Evey Reidy

*Top 10% of submissions for the Women's Prize for Playwriting 2025 (UK)*

This is a love story between ghosts and the people who dig them up.

Underneath Liverpool Street station, over pavement that thousands of Londoners, commuters, and tourists rush over daily, once lay the earthly remains of thousands: this was the Bethlehem Burial Ground. An estimated 20,000 people were buried on the site, primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of whom were victims of the plague, the poor, outsiders with no connections (often called “strangers”), or people who died while patients at Bethlehem Hospital, more commonly known as “Bedlam.” Things That Return is the story – one version of the story – of the 2015 excavation, during which 3,300 skeletons were removed and reburied during the Crossrail building project, and the many tales those skeletons might have yearned to tell.

Research and Development funded by an Artistic Research Fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library
*Under development*

Set shortly after the location of the Witch Trials’ execution site was positively identified in 2016, More Weight, or I Saw Goody Proctor at the Gift Shop tells the story of contemporary citizens in Salem, Massachusetts, who find themselves haunted (metaphorically, and perhaps literally) by the ghosts of the unjustly executed citizens of their unassuming but infamous town. Louise, a middle-aged woman whose family has lived in Salem for generations, runs a local café and spends her days off volunteering at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. Emma and Marc, well-meaning but often misguided millennial entrepreneurs hoping to open a witch-themed cocktail bar and event space next door to Louise’s café, are newcomers to Salem whose business plans immediately strike Louise as being in poor taste. Throughout the play, Louise and Marc clash over the couple’s tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the town’s history with witches, while Emma’s surprising connection to the executed women of Salem takes her life in directions she never expected. Throughout, the executed women serve as a kind of Greek chorus, weaving in and out of the Salem of their past and our present, attempting to reclaim the story of their lives—and finding that perhaps it is too late.

A dead girl from Denmark is enjoying a quiet afterlife in space—lounging on the lunar landscape, reading Virginia Woolf, and generally decompressing after a confusing end. Then her ex shows up.

You know the story: he’s a melancholy Danish prince, she’s… well, nobody is quite sure what her whole deal is. But they have a whole afterlife to figure it out.

Ophelia in Space is the next chapter in a (too?) familiar story, exploring deserved and undeserved love, the power of loss, and the legacies we leave behind.

Long-Listed for the 2023 Masterclass Pitch Your Play Contest (London, UK)

On May 8th, 1889, Vincent van Gogh voluntarily committed himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in St. Rémy. While there, he produced some of his most famous works, painting feverishly as he grappled with painful and disturbing episodes that left him disoriented and depressed. But in the midst of suffering, van Gogh told his trusted brother Theo he found "true friendship" in St. Rémy -- friendships that inspired his painting and lifted his spirits in even his darkest moments. Using (some of) Vincent's own words from his collected letters paired with invented dialogue, Sky Pale Green imagines those friendships shared by Vincent and the other patients who found themselves seeking healing at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole.

In 1607, in the small cathedral of Wells, Somerset, the Lady of May had a problem. Thomasine White, a local barber-surgeon's wife and a somewhat-reluctant Lady of May, was all ready to lead a dance around the May Pole to the delight of her neighbors -- most of her neighbors, anyway. Her problem was the city's puritan constable, John Hole, a wealthy and notoriously rigid man set on stopping the Maytime festivities before they had even begun.

Based on actual seventeenth century court records, Very Small Trouble is a historical re-imagining of what happens when the "culture wars" come to a small, stubborn community and the women who try to bring it back together.