James La Bella

James La Bella

he/him
2023 ANT Fest Semi-Finalist, LAMBDA Playwriting Fellow
2022 R&D Semifinalist, INKubator Finalist
2021 BAPF Semi-Finalist
2020 Rod Parker Playwriting Fellow
2019 Recipient of the Betsy Carpenter Award.
Former Playwriting Apprentice at Powerhouse Theatre.

Jameslabella.com
For inquiries, contact me at James_Labella1@gmail.com :)

Plays

  • The Painted Handgun: An Epic, Postmodern-ish Paranoia Dream
    A gunshot shrieks across the shore.
    Over the course of the Summer of 1963, three people become entangled in a possible conspiracy involving a children's television show, the Vietnam War, sleep-paralysis, and a long-forgotten Jacobean Revenge Play.

    A piece of Epic Theatre done in loving-homage to the work of the post-modern fiction writers of the 1960's.

    Running Time: 5 Hours
  • American Ant Motel
    An endless Fourth of July.
    Ex-Neo-Nazi Valerie is welcoming her son home after a five year period of estrangement.
    She's just joined a new hate group, and he wants to be President.
  • Night Flowers in Every Color
    It’s 2am. 
It’s fall. 
You’re in the football stadium of a prominent New England university and you’re here to see three lectures spanning three decades. A horde of ghosts pours onto the field. You order a cider. The three monologists appear. 
     
    Mr. Lettuce, fragmented from the AIDs Epidemic, falls into a far-right conspiracy on a gay sex website at the turn of the millennium. The fictitious...
    It’s 2am. 
It’s fall. 
You’re in the football stadium of a prominent New England university and you’re here to see three lectures spanning three decades. A horde of ghosts pours onto the field. You order a cider. The three monologists appear. 
     
    Mr. Lettuce, fragmented from the AIDs Epidemic, falls into a far-right conspiracy on a gay sex website at the turn of the millennium. The fictitious organization from the conspiracy plots an event at a child-beauty pageant run by the reluctant Ms. Beatific in early-2001. One of the pageant girls, now an Afghanistan veteran, plans her The Office-themed wedding in the same hotel in 2010.
     
    Three moments of political paranoia, American pageantry, and national fracturing collide and weave together into one raging river.
     
    You’re holding your cup of cider. It feels warm. Everyone is a haunted house here.
  • Mrs. Wrath
    Mrs. Wrath finds a tongue in her pool, then a hand, then a penis. She tries to solve the unsolvable as body parts continue to turn up, guests arrive and depart, and she lives through a non-insignificant number of national tragedies.
  • Squeaky Fromme Love Song
    Chick Baby's brother just died, his friend Celeste is pregnant with the Messiah, and the Squeaky Fromme Trial is in full swing. A pitch-black comedy about the fetish of destruction hidding in our search for meaning.