Mildred Inez Lewis

Mildred Inez Lewis

Mildred Inez Lewis writes and directs for theatre, film and the digital space. Recent honors include the AGE Legacy Award (2023), Samuel French OOB Festival finals (2022), Grand Jury Award from Fusion (2022), the 2021 L.B. Williams award and Humanitas' PLAY LA (2018).

A member of the Dramatists Guild, she writes for Antaeus Theatre Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA Playwrights Unit,...
Mildred Inez Lewis writes and directs for theatre, film and the digital space. Recent honors include the AGE Legacy Award (2023), Samuel French OOB Festival finals (2022), Grand Jury Award from Fusion (2022), the 2021 L.B. Williams award and Humanitas' PLAY LA (2018).

A member of the Dramatists Guild, she writes for Antaeus Theatre Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA Playwrights Unit, PlayGround-LA and Towne Street Theatre. She is an associate artist with Rogue Artists Ensemble.

Current comissions from ReproArts and the Lucille Lortel. Upcoming productions in 2023 include JUKED a commissioned adaptation of Sophocles' ELECTRA for A Different Myth (Asheville, NC). Mildred will also create work for Ohlone College students. 2022 productions included THE MUSEUM ANNEX for Central Works (Berkeley, CA), /kom'plisit/ (staged reading) at Moving Arts (Los Angeles), BONWIT TELLER'S REVENGE for The Workshop Theatre (NYC), and Purity, UnPledged for the Playground Experiment's Faces of America.

Her plays have been published by Applause Books, Broadway Play Publishing. LazyBee (UK), Breathe Fire literary magazine and elsewhere.

Plays

  • Louisiana Shoal
    Facing down a Cat 6 hurricane in a lake near Louisiana's Cancer Alley, two women hunker down to fight to reclaim the land.
  • The Bridge, Again?
    A comedy that takes on the "London Bridge is Falling Down" nursery rhyme. Set in the 1800s, it features two women whose husbands work on the bridge. One woman secures a long sought friendship when she wins the battle of what material the bridge should be rebuilt with.
  • /kom'plisit/
    Based loosely on the life of Ghislaine Maxwell, this play tells story of Amanda, who's spent her life partnered with Jay at an investment fund. She is trying to break away, but fails.

    The story focuses on the group of female executives around Amanda who ensure that the machine around Jay that produces extraordinary profits and allows him to abuse women keeps running.
  • Juked
    An adaptation of Sophocles' Electra set in a 1940s South Carolina drink house, part of a chain of illegal juke joints that has made the Memnons, an African American clan wealthy and powerful. In this piece Lectra tries, but fails to enlist her sister to confront their mother who long ago murdered their dad.
  • Moving Conversations
    Three men in a newly formed carpool fight to hold onto their sliver of the American pie.
  • $10 and a Tambourine
    It's 1925. Real life evangelist Sis. Aimee Semple McPherson is visited by the ghost of Rev. William J. Seymour, a mentor, and William Mulholland on the first anniversary of her radio station, KFSG. They force her to choose a vision of Los Angeles.
  • We Dreamed Ourselves
    As an "aging at 38" hip hop star and his main man confront a PR crisis, they are also forced to deal with how the world is shifting around them.
  • We Jump Broom
    Two enslaved women decide to jump the broom and seal their love affair into a marriage.
  • The Peace of Home
    An interracial gay couple confronts some difficult truths during quarantine.
  • Acknowledge
    An upscale parent pod in Tucson, AZ starts with a land acknowledgment, but ends with a vigorous debate over the influence of Native American women on the suffragettes movement.
  • My Body, An Offering
    The morning after some noisy sex, an African American wife explains to her visiting best friend what was happening. Her husband suffered a racist microaggression. She offered herself for comfort. It's not abuse. It's complicated.
  • Between Aisle 3 and a Half
    An Afro Latinx woman reveals her culture to another shopper between the Hispanic and Soul Food aisles in her local supermarket.
  • How's the Store?
    An older Korean brother paints a Black Lives Matter
  • Sold As Is
    In order to sell their childhood home for the best price, two sisters remove all traces of blackness and it works!
  • Submerged
    Two women find each other online via a fragile connection after the climate crisis.
  • Roost First, Then Fly
    Two hens and a rooster successfully rediscover their ability to fly and escape from an oppressive chicken farm.
  • Piece Work
    On a short break at a LA sweat shop, a new worker, Brooklyn, is hurting and wants to leave. Her three coworkers try to get her to stay. At the end, with no realistic shot at other opportunities, Brooklyn stays.
  • Dedications
    Four women in East Los Angeles prepare dedications for incarcerated loved ones. Their hope is to get air time on the legendary Art Laboe radio show, which has connected people in prison with friends and family for decades.
  • We Wuz Robbed!
    Two diehard female LA Dodgers fans come to protest the cancelled 1994 baseball season on what would have the first day of their World Series.
  • The Last Ride
    After a cataclysmic tsunami, three Los Angeles survivors try to find their way home from what remains of a Catholic Church's carnival grounds.
  • The Gift
    When a young Yankee husband gifts his southern wife a slave, everything falls apart.

    Rights inquiries to
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  • Spillage
    A high school principal and two janitors clean up the gym after a school shooting.
  • CowGirls
    A horse riding lesbian couple from Compton meet for the last time as lovers in their regular motel room.
  • Turn On, Tune In
    The family that drugs together, stays together. When siblings Joel and Jenna
  • Vacuum Seal
    After an election, a mentor seeks to groom her protege with alternative facts.
  • Visitation
    A newly pregnant young woman who is working as a convenience clerk enlists her foster sister, a college student, to help her make the arduous trip to visit her incarcerated boyfriend.
  • Chained Labor
    After two stepsisters attend a #BlackLivesMatter protest, they return to find their mother anxious and angry about their participation. During their confrontation, the eldest daughter learns that she was born in a prison hospital while her mother was shackled.
  • Bad Paper
    When Xavier Foshay, African American patriarch and founder of the Foshay Corporation, dies, his granddaughter Angelique reluctantly returns to run the company. Xavier co-founded the company with current firm leaders Mr. Joe B. and Harold.

    Foshay faces more than a leadership transition. The company is in a gentrifying part of Los Angeles. Angelique has big problems. She secretly used the company...
    When Xavier Foshay, African American patriarch and founder of the Foshay Corporation, dies, his granddaughter Angelique reluctantly returns to run the company. Xavier co-founded the company with current firm leaders Mr. Joe B. and Harold.

    Foshay faces more than a leadership transition. The company is in a gentrifying part of Los Angeles. Angelique has big problems. She secretly used the company for collateral for several personal loans. When she misses a payment, the bank calls the loans. The firm has to come up with $30,000 in two weeks.

    Angelique brings in her college friend Ben to help. Ben's grandfather acted as a shadow buyer for Foshay to get around a restrictive covenant that barred blacks from owning property in the neighborhood.

    The firm is saved, but Ben tries to take the firm into government collections. He is ousted, but Angelique's ongoing financial problems force Foshay to make an alliance with Ernesto, a Mexican American employee who has ambitions of his own.
  • Night Sweats
    After a father's death, a middle aged daughter moves in with her mom, but who's really helping whom?
  • Portland Summer Waltz
    A young newlywed and former phone sex operator from the south, follows her husband to Oregon, only to find that she has married into the White Aryan Nation. Bummer.
  • Not Peace But A Sword
    Two women, long time friends and business partners, one single and the other married, deal with the aftermath of the married woman's murky sexual experience with her husband.
  • the end of everything
    Very loosely inspired by the life of Brooksley Born, the federal commissioner who tried unsuccessfully to blow the whistle on the 2008 mortgage crisis, the end of everything asks why powerful women lose their voices at critical moments.

    In the play, Tyler Stallworth uncovers the ticking bomb of mortgage derivatives along with her protege Shayna Gross-Mendel. Her efforts to do something about...
    Very loosely inspired by the life of Brooksley Born, the federal commissioner who tried unsuccessfully to blow the whistle on the 2008 mortgage crisis, the end of everything asks why powerful women lose their voices at critical moments.

    In the play, Tyler Stallworth uncovers the ticking bomb of mortgage derivatives along with her protege Shayna Gross-Mendel. Her efforts to do something about them are defeated when her colleagues betray her and her husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

    The play ends on a hopeful note that Tyler will regroup and reenter the fray, battered, wiser and whole. It is an exploration of politics, power and family.
  • Bleed Black Bleed Blue Bleed
    Two African American detectives wrestle with how to respond when one is beaten up by some off duty white officers.
  • Daily Habits Mask Pain
    A middle aged couple confronts their darkest fears when the husband tries to prevent his wife from visiting their son, a convicted pedophile, in prison. This script is published by LazyBee Scripts.