National Theater Project Announces Finalists

The National Theater Project team at NEFA, including the NTP Advisor ensemble, are pleased to welcome our final 24  National Theater Project Creation & Touring Finalists. This is the last finalist cohort for NTP Creation & Touring grants in this form, and we are grateful for a grant sunset that is expansive, colorful, and bold thanks to the work of these theater artists from across the country. This year’s finalist ensembles hail from:

• 11 states (MA, HI, NY, CA, LA, TX, FL, PA, IL, CO, NJ) 
• One U.S. Territory (Guåhan/Guam) 
• All six regions as defined by US Regional Arts Organizations 

Across projects, there are:

• Over a dozen languages including but not limited to: English, Spanish, Japanese, Chamorro, ʻŌlelo Hawai'i, ASL, BASL, Arabic, Fadjiki, Serbian, Catawba, and Wampanoag. 
• Multiple theater disciplines, including but not limited to: documentary theater, musical theater, rock opera, dance theater, and clowning – all created via a devised ensemble process.

As these projects bring us through a range of spaces and times, including our shared American history, a series of shifting borders, islands throughout the Pacific, the liminal space of mythmaking, folktales, and dreams, and both the near future and the recent past, the FY25 NTP Creation & Touring Projects embody . . . “the fundamental nature of art. . . art arises from our deepest emotions and impulses, reflecting our joys, sorrows and aspirations. It serves as a medium through which we process, question and challenge the world around us.”

Learn more about the FY25 National Theater Project Creation & Touring Finalist cohort below.

FY25 National Theater Project Creation & Touring Finalists

Queering the Border: Que el amor nos haga

Dora Arreola (Tampa, Florida)

Queering the Border: Que el amor nos haga (Love Makes Us) is a bilingual, movement-based, devised theatre project based on stories of women and LGBTQ2S+ asylum seekers, exploring the lived realities and symbolism of the U.S.-Mexico border. Created and directed by Dora Arreola, with Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro, this new work sheds light on the reasons people migrate: from fleeing domestic or state violence, to homophobic or transphobic assaults, to climate crises and poverty. Approaching stories of migrants from a queer feminist point of view, it explores the theme of love through the lens of decolonization, using ritual and imagination as tools of resistance and healing.

The Carlisle Project 

FLORA (Melrose, MA)

From those who first attended boarding schools in the 19th century to their descendants over a century later, the boarding school experiment has left an indelible mark on the welfare, identity, and future of Native peoples. The Carlisle Project is a healing ritual for Native peoples experiencing intergenerational trauma and a critically needed re-storying for non-Native Americans today. Led by Ronee Penoi (Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, and a Carlisle descendant) as composer/lyricist and Annalisa Dias as lyricist/book-writer, The Carlisle Project is a song cycle, ceremony, and ritual centering the experience of Native peoples who attended or descended from students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. We see The Carlisle Project as an important advocacy tool for healing and repair among Native and non-Native peoples, and part of the broader arc of Indigenous-led repair work for survivors and descendants of residential boarding schools.

Chronicles of a Black DeafBlind Girl 

Deaf Austin Theatre (Austin, TX)

Chronicles of a Black DeafBlind Girl: A Dating Journey is a powerful production that follows Ghari Constance Sorrell, a vibrant 30ish Black DeafBlind woman navigating life, love, and the challenges of a world not designed for her. Using ASL, Protactile Language, and her cane “Alice,” Ghari overcomes physical and societal barriers, while building her support system and fully embracing her intersectional identity. Created by Deaf Austin Theatre, the production masterfully blends ASL, Protactile language, movement, and sensory experiences, immersing audiences in Ghari's unique journey. The show challenges stereotypes about disability, celebrates individuality, and promotes vital representation for Black DeafBlind individuals. Through her deeply personal story, viewers are invited to broaden their perspectives, embrace diversity, and rethink societal norms. Following its premiere in Austin, the show will tour multiple cities across the U.S., raising awareness about the DeafBlind experience. 

