Emerging Playwrights Lab Reading SERIES 2026
JULY 18-26, 2026
ATWATER VILLAGE THEATRE
FREE ADMISSION. Reservations Recommended.
IAMA Theatre Company presents staged readings of six new plays written by members of the company’s 2025-26 Emerging Playwrights Lab. Readings will take place over the course of two weekends, July 18 through July 27, at the Atwater Village Theatre. Admission is free and open to the public; reservations are recommended.
Making up the Lab’s Class of ’26 are Andrew Grace, Aja Houston, Josh Levine, Tyree Marshall, Samah Meghjee, and Erica Wachs. The six playwrights met on a monthly basis during their one-year residency to share and develop work in a peer-guided format led by program director Nicholas Pilapil, himself an IAMA Playwrights Lab alumnus. Pilapil’s play, The Bottoming Process, developed in the inaugural 2019-20 Lab, was produced by IAMA in a co-production with the Los Angeles LGBT Center in 2023. Also developed in the 2019-20 Lab, Job by Max Wolf Friedlich, went on to receive a Broadway run from July 15 through October 27, 2024.
SCHEDULE OF READINGS: JULY 18-19 & 24-26, 2026
SATURday, July 18 at 8 p.m.:
Play On by Andrew Grace. Directed by Yari Cervas.
A journalist reunites with his childhood friends to uncover how the video games and technology they grew up loving ultimately drove them apart. Moving between their present-day lives and their adventures inside the games they played as kids, he searches for a way to reconnect before it's game over for good..
SUNday, July 19 at 8 p.m.:
Blood Party by Samah Meghjhee. Directed by Nikki DiLoreto.
It's Anisa's birthday party - I mean, blood party - I mean, wajib party! Anisa finally got her period at 17 years old, and her mom is throwing her a coming-of-age party in the park. Her mosque friends come, her school friends come, no one is getting along, and everyone is trying to figure out Anisa's secret.
FRIday, July 24 at 8 p.m.:
Joy Black Club by Aja Houston. Directed by Roz Bevan.
In this magically absurd play with music (not a musical) spanning classical, rock and roll, and country genres, we follow a devastated Melancholy who after losing her high-powered job in a massive DEIA purge, joins a Black activist group to aid her getting retribution. Instead its vibrant members challenge her to first discover what society, family, and even herself has blocked her from experiencing —radical joy.
SATURday, July 25 at 8 p.m.:
You Will Burn by Tyree Marshall. Directed by Melissa Coleman-Reed.
At a quarterly board meeting for the East Indiana Youth Symphony Orchestra, Sylvia and Dennis discover that the corrupt organization they work for is a far deeper hell than they could have ever imagined.
SUNday, July 26 at 2 p.m.:
Bury Your Ledes by Erica Wachs. Directed by Johannah Maynard Edward.
In the fall of 1990, Ann, a college freshman, is outed as a lesbian by her college newspaper. 36 years later, Ann is now the host of a Chicago morning show—locally respected, yet ambitious for more. But just as Ann starts to uncover the story she knows will propel her to national attention, her source begins to doubt going public. As the past increasingly mirrors the present, Ann must decide which secrets are worth revealing, and which should stay in the closet. At once a memory and a morality play, Bury Your Ledes asks what the real cost is of telling the truth.
Sunday, July 26 at 8 p.m.:
Oskar, The Amazing and Magnificent by Josh Levine. Directed by Jennifer Chambers.
Oskar, a young, wanna-be magician, is filled with longing — for his best friend Gerti, for a life he's only heard of in America, for a trick that will make the world notice him. When he meets Josephine, a young Black photojournalist traveling to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, he comes face to face with the true cost of wanting to disappear.
