Adara Meyers

Adara Meyers is an interdisciplinary writer and Communications Director of Sleeping Weazel, a Boston-based multimedia experimental theatre company. Her performance works and plays, Picture This, Talk To At Me, and Birds, premiered at Boston Center for the Arts (Sleeping Weazel), and Tryouts received its world premiere at Salvage Vanguard Theater. Her work has been developed or produced at Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Factory Theatre (Sleeping Weazel), and Perishable Theatre; new music collaborations with composers Kirsten Volness and Leaha Maria Villarreal have premiered at Roulette and the L.A. Philharmonic. She is the recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Finalist award and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts merit award, and has been a resident at Sedona...

Adara Meyers is an interdisciplinary writer and Communications Director of Sleeping Weazel, a Boston-based multimedia experimental theatre company. Her performance works and plays, Picture This, Talk To At Me, and Birds, premiered at Boston Center for the Arts (Sleeping Weazel), and Tryouts received its world premiere at Salvage Vanguard Theater. Her work has been developed or produced at Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Factory Theatre (Sleeping Weazel), and Perishable Theatre; new music collaborations with composers Kirsten Volness and Leaha Maria Villarreal have premiered at Roulette and the L.A. Philharmonic. She is the recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Finalist award and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts merit award, and has been a resident at Sedona Summer Colony. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and a BA in English from Wheaton College (MA). Adara served as Sleeping Weazel’s Managing Director from 2012 to 2019.

Scripts

Hand Expression

by Adara Meyers

Cast Size

4

Genre

dark comedy,

political,

tragedy

A satirical hellscape stoked by the consumerist flames of American “self-care,” HAND EXPRESSION follows two new mothers grasp feverishly to understand their fluctuating identities, postpartum depression, and Jewish lineage—all while being trapped in the last functioning warehouse for the largest online marketplace in the world. Their attempts to escape, however, diverge for the worst when one mother demands a...

A satirical hellscape stoked by the consumerist flames of American “self-care,” HAND EXPRESSION follows two new mothers grasp feverishly to understand their fluctuating identities, postpartum depression, and Jewish lineage—all while being trapped in the last functioning warehouse for the largest online marketplace in the world. Their attempts to escape, however, diverge for the worst when one mother demands a makeshift mikveh.

Birds

by Adara Meyers

Cast Size

6

Genre

comedy,

dark comedy,

drama,

experimental,

political

Toby, a misguided grassroots organizer, is a struggling fighter in the epic battle between creature comfort and meaningful work. As the self-proclaimed leader and sole member of a movement against birds flying into the windows of New York City skyscrapers, the accumulation of Toby’s unsent business memos, elaborate paper cutouts of pigeons, and paralyzing bouts of anxiety have all but obliterated the time he...

Toby, a misguided grassroots organizer, is a struggling fighter in the epic battle between creature comfort and meaningful work. As the self-proclaimed leader and sole member of a movement against birds flying into the windows of New York City skyscrapers, the accumulation of Toby’s unsent business memos, elaborate paper cutouts of pigeons, and paralyzing bouts of anxiety have all but obliterated the time he has to advance his cause. The world of BIRDS holds a mirror up to the profoundly normative forces that affect American individuals as they resist and comply with social ills.

**Note on casting: racial/ethnic diversity is essential.

Talk To At Me

by Adara Meyers

Cast Size

5

Genre

dark comedy,

drama,

experimental,

movement/physical,

political,

satire

TALK TO AT ME is a comedic and fiery send-up of middle class American values that slyly traverses the tension between emotional isolation and human yearning. When four friends meet for some lighthearted social time, they quickly find themselves abandoning pleasantries in favor of hilariously self-centered ruminations of the blissfully-ignorant class: travel as something one “accomplishes,” evasive mentions of...

TALK TO AT ME is a comedic and fiery send-up of middle class American values that slyly traverses the tension between emotional isolation and human yearning. When four friends meet for some lighthearted social time, they quickly find themselves abandoning pleasantries in favor of hilariously self-centered ruminations of the blissfully-ignorant class: travel as something one “accomplishes,” evasive mentions of war, and armchair science and philosophy. When a rat disrupts the gathering, the unbecoming and downright violent tendencies of their lives are forced to the foreground by hilarious and tragic means.

"'Talk To At Me' is a tour de force that combines a fearless quartet of actors with Shana Gozansky’s precise, disciplined direction — balancing several different things happening at once — with Meyers’s zany, satirical script.” —Terry Byrne, The Boston Globe

"I came away feeling I’d been treated to a master class in the meaning (and meaninglessness) behind Shakespeare’s famously despairing comment that life is "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Except, that is, the human capacity for making a mess." —Michael Cox, EDGE Boston

*Note on casting: racial/ethnic diversity is essential.

Tryouts

by Adara Meyers

1

Cast Size

5—6

Genre

dark comedy,

drama,

experimental,

political

Two unrelated mothers and three teenage girls maneuver the confines of a prestigious, draconian high school run by an unseen yet always-heard Headmistress, who attempts to maintain regimen in the face of unnamed danger. In a tragi-comic turn of events, the mothers throw themselves into the work of forming a pseudo-religious order focused on topiary, while the girls decide to confront head-on the version of...

Two unrelated mothers and three teenage girls maneuver the confines of a prestigious, draconian high school run by an unseen yet always-heard Headmistress, who attempts to maintain regimen in the face of unnamed danger. In a tragi-comic turn of events, the mothers throw themselves into the work of forming a pseudo-religious order focused on topiary, while the girls decide to confront head-on the version of adulthood they’ve been taught so well. With the apocryphal history of St. Anne, the barely-acknowledged mother of Mary, as its launching point, TRYOUTS investigates how women navigate autonomy by creating, destroying, and rebuilding meaning at every stage of life.

"This episodic and fractured narrative was full of angst and kinetic images of bodies in motion." —Michael Cox, EDGE Boston

Fellowship Merit Award in Playwriting/Screenwriting, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, 2014

*Note on casting: racial/ethnic diversity is essential.