Producers Sam Gravitte, Sammy Lopez, and Ibi Owolabi, with the support of original founders Michael Urie, Doug Nevin and Nick Mayo, are thrilled to announce programming for Pride Plays 2025 in Washington, DC, collaborating with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Maria Manuela Goyanes, Artistic Director; Kimberly E. Douglas, Managing Director). Pride Plays 2025 will take place during Washington, DC’s WorldPride celebration, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pride celebrations in Washington, DC.
Pride Plays, a festival celebrating the rich tapestry of LGBTQIA+ experiences through the power of live theater, will kick off June 3 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, with artists including Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, directed by Zhailon Levingston (Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Broadway’s Chicken & Biscuits), and Sylvian Oswald’s PONY, directed by Will Davis (Men In Boats); as well as Arturo Luíz Soria (Ni Ni Madre), Danilo Gambini, Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Ibi Owolabi, Jason Tseng, Emily Hartford, KJ Moran Velz, and Charlotte La Nasa.
“Bringing The Normal Heart to the Pride Plays stage alongside a slate of bold new works is a powerful reminder of our lineage,” said the Pride Plays producers and original founders. “Larry Kramer’s words ignited a movement, and at a time when queer rights are once again under attack, his work reminds us of what’s at stake. Uplifting this landmark play in conversation with the next generation of queer stories is exactly what Pride Plays was built for: to honor where we’ve been while demanding the futures we deserve.”
The lineup of Pride Plays 2025 is as follows:
PONY
By Sylvan Oswald
Directed by Will Davis
Tuesday, June 3 and Thursday, June 5 at 7:30pm
On the Mainstage
When Pony, a formerly incarcerated trans guy, moves to a small rural town to start a new life, he quickly becomes entangled with its isolated community. He starts to fall for a waitress who is obsessed with a local murder; his social worker doesn’t understand him; and he is pursued by a young trans man who thinks Pony could be the father he always wanted. Amid this whirlwind of fear and desire, Pony must find the strength to confront the stories he’s been told about masculinity, violence, and self-worth.
THE NORMAL HEART
By Larry Kramer
Directed by Zhailon Levingston
Wednesday, June 4 and Friday, June 6 at 7:30pm
On the Mainstage
Originally published in 1985 and celebrated in a passionate and eloquent 2011 Broadway revival, this definitive edition of Larry Kramer’s play features an updated version of the script, as well as notes on both the original production and the revival.
A searing drama about public and private indifference to the AIDS plague and one man’s lonely fight to awaken the world to the crisis, The Normal Heart was based on Kramer’s real-life experience. Produced to acclaim in New York, London and Los Angeles, the play centers on Ned Weeks, a gay activist enraged at the indifference of public officials and the gay community. While trying to save the world from itself, Ned confronts the personal toll of AIDS when his lover dies of the disease.
NOVIOS
By Arturo Luíz Soria
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Tuesday, June 3 and Thursday, June 5 at 7:30pm
In The Rehearsal Hall
A motley crew of cooks hurl insults, grab ass, and compete to be the most macho en el calor of a gringo’s kitchen but, when a new dishwasher arrives rupturing the haze of machismo and sparking a love affair with Luiz, the youngest amongst them, Gallo, the head chef and guardian to Luiz, must do what she can to wrangle the men before the train goes off the rails, jeopardizing her whole operation.
THE HOTEL/MAKEDA – A BALTIMORE CYCLE PLAY
By Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi
Directed by Ibi Owolabi
Wednesday, June 4 and Friday, June 6 at 7:30pm
In The Rehearsal Hall
Nearly a decade after World War II, Genieve Adams has made The Hotel Makeda one of Baltimore’s most celebrated destinations. But, even with all of its success, family secrets, the legacy of slavery, and familiar regret threaten to tear it apart. Can Gen protect her family and her business, or will she be consumed by the shifting alliances of those she holds most dear? The Hotel/ Makeda: A Baltimore Cycle Play examines a businesswoman’s life as she navigates love, history, family, and systemic pressures and it invites us to reflect on what exactly do we mean by the American Dream.
