BSC’s 2025 10×10 NEW PLAY FESTIVAL

CAST

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.

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

CREATIVES

ALAN PAUL (Director) spent 15 seasons at the Tony Award-winning Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he served as Associate Artistic Director. His shows at STC bridged the gap between classical and popular culture. His productions of Camelot, Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha are the theatre’s #2, #3 and #4 highest-selling shows, and Camelot won the Helen Hayes Award for Best Musical. Alan has received acclaim for his bold interpretations of Shakespeare, including a modern-dress Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors set in 1960s Greece. Alan directed the film of Patrick Page’s All the Devils Are Here, which was a New York Times Critics Pick. Alan is particularly dedicated to new work and has spent much of his career developing new plays and musicals. At STC, Alan commissioned Lauren Gunderson to write a feminist reimagining of Peter Pan and Wendy which premiered in 2019. He recently directed Our Town with a new score by Michael John LaChiusa. Other STC productions include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Boys From Syracuse, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. Alan has directed productions at theatres across the country including Kiss Me, Kate at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre and The King and I at Chicago’s Drury Lane Theatre, for which he was nominated for a Jeff Award for Best Director. In Washington, Alan has directed at the city’s top theatres, including The Pajama Game at Arena Stage, Cabaret at Olney Theatre Center, Spring Awakening at Round House Theatre, The Rocky Horror Show and Silence! The Musical at Studio Theatre, and I Am My Own Wife at Signature Theatre.

MATTHEW PENN (Director) BSC: 10×10 2017–22, Judgment Day, Typhoid Mary. Penn most recently directed The Sweet Taste of Freedom, a film shot entirely in the Berkshires. The film won Best Drama at the New York Shorts International Film Festival. To date the film has played in 14 festivals in 4 different countries. Penn is an Emmy-nominated director and has directed and/or produced over 200 hour-long dramatic television shows. He has worked for every major network as well as Netflix and HBO. He began his television career at Law & Order where he earned an Emmy nomination for directing the show’s 200th episode and became the show’s Executive Producer. Penn’s TV credits include iconic series like: The Sopranos, Law & Order and NYPD Blue as well as Queen of the South (Co-Executive Producer/Director) Orange is the New Black, Blue Bloods, Damages, Royal Pains, The Mist, Secrets and Lies. On stage Penn directed Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid at New York’s Public Theater starring Glenn Close. Berkshire theatre audiences also know Penn from his work at many of the region’s most significant theatres: Shakespeare & Co.: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike. BTG: The Actor’s Nightmare and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You. Penn was a Co-Artistic Director of Berkshire Playwrights Lab for 13 seasons.

MOIRA O’SULLIVAN (Assistant Director)

PEGGY WALSH (Costume Designer) has spent most of her career performing and designing for Musical Theatre. Favorite design projects are Children of Eden, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Angels in America and The Pirates of Penzance. For the last 12 years, she has been working with high school students for Shakespeare & Company’s Fall Festival. She has costumed in high schools throughout the Berkshires including Taconic, Monument Mountain, Springfield Central, Waldorf, Mount Everett, Chatham and Pittsfield High School. She also designs for Pittsfield’s Shakespeare in the Park project.

CAL MURPHY (Assistant Costume Designer)

ERIKA JOHNSON (Lighting Designer)

AMY ALTADONNA (Sound Designer)

RENEE LUTZ (Production Stage Manager)

NATHANIEL BOKAER-SMITH (Assistant Stage Manager)

McCorkle Casting: Pat McCorkle, CSA; Rebecca Weiss, CSA (Casting) (C.S.A.) Casting actors for Barrington Stage for 21 years. Pat McCorkle is pleased to be an Associate Artist at BSC. Broadway: Over 50 productions including On the Town, Amazing Grace, End of the Rainbow, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, She Loves Me, A Few Good Men. Off Broadway: highlights — Clever Little Lies; Sheer Madness; Tribes; Our Town (Barrow Street); Freud’s Last Session; Toxic Avenger; Almost, Maine; Driving Miss Daisy. Feature film: Premium Rush, Ghost Town, The Thomas Crown Affair, Die Hard with a Vengeance, School Ties, etc. Television: Twisted, St. George, Sesame Street, Hack, Californication, Max Bickford, Chappelle’s Show, Strangers with Candy, Barbershop, etc. mccorklecasting.com

CHARLIE SIEDENBURG (Berkshires Press Representative) (Associate Artist, 19^th Season) joined the BSC family in 2005 and has represented over 150 BSC productions. His work has led to features in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Associated Press and American Theatre Magazine. His many PR credits include the Metropolitan Opera (Live in HD), Paper Mill Playhouse, George Street Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Goodspeed Musicals, Long Wharf Theatre, Surflight Theatre and Two River Theater Company. He serves as Press Rep for Wagner College Theatre, The Minty Awards, Ghostlight Productions and Forestburgh Playhouse. Charlie is a 1995 Theatre/Arts Administration graduate of Wagner College on Staten Island, where he currently teaches Theatre Appreciation. In 2021, he received a Berkshire Theatre Critics Association Special Award for Exceptional Support of Arts Journalism in the Berkshires.

THE PRESS ROOM (National Press Representatives) Broadway: Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, Prima Facie, Room. Off-Broadway: Blue Man Group, Death Drop, The Fears. Upcoming: Female Troubles, Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical, A Wonderful World. Recent credits: Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, Paradise Square, The Waverly Gallery, Three Tall Women, Farinelli and the King. Clients include: The Acting Company, Drama Book Shop, Hershey Felder, Hunter Theater Project, National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, New York Classical Theatre, Ogunquit Playhouse, Paper Mill Playhouse, Rosie’s Theater Kids, Shakespeare’s Globe, Theatre Row, Vineyard Theatre, The Wooster Group.

TO BE ANNOUNCED