Jayne Deely

Prodigal friend Kap has finally (and somewhat reluctantly) returned home to Queens for best friend Sam’s wedding weekend. Unbeknownst to Kap, getting married isn’t Sam’s only goal for the weekend. Ish and Mel are firmly placed in Kap and Sam’s respective corners; their cautious optimism about the reunion doesn’t last long. As four disappointed millennials staring down forty return to the scene of the crime that was a 90’s childhood, they wade through their formative influences, from talking Jack Russell Terriers to TLC, all in the shadow of the event that altered the course of their lives forever. But before long, the layer of nostalgia they are all skating on begins to give under the weight of broken promises, festering resentments, and one very unexpected guest, ultimately revealing growing cracks in the world as they knew it.

Millie is back home in Mobile, AL for a prestigious fellowship she couldn’t pass up. Her east coast born and raised Puerto Rican partner, Avery, is recovering from gender affirming top surgery. When quasi-aunt to Millie and righteous woman of God Teresa overhears Millie talking to the pharmacist at CVS, she assumes Avery has breast cancer and puts events in motion that turn everyone’s lives upside down: cue the casseroles, care packages, and checkbooks – a gofundme to SAVE AVERY! "I never asked for a gofundme" is a new queer comedy about gender, family, and religion that asks what it means to be worthy of care.

unqle play is the story of uncle and fave, both gay, one sober, one not, one dying, one not, navigating their relationship, their history, and their shared legacy within the context of one epic last conversation. It is a 90-minute negotiation of terms of what it means to tell someone’s story, how much we can ask of those who leave us, and what it means to say goodbye.

Using the shared love language of the musical theatre canon, the somewhat shared language of recovery, and a conflicting, sometimes fraught understanding of what it means to be a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, guncle play is a highly theatrical exploration of love, grief, and the shifting values of the queer community. As we transition (pun intended) into a world in which gay marriage is legal (for now) and the fight for trans rights has begun to take center stage, we watch two people who love each other fiercely come together and fall apart as niece moves into their moment and uncle faces the rising tide of both mortality and an existential feeling of being erased.

Experience this two-hander vaudevillian journey of love, grief, Sondheim, and community through time, a titanic debate of queerness within multiple generations of the same family that asks ‘how do we both honor the work of those on whose shoulders we stand while also taking ownership of our moment?’

We all need a little help sometimes. Identity is confusing. Dating is HARD. Some of us go to therapy. And some of us – wait until it gets bad enough that our dead abuela sends three Puerto Rican ancestors/pop culture icons our way on Christmas Eve to get us back on track by taking us on a tour of our past, present, and future.
Meet Zee. It was just supposed to be three dates, but Walter Mercado has other plans.

A spin on the classic Christmas Carol story about queerness, Puerto Rico, friendship, and accepting a helping hand from the ancestors.

Oh, and sobre todo mucho, mucho, mucho ...

Not yet.

Lee is one of the CIA’s finest assets, but the grind is starting to get to her. Her only friends are her boss at the CIA and her arch-nemesis MI6 agent Olivia Winston Davies. When their newest mission sends them to a small town in Georgia to infiltrate a community theatre posing as something called a – dramaturg? – she wants nothing to do with it. But she soon realizes that there’s more to saving the world than she imagined, and they will need all of their training, instincts, and maybe even a little help from her friends, to make it to opening night.

Max is a precocious kid, overachieving and a little anxious, sure, but mostly well adjusted. She’s got a lot going on, but she’s on top of it. Adult supervision not required. Besides, it’s 1999, what could go wrong?

Dr. C is a child psychologist recently dubbed the ‘child whisperer;’ her professional life is on a steady upward trajectory. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for her personal life. Enter Max.

When Max starts receiving threatening notes at school, she embarks on a hunt for the culprit in this pre-Y2K whodunit that what asks us what it means to be a kid in a chaotic world, and leaves us wondering if we’ve been looking in the wrong place all along.

When a college senior begins a crusade against the head of her department for bringing a prominent white male lecturer in after promising to diversify the program, she places herself at the forefront of a fight she might not be willing to go all in on. A classroom play about white fragility, moral outrage, and the pervasiveness of privilege that asks what 'the work' really looks like.

A normal zoom game night because game nights on zoom mean you're fine.

Written as a Beckett inspired play in May of 2020 for a class at Indiana University Bloomington taught by Liz Duffy Adams.