FEAR & WONDER
By Jason Tseng
Directed by Emily Hartford
Tuesday, June 3 and Thursday, June 5 at 7:30pm
In The Workshop Studio
In a forbidden love story, Jabez and Ryan, two boys of color, navigate a Christian summer camp together in the early 2000s. Their friendship quickly grows into a budding romance that they try to keep alive after returning home. Challenged by their parents, the hazards of landline phones, and their faith, they are forced to secrecy. Finding solace in each other and their shared love of music, theology, and Harry Potter; the reality of living in between two worlds threaten to keep them apart as they navigate their blossoming queer identities and teenage angst in their conservative faith communities.
MOTHER MARY
By KJ Moran Velz
Directed by Charlotte La Nasa
Presented Wednesday, June 4 and Friday, June 6 at 7:30pm
In The Workshop Studio
Taxi driver Jo Cruz knows the streets of Boston like the back of her hand, but no road map can prepare her for meeting Mary O’Sullivan, a Catholic school teacher with a boyfriend and a strict Irish mother. Despite rising tensions between their Irish and Puerto Rican communities, Mary and Jo start connecting over daily rides to work – sharing hot dogs, library books, and a lineage of islands under Catholic and colonial rule. But their new friendship takes a turn when Mary asks Jo to take her on a risky road trip where there’s no going back. A new romcom about choice, the women who choose, and the sinners and saints that make Boston home.
In New York, Pride Plays 2025 will partner with longtime collaborator Rattlestick Theater (Will Davis, Artistic Director; Maegan Morris, Managing Director) to present a Pride 2025 Celebration on Monday, June 23, 2025. New York programming will be announced shortly.
PLAYWRIGHT BIOS
LARRY KRAMER (1935-2020) founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1981 with five friends; the organization remains one of the world’s largest providers of services to those with AIDS. In 1987, he founded ACT UP, the AIDS advocacy and protest organization, which has been responsible for the development and release of almost every life-saving treatment for HIV/AIDS. Kramer was the author of The Normal Heart, which was selected as one of the 100 Greatest Plays of the Twentieth Century by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and is the longest running play in the history of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater. He was also the author of The Destiny of Me, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won an Obie and the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play. Both The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me are published by the Samuel French imprint of Concord Theatricals. Kramer’s screenplay adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, a film he also produced, was nominated for an Academy Award. His writing about AIDS is published in Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. His novel Faggots is one of the bestselling of all gay novels. He was a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and he was the first openly gay person and the first creative artist to be honored by an award from Common Cause. The American People, Kramer ‘s reimagining of American history, was begun 1975 and published in 2015.Kramer was the winner of a 2013 PEN Literary Award, receiving the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist. A graduate of Yale, Kramer lived in New York and Connecticut with his lover, architect/designer David Webster.
SYLVAN OSWALD (Playwright) writes plays and texts that explore queer and trans identity through metatheatricality and formal irreverence. Recent projects include the theatrical essay Trainers (Gate Theatre, London) and the performance text High Winds (Fusebox Festival, Austin and TBA, Portland). Plays include A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theatre, San Diego) Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago), Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb, New York). Sylvan has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and residencies at MacDowell, Sundance/Ucross, and Yaddo. He is an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and an alum of New Dramatists. Pony has just been published by Northwestern University Press.
ARTURO LUÍZ SORIA (Playwright) is an Obie and Offie Award-winning actor and writer. His solo show Ni Mi Madre premiered at Rattlestick Theater and went on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, earning multiple award nominations. He is developing The White Whale Journal and La Kasa Mita’echo through commissions from Rattlestick and Lucille Lortell’s Alcove program. Soria is adapting the novel Bodega Dreams for screen with Black Bar Mitzvah Productions and Votiv Films. Theatre: Broadway’s The Inheritance; Wet Brain, Hit the Wall. TV/Film: Insatiable, The Blacklist, East New York, Found; and the upcoming feature, Mermaid. A MacDowell Fellow and Hillman Grad Mentorship alum, he holds an MFA from Yale and a BFA from DePaul.
DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI (Playwright). Dubbed the Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa, Lady Dane is a Black Nigerian, Cuban, Indigenous, American Performance Artist, Author, Poet, Educator, Advocate, producer, a Helen Hayes Award winning Playwright (Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem), a 2021 Helen Merrill Award Winner, Film Maker, Advocate, Dramaturg, a 3x Helen Hayes Award nominated choreographer (2016, 2018, 2023), and a Princess Grace Honoria Award winner. She is the co-founder and Co-director of the Black Trans Prayer Book. She is the curator and associate producer of Long Wharf Theatre’s Black Trans Women At The Center: An Evening of Short Plays and is an artistic ensemble member of the company as well.