We Will Not Go Silent

Breaking Wave Theatre Company (BWTC Guam) (Barrigada, GU)

Do you remember the bird songs? Have you noticed the growing silence? On Guåhan, native birds once filled the skies, but the invasive brown tree snake, introduced after World War II, wiped out ten of the twelve native species, triggering a collapse in biodiversity. This loss reflects the larger climate crisis, shaped by colonization, militarization, and capitalism. Breaking Wave Theatre Company (BWTC) aims to develop an original, multi-disciplinary performance that explores these forces and their impact on Guåhan and the Pasifika. Through devised theatre, a team of local artists will collaboratively create a piece blending theatre, music, and movement. The performance will tell stories of resilience and loss, while also exploring how ancestral knowledge can offer solutions to environmental challenges. This work seeks to inspire reflection, dialogue, and action around the urgent issue of the climate crisis.

HERitage emBODYment: Re-Storying Egyptian Antiquities 

Nabra Nelson, Sarah Fahmy (Tallahassee, FL)

HERitage emBODYment: Re-Storying Egyptian Antiquities is a multi-media, multi-modal, multi-lingual (English, Arabic, Fadjiki) piece that tours as a site-responsive performance installation and theatrical procession at Egyptian wings of US museums and theatres. Deeply satirical, humorous, and rooted in our indigenous performance traditions (oral storytelling, music, dance, puppetry, clowning), we invite audiences to witness us re-author what it means to be Egyptian, Nubian, and American. Embodying the personal as political, our bodies serve as extensions of our ancestors’ memory as we intertwine our lived histories with theirs. We interrogate how our own exoticized and politicized bodies are like the artifacts: on display for western consumption. Doing so, we mirror the migration and displacement of humans and artifacts. 

Clown Show

Fin Productions (New York, NY)

Portrait of America as a falling apart clown show.

Edible Tales: Hoʻoulu 

Dancers Unlimited (New York, NY & Honolulu, HI)

Edible Tales is a multimedia dance project, performance installation, and series of immersive community engagement programs exploring social justice, cultural heritage, and ethical sustainability around food through embodied experiences, practices, and presentations. With this project, we are centering community engagement as the key part of our creative process, then turning these experiences and explorations into movement narratives and stage performances. An example is visiting an ancient Hawaiian fishpond to help with restoration efforts, learning about reciprocal ahupuaʻa land-care practices that honor ancestral stories and memories, and transforming this learning into movement narratives performed by intergenerational and multicultural artists. For this iteration, Edible Tales: Hoʻoulu, we hope to visit other Hawaiian islands, engage with local artists to co-create performances that uplift our collective stories, and highlight the post-fire restoration work of the Lāhaina residents.

Front Page: The Encore

Junebug Productions (New Orleans, LA)

The Encore is an experience that seamlessly blends live music, dance cyphers, and multimedia elements, emphasizing that the 'featured artist' is the audience member. In the rich tapestry of R&B and the legacy of Black music, The Encore invites the full spectrum of American individualism to celebrate as one community in creating an immersive, multi-sensory experience that erases the boundaries between audience and performer. Led by Junebug Productions, The Encore chronicles the real-life journey of FRONT PAGE—an early New Orleans boy band—featuring Michael Turner, Octarve Anderson, and Gregory Ringo, who rose to prominence in the 1990s. Their narrative intertwines various influences and experiences that reflect the essence of their musical journey. 

By touring areas with connections to Black music—Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Mississippi—the production seeks to connect with audiences who resonate with its themes of resilience, love, and affirmation.

Douglass v. Democracy 

Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles, CA)

Douglass v. Democracy (working title) investigates American Democracy by way of Frederick Douglass – who was subjected to its injustices and offered its dreams of freedom. Douglass spent his life as a free man documenting – in essays, lectures, debates, and correspondence, his obsession with Democracy’s promise. His inquiry is more important than ever; he reminds us that abolitionist labor is carried out in performance, radical oratory, raucous town halls, intimate but loud questioning in public space. The human voice does the work of abolition, and though his voice was never recorded you can hear it if you listen. DvD catches Douglass’ voice in the air and rides it.

