10×10 New Play Festival @ BSC

Barrington Stage’s annual festival returns in its 14th year with six actors swapping roles in 10 new 10-minute plays.

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Plays

Altared
By Brent Askari
With her sister’s wedding on the line, Gwen scrambles to rein in her unpredictable mother.

Choosing You
By Rachel Lynett
As Aurora moves through her day, she finds herself torn between the two very different lives she might have lived and whether she has ultimately made the right choice.

Forever is a Long Time
By Jessica Provenz
What if when you get married, it’s truly “til death do us part” and annulment and divorce are not an option? Ready to commit to one another… forever?

The Friendship Dynamic
By Alex Dremann
Four friends decide to go on an off-roading adventure to get out of their rut, if they can just get out of their driveway.

A Happy Child
By Melinda Gros
Your child returns home and every word you utter can be the wrong word… and you SO do not want to get it wrong… but you also need to keep your grandchild safe…

Ordained
By Mark Harvey Levine
Two strangers in an airport suddenly find themselves with a proposal they can’t pass up.

Poetry, Prose and… Pirates
By Ken Preuss
An author attends her monthly critique circle but discovers some unexpected and unethical similarities between her writing and that of her peers.

Safe Haven
By James McLindon
A fraught holiday, a desperate family, a public servant: Can this Thanksgiving be saved?

Senior Prom
By Robert Weibezahl
When high school friends Deborah and Mike unexpectedly reunite at Shady Acres Independent Living, some truths about past memories are clarified.

Wheel of Fortune Reversed
By Scott C. Sickles
Death has come for Michael. Which is not necessarily a bad thing because Michael has a bucket list only the Grim Reaper can fulfill.

Actors

Raya Malcolm: BSC Debut. Theater: Shake It Up: A Shakespeare Cabaret (Shakespeare & Co.); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Capital Rep); Full Transparency (Reading), Things I Know to Be True, Breakwater (Great Barrington Public); City of Myth, Where There’s Smoke, Yellow (Troy Foundry); Henry IV: Parts 1 & 2, Romeo & Juliet (Saratoga Shakespeare). Member of Eddy Award winning vocal trio Hold On Honeys. BA Suffolk University. When not on stage, Raya tends to her houseplants, practices yoga and teaches Spanish to preschool-3rd graders. www.rayamalcolm.com @holdonhoneys.

Matt Neely: BSC: 10×10 (12 yrs), The Crucible. Off-Broadway: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Hospital. Off-Off Broadway: The Trial, The Heart of a Dog, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Furies, Twelfth Night, Sex and Other Collisions, Spare Change, Marriage, Unreal City. MFA in Acting from Carnegie Mellon University and The Moscow Art Theater, BS Skidmore College. Matt is a member of the Williamstown Select Board. Stay tuned for his new podcast about creativity at thevibecontrol.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Coming April 2025. Love to Margo, Allie and Tommy!

Xavier Reyes: BSC: Anna in the Tropics. Theater: CATS: The Jellicle Ball (Off Broadway, Perelman Arts Center); How the Grinch Stole Christmas (The Old Globe); Clyde’s (George Street Playhouse & Playmakers Repertory Theatre); Kinky Books (1st National Tour); Evita (Virginia Musical Theater); SWEAT, Moliere’s Scapin (Pioneer Theater Company); In the Heights, Hair (Geva Theatre); Trading Places (Alliance Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon); Next to Normal (Greenbrier Valley Theatre); Fun Home (American Stage). Grateful for McCorkle Casting, Rebecca Weiss and BSC. Proud island born and raised Puertorican! BFA Ithaca College. @XavierReyesActor

Lori Vega: BSC Debut. NYC Theater: Downstate (Playwrights Horizons); The Scream Inside (Working Theater); One Night, P* SSY C* CK KNOW NOTHING, Pay No Attention to the Girl (Target Margin Theater); The Bacchae (Classical Theater of Harlem). Regional: Dial M For Murder (The Guthrie); The Good John Proctor (Trinity Rep); Babel and Ushuaia Blue (Contemporary American Theatre Festival); Nonsense and Beauty (Rep Theatre St. Louis); Read to Me (Portland Stage); Halftime with Don (NJ Rep); As You Like It (Idaho Shakespeare); A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It (Lake Tahoe Shakespeare). Film and television: Pretty Little Liars, And Just Like That, FBI, Bull, El Deafo. Post graduate LAMDA, BA Cornell University. www.lorivega.net @thelorivega

