New

Plays!!
Morgan Baker, Joann Shaver,
Courtney Waltermire, Caleb S. Garner
Indecent
Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel
 • Pulitzer Prize winner
• Longtime teacher both at Brown and
Yale.
Paula Vogel • She tends to write about controversial
topics.
• I believe a lot of her works would fall
under magical realism.
• Critics deeply loved the play.
• Charles Isherwood called it, “a
powerful play.”
• Ben Brantley said, “Indecent is above
all, decent, in the most complete Indecent
sense of the word. It is virtuous,
sturdily assembled, informative, and Reviews
brimming with good faith. The
territory it covers in one hour and
forty five minutes is immense.”
Important things about this play
• Jewish Theatre
• Show within a show device
• How art helps us keep living.
• The purity of love.
Trailer
Works Cited
• “Paula Vogel.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Aug. 2019,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vogel
• Indecent (Play).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Aug. 2019,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_(play)#cite_note-14
• Isherwood, Charles. “Review: 'Indecent' Revisits a Play Colliding With Broadway
Mores and More.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 May 2016,
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/theater/review-indecent-revisits-a-play-colliding-
with-broadway-mores-and-more.html.
• Brantley, Ben. “Review: 'Indecent' Pays Heartfelt Tribute to a Stage Scandal.” The
New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2017,
www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/theater/indecent-review-paula-vogel-
broadway.html
• BroadwayHD. “Indecent Trailer.” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Jan. 2018,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UfMs7H0jBk.
The Cake
Bekah Brunstetter
 Bekah
Brunstetter

Figure 1. Bekah Brunstetter

  Born and raised in Winston-Salem, knows North
Carolina (Brunstetter 2018).
 Her father was a state senator who sponsored North
Carolina’s Amendment One, which would have legally
defined marriage as a union between only a man and a

About Bekah woman (Goldberg 2016).

 Now a successful playwright in New York and a TV
Brunstetter scriptwriter and producer in Los Angeles, her plays
frequently draw on people and places back home, so
much so that she “asked Krispy Kreme to pay for her
graduate school education because she put the
Winston-Salem doughnuts in so many of her scenes
(Brunstetter 2018).”
  In 2008, her play F*cking Art, about a cheerleader
who visits her cancer-stricken classmate, was a
winner at the 33rd Annual Samuel French Off-Off-
Broadway Short Play Festival, and was
subsequently published by Samuel French
(Hetrick 2008)
About Bekah
 The following year she was named Playwright in
Brunstetter Residence at Ars Nova, and her play Oohrah!, a
story about the family lives of people in a North
Carolina town changing as veterans return home
from Iraq, premiered off-Broadway at Stage 2 of
the Atlantic Theater Company (Isherwood 2009).
  In 2015, Brunstetter began writing The Cake, a play about a
baker who is asked to bake a cake for the wedding of her
best friend's daughter but refuses because it is a same-sex
wedding (Ito 2017).
 The play was inspired by real-life events that eventually
led to the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights
About The Cake Commission Supreme Court case, and by her father's
opposition to same-sex marriage (Menconi 2017).

