This fall, Playing on Air is thrilled and honored to present a new season of eight short audio plays.
On Sundays beginning October 18, new episodes from dynamic playwrights including Lucas Hnath, Dominique Morisseau, Rachel Bonds, and Melis Aker will be available online and via podcast. Each play features exceptional artists from stage, television, and film, including longstanding friends of Playing on Air like William Jackson Harper, Carol Kane, Amy Ryan, and April Matthis, and welcoming new voices to our ensemble including Jean Smart, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and J. Alphonse Nicholson.
San Francisco Playhouse continued its commitment to developing new plays and nurturing the voices of active writers with the selection of the playwrights who will comprise the third year of the company's five-year commission program.
The recipients of these commissions are Julia Brothers (first commission), Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man), Ruben Grijalva (Value Over Replacement), and Tori Keenan-Zelt (The JonBenet Game).
New Georges commissioned some tiny new plays for the time of new plays. You can find mine (WEATHER WE'RE HAVING) and others here!
Heartbroken for our artists and colleagues when theaters shut down this week with their beautiful, long-imagined work inside (or waiting right outside the door)… we looked ahead at a time of no plays, thought about what we might need, and asked our artists for tiny plays to share: perhaps a tiny balm for us, them, and you.
Portia Krieger and I were selected for this year's Audrey Residency. We'll be working on UNTITLED TAXIDERMY PLAY.
Announcing Cycle 7, the new group of Audrey residents at New Georges!
Named for Audrey Bernfield, Susan’s mom, an innovative mentor and of course a great supporter of our company, the year-long residencies that make up our core play development program are project-based and collaboration-focused.
I'm delighted to announce that I'm now working with Samara Harris at The Robert Freedman Dramatic Agency. She's caring and fierce. Stay tuned!
Tori Selected for Project Y Playwrights Group
Nov 26, 2019
Project Y Theatre is thrilled to announce the 2020 Project Y Playwrights Group! Can't wait to work with this amazing group of writers this year.
Jul 29, 2019
On Monday, July 29, 2019, The New York Innovative Theatre Awards, announced the 2019 nominees for the annual Off-Off-Broadway awards. The It Awards have celebrated the vibrant and creative theatre community for the past 15 years.
Jul 17, 2019
In Tori Keenan-Zelt's dark comedy How the Baby Died, Grand Guignol hijinks take center stage in this absurdly comic play about a nanny, a baby, and its daddies.
Our interview with Keenan-Zelt reveals more about the motivation behind the play and what she hopes to achieve from participating in #BAPF2019.
Apr 30, 2019
The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, now in its 42nd year, welcomes a new cohort of fiercely talented and insightful playwrights who present challenging and provocative developing new work this summer. Save the date for two transformative weekends of readings, speakers, panels and a celebration of the creative fire.
Performance schedule will be announced May 15.
HOW TO BE A WIDOW Wins Ellie Playwriting Award
Feb 13, 2019
The Ivoryton Playhouse is thrilled to announce the dates of its Third Annual Women Playwrights Initiative - Passion, Power and Prose 2019.
The Initiative includes the Ellie Award and a $500 stipend for each of the four women playwrights chosen and provides a safe, nurturing environment...
Dec 10, 2018
In anticipation of the gala 30th anniversary celebration of The First Night Awards, Tennessee's best and brightest in live theater were revealed tonight as First Night's Top Ten of 2018.
SEPH Named Princess Grace Finalist
July 14, 2018
From a national pool, SEPH was named as one of 18 Finalists for the Princess Grace Foundation Award in Playwriting.
Happy Bastille Day!
July 3, 2018
Playwright Tori Keenan-Zelt's emergence as a force in contemporary theater seems assured with her newest play, Truth/Dare, an incisive, on-target treatment of the pitfalls of adolescence and the frailty of relationships during a time in which everything seems in a constant state of flux...
TRUTH/DARE Nashville Premiere at Woven Theatre
Woven Theatre Company kicks off its third season with Tori Keenan-Zelt’s “Truth/Dare.” Exploring themes of friendship, faith and transformation, the play centers on four close-knit friends in the late ’90s, who gather together for one last sleepover before they start high school. But a mysterious tragedy leaves them struggling with “what happened, what has been lost, and who they are now.”
