April 24–May 10, 2026
Columbia University School of the Arts presents an expanded festival of new plays written by Columbia MFA Playwriting Students. The esteemed faculty who have nurtured these students, including Tony©, Pulitzer, and Obie Award winners such as David Auburn, Leslie Ayvazian, David Henry Hwang, James Ijames, David Klass, Michael Korie, Rogelio Martinez, Charles L. Mee, Lynn Nottage, and Blair Singer, invite everyone to experience these innovative new playwrights.
Organized by James Ijames, Head of the Playwriting Concentration.
Featuring
Singing Lessons by Edison Hong, Quarryman by Tim Lucey, FEMM by Zoe Stanton-Savitz, Limithrope by Flavie Philipon, Alala and the Scarman by Silma Sierra Berrada, and WINGS // WATERMELON by Mo Holmes.
Schedule of Events
Singing Lessons
by Edison Hong
April 24 & 25
Miles, a neuroscientist PhD student, studies Australian Zebra Finches and how they learn to sing, but his finch, Teal 53, stopped singing. As he tries to get his bird to sing again, Miles thinks about the songs of his own life, the ones passed down to him and the one he composes for himself.
Quarryman
by Tim Lucey
April 25 & 26
Set in New Hampshire during 1975, John Burton, a worker at a Coös County quarry, goes missing and a group of fellow workers and community members try to piece together what has happened.
FEMM
by Zoe Stanton-Savitz
May 1 & 2
A museum for its patrons and a prison for its relics, FEMM is a place where women who behave outside of the patriarchal status quo are kept for their own safety. When Char is admitted to the “hysterics exhibition,” she meets four women who have been kept there for longer than they can remember—Ginny, an emotionally volatile recluse who touts complacency but is secretly manipulating her way to escape; Zee, an excitable harpy prone to fits of ecstasy; Via, an apathetic lover of morbidity; and Opi, who often gets lost in familiar places and speaks in strange hallucinogenic riddles. As Char enters their realm, she begins to discover a community among the madwomen but pushes them to begin exposing the injustices of the emporium.
Limitrophe
by Flavie Philipon
May 2 & 3
What can you build on a territory that has been reduced to ruins? On the edge of a border harbour, under a cloche, there aren’t many souls left living. Yet, THE GRAPEVINE narrates NEREO’s arrival to this terrible territory on Suspension Sunday. By chance (or not), he gets hired as a handy man at the Borrodale country house. There, in the middle of debris, are surviving THE BARONESS OF BORRODALE and JACKIE, childhood allies and accomplices. At first blush, the young man’s presence sows discord, friction, and jealousy between the two. At second blush, it also reveals the devastation of their past, and the limits of their future.
Alala & The Scarman
by Silma Sierra Berrada
May 8 & 9
In an unnamed nation that bankrolls American power, a radical student activist leads a campaign demanding her university divest from the United States. At home, her boyfriend—an immortal man who once survived a lynching—keeps himself safe by offering spiritual readings, turning the scar that could not kill him into currency to avoid deportation. As protests rage outside their apartment, the performances that keep them alive begin to erode their intimacy. When survival becomes spectacle, what remains between them that isn’t an act?
WINGS // WATERMELON
by Mo Holmes
May 9 & 10
There’s mean things happenin’ in this land. What's left to do but make a scene? Join the 1500, a group of sharecroppers and tenant farmers from the bootheel of Missouri, as they camp out on the highway to protest the failings of the president’s New Deal. Based on historical and familiar events from peoples who take to the road.