April 17 - May 2, 2027
Jen teaches third grade and runs on coffee and bad sleep. Arthur designs playgrounds and carries an old grief he cannot shake, while his teenage daughter Clara is writing songs she isn't yet brave enough to sing. A tender, funny, searching new play about the teachers who memorize every name, the fathers who mistake protection for love, and the students who are asked to carry more than they should.
Emma Watkins (Playwright) is a playwright & educator based in New York. Her play Pretend it’s Pretend will be produced by LCT3 in 2027. She has been the runner-up for New Dramatists’ Princess Grace Award and the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award and was included on the Playwrights’ Center’s Venturous List. Her plays have been developed by Lincoln Center Theater, Ashland New Plays Festival, Theatre Masters, and PlayPenn. She’s been published by Concord Theatricals/Sam French and Routledge.
Emma is under commission from the Atlantic Theatre Company, South Coast Repertory and Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan and is a New Georges Affiliated Artist.
Her teaching spans playwriting, Shakespeare through Performance, documentary and devised theatre, and undergraduate academic writing. She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from UT Austin, an M.A. with Distinction in Welsh & Celtic Studies from Cardiff University (Fulbright Fellow), and a B.A. magna cum laude in English from Princeton University.
Beyond writing, she loves foraging for chanterelles, shape-note singing, and listening for hermit thrushes on the Appalachian Trail.
Craig Willis (Director/Producing Artistic Director) has an MFA in Directing and a PhD in Dramatic Literature/Theory from the University of Oregon. In 2008, he received an Oregon Arts Commission fellowship to train with Anne Bogart and SITI Company. Craig’s OCT directing credits include: Deborah Zoe Laufer's The Last Yiddish Speaker, Heidi Schreck's What The Constitution Means To Me, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Jonathan Tolins’ Buyer & Cellar, Jen Silverman’s The Roommate, Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori's Fun Home, David Ives's Venus in Fur, Steve Yockey's Blackberry Winter, Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years, Aaron Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird, Nathan Alan Davis's Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Lauren Gunderson’s I And You, Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, Nina Raine’s Tribes, Adam Gwon's Ordinary Days, Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next To Normal, Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty’s Avenue Q, Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall, Itamar Moses’s The Four of Us, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R & J, Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins, Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, David Auburn’s Proof, and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. His scenic designs for OCT include: The Flick, Becky’s New Car, Ordinary Days, The Seagull, and I Am My Own Wife.
Synopsis
Jen teaches third grade and runs on coffee and bad sleep. Arthur designs playgrounds and carries an old grief he cannot shake, while his teenage daughter Clara is writing songs she isn't yet brave enough to sing. A tender, funny, searching new play about the teachers who memorize every name, the fathers who mistake protection for love, and the students who are asked to carry more than they should.
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