Meet the 2023 Interstate 73 Writers Group
the eight playwrights are Lucas Baisch, Majkin Holmquist, Mary Kamitaki, Shayan Lotfi, Naomi Lorrain, Charlie Oh, Audley Puglisi, AND Nia Akilah Robinson.
Interstate 73 is Page 73's biweekly writers group. Over the course of 2023, these 8 incredible writers will share their newest pages with each other and Page 73's artistic staff. We're proud to pay a stipend to each Interstate 73 playwright.
We are overjoyed to be in the company of so many talented writers in the coming year!
LUCAS BAISCH is from San Francisco. Select plays include REFRIGERATOR (First Floor Theatre), On the Y-Axis (The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), Dry Swallow (Brown University), import speech_memory (Cutting Ball’s Variety Pack Festival), and 404 Not Found (2022 O'Neill NPC Finalist). Lucas is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award, The Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and a Jerome Fellowship. His plays have been published through Methuen/Bloomsbury and Yale’s Theater Magazine. His artwork has been presented at Elsewhere Museum, the Electronic Literature Organization, gallery no one, and the RISD Museum. MFA: Brown University. www.lucasbaisch.com
MAJKIN HOLMQUIST is a playwright originally from the Smoky Valley region in central Kansas where she was co-founder of The Next Stage Theatre Company. In January of 2023, her play Tent Revival will be produced by Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series in partnership with the McCarter Theatre Center. Other plays include Stargazers, Every Anne Frank, Quickmatch, The Dog Pack Play, and Skinflint. Credits include The Quonsets (co-written with Alex Lubischer, Yale Cabaret), Broken Melodies (WVIT Women in Theatre Festival), and Styx Songs (contributing writer, Yale Cabaret). Her work has been developed at New York Stage and Film, Woodshed Collective, Bay Street Theatre, Page 73, Ucross, and Roundabout Theatre Company. She has been a finalist for Colt Coeur, the Pacific Playwright’s Festival, and PlayPenn. She is currently a member of Midnight Oil Collective and Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group, and is a Lecturer in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She holds a BA in Secondary English Education from Bethany College and an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
MARY KAMITAKI is a New York-based playwright from the Big Island of Hawaii. Her plays have been produced by Playwrights’ Arena in Los Angeles and developed at the Alliance Theatre, A Noise Within, Open Fist Theatre Company, Pasadena Playhouse, Skylight Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, UCLA, and USC. Mary’s work explores questions of identity and self-determination facing young people today, particularly mixed, queer girls who reinvent themselves to survive in transforming worlds. marylyonkamitaki.com
SHAYAN LOTFI has written some plays and thankfully still wants to write. He's been fortunate enough that some wonderful institutions have supported and developed his work, including MacDowell, The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Atlantic Theater, Roundabout Theatre, South Coast Repertory, The Lark, Marble House, Millay, and Boston Court. Maybe one day his biography will end with the fact that he, his partner, their six children, and pug split their time between Fort Greene, the Sicilian coast, and Kyoto, but currently that isn’t true.
NAOMI LORRAIN is a Harlem based actor/playwright. She is an AUDELCO Awards nominee and a NY Innovative Theatre Awards nominee for Best Lead Actress for Behind the Sheet and Entangled, respectively. She is a writer for the 2022 Disney Television Discovers: Talent Showcase. Her one-act comedy, THERESA, was selected for the 2022 Black Motherhood & Parenting Festival. Her play, how to roll a blunt, was a 2021 Finalist for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Her screenplay, My Better Half was a 2021 2nd Rounder for Comedy Feature Screenplay at the Austin Film Festival as well as a quarterfinalist for the WeScreenplay: Diverse Voices Screenwriting Lab. Theater: La Race (Page 73), Mark it Down, Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), What To Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company). TV: "Orange is the New Black" (Netflix), "Elementary" (CBS), "The Good Fight" (CBS All Access), "Madam Secretary'' (CBS). Lorrain also moonlights as a Research Assistant at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. NYU: MFA; Yale: B.A. www.naomilorrain.com
CHARLIE OH’s plays have been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Rep, The Lark, Second Stage, The Goodman, and others. His play LONG won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award and was an honorable mention for the Relentless Award. His play Coleman 72 won the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award and will premiere at South Coast Rep Spring 2023. Commissioned by MTC / Sloan and developing projects with Amazon and Universal. Northwestern University and The Juilliard School. charlieoh.com
AUDLEY PUGLISI is a playwright and poet. Audley has received fellowships from VONA/Voices, Lambda Literary, The Playwrights Realm, Blue Mountain Center and has worked with St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre. Writings have been published in ColorBloq and Garage Magazine. Plays include the salt women, Two Sisters (Sip Fest @ The Wild Project); blues for miss lucille (Lorraine Hansberry Award, finalist), Home on High; and The Misplaced Saints. Audley is a recent M.F.A. Graduate from the Yale School of Drama.
NIA AKILAH ROBINSON (she/her) is a playwright and actor who reps Harlem with all her might. Nia will be mentored by Mitzi Miller (Vice President at Warner Bros. Entertainment and HBO Drama) through YoungArts’ Emerging Professional Artists program. Her work has been seen and developed with The Ground Floor: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, National Black Theater: Soul Series (2023), Great Plains Theater Conference, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Ensemble Studio Theater, Waterwell, Classical Theater of Harlem, Urbanite, New Georges, The Dramatist Guild in partnership with The 24 Hour Plays, and Nuyorican. She has been a MacDowell Fellow, YoungArts Artist Fellow supported by Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Alumni Award), Travis Bogard Artist-in-Residence at the Eugene O'Neill Foundation, a commissioned writer for Pen America & EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (short play), in residence at Prospect Street Writer’s House, and The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s DEAR fellow. Finalist: O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Blue Ink Playwriting Award, New York Theater Workshop 2050 Artistic Fellowship, and a Semi-Finalist for The Blank Theater’s “Future of Playwriting Award ''. Member/ Alum: EST's Youngblood, The Orchard Project NYC Greenhouse, The Wish Collective, and TheBlackHERthePen. She was a Consultant for (CLASSIX), Archival Researcher for CLASSIX in collaboration with Princeton University, Co-Program Manager & Co-Facilitator of Inaugural National Fellowship dedicated to Black Femme Artist-Activists at The 2021 Tony Award Winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Co-Program Manager & Co-Facilitator of a Monologue Writing Program in partnership with Exodus Transitional Community & BOLD, Facilitator at Columbia Law School (Theater of Change), and was presented a certificate for her “Commitment to Black Stories” by BAC. She is a faculty member at a middle school (teaching acting) and is 2022-2023 Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at Juilliard. https://www.niaakilahrobinson.com
