FEATURED PLAYS
Read Rachael’s plays on New Play Exchange
Live Theatre!
After 2020 postponements — the Eden Prairie Players have pulled off an in-person premiere of my play The Invention of Pickle Ball. Congratulations!
Exciting news! I was awarded the Jane Stevens King Residency Award in Theatre by Lane Community College. This will provide me with the opportunity to develop a brand-new large-ensemble play in 2021-22!
My play LIGHT MEAT is featured in the latest issue of the Ponder Review.
My play THE BELL WITCH will be featured in a new podcast series!
My play WATERFALL will be featured by Queen of Cups London.
My play “Curbed” will be performed as part of the @WriteON Festival Zoomologues- Zoom not Zoom, in Cambridge U.K.
And April brought some exciting news!
I have been selected to receive a fellowship to attend the LitFest Advanced Dramatic Writing workshop this summer!
March is a blur. Lots going on. Including… My play “Dark, Leafy Greens” in NYC’s Between Us Productions’ benefit
And a wonderful reading of my play “Partner Of—” with Towne Street Theatre in Los Angeles.
Oh my gosh – February flew by. My play SOUP won an award!
In January —
WINDBERRY CREEK was featured as part of a wonderful Bechdel Group Short list event.
December fun!
It’s the holidays, whatever that looks like in 2020, and my work’s busy online!
A brand-new London collaboration resulted in my new holiday play PUDDING.
I recently shared a monologue – KITCHEN TABLE – via Fools FURY Theatre in San Francisco, via their annual Celebration Provocation.
Onto November!
I responded to a call for plays in response to the Election.
Find MOUSE & OWL on New Play Exchange.
It was featured as part of the Dramatists Guild’s Live from the Anarchist’s Jurisdiction, on the eve of the Election!
Excited to meet with the Director’s Cut in London, with writers from all across the U.K., the Monday after the Election. They expressed their feelings of relief and joy at the news of a new American President and supercool Veep!
A new commission! DARK LEAFY GREENS in Post-Industrial Productions in Buffalo, NY!
A busy October!
WABI SABI, with the Open Door Playhouse
WHAT A MEMORY LOOKS LIKE in the PDX Playwrights’ Fertile Ground Festival! (I’m also writing a quick-turnaround 48-hr-play with them, too!)
And later this month, my play SYZYGY will have a reading with the 10 Minutes a Month Playwriting Collective in London.
It’s September and that means: “Fumblewinter”! The web series!
After a reading at the Inge Festival in 2018 – I never thought I’d see the day that my kooky play about 9th-century Vikings with Smartphones would see the light of day, but huzzah, it was MADE for Zoom! We fundraised to pay our artists and we’re underway, filming seven episodes, directed by Anna Ly!
Excited about this event: A development reading of “Windberry Creek” with New Play Project in Portland! Grateful to producer/dramaturg Devon Roberts, director Lauren Shields and actors Hannah Lauren Wilson, Kaitlynn McConnell and — how cool is this — my theatre professor from college, Kathleen Worley!
So many virtual play experiences, all around the world:
EVERYDAY AVIATION in THEATRE THREE‘s Offstage-Online Series.
August 7, 2020
Preparing for a feature on my Oregon Arts Commission grant encouraged me to collect photos of my play PARTNER OF— in one place!
August 3, 2020
My little play INTERMOLECULAR FORCES – Written for Zoom! – Has been zipping all around the planet: L.A., New Haven, Madison, NYC. Next stop London with Metal Rabbit Productions and SlamMinutes Kings Cross. Then it’s the Towne Street Theatre, back in L.A.!
It’s not everyday you get a reading of a full-length! But here’s BINDERS in Panglossian Production’s Area 51 Plays in Progress series.
July 30, 2020
Coming Soon(ish)! A new collection of Weird Plays by playwrights near and far, edited by me! Here’s the cover art, by my son Hugh. (@hueparman)
July 6, 2020
New Publisher!
I’m excited to announce that a collection of my oft-produced short plays — between people, between people and sock monkeys, between people and public lice they bought off the internet… just lots of relationships, okay? — Have all been published by Smith Scripts in London!
June 15, 2020
What a JOY to develop my play Windberry Creek with Theatre 33! So many thanks to Artistic Director Susan Coromel, Director Stephen Alexander, Dramaturg Deb Vaughn, and the BIGGEST thanks to our beautiful cast!
May 22, 2020
This was a treat! I was invited to participate in an Advanced Dramatic Writing Symposium with playwright and screenwriter Peter Parnell at – well, it was all on Zoom – so through (?) the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop! I learned a ton, met new writing colleagues as far away as Australia and Bulgaria, and got to crack open a new draft of my play WINDBERRY CREEK.
