Julius Rea

High school science teacher Amari must let go of her grief while starting a new relationship; her brother, QC, grapples with the realities of long-COVID and his future as an artist; and her student, Alé, is just trying to pay for remote therapy.

Painted with the background of the ongoing pandemic, Black Lives Matters uprisings, and an upcoming election, these interconnected San Franciscans face yet another sobering moment: the day the sky turned orange.

Premiering in San Francisco on the fifth year anniversary of Orange Skies Day, the musical was co-produced by SFBATCO & Z Space, and commissioned by SFBATCO. Rea received a YBCA Creative Corps Initiative Grant (2023-24) to develop the project.

When a major theatre company replaces a Black actor with a humanoid robot to avoid “burdening” anyone with the trauma of portraying Othello, the robot’s programmer is tasked with rewriting its understanding of Black identity. But as she dives deeper into the code—and the play—they both spiral into a surreal interrogation of race, technology, performance, and power.

Othello.exe is a sharp, speculative remix of Shakespeare’s tragedy, where artificial intelligence meets real-world bias, and long-standing questions about representation, audience, and authenticity come to the surface. This piece marks the playwright’s first Shakespeare adaptation, emerging from an urgent curiosity about how the stage continues to grapple with what was once called DEI—through the double lens of Race and AI.

The play was developed part of the Marin Shakespeare Theatre's Seed of Time Festival in 2025.

As industrious engineer Ervin explores his past, the memories of his two childhood best friends defend him through an exploration of his mother's mysterious abandonment.

His joyful memories with Geo and Cielo juxtapose his urgency to find a deeply hidden memory. Tinged with humor and nostalgia, this narrative also explores the nuances of navigating young adulthood with queer and BIPOC identities.

This piece was produced in Crowded Fire Theater's Resilience and Development Lab. Formally titled "rgb", this piece was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

Vivienne finally faces her sister's addiction and its impact on her son. In the apartment next door, Jonathan’s house arrest seems less important than his daughter's choice of college. While listening to fights through closed doors and thin walls, young Kenny learns about his forged family and the traits he may one day inherit.

This tender and matter-of-fact narrative explores normalized and adverse trauma in the home as well as through internet and news media between 2009 and 2019. This piece was a semi-finalist for the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

After her childhood friend accuses her brother of sexual assualt, Ari travels inside the mind of the man investigating the incident. This multi-layered story describes how trauma warps when it enters either the public sphere or the subconscious.

This piece was developed through The Forum Collective, and received a Theatre Bay Area CASH Performs Grant in 2018. After a successful run of the show, Sarafael was co-produced from in partnership with Oakland Theatre Project (previously Ubuntu Theater Project).