WHY: Because there comes a point where each of us questions our life choices. What do a mouse, a mature woman named Alice (Clara Rodriguez), an aged mother-in-law (Seemah Wilder Idelson) and a clueless husband (John Combs) have in common? A release-seeking a road trip. Writer/director/performer Clara Rodriguez has crafted a hilarious feel-bad comedy that pokes at the soft, sensitive underbelly of aging and the human desire for purpose. Alice feels trapped after attending her high school reunion and running into her former best-friend-turned-meteorologist. She questions her 50-year career as “just a receptionist” and 43-year marriage. This three-hander is expertly crafted and performed. Find out if Alice finds the freedom she craves.
WHY: What happens when you take the worst movie ever made and turn it into a musical? Kristin Boulé (co-creator/producer/director), Tiffany Asta (co-creator/Joshua) and Juan Lazano (co-creator/composer) have created a pure, unhinged, hot mess of an adaptation. The ensemble and creators have used their crafts to weave a sweet, absurd homage that the best worst movie deserves. It is replete with goblins, ghosts, sexy Stonehenge, ballads, conditional love, vegetarians, green goo and a ludicrous lack of trolls. Even if you are not a fan of the movie, you’ll leave a fan of the musical. If you crave a non-stop evening of laughter, this musical delivers.
The SheLA Arts Summer Theater Festival is back in Los Angeles, this year at Rogue Machine Theatre. The 2026 Festival features four plays and one musical, and we’re glad to be able to profile the femme writers again, getting to know them and these new works a bit better through a few questions.
Ashley Denise Robinson
Ashley Denise Robinson – Writer/director of “The Partner Or, The Sou-Sou Play”
The Play: Every Tuesday night, five first-generation women meet to exchange money, gossip, and insults. Their deepest secrets are pulled out of the shadows when a new, non- Caribbean member joins the group. “The Partner, or The Sou-Sou Play” pulls at the threads of how tightly we can hold on to our secret lives, no matter the cost.
LAFPI: Where did this play come fromand why were you compelled to write it?
Ashley Denise Robinson: It was important for me to write the sou-sou play because I wanted to see more first generation, Caribbean and African women on stage. Sou-sou was something that I had just recently learned about and I wanted people to understand this very old very traditional form of money saving that came out of West Africa. I also wanted to send a play around a topic that I personally hadn’t seen before. I think writing the sou-sou play has reinforced the power of women, specifically Black women, and the power of community and also how trying to smooth over the circle can cause fractures that may never be able to be mended.
LAFPI:What do you hope is next for your play?
Ashley: Global dominance. Because sou-sou is a global practice, I’d love to see the show in different countries, different languages, with different people taking on these characters. I’d also love for audience members to see these women and themselves, and to have something to relate to in terms of first generation stories, complicated, love stories, black women stories.
LAFPI:What should someone ask you about your work?
Ashley: “How many commissions can you take on this year?” “Are you available to be out of the country writing for the next 6 months?” “Where can we house you in NYC/London for the Broadway run and West End runs?”
Ashley Denise Robinson, Catie Zaleski and Heather Daughtry in rehearsal for “The Partner Or, The Sou-Sou Play”
Chandler Patton – Book writer of “Ghostlight,”a new musical
The Play: Leah just can’t catch a break. After bombing her audition for the revival of her dream show — “Ghostlight”, the story of 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite poet-painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal — she and her best friend Jen are about to give up on their dreams. Then they get the call. As they rehearse, argue, and create, the line between reality and theatricality blurs, forcing them to face the truths about their characters, themselves…and the pasts that haunt them still.This is a real play about a fake musical.
LAFPI: What made it important for you to write this play?
Chandler Patton: I wanted to explore the addictive, electric energy of collaboration–to capture, in real time, that magic that all theatre artists pursue. It’s a story about how artists turn their pain into beauty, and to me, the tragic story of Elizabeth Siddal is the perfect example of this.
LAFPI: Which playwrights do you find most inspiring?
Chandler: I’m a dramaturg, so too many to name. This play in particular was heavily inspired by Venus in Fur by David Ives. Unfortunately a lot of the best plays I’ve ever read have been unproduced and by struggling writers… but I’m very inspired by that. Here’s to all the epic plays gathering dust in desk drawers as we speak.
LAFPI: What do you wish someone would ask you about your work?