The Table (working title)

Ping Chong and Company (New York, NY)

The Table is a participatory theater performance developed by Ping Chong and Company with lead artist Mei Ann Teo that investigates the question: what is enough? The blending of theatrical image, game structure, and communal meal playfully brings to light both our complicity in habits of consumption and our agency in changing them. 

Envisioned as an adaptive, creative structure that responds to the uniqueness of each community gathering, The Table galvanizes local artists and audiences through meditations on the interiority of need and desire with a process of interviews, conversations, and creative laboratories. The Table occurs in two parts. The first part is a performance of dynamic collaborative generated scenes, alongside game-based, participatory activations that enact and disrupt a win/lose paradigm. The second is a collective meal ritual inspired-by the Zen Buddhist practice known as Oryoki.

LOS FRUTOS DE LA MUERTE, or the Breakdown Play

Glass Half Full Theatre (Austin, TX)

Los Frutos de la Muerte is a fungal play that follows two half-sisters racing to clean up a disaster before the next one arrives. The performance uses fungi as a window into the denigration of clearing, healing, caring labor and those who perform it, and it is built through a fungal process that incorporates textual/image research, personal histories, movement, puppetry, a fully bilingual script and a captioning system that is integrated into the fabric of the show. 

Presented by Glass Half Full Theatre, Frutos is a continuation of the company’s longstanding devising process that honors the experiences and bodies of those in the rehearsal room, while creating layered stories that refract the stories of latinx/queer/multilingual audiences to enact a more just present and future.

we come to collect: a flirtation with capitalism 

Jenn Kidwell/the blackening (Philadelphia, PA)

we come to collect: a flirtation with capitalism is a new performance artwork written and performed by Jennifer Kidwell in collaboration with the artist collective the blackening. In this anti-capitalist ritual comedy, performers and the audience explore value, labor, and currency together. An emerging vision instigated by Kidwell and the blackening, this work melds genres from stand-up to performance art, clowning to carnival, and questions work-life’s inherent imbalance.

CLERC'S INFERNO

Dreamatorium Theatre US (New York, NY)

Though virtually unknown to the hearing population, Laurent Clerc is beloved in Deaf communities around the world and often referred to as the “Apostle of the Deaf.” CLERC’S INFERNO, a play in two-acts, explores universal themes of alienation, identity, and self, and looks at the ways in which the sign language native to Deaf communities has been under attack by mainstream society. When it becomes clear that he must decide between his “immoral” marriage to a Deaf woman and the fate of the revolutionary Deaf school he spent his life creating, Laurent Clerc takes a hellish trip down memory lane, populated by shadows he thought he’d left behind. Sometimes... finding your bliss can be hell. Based on a true story. 

The audience experiences the ferocious, often humorous arc of the play via American Sign Language, Langue des Signes Française, rich pictorial visual vernacular, spoken English, and French by a Deaf and hearing cast and a supporting chorus of shadow puppets.

Ululations and Gurgles of the Invisible

Guerilla Opera (Boston, MA)

Ululations is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary devised theater piece by composer Elisabet Curbelo, centering deaf artists through a blend of American Sign Language (ASL), movement, and technology. Inspired by two poems by Federico García Lorca, this four-part composition for soprano, percussion, piano, and five deaf dancers explores oppression, communication, community, and transcendence. 

The performers communicate solely through ASL, creating a gestural language integral to the narrative. Deaf dancers, using motion sensors, generate electronic sounds and video projections, with their movements shaping the sonic and visual landscape. This collaborative process merges multiple art forms, redefining communication between deaf and hearing communities and fosters a shared sensory experience.