May 6, 2020
Excited to learn that I am the recipient of a 2020 Career Opportunity Grant, through the Oregon Arts Commission, to develop my play “Partner Of —”
May 3, 2020
So many quarantine productions!
This has been the weirdest two months ever, right?
Between work and family, I’ve barely had time to breathe, but I’ve also been a part of some wonderful collaborations, highlighted below.
February 26, 2020
This week, WABI SABI, a new play opens at the Q Collective in St. Louis.
Two teens (played by Julian Rodriguez – top left; Stasia Kroeger – top right) who used to dance together reconnect in the High School library, exploring their identities and relationship to each other, their past and futures.
Sean Michaels directs.
I’m honored that the inimitable Gary Garrison has featured the play on his website, as part of a collection called A Younger Ten: Writing the Ten-Minute Play.
Read WABI SABI on New Play Exchange.
February 17, 2020
More WINDBERRY CREEK development news. A terrific reading and lively discussion at the Akropolis Performance Lab in Seattle!
A new creative team embraced characters EMMA, KATE and MARY, and off we went to the wilds of Oregon. Audience members were able to share insights into all kinds of thematic layers, including the secondary trauma surrounding domestic violence, assisted suicide, mental illness. Whoa – This play sounds grim! It’s not, it’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever written.
January 24, 2020
This week, I’m all fired up about WINDBERRY CREEK.
This new play for three intergenerational women had a staged reading at the Parson’s Nose Theatre in Pasadena in December, and looks forward to a reading at the Akropolis Performance Lab in Seattle next month.
Parson’s Nose selected my full-length play CANOPY in 2019, for their Women’s Playwright Series, chosen from more than 400 scripts.
Working with co-artistic directors Mary Chalon and Lance Davis, on that project, was fabulous, and in Fall of 2019, Mary asked me if I had anything new to share. I did – A not quite finished new piece, about three women, in an Oregon cabin for a long weekend.
It was a treat to travel to California in Mid-December for the sold-out staged reading, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled by the direction that Chalon lent to the work, as well as the incredible acting talents of Lois Faraker as “MARY”, Amanda Carlin as “KATE” and Heather Taylor as “EMMA”.
Now the play’s heading to a Salon in Seattle, and on its journey in the submission process. I’m grateful to development opportunities that allow me to see and hear the play with “breath behind the word” — It’s so exciting, and a wonderful, instructive step in the creative process.
We’ll see where this play goes next.
THIS WEEK’S PLAY:
January 9, 2020
“Forcefully Denied” returning to We the People at Sacred Fools, in L.A.
This short play is a piece of documentary theatre, sourced from Supreme Court Nomination Hearing Testimony, by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford; a statement by Senator Susan Collins, October 5, 2018; Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution, inked in 1787; and the step-by-step instructions of a sexual assault evidence collection kit (SAECK), that comes in a sealed package, with an expiration date. The play premiered at Sacred Fools in 2019.
Characters include SUSAN COLLINS — When people in Washington want to solve a problem, they turn to the senior United States Senator from Maine. DR. CHRISTINE BLASEY-FORD — A professor of psychology, and a researcher, who specializes in developing statistic models, presented here as a middle-aged woman, and her teenage self. And KATHLEEN — A forensic nurse.
Trigger Warning: Rape. Play sample:
Read the rest of the play on New Play Exchange, and if you’re in Los Angeles, catch the play at We the People on January 23.
THIS WEEK’S PLAY:
Jan 3, 2020
“Maintaining a Space Cushion” coming to the Los Angeles Fringe!
**UPDATE**
New title for the full-length World Premiere!!
“BINDERS” (formerly known as “MAINTAINING A SPACE CUSHION”) — Had its first read-thru in SoCal January 8! More on the play…
“Maintaining a Space Cushion” enjoyed a staged reading at the 2019 Mid-American Theatre Conference, and premiered at the Nylon Fusion Theatre in NYC, directed by Janet Bentley.
Now the full-length version of the play is heading to the Los Angeles Fringe!
I met director Rebecca Lynne when she directed my short play INERTIA for 2CentsTheatre’s INKFest, and after seeing John Patrick Daly in his fringe show HOW TO BECOME A SUPERHERO, I thought we’d all make a dream team!
We recently toured Hollywood venues, and we’re meeting soon (Thanks, internet!) to read-thru this zany, fast-paced, sci-fi absurdist piece. So excited!
THIS WEEK’S PLAY:
Dec 19, 2019
“Sh*t Train” — Featured at London’s Founding Fall Theatre this week!
