Five Playwriting alums have their short plays included in Methuen Drama’s new anthology, The Future is Short, edited by Mitchell Thomas, award-winning actor, director, and professor at Westmount College. The anthology features 20 short plays of various genres with a run time under 15 minutes, “written by some of the most exciting contemporary voices in American theatre.” These inventive, resonant plays are catered to college and high school students developing their craft.
Several of the featured playwrights graduated from the same Columbia SOA cohort: Alle Mims '23, a queer, genderfluid, Black, biracial theatre artist, writes about Black, Queer, and Radical History through the lens of cultural archeology and political satire. Their play A Baptism at Second Reformed Church is included in the anthology. Creatures of the Earth, or Opposable Thumbs by Emma Schillage '23, also in the anthology, served as inspiration for a longer show, CRITTERS, which features a cast of animals grappling with an apocalyptic warning that spurs many of them to want to become human.
Worm Play by Catt Filippov '23—a Russian-Canadian artist based in Brooklyn who has performed in numerous roles on stage and screen—is a dark comedy about two worms in purgatory. Among her writing projects is Ahab’s Fable, a one-act play commissioned by MORE Theater/SB as the third installment in their Whaler’s Triptych Series. Luz Lorenzana Twigg '23 appears in the anthology with her play Remembrance. She is an emerging biracial/bicoastal playwright, educator, folk herbalist, and full spectrum doula from Santa Barbara, CA, who is currently developing an adaptation of America Is in the Heart, the first Filipino American novel by Carlos Bulosan.
Justin Aaron Halle '24 rounds out the Columbia alums in The Future is Short with Saturn Return. Halle is a playwright whose work has been developed and performed in NYC, including Vile Isle, a dark comedy praised by New York Times theatre critic Helen Shaw as “the horny queer apocalypse-slash-reflection on Rosh Hashanah you didn’t know you needed.”
Professor of Playwriting Lynn Nottage called the collection “an array of wildly imaginative and distinct new voices…plays that range from funny and whimsical to heartbreaking and inspirational.” Professor Emeritus David Henry Hwang said “[a]s theatre funding in high schools and colleges continues to be slashed, this invaluable volume will help launch the theatre makers who will be creating the future of our art form.”