Chandler: I’d secretly love to be asked about the uncanny woo-woo experiences I had writing the play…about how I would create specific details in the story that I thought I was inventing, only to come across them deep in the historical record and find out that I was correct.
The Play: A backpack is surreptitiously thrown out of an Uber on a Des Moines highway. When the bag’s gruesome contents are discovered, Detectives Merritt and Van Roekel track down and interrogate the 15 year-old passenger responsible for the “littering”.
LAFPI: Why did you want to write this play?
Bridget Flanery: I hadn’t seen these people or these circumstances before on stage or film and that drove my writing process. I tried to explore the humanity of their struggles and their aches and give reason or make sense of what might seem controversial behavior and action.
LAFPI: Do you see a lot of plays?
Bridget: I attend a great deal of Theatre and I read a lot of plays. I will always feel like there is something sacred about sitting in a live audience in that darkened space, experiencing the art form where anything can happen.
LAFPI: Are there playwrights who inspire you?
Bridget: Oh, gosh, there are SO many. Anton Chekhov, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage, Lauren Gunderson, Sarah Ruhl, Duncan MacMillan… I could go on forever.
Caroline Ullman – Writer/director of “Role Models”
The Play: Jack and his older sister Willa haven’t spoken in months, since she moved to New York without him. When he finally agrees to pay Willa a visit and see her new life, he discovers that Willa’s new boyfriend Peter is someone he already knows and he must decide whether or not to tell Willa his secret and risk ruining the trip, and possibly their relationship as well.
LAFPI: What made you want to write this play?
Caroine Ullman: My favorite plays to write center on young people navigating messy relationships. I love coming of age stories about people making mistakes and learning from them (or not!) and ultimately seeing how the relationships evolve and change over time. This was my initial approach to writing “Role Models,” and the characters and plots began to flow.
LAFPI: And how has it been, taking the next steps into production?
Caroline: Having the opportunity to premiere my work with the team at SheLA is always a dream! I feel so lucky to spend time with such a collaborative, supportive group of artists. I’m excited to see this play on its feet for the first time, and how it will continue to grow and evolve from there.
LAFPI: As a writer, are there playwrights who have influenced you?
Caroline: One playwright I’ve always admired is Annie Baker. Reading her work growing up was definitely foundational to my own writing. I love losing myself in her characters’ dialogue and the complex relationships she crafts.
The Play: Summoned home to her mother’s apartment in Kaoshiung, Jessica walks into an ambush: her mother, Anita, has stage 4 cancer, and a deadline. Anita wants to die with dignity by week’s end, and she wants Jessica’s help. As a typhoon locks the family inside, pressure builds, secrets spill, and love turns volatile. With her father, Gary, caught in the middle, this darkly funny, emotionally explosive drama asks: can a mother and daughter forgive each other before time runs out?
LAFPI: Why did you write this play?
Jenn Meylan: I wrote this play because I wanted to share a story from a deeply personal and distinctly Taiwanese perspective that is rarely seen on stage. Through the story, I explore questions of death, family, and dignity at the end of life, and the difficult choices that accompany serious illness. My hope is to create space for meaningful conversations about death and family dynamics.
LAFPI: Which playwrights do you find most inspiring?
The playwrights I find most inspiring are actually the ones who are working on developing new works and putting their writing out there. I am part of a group of mostly women writers who regularly develop new works and give each other critiques – I find those playwrights most inspiring bc it takes a tremendous amount of courage to write, share, and receive feedback on shitty first drafts.
LAFPI: What would you like audiences to ask you about this play?
Jenn: Where the story came from, what parts are from everyday life, and what parts are uniquely from the Taiwanese diaspora.
Lee Chen, Cameron Dye and Stephanie Lee in rehearsal for “Her Way (隨 她而流)”
The SheLA Summer Theatre Festival runs Tuesday, July 7 – Sunday, July 12. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to shenycarts.org/she-la – Use code LAFPI20 at checkout for 20% off all ticket orders!
WHY: What happens when you go to a magic show, but it is actually a spy convention? The spy, no… the magician/writer Katrina Kroetch takes us on a comedic noir caper with magic, mentalism and a bit of spy craft. What better cover to infiltrate secret organizations than magic? As an audience member you might be the sleeper agent, but you are definitely a world-famous spy. This is a clever, funny, impossible-not-to-enjoy show. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: have fun, solve a mystery and laugh.