Peggy Pharr Wilson: BSC: Associate Artist, Forgiveness, Boca, America V2.1, Gaslight, His Girl Friday, Guys and Dolls, The Crucible, To Kill A Mockingbird, Carousel, Laramie Project: Epilogue, 10×10 (14 yrs). Theater: Off Peak, Dad, Public Speaking 101 (Great Barrington Public), Doubt (BAT), Leap Year (Shakes & Co), Six Women with Brain Death (co-author, and performed in New York, Chicago, Dallas & Kansas City); Sweeney Todd (best actress Ovation Award Denver Post), Shirley Valentine, Moon for the Misbegotten, 3 Viewings and many others (Creede Repertory Theater); Dallas Theatre Center, Theatre 3, Kansas City Rep, Unicorn, KC Lyric Opera, White River, Rose Theatre.

Robert Zukerman: BSC: Twentieth production at BSC, tenth 10×10. Two dozen shows Off and Waaay Off Broadway. Regional work in CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, PA, RI, TN, VA, VT. His TV, radio and film credits are too obscure to mention, but he has toured US Air Force bases for the USO and narrated Talking Books for the Library of Congress. Trained at London’s Guildhall School, he holds a PhD in Theatre History, served as Theatre Program Director at the New York State Council on the Arts, and is a loud and proud cornetist with the Ghent (NY) Band.

Playwrights

Brent Askari (Altared) BSC: 10×10(2021, 2023, 2024); His plays American Underground and Andy Warhol in Iran premiered at BSC, with Andy Warhol in Iran subsequently staged at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre (2023), City Theatre Pittsburgh (2024), and an upcoming production at Mosaic Theater in Washington, DC (2025). His new comedy Advice debuts at Florida Studio Theatre and B Street Theatre this year. Brent is the winner of the NNPN Smith Prize for Political Theater for The Refugees, which premiered at Gulfshore Playhouse in 2024. Other recent productions include Hard Cell at Geva Theater Center and Dirty Deeds Downeast at Penobscot Theater Company.

Alex Dremann (The Friendship Dynamic) is a Philadelphia based playwright who studied playwriting at the University of Southern California and has had more than 500 productions of his short plays. Full lengths include: Split Pea Pod (The Brick Playhouse), Postcoital Variations (Philadelphia Theatre Workshop), The :nv:s:ble Play (Theatre of NOTE) and The Cure (Dayton Playhouse). Evenings of his collected short plays include: Slap Happy (Madlab Theatre), Bipolar by Thursday (Theatre Neo) and 13 Lemonade Ave. (Secret Room Theatre). Published short plays include On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning in The Humana Festival 2009: The Complete Plays. www.alexdremann.com

Melinda Gros (A Happy Child) I write mostly about women – betrayed, betraying, bowling, hustling breakfast, facing down the pandemic, muscled by tech giants, pregnant (as misunderstood by her fetuses), re-connecting after estrangement, reliving problematic pasts, drunk on life or just drunk. I look compassionately on my characters, their regretted might-have-beens, and their still unrealized dreams – they may be buffeted by the world but they have agency. Pain is confronted, truths revealed and kindness sometimes, but not always, offers redemption. These are stories of women’s lives: sometimes messy, often tumultuous, always real. I started writing plays after careers in dance and costume and clothing design/manufacture.

Mark Harvey Levine (Ordained) BSC: 10×10 (2020, 2022). Mark has had over 2200 productions of his short plays everywhere from Bangalore to Bucharest and Seoul to Sao Paolo. Full evenings of his work, like Didn’t See That Coming and A Very Special Holiday Special, have been shown around the world, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a multi-year tour of Brazil. His new full-length, Save Hamlet, premiered at the Laboratory Theater of Florida and is playing all over, with an upcoming production in South Africa! Not bad for a guy from Pittsburgh, huh?

