Sound Theatre Names Zharia O' Neal For Inaugural William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency

Following a competitive nationwide search, Sound Theatre has announced Zharia O' Neal (Los Angeles, CA) for its first-ever playwright residency. The summer call for submissions to the Making Waves William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency drew over 120 applicants, resulting in a breathtaking pool of intersectional identities and writing samples.

In a mission-critical bid to develop a new canon for a new era, Sound Theatre launched the residency in posthumous honor of a prolific Native playwright, William S. Yellow Robe Jr., whom O' Neal deems both a force and reason for long-overdue structural change within traditional institutions:

"William S. Yellow Robe Jr. spoke in an interview about having to fill cultural knowledge gaps and fight Native stereotypes in the development process before he could even begin the necessary work on his play," said O' Neal. "That's the insidiousness of monolithic structures - there's so much to work through before you can begin your work. Creating diverse, culturally-informed rooms gives us less to work through before we can get to the work. The room around a play builds it - so fill it wisely."

O'Neal is a recent International Artists' Fellow and 2022 graduate of the MFA program in Dramatic Writing at the University of Southern California. In the six-month residency cycle, she will receive a $10,000 stipend (separate from paid mentorship and cultural competency training), travel and housing reimbursement, as well as Sound Theatre's in-house support in developing a new project: ROOST, a dark comedy about Black womens' complex relationships with reality television, media representation, respectability politics, and hotepery.

In addition to the residency's unique intersectionality focus, its hybrid format includes both Zoom and in-person engagements. O'Neal will travel to Seattle for a December 2022 private play reading of ROOST, with local feedback leading to a March 2023 public staged reading.

In conjunction with the 10th anniversary of Sound Theatre's Making Waves New and Experimental Works program, O'Neal will also teach a playwriting class in January 2023. The community-focused class, which will culminate in a 10-minute play festival, is geared towards students from underserved communities, who typically lack access to traditional modes of storytelling:

"The truth is, if you want to develop stories from BIPOC, intersectional playwrights that speak to their dynamic, kaleidoscopic experiences, you cannot require them to be told in a certain manner, shape, and structure that is familiar or comfortable to you - that will 'promise ticket sales,'" said O' Neal, who identifies as an Afro-Caribbean queer playwright.

Sound Theatre's core residency committee (Teresa Thuman, Andrea Kovich, Aimee Chou, Janet Hayatshahi, Riley Gene, and Josh Brown) engaged a corps of eleven volunteer script readers in a multi-phase selection process - including Zoom interviews with five short-listed applicants, conducted by the core committee. Four finalists were chosen to receive honoraria: Alex Chand (Southlake, TX), Zachariah Ezer (Austin, TX), Kennedy Dawson Healy (Chicago, IL) and Wind Dell Woods (Tacoma, WA).

"This new residency program will provide an opportunity for the playwright, Sound Theatre Company, and our community to focus on how theatre-making can benefit from engaging in tough conversations," said Janet Hayatshahi, incoming professor of acting at Seattle University.

"Zharia is a force. Her dynamism is apparent both in her writing and in how she speaks about creating story. She is driven by ways to articulate stories that look beyond traditional forms, questioning existing values and structures, breaking their rigid edges and allowing in a viewpoint different than the one anticipated."

Playwriting class and public stage reading details will be released here: William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency | Sound Theatre Company

The William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Residency is made possible in part through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office of Economic Development (OED)'s Neighborhood Economic Recovery Fund, and The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation.