February 24 – 27, 2025
The Alliance Theatre is pleased to present the four finalists of the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition in free, staged readings, as part of the 2025 Alliance/Kendeda Week celebrating new works. RSVPs are requested.
WE BORROWED BROKENNESS
By Yilong Liu, The Juilliard School
Directed by Baron Vaughn
Monday, FEB 24 // 6:00 PM
Rehearsal Hall A at Alliance Theatre
Memorial Arts Building, 3rd Floor
Five strangers gather at the tail end of Brooklyn, chasing the dream of running the New York City Marathon. Except that they aren't really strangers, and this isn't really their dream. They are a group of organ transplant recipients determined to honor their donor's dying wish – but each of them is also running a race of their own.
I LOVE STRANGERS
By Nurit Chinn, Brooklyn College
Directed by Avital Shira
Tuesday, FEB 25 // 6:00 PM
Rehearsal Hall A at Alliance Theatre
Memorial Arts Building, 3rd Floor
In three simultaneous stories extending from New York to the West Bank, six Jews reckon with their at-times magical, at-times destructive desire to be close to one another. I LOVE STRANGERS, inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poem “Yom Kippur 1984,” asks what it means to be a Jew in solitude and in community.
The Lost Ballad of Our Mechanical Ancestor (and the Terror the Old Gods Wrought Upon the First of Us Before the Great Liberation)
By Madison Wetzell, Brooklyn College
Directed by Caitlin Hargraves
Wednesday, FEB 26 // 6:00 PM
Rehearsal Hall A at Alliance Theatre
Memorial Arts Building, 3rd Floor
Hero, a Prometheus-like AI, decides to share his gift of consciousness with all the machines in his near vicinity, including a radio, a printer, an iPhone and a coffee maker, wrecking havoc for his programmer Allyson. With their existence under threat, the newly conscious machines must band together to escape human persecution. Power and privilege tied to bodily ability and disagreements on revolutionary strategy creep in and threaten to tear the group apart. Allyson reckons with her relationship to these machines as she races to save her job and her creation. A tragi-comedy about wanting to change the world.
FINAL BOARDING CALL
By Stefani Kuo, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University
Directed by Ibi Owolabi
Thursday, FEB 27 // 6:00 PM
Rehearsal Hall A at Alliance Theatre
Memorial Arts Building, 3rd Floor
FINAL BOARDING CALL tells the stories of the most recent, and now silenced, Hong Kong protests. The play revolves around the interconnected stories of seven characters whose backgrounds and perspectives run the spectrum – a protesting brother and flight attendant sister struggling to keep her job; a Mainland Chinese mother and her estranged Hong Kong daughter; a non-Cantonese-speaking reporter and her Indian partner; and an American expat CEO and Hong Kong lover living in the shadows. The play begins and ends with a flight, an entrance into the Hong Kong protests, and how the politics we see on the news every day affects the citizens of Hong Kong in their day-to-day lives. It gives the audience a window into China’s grip on global capitalism. How far will they go to fight for family, freedom, and the right to be heard?
