C. Meaker

Set in the deep woods of Appalachia, three girls meet to conduct a serpent-handling service in order to speak to their recently deceased father. Using elements of horror and Appalachian folklore, the play uses a queer, Southern gothic lens to explore the intersections of faith and environment, shame and grief.

Then: Fifty years ago, in the town of Grimdale, the Sleuth Club solved the Mystery of the Haunted Carnival, an achievement that earned each of them jobs and security within Grimdale’s rising-star company, The Factory.

Now: At The Factory retirement party for the remaining Sleuth Club members, their children and grandchildren gather to celebrate. But a loving reenactment of the original mystery uncovers a long-buried truth — the Sleuth Club pinned the case on the wrong costumed-villains. The generations must unite to find the truth, grieve what’s been lost, and figure out how to rebuild over toxic sludge.

Ghosts in the Graveyard is a multigenerational play about grief, family, and the terror of capitalism.

2008. Before the recession truly begins and Obama was elected for the first time. Five recent college grads are charged with keeping a slew of hormonal teenagers alive at an all-girls summer camp. Saddled with crippling student loans and terror over what they’ll do next in life, the counselors forego their actual work to have one last hurrah before adulthood kicks in. But the camp has many mysteries around its history and there are more monsters here than their looming debts. What starts as a substance-fueled party, soon becomes a battle for the soul. The Lost Girls is a horror-comedy about privilege and purpose, feminism and fear that’s part ghost story and part history play about elections and that specific time of life between college and the real world before we realized how bad things could get.

***A previous version of this script was produced and performed at Annex Theater (Seattle, WA) in 2016 directed by the talented Kaytlin McIntyre. The previous production was nominated for a Gregory Award for Best New Play. This production was fantastic, but overlapped with the 2016 election, which meant some of the moments didn’t feel right anymore, in particular the previous draft’s neat ending. Motivated by the challenges of this time and wanting to wrestle with further complexities these characters might face, I re-wrote the piece.

This draft has undergone significant revision since the 2016 production. It includes an entirely new character (Shannon), several new scenes, and a drastically different tone and plot.

It’s the big day! Bride and Groom have awaited the chance to celebrate with family and friends, inviting several witnesses to their bondage ritual. The only trouble is, they can’t consummate the wedding before hitting the dance floor (fuck first, right?), setting off a terrible chain of events for the rest of their marriage. Bride and Groom must reckon with marriage’s ramifications on their gender, lives, friends, family, ghosts, and werewolves. Loosely inspired by Jacobean drama and reality TV, comma his wife explores the horrors of the marriage system and its impact on gender and heterosexuality through a rotating cast of queer performers.

After joining an office initiative to lose weight, Mickey vomits her Tiny Thin Woman Inside into existence. Inspired by the popular meme that there’s a tiny, thin woman inside every woman if she’d only stop eating “crap,” Tiny Thin Woman Inside explores the relationship women have with their bodies, media representations of weight loss, queer dating while fat, and general anxiety about the violence inherent in trying to fit into a societal norm of size.

Tuesday and Weeks make hats on the Great Barrier Reef waiting for the world to end. A play for two and a rabbit puppet.

Cass wakes up from a dream to find her hands are burnt having seen a vision of Greenville engulfed in flames. No one believes her, but smoke is on the horizon. People are leaving, never to be heard from again. Two little girls are taking action into their own hands by causing terror through their magic. Meanwhile, the Director of Tourism is determined to keep tourists out of the town for this year’s founders festival so she can impress Sean, Cass’ best friend and the town’s de-facto leader. But Sean only has eyes for Cass. Bell at the Back of Her Throat is an examination of patriarchy, witchcraft, and xenophobia through the Cassandra myth, and is kind of like Our Town, but in hell.

