Kirsten Baity

Kirsten Baity

Kirsten Baity (they/them) is a Chicago-based playwright, deviser, and intimacy director.Their work mainly explores race and gender politics within queer spaces. Their plays include Forest Friends & the First Day of Spring (Theatre Between Addresses), This Is Normal (Quaranstream Theatre Festival), Rage Isn’t Free: A participatory play (Youth Empowerment and Performance Project), and Tonin Town, Minstrelsy 2...
Kirsten Baity (they/them) is a Chicago-based playwright, deviser, and intimacy director.Their work mainly explores race and gender politics within queer spaces. Their plays include Forest Friends & the First Day of Spring (Theatre Between Addresses), This Is Normal (Quaranstream Theatre Festival), Rage Isn’t Free: A participatory play (Youth Empowerment and Performance Project), and Tonin Town, Minstrelsy 2.0 (Columbia College Chicago). They have devised plays with Goodman Theatre's Playbuild and Intergen Ensembles, About Face Youth Theatre, For Youth Inquiry, and Free Street Theater.

Plays

  • Love and Nappiness by Kirsten Baity
    Cast: 
    3
    ·
    Genre: drama
    ·
    Keyword: site specific, black hair + 1 more
    Genre: drama
    Keyword: site specific, black hair, interracial relationships
    When Meraki's white girlfriend, Emma decides to bring her to a predominately white hair salon as a bonding exercise. The experience quickly devolves into an exercise in dealing with micro-aggressions and the intricacies of interracial love.

    This play is meant to be site-specific where the audience is either in the waiting room or getting their hair done while listening in on this conversation.
  • Rage Isn't Free by Kirsten Baity
    Cast: 
    6
    ·
    Genre: comedy, immersive + 3 more
    ·
    Keyword: audience participation, a political satire + 3 more
    Genre: comedy, immersive, movement/physical, political, satire
    Keyword: audience participation, a political satire, mutual aid, Voting, American political protest
    When the people on the bottom remove their support. Those on the top will fall.
    What if there was a political system built to support the enterprises and financial gain of those who already have privilege and leave people with less power and wealth to fend for themselves. There’s only one problem with this plan. They need us to make this system work. Follow Isha and their roommates who live in a world...
    When the people on the bottom remove their support. Those on the top will fall.
    What if there was a political system built to support the enterprises and financial gain of those who already have privilege and leave people with less power and wealth to fend for themselves. There’s only one problem with this plan. They need us to make this system work. Follow Isha and their roommates who live in a world not so different from our own. Getting by on low wages and whatever they can get from nonprofits until everything changes when they realize that the vote they cast with their dollars is more powerful than their ballots.
    Join us for this performance that is half theatre half resistance training.
    This is a participatory theater experience. Audience members will be invited to interact with the players. This includes opportunities to engage and explore ideas about politics, protest, and mutual aid.

  • Minstrelsy 2.0 or AAVE Ain’t Just a Dialect and Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt. by Kirsten Baity
    Cast: 
    3–5
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, experimental + 3 more
    Genre: dark comedy, experimental, political, satire, zoom
    Social media influencer, Carmen D'Angelo, is in hot water after she posted a culturally insensitive video on TikTok. Her solution is to stage a well-crafted apology video but everything goes wrong when Yimmy gets on her live stream and calls Carmen out for her constant cultural appropriation and curses Carmen to be treated with the blatant disrespect that Black women face on a regular basis.