WHY: : What happens when two performers find themselves aging out of their niche? A 42-year-old actress (Keri Blunt) struggles to meet the deadline of her taped audition for Hamlet. She laments her aging skin, and her AI avatar threatens to take over. A 35-year-old actor (Dino Petrera) is cued to be “gayer” when reading for Hamlet. His agent hits him with the gut shot: he’s no longer marketable as a teen, and the agency drops him. He finds drag and holds a funeral as Trita Wright for his career as a high school student. Each actor takes the stage to ask the question, to be or not to be. Because identity, aging and reinvention sit at the edge of every actor’s mind. Keri Blunt has crafted a funny, touching and quietly defiant two-part short play and Dino brings the wow factor with his drag performance. A perfect mixture of drama and drag.
WHY: What happens when a gorgeous woman has been trapped performing to an empty room for years, finally has an audience? Step into the parlor with Jackie Skinner’s clown-horror show and find out. She blends tension, silliness, burlesque and scream-out-loud terror in ways you would never expect. She has created the best chase scene between a gorgeous woman and her faceless doppelganger in the history of Fringe. Because sometimes what haunts us is our inability to stop repeating patterns. Who knew a clown could do all this?
WHY: Lady M offers an inventive reimagining of Macbeth, shifting the spotlight from the ambitious thane to Lady Macbeth herself. Playwright Caitlin Apparcel explores an unexpected relationship between Lady Macbeth and one of the three witches, adding a fresh emotional dimension to Shakespeare’s familiar tragedy. As a playwright, what I found especially enjoyable was watching the script walk a delicate line between honoring the heightened intensity of Shakespeare’s world while gently puncturing it with humor. The servant, played by Sarah Lilly, is armed with impeccable dry wit and becomes the audience’s surrogate, quietly acknowledging that the nobles’ escalating madness is anything but normal. Those moments of grounded realism provide a welcome counterbalance to the play’s dark passions and supernatural intrigue. Rather than parodying the source material, Lady M finds comedy in perspective, reminding us that even the greatest tragedies can benefit from someone willing to observe – with perfect timing – that everyone on stage has completely lost their minds.
WHY: What happens when a high-profile freedom of speech lawyer who defends tech companies against online harassment claims becomes a victim of cyberstalking? Sara, a constitutional lawyer, has built a career defending tech companies from accountability and just scored the biggest victory of her life. She feels like a celebrity. While riding the high of victory, she decides to give online dating a try. Things seem great until one victim from the cyberbullying case commits suicide, and her personal and professional life starts to unravel. Tiffany Esteb’s solo show masterfully makes it personal. She pulls off the blindfold of Lady Justice and exposes the actual harm of cyberstalking, AI-generated porn and a slow-moving legal system. The show is smart, timely and refuses to let you look away.
WHY: Wild! I loved this show and found Tozy to be a magnificent worm. This show truly pulls at your heartstrings in the sneakiest of ways. I thought I would enter the show, hide and view it from the stands – you know, a spectator of sorts. NO! Mr. Ow was not having it. He did not allow us to sit together in a shared space while still in individual isolation.
One by one, moment by moment – in the most poetic, profound of ways – Tozy brought us out of our shells and closer together. Midway through the show a young man walked onstage to become Tozy’s assistant and that whimsical action changed the course of the show. It became a beautiful thread that tied the entire show together… or perchance it revealed exactly who we can become as a society when we allow ourselves to connect. At first we may seem to be strangers, until we realize that we truly are interconnected and more similar than different.
WHY: Mammy is a Star is a wonderful, lyrical tribute honoring the life and pioneering career of legend Hattie McDaniel. There is nothing like seeing a talented, beautiful, Black cast of actors onstage. There is nothing like seeing a large triple-threat ensemble onstage that is magnificently in step with one another, lightening up the stage.
What I loved about this show and the writing is the epicness, the sweeping timeline of it. It felt as though I had walked into the midst of a grand story and I was immediately invested. It is quite rare for Black artists to exist in plays that allow us to just live without having an immediate focus on our Blackness. It was a gift to be in the audience.
This play is about a family that has dreams in a time when they can boldly chase those dreams, but it is also a play about a girl refusing to be/do what is expected of her. A girl who creates her own narrative by standing by who she is, supported by her family.
I cannot wait to see how the work unfolds and manifests. We need new work that is original + expansive, and we need it right now from a wide variety of artists.
