Kev Berry

In this epic, genre-exploding tragedy about the Long Island Serial Killer case, On a Small Strip of Land on the Great South Bay unearths the complex story of police corruption, sensationalized violence, and the broken dreams of the women discarded along Ocean Parkway.

Living together was going just great for best friends Bunting and Finch, balancing ruthless day jobs, pursuing their respective visual arts careers, and still finding time to blackout at Hardware after one too many vodka sodas. But when Finch starts dating a wealthy pharma daddy finance bro, the intertwining web of Gay New York proves just how toxic and self destructive it can be. Rough Trade is a comedy about classism, chosen family, and holding on (too) tightly to the ones you love.

Harsh Cacophonies I & II is a full-length monologue about the intersection of queerness and the things that hold us back from attaining an impossible perfection. Carefully balancing autobiography, spoken word, standup, and storytelling, Berry’s ritual of queer performance explores how we each learn to view our physical selves in the mirror and the constant struggle to to find a sense of the sacred among the infinite and unbearable noise.

We Had Not Ceased Desiring is a ramble through the history of cruising and public sex, a time-old tradition in the queer community. As he wrestles with what it means to participate in the pastime in the age of hookup apps, PrEP, and a creeping return of normalized anti-queer rhetoric in the zeitgeist, he tells the stories of how far we're willing to travel in order to connect. Initially performed in The Tank's Attic Studio for only 30 audience members a night, this production marked Kev’s return to deeply personal lo-fi monologue theatre. Sort of like if Eric Bogosian and Madeline Kahn had a redheaded stepchild who can’t stop quoting Caryl Churchill and August Wilson.

{uploaded script is the working version of Part 1}

A man grappling with who he is and dragging his wife along for the ride.
A family trying to maintain appearances and grappling with the greatest moral quandary of their lives.
A meet-cute blossoming into a love story and transforming into a zombie road movie.
A nurse trying to keep it together and her patients are dying quicker and quicker.
A man charged by God with building an ark for the flood.

The trains will fly off the tracks.
The internet will fail.
The water will come.

Overflowing operatic language,
a world unafraid of its own theatricality,
a pageant.

These five seemingly disparate stories come together in surprising ways and coalesce in
A speculative fable for a suffocating planet
&
An ambitious climate change epic.

A play that is, for legal purposes, NOT about Kev's gym.

When a new owner takes over a semi-luxury gym with locations in Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, and the East Village, its predominantly gay clientele start to notice some changes to policy and staffing. As management starts to enforce new rules, staff and membership alike are forced to reckon with where they'll draw the line when palpable danger begins to creep into their previously safe space.

Play 1: My Lord, and This Land Is Strange (after Philoctetes)
Play 2: No One Burns Me (after Hippolytus)
Play 3: In the Royal-Blue Night-Time (after Ajax)

A cycle of three plays that examine class, power, and justice in America, using Long Island suburb Rockville Centre as a microcosm of the country writ large.

Peter is a magic realist tragedy about the way gay men grieve. Henry is a lonely accountant living in Queens who has devoted his entire basement to the construction of an elaborate and intricate miniature model world, whose citizens include figurines of the most important loved ones from his life. He spends most of his free time caring for his elderly neighbor, Angie, whose recent medical diagnosis gives her months left to live. When a button appears on Henry’s workbench giving him the chance to revisit the past by descending into the model world he’s created, Henry’s emotional stability is thrown off balance as he reunites with his deceased ex-boyfriend, Peter, while simultaneously beginning a new relationship in the real world with a new man, also named Peter. Peter is about a man caught between two Peters and two worlds, and how a community of gay men who have dealt with so much loss over many generations still don’t quite know how to take care of each other.

It's everyone's favorite time of any election cycle: that period of time where there's a debate every week and candidates aren't actually asked questions about their policies and the answers they give are focused on giving Left Twitter something to buzz about. Not this debate. No. The folks in this play are here to present and argue ...about something else...

What starts as a polite debate quickly descends into low blows and personal shots, before descending even further into a carefully wrought experiment in conjuring and creating chaos and calamity on a dying planet.

{uploaded draft is a work-in-progress, new draft as of 3.5.22}

Vincent is a painter and so is Paul. They're lovers, though history would tell you otherwise and call Paul Vincent's mentor. It's the 1880s in the South of France, and everything is gay gay gay. Vincent's sick, Paul's kind of a prick. They argue, they paint, they drink, they fuck. And then one night, Vincent cuts his ear off. Vincent van Gogh is a disco-infused remix of a story you maybe think you maybe know that looks at what stories stand the history of time and what is erased into the annals of queer history for the sake of straight folks' comfort.

1. In a not-too-far-off New York, a Grindr hookup goes awry high above Park Avenue.
2. In a not-too-far-off New York, a Grindr hookup decides what to do.
3. In a too-close New York, a Grindr hookup meets his victim's sister.

{uploaded script is a work-in-progress}