Sh*t Train hops aboard the job from hell, premiering in 2018 at Founding Fall in Surrey, U.K.
The piece was also featured at Cast Iron Theatre in Brighton, U.K., and stateside in 2019 at the FunHouse Anthology in Seattle, WA.
This week, Founding Fall requested Sh*t Train for their “Best Of’s” at London’s Draper Hall. Funny, wry and kinda inappropriate, this play’s for anyone who’s ever had a not great boss. Which is everyone.
THIS WEEK’S PLAYS!
Dec 12, 2019
The reviews are in! Read the Eugene Weekly review of AT WINTER’S EDGE.
Read the week-two Register-Guard preview of AT WINTER’S EDGE.
Read the week-two KLCC preview of AT WINTER’S EDGE.
Read the Eugene Weekly review of BUNFIGHT.
BUNFIGHT, featuring four short plays by Rachael Carnes and four by Paul Calandrino, and AT WINTER’S EDGE, both continue Thurs-Sun, 12/12-12/15.
Rachael’s BUNFIGHT plays — RIPPLE, CONTRAPPOSTO, JOIN THE MOVEMENT and CORNUCOPIA — are available on NEW PLAY EXCHANGE.
RIPPLE, written in consultation with physicists Rachel Scherr and Joey Keye, imagines two black holes colliding and merging, from their perspective as two actors in a ten-minute play, 1.2 billion years ago. With them is Albert Eistein, because Eistein, and as the director, he knows they have to manage their timing to ensure their merge will be observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatories (LIGO) in 2015. Does it work? Find out, in this play for science nerds, theatre geeks and anyone who’s ever resisted falling into a relationship. Read RIPPLE here.
CONTRAPPOSTO, a #MeToo conversation set in 1485, finds Venus de Milo arguing with Sandro Botticelli about trapping her in the male gaze. This battle, with centuries’ implications, premiered in London at the Undisposables, and will be published in 2020 in Feels Blind Literary. Find the play here.
As a busy mom, I feel like I’ve been invited to every Multi-Level Marketing house party in existence: I’ve been to essential oil parties, cookware parties, sex toy parties (that one was at least amusing), make-up parties, candle parties and legging parties. There’s something so challenging about the environment, the desire to become more solvent, while the hose is invariably making a huge outlay of cash. JOIN THE MOVEMENT explores all that, as a lens on influencer culture, in a big, bonkers farce. Find it here.
And the last play in the line-up is CORNUCOPIA, my answer to theater’s cyclical needs for holiday plays. This one isn’t your typical holiday fare, opening is it does on the floor, where two people (it’s written gender neutral) have just fallen to the floor, crushing their dining table with their own weight.
And AT WINTER’S EDGE will be on NPX — Soon!
THIS WEEK’S PLAY
December 5, 2019
This week’s play is PERMISSION, a play for two women. The piece premiered in December 2018, as part of Clutch production’s EmpowHER Series, in NYC, directed by Tricia Mancuso Parks.
This year, Rachael was invited to join the Clutch Full Circle program, and has been enjoying collaborating with NYC-Based writers, filmmakers, storytellers, dramaturgs, actors and directors, to create new work.
PERMISSION has been featured as far as Lake Charles, LA to Ontario, Canada, and next week, returns to NYC and the International Human Rights Arts Festival at the Wild Project, with Tricia Mancuso Parks again directing.
International Human Rights Arts Festival
As a creative team, we’re using the play to raise funds for Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program in NYC. Find our GoFundMe here:
Here’s a review of “Permission” at the Secret Theatre.
Read PERMISSION here: Permission Script on New Play Exchange
THIS WEEK’S PLAY
November 29, 2019
This week’s play is INERTIA, a two-hander based on Chekhov. The play was written in response to a call for plays using a Sock Monkey, at the Weathervane Playhouse, in Akron, Ohio. It got into that festival, and has since been performed in London, Hollywood, Seoul, Eugene — And who knows where? Here are just a few of the images from these worldwide performances.
Seoul, South Korea, Seoul Players Play Festival, directed by Mark Dorman.
In Akron, Ohio, the Weathervane Playhouse, directed by Brian Westerly.
In Hollywood, CA, in 2CentsTheatre’s INKFest, directed by Rebecca Lynne.
Rehearsing in a pub in London for Cuckoo Bang, directed by Charlie Norburn.
MINKY comes home to Eugene and Oregon Contemporary Theatre, directed by Aaron Michael Smart.
And COMING SOON!
MINKY is heading to NYC! Here are a few snapshots from a first read-thru with the New Ambassadors Corp!
Catch INERTIA at HEARTBROKE: Coming Soon!
Read INERTIA here: INERTIA script on New Play Exchange