Alumnae Participate in the 2022 Pipeline Festival
New work by alumnae Zizi Majid ’20, Daaimah Mubashshir ’15, Katherine Wilkinson ’19, and Gethsemane Herron-Coward ’19 join the billing for the 2022 Pipeline Festival.
The Pipeline Festival at the WP Theater in New York gives audiences a unique opportunity to see five new works in various stages of development, ranging from staged readings, to streamed films, to full-length workshop productions. The festival runs from March 24 to May 14, 2022.
In Majid’s They Came in the Night, after the sudden death of Zsa Zsa's mother, a visitor arrives from Baghdad: an aunt who served as an interpreter for the U.S. military and has finally been allowed to immigrate to the U.S. What follows is a distinctive play about a family sifting through the debris of America’s fraught War in Iraq. They Came in the Night runs March 24-26.
Zizi Majid plays include How to Gild An Eagle (Finalist, Columbia@Roundabout New Play Reading Series; Semi-Finalist, National Playwrights Conference; Semi-Finalist, Athena Project); Return to Fall (Finalist, Blue Ink Playwriting Award; Semi-Finalist, National Playwrights Conference; Semi-Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival); To Raqqa With Love (International Human Rights Arts Festival 2021); Cost (Climate Change Theatre Action Commission 2021); Being in Time (International Human Rights Arts Festival 2019); How Did the Cat Get So Fat? (nominated Best Play, Life! Theatre Awards, Singapore). Currently an Instructor of Drama at Syracuse University she received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also part of the International Fellows Program at the Columbia School of International Public Affairs.
In Wilkinson’s staging of Mubashshir’s Room Enough (For Us All), a recently widowed mother attempts to set things right by her queer daughter by inviting her for Eid after a 10-year absence. Room Enough (For Us All) is an insightful journey into the struggle of one contemporary African-American Muslim family to come together, despite everything trying to tear them apart. Room Enough (For Us All) runs April 14-16.
Daaimah Mubashshir is a playwright based in Manhattan. She is a recent winner of the Helen Merrill Playwright award, and a Fisher Center Commission for development of a new music play called Emily Black is Total Gift.
Katherine Wilkinson is a queer director and writer based in Brooklyn. They are a recent winner of the Opera America Tobin Director-Designer prize and a Visiting Artist at Duke, Rutgers and Arcadia University. This spring, they are directing a new work to premiere at La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Fest.
When Gethsemane Herron-Coward’s family comes together to celebrate the return of an incarcerated relative, she reveals her worst secret on the internet. In Herron-Coward’s autofictional play, Kin, the ties that bind a single family are threatened with each tap of the keyboard. Kin is the first of a three-part work, and an investigation of the ripple effects of sexual trauma, memory, and the temporality of violence. Written by Herron-Coward, Kin runs April 21-23.
Gethsemane Herron-Coward is a playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with JAG Productions, The Hearth, The Fire This Time Festival, The Liberation Theater Company, Roundabout Theatre Company, The Playwright’s Center, Ars Nova, and WP Theater. She is a Resident Artist with Ars Nova’s Play Group, a 2020-2022 member of the WP Lab, and a 2021-2022 Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center. She is a winner of the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series, as well as the 45th Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival. Gethsemane was featured in our Meet The Playwrights feature, in 2019, where she discussed her craft and her background in writing poetry.