Heads up for the five winners of Unleashed! And be ready to bask in their awesomeness when we present the revised versions in public readings this June!
Hail Mary/Maria by RJ Silva
Kid, short for Kindness, gets slapped with his first real crush. He relies on his three Marys for guidance: his Filipina mother Marie, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and his favorite pro wrestler Maria. And although he feels like he’s blindly top-rope diving into love, will he be able to stand as a champion for himself? A coming-of-age story with the electricity of a live wrestling show, the comfort of your Filipino family, and the warmth of a budding romance, HAIL MARY/MARIA is a heartfelt adventure of finding and loving who you are.
RJ Silva (he/him/his) is a playwright based in Chicago, born and raised in Manila, the Philippines. His play, Hail Mary/Maria, has been in workshops and staged readings in Chicago and San Francisco, and continues to develop queer-centric stories told through magical realism and Filipino mysticism in his plays. Silva is the Artistic Director of CIRCA Pintig, Chicago’s Filipino theatre and community arts organization, having recently launched the Chicago Filipino American Theatre Festival. Silva is the co-creator of The Ampliverse, a multimedia channel that celebrates pop culture without the toxicity of exclusivity, creating podcasts and video content, and is in pre-production for their first queer web series, “Eat Cute.” RJ-Silva.com instagram.com/rj.slay theampliverse.com
C[Y]PHER
Fourth-grade math teacher ZARA CHADHA discovers that her father, a recently deceased AI pioneer, may have uploaded a digital copy of his mind onto a vast network. Clues point to Zara’s memories serving as the decryption key—the “cypher”— that will permit entry into where her father resides in his digital afterlife. How are her mother’s suicide, her father’s obsession with fixing the past, and Zara’s sense of abandonment linked?
HAROLD TAW is a playwright and multi-form writer. His debut novel was Adventures of the Karaoke King (Lake Union Publishing 2011). His writing has featured on NPR, in a New York Times bestselling anthology, and in The Seattle Times; his screenplay Dog Park was a 2023 LA LGBTQ+ Film Festival winner. With The 5th Ave Theatre’s Writers Group, Harold wrote the book for two musicals: PERSUASION (2015), based on Jane Austen’s final novel; and original one-act THE MISSED CONNECTIONS CLUB (2014). PERSUASION had its world premiere at Taproot Theatre Company in 2017 and its California premiere at Lamb’s Players Theatre in 2018. He wrote the book and lyrics for IN A BETTER WORLD: A MULTIVERSE MUSICAL, which had a 2022 staged reading funded by 4Culture, and the original play C[Y]PHER, which had a 2024 staged reading funded by City of Seattle and produced by Infinity Box Theatre Project.
BLOOD/SUCKER
Ryan, a high school social studies teacher, is tired. He’s been spending late nights grading homework, as well as fending off parental complaints about his Asian-American History class, who claim that he is using ‘Critical Race Theory’ to indoctrinate the students. Then Hillary, the new Principal, arrives. And the students are beginning to act very strange…
Anamaria Guerzon (She/They) is a Filipino-American Theatre Artist in Seattle. Their work seeks to explore humanness, with an emphasis on marginalization and the legacy of ongoing colonization. They believe in the power of specificity. They also believe in the inherent magic of the human experience, and seek to represent this lived reality through the fantastic and strange. They blur the lines between this magic and the mundane, with the understanding that both exist, and life is full of inherent contradictions.
Their play SKIN has been developed in a workshop/reading with The Playwright Realm’s Scratchpad Series (dir. May Adrales), and was also in Seattle Public Theater’s Distillery program in 2024 (dir. Zenaida Smith). They have also developed work with Village Theater’s Northwest Creator’s Program (2022 Cohort), and Copious Love’s Plays On Tap series (2024). They received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre, from Pacific Lutheran University (2021).
Eggshell; or Vỏ Trứng by Anthony Doan
Everything’s coming up roses at the Ly family’s Christmas Eve dinner. That is until Rose arrives, hoping to make a good impression, as she’s meeting her fiancé’s family for the first time. Despite her best efforts, the mood turns frigidly vicious when secrets are brought to light, forcing everyone to confront the fragility of their individual nature. “Eggshell; or Vỏ Trứng” tiptoes between farce, dark comedy, tragedy, and thriller as it follows a hauntingly dysfunctional family and unearths the fangs of internalized whiteness, self-acceptance, and the lengths we go to in order to survive.
Anthony Doan (he/they) is queer, first-generation Vietnamese-American theatre artist currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through an anti-racist, culturally-informed lens, they strive to viscerally entertain and challenge audiences, provoke political thoughts, and inspire people to empathetically listen to the world in a different vibration. He coins his aesthetic as “epic intimacy:” a sense of grandeur in dramatically heightened stakes that emerges from the obscure delights and emotional truths of human nature. Notable projects include developmental residencies with Crowded Fire Theater and More Más Marami Arts, a commission by Contemporary Asian Theatre Scene, and recognition as a semi-finalist in the 44th Bay Area Playwrights Festival. IG: @theanthonydoan
Play: “The Machine”
When Claudia, a 13-year-old, first-generation Korean-American is selected for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be one of three medical volunteers for a fantastical new piece of technology that has the ability to change any physical aspect of any person, she gives herself red hair in the hope that Penelope, the girl she has a crush on, will like her. However, she finds herself obsessed with this newfound access she has to change and the chance to live in the skin of those she is not. Ultimately, she has to decide: What does it take to live as your own authentic self?
Magpie Park (they/them) is a burgeoning playwright, creative, and neurotic artist. Based in New York, they have an interest in the intersection between the fantastical and the disturbing. Their plays feature a grotesque take on magical realism, frequently through the lens of race, sexuality, and gender. Most recently their work has been featured at the Tank and Theatre Write Now in NYC.