COMMERCIAL 

Found Sound Nation (Ridgewood, NY)

“This is the true story: In my hometown, Sacramento, two policemen fatally shot an unarmed Black man, Stephon Clark, in his grandparents backyard. When the news broke, I was confident that I was somehow linked to Stephon. Instead, I learned that my childhood friend was one of the cops who shot him.” - playwright Dahlak Brathwaite 

Based on a true story, COMMERCIAL is an imaginative blend of autobiography, metadrama, and alternative history. Marquise Johnson is the playwright’s avatar whose principles and artistic integrity is tested by his connection to the shooting of Stephon Clark. A play within a play unfolds as Marquise attempts to process the news through his art, beginning as an earnest, poetic meditation on this moral dillema. As media coverage wanes and the movement for Black lives becomes dormant once again, Marquise plots to capture the attention of a national audience, manifesting a real-life sensational drama - interrupted progressively by intrusive commercial segments.

dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams

alexa dexa (Lindenhurst, NY)

dreaming our futures + embodying our dreams is a free year-long crip ritual opera made by, with, and for Disabled folks dreaming together from bed. Rooted in Disability Justice, dreaming our futures centers processes of community co-creation, responsive accessibility, and radical inclusion in a live participatory remote setting that prioritizes our collective safety through ongoing pandemic. 

Channeling interdependence and community care, dreaming our futures encompasses the transformation that takes place in our lives throughout one year as we dream our most glorious dreams into existence. Blurring the distinctions between opera, our dreams, and our lived realities, the year-long nature of the performance recontextualizes our daily lives as sites of magic/opera, a ritual we continuously perform, dreams we perpetually manifest. 

Together, we’re dreaming futures with us in them in direct resistance to ableist systems of oppression and eugenics that celebrate our Disabled deaths.

ZOTTO: A Supernatural Japanese Folktale

JAPANESE ARTS NETWORK (Broomfield, CO)

Through the lens of Japanese folklore, ZOTTO connects audiences to a lesser known history of Japanese families in America, inviting participants to journey into an embodied experience in an immersive world with liminal imagined rooms and familiar places incorporating traditional Japanese craft, aesthetics, and manga art sets and a theatrical experience that embraces the five senses.  Audience members encounter yōkai (Japanese spirits) and other unexpected characters while learning about the lived experiences of five generations of Japanese American women. Through the characters’ individual stories, the audience explores Denver’s sordid history and the ghosts of the past, touching on racism, WWII incarceration, generational trauma, redlining and resettlement. A final true story contextualizes the experience. ZOTTO emphasizes the joy in community healing and the lasting impact of the choices we make, asking participants what kind of ancestors they will be for future generations

water riot: a cyber punk rock opera 

Derek Lee McPhatter (Chicago, IL)

Set in a near future transformed by climate change, water riot follows a troupe of misfit Blacktivists struggling to build a coalition via the rallying power of rock and roll! If they learn to work together, they can defy the Artificial Intelligence overseeing their city and find their way back to balance with the natural world. But between drone surveillance, digital temptations, and their own egos, this protest might be over before it begins. 

We are creating work on ancestral land of the Peoria, Miami, Kickapoo & Potawatomi Nations. The Potawatomi Nation is part of the Council of the Three Fires, along with the Ojibwe and Odawa Nations. The Ojibwe word mishigaama means Great Water (root for "Michigan").

The Secret Sharer (TSS)

DNAWORKS  (Pittsburgh, PA)

DNAWORKS is adapting Joseph Conrad’s 1909 novella THE SECRET SHARER (TSS) into a devised, ensemble, multimedia performance. Considered an early Queer text, TSS integrates text, visual elements, sound, and dance and will be performed in an open-concept space with audiences co-creating the environment and the narrative. In an extension of our community storycircle practice, audience members share their own stories during the performance, interspersed at critical moments in the narrative. TSS is an exploration of fragility, tenderness, and intimacy in times of personal danger and societal discrimination — the narrative of a silent, shared connection between two outsiders in the face of violence. In response to increases in bullying, murders, and suicides of LGBTQQ2SPIAA+ youth worldwide, with youth of the Global Majority at higher risk, TSS offers intergenerational, Queer-centered spaces for resiliency and healing.