TRUTH/DARE in New York Theatre Review
Whoever first said high school represents the best years of your life must have been in a coma during their entire adolescence. Or they were perhaps one of those assholes who made things terrible for the rest of us. Or, most likely, with time comes the ability to compartmentalize and rationalize the bitter traumas of young adulthood.
Playwright Tori Keenan-Zelt is intimately familiar with this emotional space, and her unsparing play Truth/Darepulsates with restless, hormonal volatility.
Since 2010, the Ingram New Works Festival has brought four extraordinary playwrights from across the country to Nashville each year to share their new plays with local audiences. All of the plays have been developed for several months with local actors, directors, and artists as part of the Ingram New Works Lab, just one of the facets of Nashville Repertory Theatre’s Ingram New Works Project.
May 10, 2018
On the first night of Nashville’s 1,000-year flood, the Nashville Repertory Theatre staged the city’s first festival of new plays—the Ingram New Works Festival.
Panglossian's Latest Tackles Prejudice with Dark Humor
Aug 16, 2017
The play... tackles the notion of prejudice in a unique way. Sylvia expects a grand adventure out of Egypt, almost as if the country's people owe it to her. What she finds is quite different.
"It also parallels what one person from one culture expects from another one and how we just assume that our needs are going to be met," Whitacre said. "I think it helps show us how to question our prejudices."
"There's an element of we're not quite sure to react to it," Whitacre said. "It helps us to question 'should.'"
Tori Selected for EST Playwrights Unit
January 2017
An amazing thing about living in theatre is seeing relationships grow along with the art. We take turns as one another's teachers, collaborators, inspirations, conspirators, clowns, and friends. EST has made a home for all of this, and I'm very happy to be spending time there with women whose work I love and who heard in my first, tentative lines the things I could eventually sing.
AIR SPACE is a Princess Grace Finalist
July 2016
Margulies is excited.
That is all.
AIR SPACE on The Kilroys List
June 2016
LOS ANGELES: The Kilroys have released the third annual edition of “The List,” which features 32 industry-recommended new plays by female and trans playwrights. The L.A.-based cohort of playwrights and producers is committed to working toward gender parity for playwrights in the American theatre. According to the Count, an ongoing study funded by the Lilly Awards and the Dramatists Guild released in 2015, just 22 percent of productions in regional theatres over the three years prior were written by women...
WORKING CHILDREN Nominated for Emmy
May 2016
In 1775, a young apprentice boy dreams of a better life while working in a Philadelphia print shop. A Mexican-American migrant girl in 1960's California struggles to harvest garlic all day and keep up with her studies. These and other working children help illuminate the evolution of child labor in America from colonial times to today.
February 13, 2016
Good Monsters is a play about Frank, who shot Safira in a Walmart parking lot. Frank is a police officer. He is white. He is a veteran. He is trusted with protecting people. Safira was 16. She was Kuwaiti. She was not armed. She had stolen a pair of jeans. She was running. She was shot. And she died. And now, Safira haunts Frank...
Doing a little research for my new play, I went to NYComicCon to try cosplay for myself. Jane Austen is my hero, so I made her super! I met some fascinating women, who are profiled in this piece by Refinery29. Check 'em out!
Ingram New Works Interview
April 7, 2015
"As we gear up for our annual Ingram New Works Festival (happening May 6-16, don’t miss it!), we want to introduce you to our three 2014-15 Lab Playwrights: Bianca Sams, Gabrielle Sinclair and Tori Keenan-Zelt. Since October, our lab playwrights have gathered here in Nashville each month with our Resident Playwright Nate Eppler to create, critique, read and write… and rewrite. Mainly to rewrite..."
February 6, 2015
July 31, 2014
"...there are loftier ambitions at play here than just an English sit-com... Keenan-Zelt digs at the motivations behind the period “sillies” we’re used to seeing... and questions their existence. Although we can’t help but enjoy the “imposing parasols” and cries of “Lepers, Mamma!” (real, fantastic quotes), as we travel further down... we keep looking for the source of the trouble."
May 14, 2014
"The mystery of the tragedy at the center of the plot had a slow but effective reveal and I even shed a tear, because I’m human. We selected this show as Best Ensemble."
June 2015
THE LIST includes the results of the first annual industry survey of excellent new plays by female-identified playwrights. It is a tool for producers committed to ending the systemic underrepresentation of female voices* in the American theater...