KJ MORAN VELZ (Playwright) is a Boston-born playwright, librettist, and educator now based in Alexandria, Virginia. Her work has been performed at Signature Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Imagination Stage, NextStop Theatre, Flying V, Adventure Theatre MTC, and Theater Alliance. MOTHER MARY will receive its world premiere this fall at Boston Playwrights’ Theater. She graduated from Georgetown University with degrees in Spanish and Theater and Performance Studies, and she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Drama Therapy at Lesley University. Much of her work – both clinical and artistic – focuses on the intersections of language, religion, race, and ethnicity.
JASON TSENG (Playwright) is a queer, non-binary Chinese-American playwright, with roots in New York City and Washington DC. Their plays have been presented, developed by various theater companies and festivals across the nation, including Flux Theatre Ensemble, Judson Arts, Mission to dit(Mars), Second Generation, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, LA Queer New Works
Festival, the BIPOC Playwrights Festival, New American Voices Playwrights Festival (Semi-Finalist), Southern Queer Playwrights Festival (Hon. Mention), Eugene O’Neil Playwrights Conference (Semi-Finalist), Pan Asian Repertory Theater and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Selected Playwright). Tseng serves as a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Their notable works include Rizing, Like Father, Same Same, Ghost Money, Fear & Wonder, and The Other Side.
ABOUT PRIDE PLAYS
Launched in 2019 by the original founders Michael Urie, Doug Nevin, and Nick Mayo, in partnership with Rattlestick Theater, the initial festival hosted 19 separate works and involved more than 200 artists over five days. Pride Plays then presented a virtual festival in 2020, along with several online workshops. Pride Plays has also supported LGBTQIA+ creative initiatives, including Donja R. Love’s Write Out Loud program. In 2024, Sam Gravitte and Sammy Lopez joined as producers of Pride Plays.
Last year, Pride Plays returned to in-person programming, celebrating with readings of Pure Glitter, by Douglas Lyons; Debt, by Adrian Einspanier & reid tang; and Saint Brigid, by Hannah Benitez.
Pride Plays’ mission is to celebrate and platform queer-themed works, introduce new voices to the theatrical ecosystem, and support the next generation of LGBTQIA+ artists. Through their work, Pride Plays hopes to foster a deeper understanding of and appreciation for queer stories.
ABOUT WOOLLY MAMMOTH THEATRE COMPANY
The Tony Award-winning Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates badass theater that highlights the stunning, challenging, and tremendous complexity of our world. For over 40 years, Woolly has maintained a high standard of artistic rigor while simultaneously daring to take risks, innovate, and push beyond perceived boundaries. One of the few remaining theaters in the country to maintain a company of artists, Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theater. Plays premiered at Woolly have gone on to productions at hundreds of theaters all over the world and have had lasting impacts on the field. Currently co-led by Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly E. Douglas, Woolly is located in Washington, DC, equidistant from the Capitol and the White House. This unique location influences Woolly’s investment in actively working towards an equitable, participatory, and creative democracy.
Woolly Mammoth stands upon occupied, unceded territory: the ancestral homeland of the Nacotchtank whose descendants belong to the Piscataway peoples. Furthermore, the foundation of this city, and most of the original buildings in Washington, DC, were funded by the sale of enslaved people of African descent and built by their hands.
ABOUT RATTLESTICK THEATER
Founded in 1994, Rattlestick Theater has been steadfast in producing diverse, provocative, and expansive new work to foster the future voices of the American theater. From its historic West Village theater, Rattlestick has produced the first plays and early works of some of today’s leading voices, including Martyna Majok (Ironbound), Diana Oh (mylingerieplay), and Heidi Schreck (There Are No More Big Secrets). Rattlestick is where some of our nation’s most celebrated playwrights are encouraged to test their boldest ideas, including Dael Orlandersmith (Until the Flood), José Rivera (Massacre, Sing to Your Children), and Samuel D. Hunter (Lewiston/ Clarkston, nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play). Now led by Artistic Director Will Davis, the first transgender person to run an off-Broadway theater, Rattlestick is redoubling its efforts to support energetic theater that responds to the complexities of our culture through the radical distribution of resources toward the creation of new theatrical work.
