Baltimore Playwrights Festival

Festival Schedule

Saturday, March 15th. 11:00 am Mrs. Richardson, 1:30 pm Merryborough

Saturday, March 22nd 11:00 am Repair of the World ,1:30 pm Apartment Swap

Saturday, March 29th 11:00 am Elephants in the Basement, 1:30 pm Ink & Paint

Saturday, April 5th 11:00 am Tom Huddleton and the Ur-Thello, 1:30 pm Floating Down to Camelot

Saturday, April 19th 11:00 am Wise, 1:30 am I Choose Pain

About The Plays

Mrs. Richardson by Peter Levy

When freedom riders arrived in Cambridge, Maryland in the early winter of 1962, Gloria Richardson, a forty-year-old single mother, was busy working in her family store and raising her two teenage girls. Concerned about her daughters' growing disillusionment, Richardson accepted an offer to co-chair the newly formed Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. In less than three years, she helped build one of the most vibrant local movements in the nation, compelled the Kennedy administration to negotiate an unprecedented agreement, was recognized as one of the "Negro Women Fighers for Freedom" at the March on Washington, and established a collaborative project with Malcolm X. This historical drama traces Richardson's rise and her disappearance from the conventional telling of the civil rights years.

Merryborough by Jacob Zack

Merryborough was a quiet town. The City Council had never dealt with anything more serious than administrative issues: noise complaints, landscape questions, zoning matters. Until now. With crime on the rise and mysterious neighbors incoming, the Council must adjust. Local bureaucracy takes a worrisome shape as dark forces threaten the town. Ready or not, change is coming to Merryborough.

Repair the World by Paul Sambol

Repair the World tells of David working in the admissions office of a drug clinic. In a job where empathy is all you have to work with, what is empathy? Is it an endless well you tap into? Or does it burn out under enough pressure? Is it possible for somebody’s emotional pilot light to get snuffed out? If so, how much time and rehabilitation does it take to get it back?

Apartment Swap by Alli Hartley-Kong

Romance novelist Lily has spent her twenties “growing her garden” as a single woman eschewing IRL romance. But when her long-distance partner wants to “close the gap”, she accepts his proposal–just as she sits down to write a sequel for her suffragist novel. Though she’s unsure about the concept of marriage, she enrolls in “apartment swap” to switch leases–and in turn meets three women at the end of romantic relationships. The past and the present collide in campy suffragist glory and encounters with the ghosts of bad marriages past as Lily explores what it means to be an independent woman.

Elephants in the Basement by Amy S. Hansen

Elephants in the Basement asks us to find the essence of the character Louise. Is it when she is with her family? Her friends? Her career? And does her essence change as she journeys through illness and aging? Life, in this drama/comedy, is not like a box of chocolates, but rather like a good soup; it can always be reduced.

Ink & Paint by Danielle Moore

follows five women artists at Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and beyond, whose ranks included immigrants from the U.K. and Asia, a single mother and architect, a record-breaking pilot, a concept artist, and Disney’s first credited woman animator. At the musical's outset, in 1991, they convene to accept a Disney Legend Award on behalf of their friend and colleague Mary, who passed away of a cerebral hemorrhage in the 1970s. The company’s framing of her legacy prompts an outburst from Retta, her closest friend at the studio, who argues that they are distorting history. With the help of Gyo, Sylvia, and Grace, she tells the real story of what happened to the first women to work in Disney’s story department in a madcap musical mashup of mid-century American history, the golden age of hand-drawn animation, and the wild, wisecracking women who fought tooth, nail, and paintbrush for their place in it.

Tom Middleton and The Ur-thello by James Lewis Huss
Imagine a world where black men are beaten and killed by white men in power simply for being black. Now put down today’s paper and imagine it’s the English Renaissance. This is Urthello’s world. But not Urthello’s play. This is Tom Middleton’s play, a tragedy in five acts about a white writer who has no idea what it’s like to be black. But he tries. Before Shakespeare wrote all those racist tropes in Othello, Middleton did it better. Tom Middleton and The Ur-thello—black comedy at its best.

Floating Down to Camelot by Sache Satta

Things are looking up for Prof. Julian Chapel - he has a new exhibition and possibly a new boyfriend. Scandal erupts when the Dean believes one unabashedly homoerotic painting is a portrait of one of Julian’s male students. Before Julian can decide what to do, the painting mysteriously disappears. Set in 1977 at the dawn of the modern gay rights movement, Floating Down to Camelot is about love, art, and finding allies in unlikely places.

Wise by Jerry Staff

After American Nazis beat up Jews on the streets of New York before World War Two, a judge and a rabbi ask the leading Jewish mobster to teach them a lesson. But how far can good go to challenge evil before it becomes evil itself? When does justice become revenge? And is it a good deed – indeed, a mitzvah – to punch a Nazi? Based on true events.

Light by Jarrin Davis

A prodigal sister returns home and upends the lives of her devout younger sister,

family friends and, most of all, the ten-year-old son she abandoned by suggesting an unsettling plan.This sets off an inferno of misunderstandings which if carried out has the potential to greatly reward or completely destroy everything they treasure in this intricate portrayal of one Black family’s journey of forgiveness.

All Five of Us by Ilana Rothman
All Five Of Us follows a tight-knit group of five college band members who yield to the temptation to get together in person during the COVID-19 pandemic. Told through a combination of flashbacks and the narration of the now-isolated characters as they struggle to come to terms with the irreversible tragedy that results, this structurally unique play explores how the unprecedented events of 2020 turned the human need for connection into a deadly liability—and then shows how that same need can offer us a path towards redemption even after the unthinkable.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center, 847 North Howard Street, Baltimore, United States