway, Tivoli, NY 12583 as part of its 2026 Annual Festival. Tickets start at $15 and can be reserved here.

Playwrights’ Platform—in which playwrights read and perform their short plays—is a newly created live anthology of new works, responsive to the needs of boundary-bending playwrights and focused on the stories central to their writing. Audiences are invited into the hearts and minds of these award-winning theater artists to explore each turn of phrase and unique worldview.

Program 1

Features Six Nations: One Fire by Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe, and Jeanette Harrison (Democracy Cycle commission awardees); encyclopedia by Rachel Jendrzejewski; and Mx. Rogers’ Neighborhood: You Can Never Go Down The Drain by Rose Jarboe.

Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe, and Jeanette Harrison—Democracy Cycle commission awardees (PAC NYC)—embody Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace through a blend of text, movement, and song. The Indigenous framework influenced colonists drafting foundational documents of the US and has fostered unity, justice, and consensus-based decision-making. Six Nations: One Fire asks how Haudenosaunee governance principles can inspire a more just and inclusive future for all. With guest artist Dawn Avery. In partnership with Bard Center for Indigenous Studies.

Rachel Jendrzejewski’s longtime friends and collaborators, choreographer Terry Hempfling and actor Lauren Lewis, read the two moon characters from encyclopedia, a not-yet produced play that explores how we trust, grieve, reach for consensus amidst uncertainty, and depend on one another to construct and navigate reality. Rachel described her writing process as pushing words around on the page like her artist parents pushed paint on canvases, and a way “to pay attention to the world” around her. Rachel died of breast cancer in July 2025. Directed by Marcela Michelle.

Rose Jarboe in Mx. Rogers’ Neighborhood: You Can Never Go Down The Drain channels the beloved, critically acclaimed, PBS-hosted, forever wholesome Fred Rogers. In revisiting this icon as nonbinary “Mx. Rogers,” Jarboe explores the character as a form of drag, “a kind of earnestness you put on and take off,” says Jarboe. “In my world, the Land of Make-Believe is the world of drag.” The play shows iconic neighborhood moments anew and wonders whether and in what way do we need irony right now as a political or social approach.

About the Playwrights

Rachel Jendrzejewski (1982–2025) was an interdisciplinary artist and writer who frequently collaborated with choreographers, musicians, and multimedia artists to explore wide-ranging performative vocabularies. Her work was developed and/or presented by Walker Art Center, Padua Playwrights, Los Angeles Performance Practice, Tricklock Company, Joe’s Pub, The Wild Project, RISD, MASS MoCA, and ICA/Boston, among others. Published texts include MERONYMY (53rd State Press), In Which _______ and Others Discover the End, a collaboration with SuperGroup (Plays Inverse), and encyclopedia (Spout Press). Jendrzejewski was a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer and a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye in Minneapolis.

Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora) is a founding member of Chukalokoli and Amerinda Theater. Her work has been developed and/or produced at Native Voices at the Autry, AlterTheater, and The Public Theater. Honors: Resident, New Dramatists through 2027; Winner, 2020 Smith Prize for Political Theater (NNPN); The Kilroys, Honorary Mention 2019 for Pure Native and 2014 for Standoff At Hwy#37; Semi-finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2019; Semi-finalist, Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference 2018; Alumna, Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group (2009). Other productions include: Glenburn 12 WP - Summer Shorts at 59E59, Smoke - Mixed Phoenix Theatre Group at Pershing Square Signature Center. Published: Monologues for Actors of Color: Women, Monologues for Actors of Color: Men, and Contemporary Plays by Women of Color Edition 2: (Routledge Press). Member: Dramatists Guild, PEN America. Consultant: Outer Range for Amazon TV.

As an Indigiqueer citizen of the Oneida and Anishinaabe Nations, Ty Defoe is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and Grammy Award winner whose work thrives in the fluid spaces between forms: art, climate justice, and cultural activism, challenging settler colonial binaries. Guided by a global commitment to story, he has been honored with the Jonathan Larson Award and the Global Indigenous Heritage Festival Award, and supported through fellowships with The Sundance Institute, MacDowell, Kennedy Center’s Next 50, and Pop Culture Collaborative’s Becoming America initiative. As co-founder of Indigenous Direction, Defoe has led landmark projects that bridge Native and non-Native communities through the arts, reaching audiences ranging from Marquette University’s First Native American Film Festival to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Jeanette Harrison is a multi-hyphenate director and writer working in theater, film, and television. She believes in combating invisibility and harmful representations by telling contemporary, complex Native stories written by Native authors. After serving as the co-founder and artistic director of AlterTheater for 17 years, Harrison joined Artists Repertory Theater, one of two LORT theaters in Portland, as their third Artistic Director. She is currently the co-director of the Arts Learning Project for Native Youth (ALP4NY), and creative director of Native Performing Arts Network, which began as Native Theater Project, under the umbrella of Bag&Baggage Productions.

