Rorschach’s 2025 MAGIC IN ROUGH SPACES New Play Lab will present a trio of staged readings of new plays, each featuring some sample design components to give audiences a taste of what a full production might feel like. Audiences will also have the opportunity to talk with artists in post-show conversations. Prior to the readings, the playwrights will spend three days in DC working with a director, dramaturg, actors, and designers to set and achieve goals for their new work.
Rorschach solicited plays from playwrights across the country and right here in DC, requesting scripts that fit the company’s unique brand. Epic in scope yet psychologically intimate, these plays blend mythology and the supernatural with contemporary themes — often rooted in magic realism and described by many as “impossible.” Learn more about all thirteen finalists.
THE 2025 MAGIC IN ROUGH SPACES SCRIPTS
THE SINGLE RAINDROP
by Zachariah Ezer
Directed by Henery Wyand
Dramaturgy by Divinia Shorter
Video Designer: Kylos Brannon
June 14, 2025 @ 2PM
1020 Connecticut Avenue NW
When virtual reality comes to the Tell-Fara assisted living facility, Harry Moore searches for a place he can no longer find. Is memory failing him — or is the town’s racist past to blame?
Zachariah Ezer is a playwright and an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include The Freedom Industry (Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, The Playwrights Center, New York Stage & Film), Address the Body! (The University of Texas at Austin’s UTNT Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights-in-Residence), Legitime (Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire), and Black Women in Tech (The Fire This Time Festival, PBS), among others. He is currently a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow and a member of The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project. He has received commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club/The Sloan Foundation, Theater J, and American Conservatory Theatre. He has attended residencies at The New Harmony Project, Ryder Farm, and Aunt Karen’s Farm. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre.
LOST GIRLS
by Paige Conway
Directed by Shana Laski
Dramaturgy by Julia Marks
Set Design: Sarah Beth Hall
June 14, 2025 @ 8PM
1020 Connecticut Avenue NW
On the precipice of adulthood, Edith decides to testify against her attacker. But when the trial is turned and twisted, help arrives in the most surreal form: The Lost Girls, a band of women pirates from centuries ago whose rage has brought them back to fight the battles women can’t seem to win.
Paige Conway is a Director, Producer, AEA Stage Manager, Playwright and Deviser from Flint, Michigan, currently based in Cleveland. Her play G-COMPLEX is being produced at the Women in Theatre Festival at Duluth Playhouse this summer. Her script Tag has been developed with drafted; A New Play Workshop and the Multi-Gen Project, and her script Lost Girls has been developed with Athena Project’s Read & Rant program. Paige currently serves as the Associate Producer at Cleveland Public Theatre where she has recently directed several world premieres, including The Body Play by Madison Wetzell and co-directed not-for-profit (or the equity, diversity, and inclusion play) by francisca da silveira.
IT WILL ALL MAKE SENSE IN THE MORNING
by Erica Smith
Directed by Esteban Marmelejo-Suarez
Dramaturgy by Jessica Singly
Set Design: August Henney
June 15, 2025 @ 2PM
at 1020 Connecticut Avenue NW
When they were children, Alastair took Sparrow’s nightmares away and buried them under a tree. Now they’re back. Sparrow wants him to take them away again, but he barely remembers doing so… and he’s got his own problems.
Erica Smith is a Washington, DC-based playwright and actor. She is a founding member of The Coil Project, serving as its Playwright in Residence since its inception, and co-Artistic Director from 2020-2022. Her work has been seen at Silver Spring Stage, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, Cape Cod Community College, and the Greenbelt Arts Center, among others. Most recently, her one-act A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF TRUTH premiered at Teatro LATEA in New York. You can hear her work and her voice every other Sunday on the Coil Project Variety Hour on Takoma Park Radio.
Magic in Rough Spaces: New Play Lab 2025, presented by Rorschach Theatre, runs June 14-15, 2025, at 1020 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036. Tickets for all three readings are pay-what-you-can and available here.