MANIFEST DESTINY to Premiere at CollectiveGenius Short Play Festival

Manifest Destiny, Emmy Potter's award-winning short drama, is set to have its New York City premiere as part of the 2026 CollectiveGenius Short Play Festival. Samantha Simone and Kathryn Fabbroni will co-lead the production. Andrea Romano will direct. The creative team previously collaborated on In the Hot Seat and The Wayward Women, which was a finalist and Winner of Best Director at the 2025 Queens Short Play Festival. They are also concurrently collaborating on a workshop production of Potter's comedic one-act, All Downhill, which is part of Emerging Artists Theatre's Spark Theatre Festival on October 10th at TADA.

Manifest Destiny received the regional Gary Garrison 10-min Play Award at the Region 5 American College Theater Festival in Rochester, MN in January of this year and was a finalist for the Gary Garrison National 10-min Play Award in April. The play premiered in August at the Woodstock Short Play Festival, presented by White Horse Theater Company, where it was awarded Best Play. Following the CollectiveGenius Short Play Festival this October, the play can be seen in the Spectacular Tournament of Playwrights at the Acorn Theater in Michigan in November where it is a finalist for Best Play.

The 10-minute drama follows two estranged friends who reunite at the Ozarks trailer park where they grew up, twenty years after the traumatic event that engulfed their lives and violently tore them apart as teenagers, forcing a reckoning with their past choices, the future, and each other.

Performances run October 8th-10th at 7:30 pm with an additional matinee on October 10th at 2:00 pm. Tickets may be purchased here. The Atelier @ TheaterLab is located at 357 W 36th St (between 8th & 9th Ave) on the 3rd Floor.

CollectiveGenius (formerly known as EstroGenius) is an NYC-based multidisciplinary performance festival and creative community dedicated to amplifying and supporting the voices of women and gender-expansive artists through script-based and body-based work. The festival enters its 26th year with a new identity that reflects the evolution of its mission and the artists it serves. The short play festival, which runs from Oct 8th-10th at TheaterLab in Midtown, features new work from six emerging playwrights.

ABOUT THE CAST & CREATIVE TEAM

Emmy Potter (playwright/producer) is an actor, producer, culture writer, and award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced and recognized both regionally and nationally including as a finalist for the Gary Garrison National 10-min Play Award. Her work mostly centers on resilient, thorny women navigating grief, ambition, autonomy, complicated relationships to motherhood, and the pursuit of deeper meaning in their lives. Selected plays include Manifest Destiny (Gary Garrison National 10-min Play Award finalist, Winner of Best Play at Woodstock Short Play Festival, Spectacular Tournament of Playwrights finalist), Sotto Voce (Inkslinger Playwriting Contest semi-finalist), In the Hot Seat (Queens Short Play Festival Best Play semi-finalist), and The Wayward Women (Queens Short Play Festival Best Play runner-up). Her monologue "A Lighthouse" has been published in Volume 4 of the Playground Experiment's Faces of America Monologue Anthology and the upcoming One Bold Voice: Writing Compelling Monologues from Hansen Publishing Group. In addition to plays, Emmy has written for various online entertainment outlets and a coffee table book for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from Abrams Books and Amazon. Emmy has a B.M. in music theatre from Oklahoma City University, earned her M.F.A. in playwriting and screenwriting from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

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 in Manhattan and was part of the 2025 Austin Sketchfest. In 2025, she directed the short play, THE WAYWARD WOMEN, by Emmy Potter, for the Queens Short Play Festival at The Secret Theatre in Queens, New York, 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 has been performed at the People's Improv Theatre, 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.

Samantha Simone is a NJ based actor, producer and college professor. She is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA Acting program. Her on camera work can be seen on CBS "Blue Bloods" and "FBI", and in feature films "Townhouse Confidential" and "Jersey Birdies." To keep up with Samantha check out: www.samanthanicolesimone.com