IN THE HOT SEAT To Premiere At The 2025 Fall Queens Short Play Festival

IN THE HOT SEAT, a new comedy written by Emmy Potter and directed by Andrea Romano, is set to premiere at the 2025 Fall Queens Short Play Festival. The play's creative team previously collaborated on The Wayward Women, a finalist and the winner of Best Director at the 2025 Winter Queens Short Play Festival held in February and March of this year. Dixie Carroll and Caitlyn Alico Beckwith will co-lead the production.

The 15-minute play is set during a girls' trip to an Arizona spa, where two childhood best friends - cooking influencer Sloane and paralegal Tessa - detox their bodies and their friendship in the sauna. As the temperature rises, the sweat, secrets, and resentments start pouring out, proving that maybe Sartre was right: hell is other people...specifically, your so-called Best Friend.

The Queens Short Play Festival is presented twice a year by the Secret Theatre, a hub for innovative, cutting edge performing arts in Long Island City, Queens. In the Hot Seat runs in Program D with performances on October 16th, 24th, 29th and November 2nd.

Emmy Potter (playwright/producer) is a New York-based writer, actor, and director by way of the Midwest. Her pop culture writing has been featured on IFC, Consequence of Sound, CultureSonar, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Crooked Marquee, the Film Stage, and the Belladonna Comedy among other outlets. She also has an essay featured in the The Magnificent, Magical, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel authorized companion coffee table book for the Emmy Award-winning series from Abrams Books, TCO London, and Amazon Studios. Her plays include The Wayward Women (FINALIST 2025 Queens Short Play Festival, 2019 New Play Series commission from Phoenix Theatre Ensemble) Maneater (2019 Players Theater Short Play Festival), Pas de Trois, Sotto Voce, and the one-act All Downhill. Her monologue "A Lighthouse" was selected as part of Volume 4 of the Playground Experiment's Faces of America Festival and Monologue Anthology in 2021. She served as a pilot script adjudicator for the Storyteller's Initiative at SeriesFest for four years and has consulted on developing TV and film scripts. As an actor, she most recently appeared as Mother in A House in the Suburbs (American Theatre of Actors) and the Nurse in Phaedra (American Theatre of Actors). Emmy is an alumna of Oklahoma City University with a Bachelor of Music in Music Theatre and is currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting from the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Andrea Romano (director/producer) is a writer, director, and performer in New York. She created and produced a musical sketch comedy show called College Radio that performs regularly at Caveat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was part of the 2025 Austin Sketchfest. In Winter 2025, she directed the short play, The Wayward Women, by Emmy Potter, for the Queens Short Play Festival at The Secret Theatre, for which she received the Best Director award from the festival judges. She also wrote a personal, one-woman musical storytelling show Kinda Witchy, which premiered at SOLOCOM at the People's Improv Theatre in 2024 and has also been performed at Upright Citizen's Brigade and Caveat. She has written comedic and dramatic material for not only comedy theatres but also for cabaret spaces, small performance spaces, and for editorial publications such as Mashable and Bustle. She is an alumna of the University of Northern Colorado with a Bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts and earned a Master's in Media & Film at The New School.

Program D has performances on October 16th at 8:30 pm, October 24th & 29th at 6:00 pm, and November 2nd at 1:00 pm. General admission tickets are $27, Children/Teen tickets are $17, and Senior 60+ tickets are $22. Tickets may be purchased here.