Rachel Lynett (Choosing You) (she/they) BSC: Well-Intentioned White People. Rachel is a queer Afro-Latine playwright, producer, and teaching artist. Their plays have been featured at San Diego Rep, Magic Theatre, Mirrorbox Theatre, Barrington Stage Company, Theatre Lab, Theatre Prometheus, Florida Studio Theatre, and Orlando Shakespeare Theatre. Rachel Lynett is also the 2021 recipient of the Yale Drama Prize for their play, Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson) and the 2021 recipient of the National Latinx Playwriting Award for their play, Black Mexican. Their play, Missing Socks and a Line of Coke was also a 2024 Blue Ink Award finalist. Lynett received commissions from Barrington Stage Company, Florida Studio Theatre, and Yale Repertory Theatre.

James McLindon (Safe Haven) BSC: 10×10 (2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2024). James is a member of the Nylon Fusion Theatre Company in New York. His plays have been produced or developed at theaters across America and around the world including the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (selection and six-time semifinalist), Lark, PlayPenn, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, hotINK Festival, Irish Repertory, CAP21, Samuel French Festival, Victory Gardens, Hudson Stage Company, Abingdon, New Repertory, Lyric Stage, Detroit Rep, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Seven Devils, Telluride Playwrights Festival, Ashland New Plays Festival, Boston Playwrights Theatre, Colony Theatre, Theatricum Botanicum, Circus Theatricals, and Arkansas Rep. They have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Smith & Kraus, Brooklyn Publishing, Applause Books, Next Stage Press, and Original Works Publishing.

Ken Preuss (Poetry, Prose and… Pirates) is a Florida-based writer and performer who became a teacher to guarantee an audience five days a week. Although his published one-acts for teens and his collection of short plays for adults have been produced in festivals and schools in Australia, Canada, China, England, Germany, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Thailand and all 50 States, Ken can be found rooted near Orlando with his wife, two sons, and assorted pets.

Jessica Provenz (Forever is a Long Time) BSC: 10×10 (2020, 2021, 2024). BSC commissioned and premiered BOCA in 2021, directed by Julianne Boyd with Debra Jo Rupp, Peggy Pharr Wilson and Robert Zukerman. BOCA is currently playing at Florida Rep. True Art premiered at Dorset Theatre Festival in 2024 with workshops at Westport Country Playhouse, Pioneer Theatre, The Directors Company. Other plays include A Wake on Chappaquiddick (Cape Cod Theatre Project, New Georges), Andromeda (Barrow Group, Berkshire Playwrights Lab), Better than Chocolate (Juilliard). A two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy for Emerging Playwrights and Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. Jessica is the Director of Development at BSC. Education: Northwestern (B.S), Juilliard (Artists Diploma).

Scott C. Sickles (Wheel of Fortune Reversed) (he/him) is an LGBTQ+/ neurodivergent/ Mixed Korean American writer. His plays have been staged in New York City, across the US, and internationally at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, City Theatre (Miami), Portland Stage, Garry Marshall Theatre, HB Studios, Road Theatre Company, Leviathan Lab, Barrington Stage, Gulfshore Playhouse, Dayton Playhouse, Whim Productions, Valdez Theater Conference, Midwest Dramatists, and The Lark Play Development Center. Published: Samuel French/Concord, Smith & Kraus, Applause, Next Stage Press. Notable honors: Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, Relentless Award Honorable Mention, O’Neill finalist. Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards for General Hospital.

Robert Weibezahl (Senior Prom) BSC:10×10 (2022, 2023). His plays have been performed live and virtually across the US, as well as in the UK and Australia. And Lightning Struck: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Creation, most recently performed by Theatre on the Ridge in Paradise, California, is published by Next Stage Press; Gown (BSC, 2022) is included in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2023; and his monologues appear in The Covid Monologues, PlayGround Experiment’s 5th Annual Faces of America, and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2024. He lives in California. robertweibezahl.wordpress.com