MADE IN CINCY: New Works Festival
Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
May 8-9
Rehearsal Studio [Eden Park]
Fri, May 8 at 7pm SOLD OUT, waiting list available
CHURCH OF BROKEN THINGS by Maggie Lou Rader
Three girls grow up to become young women in rural, turn of the 21st century, Sleeper, Oklahoma. They navigate friendship, faith, sexuality and danger in a town where hypocrisy is inherited and silence is survival. Spanning childhood through adolescence, the play tracks how the girls are shaped by institutions meant to protect them: church, family, school and law. Ferociously funny and devastatingly honest, The Church of Broken Things captures the raw confusion of girlhood in a world that demands purity while excusing harm. A coming-of-age story about belief as refuge and weapon, and the fierce bond that forms when girls refuse to look away.
Sat, May 9 at 1pm
THE MINK by Isaiah Reaves
New Orleans, 1959. Christmas Eve. One lavish mink coat and far too many people who want it. When Wyatt, a young Black playwright and occasional escort, is gifted a stunning mink by a powerful white mayoral candidate, a simple goodbye spirals into a razor-sharp farce about secrecy, desire and survival in the Jim Crow South. As the coat changes hands, chaos erupts: a crumbling political campaign, a meddling sister-in-law, a conniving fiancée, a hysterical son and a web of lies that can longer hold. With fast-paced dialogue, bold characters, and a little ancestral magic, this is a play about claiming your dignity —even when the world insists you give it back.
Sat, May 9 from 5-6pm
FESTIVAL PANEL DISCUSSION
With playwrights Nathan Alan Davis, Maggie Lou Radar and Isaiah Reaves. Followed by Happy Hour.
Sat, May 9 at 7pm
OHIO RIVER PRAYERS by Nathan Alan Davis
In antebellum Cincinnati, the Fugitive Slave Act tightens its grip and Zavia shelters eleven fugitive children in her home on the edge of the Ohio River, praying faith will hold where law has failed. Her beliefs become a battleground when a white bounty hunter arrives, her estranged husband returns hardened by violence and her son Asa refuses to meet cruelty with force. Surrounded by danger and guided by three formidable elder women, Zavia must decide what faith demands when mercy and survival are no longer aligned. Written in searing verse and shot through with dark humor, Ohio River Prayers is a tragic, urgent reckoning with resistance, inheritance and the unbearable cost of choosing how to fight.
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