"How to Make Šljivovica" 

ArtSpot Productions (Bulbancha | New Orleans, LA)

"How to Make Šljivovica" is a new performance project, with live music, led and devised by ArtSpot’s Artistic Director Kathy Randels with longtime mentor and collaborator Maja Mitić, the Artistic Director of the Nišville Theatre Festival in Niš, Serbia. Working with legendary musicians Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes and Ben Schenck from Bulbancha | New Orleans and members of the Nišville Jam Orchestra, from Niš, “Šljivovica” weaves together stories and music from these two distinct cultures using the storytelling tradition that takes place on small family farms and backyards in Serbia while sitting with the “kazan” (Serbian for cauldron or still) all night long, to make sure this plum brandy is made safely and tastefully. Our primary presenting partners are the New Orleans Jazz Museum and the Nišville Jazz Festival. And our primary research and creation partner and residency host is Maki’s Orchard, Maja’s small family home in Grejač, Serbia, south of Niš.

Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia

Sugar Vendil/Isogram (Brooklyn, NY)

Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia is a memoir of a Filipinx American childhood that interweaves chamber music, dance, and nonlinear theater. By excavating seemingly insignificant but deeply ingrained memories, Antonym envisions the future as an escape from pain and ponders how we can possess painful memories without being beholden to them. Using field recordings of New York City to create a rich sonic landscape, the four seasons serve as a cyclical frame and context for memory.

Agos Y Viento

AniMalayaWorks (in collaboration with Quilom)  (Philadelphia, PA)

Agos y Viento is a site-specific community-engaged physical theater that draws from immigration stories, specifically from the Filipino and Mexican migratory experiences. This collaboration is led by Filipina ARTivist Anito Gavino, founder of AniMalayaWorks and transdisciplinary Mexican artist and director of the Quilombo Arts and Culture Laboratory Carlos Castaneira. Collectively, they devise a work that bridges stories between Mexico and the Philippines, ancestral and diaspora, and Houston to Philadelphia. 

This research-to-performance work tackles the concept of home. Our “home” moves with Agos (Tagalog word for Tides) and Viento (Spanish word for Wind). This work merges a diversity of theater elements to center our Indigenous ways of theater-making, honor the maximalism unapologetically inherent in Mexican and Philippine storytelling modes, and foreground our immigrant stories and cultural histories, often invisible in contemporary theater.

Shiv's Project

coLAB Arts (New Brunswick, NJ)

Shiv’s Project explores the complex interplay of mental health challenges within the South Asian community, particularly as these issues were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The play is being developed in partnership with local mental health advocacy organization Shiv’s Third Eye and the Indian Heritage and Cultural Association, through oral histories focused on interviews with family members and friends of the late Shiv Kulkarni, a Livingston, New Jersey teen who tragically lost his life to suicide in 2021. These oral histories document the personal experiences, perspectives, and coping mechanisms of those closest to Shiv, offering a window into the profound impact of his loss and the broader mental health crisis within the community. Shiv’s Project explores perceptions on mental health within New Jersey’s South Asian community, and generational understanding of its importance and impact.

In Their Words, Through Our Steps: A Documentary Performance Honoring the Lives of Veterans and Refugees

Crescent Moon Theater Productions (Hercules, CA)

'In Their Words, Through Our Steps' brings the personal stories of veterans and refugees to the stage, offering a powerful blend of theater, music, and movement. Real individuals who have endured the same conflicts share their stories in their own voices, while an ensemble of actors, musicians, and dancers breathes life into their experiences. This immersive production invites the audience to not only witness these narratives but to engage deeply with the shared humanity behind them. By exploring themes of conflict, resilience, and unity, the performance creates space for empathy and understanding across seemingly divided communities.