Bets returns to Tennessee after the death of her father as the last member of the Nokes line. Despite his attachment to a Southern town Bets found unbearable, she saw her father as a hero. That image is complicated as she finalizes his funeral arrangements. His car radio is tuned to conservative talk radio, he has secretly been attending the church that booted her when she was a teenager for being queer, and most disconcertingly, Confederate Lost Cause memorabilia is hung proudly in the living room. Daughter of the Confederacy is about confronting the problematic soil of the South and stripping the sitcom veneer of family away to make peace with where you’re from and where you’re going.

J and K probably shouldn't be together but they can't stop writing, texting, talking, and screwing as the world freezes over. J/K examines toxic love we can't stop rooting for and the sexts people read as love letters when we're gone.

Freelance puppet-maker, Nadya, and corporate Japanese translator, Mo, met on a balcony at a party seven years ago and have been in a committed, loving relationship since. On the week of Mo’s birthday, she and social anxiety-ridden Nadya dream of a strange entity named Blake, whose imaginary life began years earlier after the couples’ first fight. Through dream and reality Mo and Nadya try to figure out where their relationship is going. Or, after seven years, if it can go anywhere at all.

Frannie hits the pathetic rock-bottom when her girlfriend, Mack, disappears. Frannie’s friends, Seth and Bach attempt to get her over the post break-up hump by giving her a book about chaos theory and parallel dimensions. They resolve to build a machine to take them to one of these parallel dimensions where Frannie and Mack will unite, and they all will find peace and harmony with universe. Their journey progresses through different realities and levels of denial, with a laugh track and dance sequence, before a new woman, Josie, comes to steal Bach’s heart away from the project. The friends start to face the truths of adulthood, abandonment, and building a freaking cool machine in their living room.

Performer Erin Pike, writer C. Meaker, and director HATLO explore what contemporary popular theater has to say about women by taking words directly from the mouths of its female characters. Using the most-produced plays for the 2014-2015 seasons (assembled annually by TCG) we created a new narrative stripping the text of its context and changing it into our own. Everything that is said and every action spoken over voiceover is taken directly out of a play from that list. During the production, we received a cease and desist from Samuel French, but we performed the play anyway. Our production contributed to a very necessary conversation about gender and the American Theater.

Gingerbread is a queer fairy tale about desire. Jaz (warrior) and Giselle (cursed with virginity) are two princesses who have taken over the home of a woodcutter, Uta, waiting out the end of a costly war with the mysterious (and erotic) Wolves. A stranger, Otu, blows through the cottage doors and throws their story into disarray.

In the not-so-distant future, the nation of Inner Wall expects people to earn citizenship through childbearing and military service. As an alternate pathway to citizenship, queer people are sent to the border Wall to surveil the cities beyond, paying for perks with more days to serve. Caught between the famine and violence they observe daily beyond the Wall and news of brewing rebellion inside their own capital city, the queer denizens of the Wall must choose between continuing their service or joining the battle to earn their freedom.

Run by Zoe and Kiley, two exceptional deceptive agents, Candid International manufactures lies for every occasion: employment and rental history, convenient and confirmable alibis for secret romantic getaways, or even proof of that three week ICU stay instead of the Bahamas with family. But the arrival of a mysterious and kinky stranger named Burnadette and a sharp, but romantic, detective threatens the operation. Candid International questions what's true and the ever elusive concept of trust.

Alana and Mel are officially moving in together. While packing up in preparation for their new apartment, Alana receives a phone call from her brother, Saul informing her that their long-estranged Uncle Hal has finally surfaced and has Alzheimers. Reeling from this news and preparing for Saul to visit, she violently quits her job, breaks off her relationship with Mel, and attempts to destroy her best friendships with Jax and Jalyn. Unearthing a pact made by two scared children and facing memories of brutally attacking an old friend, Alana tries to figure out if she’s capable of following through on the pact while her friends try to bring her back from the brink. Buckshot explores the lengths we go to in order to protect our siblings and ourselves from the past and present. At times, surprisingly funny, Buckshot deals with the realities of abuse as well as common ups and downs of being in relationships. (Published Dramatic Publishing)