Alex Riad

Alex Riad

Alex Riad is an Egyptian-American playwright based in New York City. He has been a part of The Lark's Middle Eastern Writers Lab, a Literary Fellow at The Farm Theater, a member of The Actor's Studio Playwright Unit, a three year Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting fellow at The Juilliard School, and is a Judith Champion Launch Commission recipient at the Atlantic Theater Company.  NY Theatre...
Alex Riad is an Egyptian-American playwright based in New York City. He has been a part of The Lark's Middle Eastern Writers Lab, a Literary Fellow at The Farm Theater, a member of The Actor's Studio Playwright Unit, a three year Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting fellow at The Juilliard School, and is a Judith Champion Launch Commission recipient at the Atlantic Theater Company.  NY Theatre Credits: "The Wild Parrots of Campbell" (Cherry Lane Theater), "The Floor is Lava" (LaMama Experimental Theatre, 2017 Planet Connections Festival Best Play), "If You Ever Come by Here" (The Tank), and "When You Go" (The Tank). His plays have also been workshopped at Atlantic Theater Company, Signature Theater, Labyrinth Theater Company, Durango Playfest, and the Juilliard School.

Plays

  • Quality Cellular by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    7
    ·
    Genre: drama
    ·
    Keyword: coming of age, A Family drama + 3 more
    Genre: drama
    Keyword: coming of age, A Family drama, American Dream, immigrant story, Egyptian-American
    During the height of the Great Recession in 2009, an Egyptian-American teenager is forced to work in his divorced parents’ failing cell phone shop the summer before college, coming of age as he sees the troublesome sides of his immigrant father, single mother, and their degenerate employees.
  • The Wild Parrots of Campbell by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    5
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    ·
    Keyword: A Family drama, coming of age + 3 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: A Family drama, coming of age, 20-something's relationships, slackers, Alcohol and Substance abuse
    In a rundown house in a California suburb, a group of loser twenty-something roommates, find their low rent, slacker existence threatened when their friend/landlord invites a strange girl he met online to move in, igniting tensions amongst the friends and digging up the home's past familial trauma.
  • Faster Horses by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    2
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    ·
    Keyword: start-ups, all-female cast + 2 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: start-ups, all-female cast, female friendships, two hander
    Two women, sick of working at male-dominated tech companies, decide to start their own app together, but the collaboration exposes the cracks in their friendship and threatens to turn their venture into one of the soulless start-ups they’re rebelling against.
  • Heartbeat by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    2
    ·
    Genre: drama
    ·
    Keyword: two hander, relationship drama + 2 more
    Genre: drama
    Keyword: two hander, relationship drama, abortion access, roadtrip
    A soon to be married couple, living in a conservative state, embark on a road trip for an abortion as they struggle to keep their relationship together.
  • Cairo by the Sea by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    6
    ·
    Genre: drama
    ·
    Keyword: A Family drama, EgyptianRevolution2011 + 3 more
    Genre: drama
    Keyword: A Family drama, EgyptianRevolution2011, EgyptianRevolution2013, American Dream, Immigrant stories
    Over the course the 2010s and always at a turbulent Christmas at free rental beach house in California, an Egyptian-American family with no connection to their culture and their Egyptian cousins who fled Cairo during the Arab Spring, all struggle to reckon with home, family, and the American dream as they strive for success and figure out if this is really the land of opportunity anymore.
  • In Place by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    6
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    ·
    Keyword: COVID-19 pandemic, Dysfunctional Friendships + 2 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: COVID-19 pandemic, Dysfunctional Friendships, 20-something's relationships, roommates
    At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, six New Yorkers shelter in place together, forcing them to finally face the problems they’ve been avoiding and the toxic relationships they’ve formed with one another.
  • Of Alexandria by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    4
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    ·
    Keyword: Egyptian-American, roadtrip + 2 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: Egyptian-American, roadtrip, A Family drama, Alcohol and Substance abuse
    Three generations of Egyptians with uneasy relationships with each other embark on a road trip to Cape Cod to see a dying aunt no one speaks to who has helped and wounded each of them in vastly different, but equally lasting, ways.
  • The Floor is Lava by Alex Riad
    Cast: 
    4
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    ·
    Keyword: start-ups, Dysfunctional Friendships + 1 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: start-ups, Dysfunctional Friendships, Alcohol and Substance abuse
    Held up in the basement of a friend's billion-dollar Silicon Valley start-up's New Years Eve Party with an endless supply of scotch, a technophobic twenty-something, whose successful life self-destructed spectacularly in New York, struggles to maintain normalcy, old friendships, and his sanity as her ponders where he fits in a world governed by social media and instant success.