Rose Jarboe is a director, producer, writer, performer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of The Bearded Ladies Cabaret. For the past 15 years, she has created and performed work for Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, Wilma Theater, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation, FringeArts, and Opera Philadelphia. Jarboe was named best drag performer by Philadelphia Magazine, is a 2022 Transformation Grant awardee (Leeway Foundation) and a 2025 Pew Fellow. She has toured and directed original work to Seattle (Seattle Symphony), New Zealand (Performance Arcade), Australia (Malthouse Theater), Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series (PBS), and Works & Process. She has written and directed original cabarets for opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo and is the drag doula of Stephanie Blythe. Commissions include Rose: You Are Who You Eat (Works and Process), touring to FringeArts, La MaMa, and Wooly Mammoth, and The Rose Garden at The Fabric Workshop & Museum and On the Boards. More at www.beardedladiescabaret.com, and @johnjarbeaux and @roseeatme.

Program 2:

Features excerpts from I Leave Saint Cloud by Sylvan Oswald; an untitled work that’s a collage of early Yiddish Theatre presented by actor/poet Jim Fletcher, composer/cellist Lori Goldston, and composer/sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson; and Blonde as Hell by Lucy Sexton and Adrienne Truscott.

Sylvan Oswald builds worlds of language that are alternately messy and meticulous, obsessive and sparse, heady and embodied. Here, he shares material from I Leave Saint Cloud, a prismatic montage anchored by a Jean Cocteau-like figure, an Icarus plummeting through his own life, addicted to art-making, opium, and beautiful young men.

Actor and poet Jim Fletcher, composer and cellist Lori Goldston, and composer and sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson collage the sonic and visual worlds of 20th- and 21st-century film filtered through the densely emotional and psychically charged resonance of early Yiddish Theatre. Pulling from the texts of Ben Hecht, Sholem Asch, Bertolt Brecht, and Isaac Babel, among others, they pose questions about freedom, connection, resistance, violence, dizzying shifts in the understanding of humanness, and cultural inheritance.

Theater/dance/performance artists and makers Lucy Sexton (one half of DANCENOISE) and Adrienne Truscott (one half of Wau Wau Sisters) tell a gritty, glamourous, 1970s-East Village-punk rock-feminist fairytale set to the music of Blondie, in Blonde as Hell.

About the Playwrights and Collaborators:

Sylvan Oswald creates plays, texts, publications, and video. Recent projects include the theatrical essay Trainers (Oberon Books, Gate Theatre, London) and the performance text High Winds (Fusebox, TBA). His plays include A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theatre, San Diego), Sun Ra (Joe’s Pub, Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab), Pony (Northwestern University Press, About Face Theater, Chicago), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb). Other writings include “Towards a Trans Theater,” (Methuen Drama Handbook on Gender and Theater), “My Butch Musical” (Little Joe), and “Cut Piece” on play formatting (3-Hole Press). Oswald is a Guggenheim Fellow and an alum of New Dramatists. He is head of playwriting at UCLA and he is currently at work on an eco-feminist sci-fi musical with composer/lyricist Tova Katz.

Described as “a stalwart of the New York avant-garde scene” by the New York Times, Jim Fletcher is a performer and a founding member of New York City Players theater company with Richard Maxwell, his working partner for more than 20 years. He is part of Elevator Repair Service’s internationally renowned production of Gatz, winning an Obie Award for his performance work in a staging of the full text of the novel The Great Gatsby. He created the monologue Sight Is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First with Tim Etchells, is currently performing and making shows with The Wooster Group, and can be seen in Jordan Strafer’s film installation DISSONANCE at the 2026 Whitney Biennial.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer, and teacher from Seattle. Her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time, and geography. Collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Lynn Shelton, and many more. Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, WNYC, Paris Fashion Week, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree interdisciplinary artist, director, and composer. Her practice explores listening as a way of knowing and relating, which is shaped by Indigenous resonance, spatial perception, and embodied vulnerability. Working with psychoacoustic tones, algorithmic systems, and sculptural spatialization as materials, she composes spaces that shift awareness, inviting deep relational encounters between bodies, technologies, and the land. Thompson’s work has been presented by CTM Berlin, MUTEK, Onassis Foundation, ImagineNative, Pioneer Works, PICA, PSNY, among others. A current Onassis ONX Studio member, she has been in residence at Pioneer Works, MIT OpenDoc Lab with the Indigenous Screen Office of Canada, and HERVISIONS x Arebyte (UK). She was a founding member of the Working Consortium in developing First Nations Performing Arts.

Lucy Sexton has worked as a choreographer, director, dramaturg, film producer, and arts advocate. She and Anne Iobst created and continue to perform as DANCENOISE. Started in the 1980s East Village club scene, they went on to perform at Lincoln Center, win a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award, tour internationally, and open the new Whitney Museum in 2015. She developed and directed Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, with Kathleen Russo, and produced the documentaries The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas, and TURNING, a concert film by Charles Atlas and Anohni, featuring Anohni and The Johnsons. Most recently, she developed and directed singer/songwriter Eszter Balint’s I Hate Memory at Joe’s Pub. Sexton currently leads New Yorkers for Culture and Arts, a cultural advocacy coalition working to strengthen the creative sector in every community.

About Tickets

• One performance ticket is $25. ($15. for students). Performance tickets do no include evening concerts.
• Ticket Combo Packages for Same-Day Performances:
• - A two-performance ticket combo is $40. ($25. for students)
• - A three-performance ticket combo is $50. ($30. for students) *only available 8/29*
• - Add an evening concert ticket to your combo and receive a $10 discount. This all-day pass maximizes discounts!

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