Announcing the 2020 Interstate 73 Writers Group

The eight incredible playwrights we've invited to join next year's group were selected from over 330 applicants, and we can't wait to get to know them better over the course of 2020. They'll share their newest pages with each other and Page 73's artistic staff at our office in Brooklyn. In addition to providing the snacks and drinks essential to any good writers group, we're proud to pay a stipend to each Interstate 73 playwright.

Bleu Beckford-Burrell

Bleu Beckford-Burrell is a first-generation Jamaican-American actor/playwright. Born and raised in New York city, she’s works for non-profit organizations where she teaches acting to teens, as well as write and direct plays. She is the 2018 Yale Drama Series Award Runner Up, The Playwrights Realm 2018-19 Fellow. Her plays include P.S.365 —2019 O’Neill Finalist, showcased in EST workshop series and The National Black Theatre —Keep the Soul Alive reading series. Lyons Pride –-Ink’d Festival of New Plays, EST Bloodwork Reading Series, Finalist for: 2018 PWC New Voices Fellowship, 2018 BAPF, 2018 Princess Grace Award; 2020 Arnold Weissberger Award Nominee, 2019 Honorable Mention for The Kilroys, and longlisted 2018 Theatre503 Award. M.F.A. Rutgers University. BleuBeckford.com

Vichet Chum

Vichet Chum is a Cambodian-American playwright and theater maker, originally from Dallas, Texas and now living in New York City. His plays have been workshopped at Steppenwolf Theatre, Fault Line Theatre, Crowded Outlet, Second Generation Productions, Crowded Outlet, Weston Playhouse, Cleveland Public Theatre, All For One Theater, Amios, Florida State University, Merrimack Repertory Theatre and the New Harmony Project. He received the 2018-19 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting. He serves as an Associate Artist at Merrimack Repertory Theatre and a board member for the New Harmony Project. This season, Vichet is a part of the Resident Working Farm Group at Space on Ryder Farm and has recently received a commission from the Audible Theater Emerging Playwrights Fund. He is a proud graduate of the University of Evansville (BFA) and Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company (MFA). He’s represented by Beth Blickers at APA Agency. vichetchum.com

 Tyler English-Beckwith

 Tyler English-Beckwith is a recent graduate of the Dramatic Writing MFA program at NYU. She holds a B.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies and a BA in Theater and Dance from The University of Texas at Austin. Originally from Dallas, Texas, Tyler currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Her plays include Mingus which was a 2019 O’Neill Finalist, first prize winner of the 2018 KCACTF Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and finalist for the 2018 Goldberg Playwriting Prize. Her play TWENTYEIGHT, received a world premiere in 2017 at The Vortex in Austin, Texas where it received Honorable Mention on The Austin Chronicle’s Top Ten Plays of 2017. She is currently writing, directing, and starring in an afro-futurist interactive film project for Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM. Tyler hopes to create worlds, in her writing, where black women live beyond the basic means of survival and have the audacity to be autonomous.

Emma Goidel

Emma Goidel’s plays include The Gap (Barrymore Award, Kilroys List 2019), A Knee That Can Bend (Nominee, ATCA/Steinberg Award & Lanford Wilson Award), Local Girls (Finalist, Princess Grace Award), and We Can All Agree To Pretend This Never Happened (EST, Òran Mór, Tiny Dynamite/InterAct). Her work has been presented by Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, InterAct, LAByrinth, Playwrights Realm, Playwrights’ Center, NYSAF, and PlayPenn’s the Foundry. She is a co-founder of Orbiter 3, and a Kilroy.

Marvin González De León

Marvin González De León is a Chicano playwright whose work has been produced and developed at Good Luck, Macbeth Theatre, Reno Little Theater, Teatro Bravo, Arizona State University, Pillsbury House + Theater, Teatro del Pueblo, and the Playwrights’ Center. He was a 2018-19 Many Voices Fellow and is currently a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. He teaches at Arizona State University, where he received his MFA in Dramatic writing in 2017. marvingonzalezdeleon.com

Morgan Gould

Morgan Gould is a writer/director whose plays include All the Stupid Bitches, Three Fat Sisters, and Nicole Clark Is Having a Baby. Her play I Wanna Fucking Tear You Apart premiered at Studio Theatre in DC and received a Helen Hayes Award Nomination. Morgan is a recent graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellowship, a member of New Dramatists, EST, and a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony Fellow. As a director she has directed productions at P73, EST, Humana, Marin Theatre Company, Primary Stages, the Hangar, HERE Arts Center, and Ars Nova, among others. She is the artistic director of Morgan Gould & Friends, her own company with 13 other actors/ designers/ producers.

 Emily Gardner Xu Hall

 Emily Gardner Xu Hall is an actor, composer-lyricist and writer. She was born in Tokyo and grew up in London. Solo musicals in development include UNTITLED CHERRY ORCHARD MUSICAL (Musical Theatre Factory), CYMBELINE, I AM THIS FOR YOU (Ars Nova ANT Fest), NASCENT PHASE (Bushwick Starr). Collaborations include THE CARDINAL (music/lyrics, play by Cusi Cram), UNTITLED FLORIA PROJECT (music/book, lyrics/book by Laura Kleinbaum), NOMAD MOTEL with Carla Ching (Atlantic Theatre Company). She is the recipient of the American Theatre Wing Jonathan Larson Grant, Saw Island Foundation recording grant, and American Music Theatre Project residency at Northwestern University. Lilly Award for a Female Composer-Lyricist “Go Write A Musical” award. Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project. MFA in Acting from NYU Tisch. 

 Haygen-Brice Walker

 Haygen-Brice Walker is a Puerto Rican-American playwright-creative producer born and raised in the American South and currently making weird art in Philadelphia, where he is the Co-Founder and Creative Producer of ON THE ROCKS. Haygen-Brice is an Affiliated Writer with The Playwrights' Center where he was a 2018-2019 Jerome Many Voices Fellow and is currently developing demolition swamp an HGTV monster play with Nashville Repertory Theatre where he is an Ingram New Works Playwright. Haygen-Brice's work is like if Streetcar Named Desire, Mean Girls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Beloved got trashed at a Buffalo Wild Wings happy hour and then stumbled into the neighborhood bathhouse while belting the soundtrack of In The Heights. Each day, Haygen-Brice is one step closer to becoming Jennifer Lopez, which is trite for a gay Puerto Rican, but he's embracing the cliché and living in his truth. haygenbricewalker.com ontherocksphilly.com