Playwright Aimee Dastin knows a thing or two about volleyball. I don’t know Dastin, but after seeing her fantastic This Is a PlayAbout God at District Fringe, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that she played competitive volleyball in high school.
In the U.S., nearly half a million teenage girls play high school volleyball in any given year. Only 1.3% of these ambitious athletes will make it onto coveted Division 1 (D1) college teams. The competition — and the overwhelming stress that comes with it — is real. In a fast-paced script full of memorable one-liners, Dastin brings the physical and mental toll of the sport to vivid life.
Directed by Rachel Johns, Dastin’s play is set in the locker room of a high school summer volleyball league where five girls prepare for their first scrimmage. Four of the girls have played together for years and have developed a cutthroat team ethos in which breakdowns, superstitions, and extreme expectations are normalized. Into this comes a new player, Kayla (Kayleandra White), who is mystified by the normalization of such extreme practices.
We soon learn that the team culture is driven by team captain Mackenzie (an excellent performance by Maddie Baylor), and much of the play’s drama revolves around some unknown drama that played out between Mackenzie and the former team captain, Jordan (Tristin Evans), who was kicked off the team. While Jordan is physically absent, her presence is everywhere in the locker room and in the girls’ conversations.
There are a few areas where future iterations of this play could be strengthened. Mackenzie is clearly cutthroat and single-minded, but we get no indication of what made her this way. I would have loved some more backstory on why she felt so desperate to succeed. The script paints her as a neurotic perfectionist with the single-minded goal of getting into a D1 school, but gives us no idea what drove her to be this way. In addition, the central storyline also revolves around sexual preference in a way that feels exaggerated in the relatively inclusive world of female sports.
But those quibbles aside, this is a really great play from a young playwright who deserves more opportunities to grow as an artist. Hooray to events like District Fringe for giving space to new works.
This Is a Play About God
By Aimee Dastin
Running Time: 90 minutes
Dates and Times:
- Sunday, July 12, 12:30 PM
- Thursday, July 16, 9:30 PM (masks required)
- Wednesday, July 22, 7:00 PM
- Thursday, July 23, 8:00 PM
- Saturday, July 25, 7:30 PM
- Sunday, July 26, 5:30 PM
Venue: Phoenix – UDC Mainstage Venue
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets
Genre: Comedy
Company based: Washington, DC
Directed by: Rachel Johns
Performed by: Maddie Baylor, Olivia Cholewczynski, Tristin Evans, Cate Ginsberg, Mollie Greenberg James, Alexandria Grigsby, Hannah Damanka, Kayleandra White
The program for This Is a Play About God is online here.
The complete 2026 District Fringe Festival lineup is online here.
The 2026 District Fringe Festival calendar is online here.
