SYNOPSIS

In a chapel in the middle of the desert, two girls meet for the first time in years. Together, they must grapple with their beliefs, an act of forgiveness, and the thought of an existence beyond the violence that has forged them.

PLAYWRIGHT’S BIO

Originally from Montreal, Canada, Leah (she/her) is a New York-based playwright currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting at Columbia University. Her work has been produced through Soho Playhouse, the Chain Theatre, the Road Theatre, Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, Columbia University, SUNY Purchase, the Broke People Play Festival, and Round the Bend. Leah is obsessed with mythmaking, the body and its shadowy realms, the dreamlike and the grotesque, and obsession itself. Proud recent graduate of the NYU Tisch dramatic writing BFA program.

A BIT ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

1. When did you start writing plays? If you had a moment where you realized you wanted to write, what was it?

I’ve been writing my entire life, but I didn’t start writing plays until I was sixteen, before which I mostly wrote poetry and prose. I’d been involved in theatre since I was little, but for some unknown reason, I hadn’t quite connected the dots that I could, well, write plays. This realization came about when I first started learning about college playwriting programs, the existence of which gave my teen self the institutional validation needed to first take the plunge, and I haven’t stopped writing plays since.

2. How did you come to write your OOB play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? How has it developed?

In January 2021, a proto-Bonefruit was born as the product of a 24-hour play festival and a loose handful of images: an abandoned chapel in the middle of the desert serving as a place of transience, trees grown from teeth, the juices of deadly fruit staining a corpse’s chin. It took until April 2022 before Bonefruit started to fill out into its current shape, and it has since grown, shrunk, morphed in and out of multiple states, journeyed through various stages of metamorphosis, and taken on a life far beyond what I first imagined for it. Most specially, Bonefruit is the child of many brains and hearts; few projects have brought me so close to so many of my cherished collaborators, all of them incredibly talented young artists without whom I never would have fallen in love with this world and its characters. It does take a village, after all.

3. What are 5 words that describe who you are as a playwright?

Lyricism, ambition, madness, indulgence, viscera.

4. What/who are some of the major influences on your writing?

Earnestly edgy productions of Shakespeare and the Greeks; whichever TV show has dominion over my psyche at the moment (Succession, always); artists both musical and visual, most recently Beach House, FKA twigs, Sufjan Stevens, Magdalena Abakanowicz, David Altmejd, and Kara Walker; magical realism, most notably as deployed in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the game Kentucky Route Zero, and Babe: Pig in the City; a life lived with mental illness and chronic pain; my cats and their domestic psychodramas; my beautiful, brilliant friends.

5. What’s one fact someone would never guess about you?

I was awake when I had my wisdom teeth removed.

6. What are some of your favorite plays?

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, Macbeth, Medea.

7. Any new projects you’re working on or shameless plugs?

Currently whittling away at my second-year MFA show, Devotions! A production will go up at Columbia sometime in Spring 2024. I always share what I’ve got going on on Instagram (@leah.annia).