: STAGE LEFT 2ND ANNUAL PLAY FESTIVAL

On tonight’s show, we’ll be joined by three playwrights – Amalia Oliva Rojas, Chad Kaydo and R. Forest Malley, each presenting their work at The Stage Left 2nd Annual Play Festival, and celebrating its mission: to transform the theater into a space for storytelling, solidarity, dialogue, community organizing and civic action, a place where art meets activism. The festival is a collaboration between Working Theater and the Broadway Advocacy Coalition (BAC). Festival events will include performances, post-show conversations, and opportunities for audiences to connect with advocacy efforts aligned with each of the five plays.  Each production is paired with an advocacy organization, such as Workers Justice Project, Freedom Agenda, Theater Workers for a Ceasefire, and Undue Medical Debt.

R. Forest Malley is a playwright and performer from Massachusetts whose work explores memory, migration, violence, queerness, divas, and his Arab, Irish & Jewish heritage. He was the winner of the 2024 Goldberg Play Prize, the 2025 Ryan Hudak Award, and was a MacDowell Fellow and a Yaddo Resident Artist. His work has also been recognized and supported by Theater Masters, Page 73, The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Working Theater, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and The American Blues Theater. He is currently a member of the SWANA Writer’s Co-Op and a Planet Fitness in Brooklyn. He has an M.F.A from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A Harvard University.

 Amalia Oliva Rojas is an award winning and internationally produced Mexican poet, performer, and theatre artivist raised in Nueva York. Her work archives the stories, myths, and legends told by her family, women of color and the New York immigrant community. Her plays include Tonantzin On the 7 Train, A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Succeed in the Myth-Making Business, and her festival entry How to Melt ICE (or How the Coyote Fell in Love with the Lizard Who Was Really a Butterfly). and In The Bronx Brown Girls Can See Stars Too. She is winner of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Darrell Ayers National Playwriting Award, the Leah Ryan Prize, and the Lanford Wilson New Play Top 20.  She is a Ghostlight Theater, Culture and Narrative Fellow for The Opportunity Agenda, The Lily’s Lorraine Hansberry Fellow, and a CUNY Mexican Studies Institute Lydia Mendoza Fellow. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Chad Kaydo is a queer playwright from Ashtabula, Ohio, who writes intimately observed plays obsessed with friendship, mortality, and the existential questions hidden in the quotidian. His recent work includes I’m Repeating Myself at the Brick, directed by Carsen Joenk, produced by The Omnivores and RHONDA; Workshops of Where Is Miss Stone? with Clubbed Thumb, and #’s at the 2025 Great Plains Theatre Commons New Play Festival. Chad was in the Clubbed Thumb 2024-2025 Early-Career Writers’ Group. His work has been supported by Fresh Ground Pepper, HB Studio, Playhouse on Park, the Quickening Room, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Theater Masters. As Playwright in Residence at the Brick, Chad produced and hosted Quick + Dirty, a development series for short works by new collaborators.  He is an adjunct lecturer and assistant director of the Office of the Arts at Hunter College. He has a BA in English and a BS in journalism from Ohio University, and an MFA in playwrighting from Hunter College.

Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer