Rachel Calnek-Sugin

Rachel Calnek-Sugin is a writer-activist who hopes to be attentive both to injustice and to miracles. She mostly writes about women living their mundane, joyous, cruel, heartbreaking, queer, sexual lives. Her plays have had productions or development in New York, New Haven, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. She’s recently won the Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting, the Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Competition, and the Frances Bergen and Wright Memorial Prizes. She's also working on a book of stories and essays about vulnerability in its many forms. She graduated from Yale University with a double major in English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Currently, she works with refugee youth in New Haven, CT.

Rachel Calnek-Sugin is a writer-activist who hopes to be attentive both to injustice and to miracles. She mostly writes about women living their mundane, joyous, cruel, heartbreaking, queer, sexual lives. Her plays have had productions or development in New York, New Haven, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. She’s recently won the Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting, the Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Competition, and the Frances Bergen and Wright Memorial Prizes. She's also working on a book of stories and essays about vulnerability in its many forms. She graduated from Yale University with a double major in English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Currently, she works with refugee youth in New Haven, CT.

Scripts

Proud Boys' Girls

by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

Cast Size
6
Genre
drama,
political

"Proud Boys' Girls" is about a group of women who are the wives & girlfriends of an organized group of white supremacist men in rural upstate New York. I am always trying to write about whiteness, and I think that the alt-right makes whiteness visible in a really useful way, and that thesewomen—housewives, basically, who see themselves as totally apart from the political world in their domestic sphere—are an...

"Proud Boys' Girls" is about a group of women who are the wives & girlfriends of an organized group of white supremacist men in rural upstate New York. I am always trying to write about whiteness, and I think that the alt-right makes whiteness visible in a really useful way, and that thesewomen—housewives, basically, who see themselves as totally apart from the political world in their domestic sphere—are an extreme of the terror of white complicity and complacency. Also, I think it must be crazy to live under such strict heteropatriarchy, even as a white supremacist woman, and the play is very much about that, too: how we condemn violence (in particular against women) that happens outside, but condone it in our own communities. And of course it’s about people just trying to figure out what they believe, how to love each other, how to make life meaningful.

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FLUSH

by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

1
Cast Size
5
Genre
comedy,
drama

Flush portrays a semester in the lives of five 15-year-old girls as glimpsed through scenes in the girls' bathroom of their New York City public high school. The girls grapple with love, intimacy, beauty, race, faith, friendship, queerness and violence in an adolescence that is often comical, mostly excruciating and always desperately tender.

Flush portrays a semester in the lives of five 15-year-old girls as glimpsed through scenes in the girls' bathroom of their New York City public high school. The girls grapple with love, intimacy, beauty, race, faith, friendship, queerness and violence in an adolescence that is often comical, mostly excruciating and always desperately tender.

The Better Half

by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

Cast Size
6
Genre
drama,
experimental,
fantasy

12 year old Mia needs a bone-marrow transplant and when her father, Eric, goes in to see whether he is a match for donation, he finds out he isn't her biological father. But it's not the saucy romantic drama that information might suggest- and Baby, the strange, poetic twin who lives in Eric's mind might have both the answer and the cure.

12 year old Mia needs a bone-marrow transplant and when her father, Eric, goes in to see whether he is a match for donation, he finds out he isn't her biological father. But it's not the saucy romantic drama that information might suggest- and Baby, the strange, poetic twin who lives in Eric's mind might have both the answer and the cure.