 The play has been widely produced, including shows at

the La Jolla Playhouse, Houston's Alley Theatre, and an Off-
Broadway premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club at New
York City Center (Ito 2017).
 It is incredibly easy to villainize the conservative angle in
this situation, but the writing makes the baker sympathetic
and compassionate.
 She's not a monster. She’s a family member. She's a
person whose worldview is challenged; she's a good-
natured innocent trying to do right by both her family
and her religious beliefs.
 Even while Della struggles with whether or not to fulfill
the cake request, she's facing the reality that her
childless marriage to her good ol' boy, plumber
Personal
husband Tim, has grown hopelessly stale.
 I deal with many of the issues presented in The Cake every
Review
day, and I feel like the writing really captured the conflicts
that a gay person from a southern town experiences.
 The play is set 40 minutes from where I grew up in NC
 Inner conflict with religious upbringing, feelings of
being an ‘imposter’ in more ‘liberal’ or artistic settings,
Fear of family, loss of family, and creating a family
schism
 I loved the framing device for the baker’s
conscience
 Della is a contestant on The Great American
Baking Show, and she often has small
interscenes in which she is participating in
the show. The voice of the judge acts as her
conscience.
 The play ultimately isn't very thought-
Personal
provoking, but it's gentleness feels almost
reassuring.
Review
 You may want the playwright to explore the
situation in greater depth, but I feel that the
play is a fresh, gentle look at the issues in
an era of sharp political and cultural
divides.
  "Rebecca Leah Brunstetter '04". Carolina Alumni Review.
October 12, 2018. Retrieved March 4, 2019
 Goldberg, Elana. “From Stage to Screen: A Feature on
Writer Bekah Brunstetter.” Breaking Character, Samuel
French, 12 Mar. 2018,
https://www.breakingcharactermagazine.com/stage-
screen-feature-writer-bekah-brunstetter/
 Hetrick, Adam (July 22, 2008). "Winners of Samuel French
Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival Announced". Playbill.
Retrieved March 5,2019.
Bibliography  Isherwood, Charles (September 10, 2009). "Back From War,
Not at Peace". The New York Times. Retrieved March 5, 2019
 Ito, Robert (July 11, 2017). "From 'This is Us' to 'The Cake,'
Bekah Brunstetter Has a Full Plate". The New York Times.
Retrieved March 4,2019.
 Menconi, David; Bonner, Lynn (September 14, 2017). "Her
legislator father opposed gay marriage. Her complicated
feelings inspired a new play". The News & Observer.
Retrieved March 4, 2019.
The Mystery
of Love and
Sex
A presentation on an
ACTUALLY GREAT PLAY
Some quick factoids to get ya goin’:
 Bathsheba Doran
Nickname: “Bash” (why?)
Studied at Cambridge University
Started her career as a comedy and sketch writer
Received her MFA in 2003 and became and playwriting fellow at Julliard
She fell in love with theatre when she found Peter Pan’s shadow backstage as a
girl and realized it was made of pantyhose (aww)
She’s written a LOT of television for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc…
She lives in NYC with her wife and two children (AWWW)
A vague and brief synopsis…
“Deep in the American South, Charlotte and Jonny have been best friends since they
were nine. She’s Jewish, he’s Christian, he’s black, she’s white. Their differences
intensify their connection until sexual desire complicates everything in surprising,
compulsive ways. An unexpected love story about where souls meet and the
consequences of growing up.”
Proof I am not the only one who likes this
play: A small, local paper, the New York Times, had this to say:
“Perfectly wonderful! Among the season’s finest plays!”
Premiered in 2015
Mitzi Newhouse Theatre
Director: Sam Gold (“Fun Home”)
Noteable cast: Tony Shalhoub (“Golden Boy” [Tony nominee], “Monk,” and, most
importantly, “Spy Kids”)

 It’s him!
What did Charles Isherwood think?
“…extends well beyond the matters of high importance referred to in the title…Ms. Doran
also probes such fertile mysteries as the fluidity of identity, our ability to keep secrets
from both our family and even ourselves…and forgiveness.”

“Ms. Doran’s drama is so packed with

humanity that it seems infinitely
larger…”
“…written with such compassion, such wry wisdom
about the vicissitudes of loving attachments…”

“Ms. Doran’s beautifully wise play affirms the adage that

the only guarantee in life is permanent change.”
“We could be good.
And comfortable.
Don’t you want to be comfortable?”

“I want so much more than that.”

By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

AN OCTOROON
The Octoroon
Octoroon
1/8 African, 7/8 Caucasian
An Octoroon
BJJ, Playwright, Assistant
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
• Plays include Neighbors, Appropriate, An
Octoroon, and War.
• Currently a Residency Five playwright at
Signature Theatre and a Lila Acheson
Wallace Fellow at The Juilliard School.
• He has taught at New York University and
Queens University of Charlotte
• Honors include a Paula Vogel Award, a
Helen Merrill Award, and the inaugural
Tennessee Williams Award.
• An Octoroon and Appropriate won the Obie
award for Best New American Play
Reviews
• The New York Times praises An Octoroon as “This decade’s most eloquent theatrical
statement on race.”
• I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that this show ends — spectacularly and
hauntingly — with all of us in the dark. As Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, that’s still the state
of the nation. –New York Times
• “Super oxygenating—despite moments of palpable fear and disquiet, we leave feeling
somehow healthier, as though the theater has given us a violent shake and a pep talk.”
—Time Out (New York).
• “[A] wildly imaginative new work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. AN OCTOROON
simultaneously gives us [Dion Boucicault’s] great melodrama and its contemporary
reverberations. [The play] might induce vertigo, but it insists that making theater can
be the best way to talk back to history.” —The Village Voice
 Works Cited

• “Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.” Playscripts, https://www.playscripts.com/playwrights/bios/1521.

• Brantley, Ben. “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5
May 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/theater/an-octoroon-a-slave-era-tale-at-soho-
rep.html.
• Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon. Nick Hern Books, 2018.
• “The PlayFinder™.” Dramatists Play Service, Inc., https://www.dramatists.com/cgi-
bin/db/single.asp?key=5049.