Announcing Our 2024–25 Season!

Hilary Bettis is a critically acclaimed playwright, TV writer, and filmmaker. She grew up with horses and chickens in rural Colorado, and with a Chicana mother and Southern Methodist father. Her work is a culmination of these cultures, exploring the American identity through a working-class Latiné lens. Her plays have been developed and produced all over the U.S. and Mexico, including at Roundabout Theatre, New Georges, The Sol Project, Yale Rep, Miami New Drama, Studio Theatre, Alley Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, the Lark Playwrights Workshop at Second Stage, O’Neill NPC, amongst others. She is currently under commission at Roundabout Theatre, Miami New Drama, Untitled Theatricals, and is writing a musical with Grammy-winning composer Julio Reyes Copello. Bettis won the 2019 Writers Guild of America Award for her work on the Emmy Award-winning FX series The Americans. She wrote for the Emmy-nominated Hulu miniseries The Dropout. She is an alumnus of the Sundance Institute Episodic TV Lab, a graduate of The Juilliard School, a board member of New Georges, and proud member of the WGAEast. She lives in New York with her husband and two small humans who cry a lot. She’s represented by CAA and Brillstein.

May Adrales is a director, artistic leader, teacher, and mother; she has directed over 30 world premieres. Her work has been seen most recently at Manhattan Theatre Club (Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks; Felicia Anchuli King’s Golden Shield), Second Stage (Rajiv Joseph’s Letters of Suresh), Signature Theatre, LCT3, MCC, Atlantic Theater Company, The Public Theater, WP, New York Theatre Workshop, The Huntington Theatre Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Rep, Two River Theater Company, Milwaukee Rep, and South Coast Rep. She was awarded the prestigious Ammerman Award at Arena Stage and Theater Communications Group’s Alan Schneider award for freelance directors and was a finalist for the Zelda Fichandler SDCF awards. She is a Drama League Directing Fellow, Van Lier Directing Fellow, WP Lab Director, SoHo Rep Writers/Directors Lab and New York Theatre Workshop directing fellow, TCG New Generations Grantee, SDC Denham Fellowship, and Paul Green Directing Award. She served as an Associate Artistic Director at Milwaukee Rep, Artistic Associate at The Playwrights Center, Artistic Associate at The Public Theater, and Director of Artistic Programs and Artistic Director at The Lark. She serves on the board of Theater Communications Group. May has directed and taught at Juilliard, Harvard/ART, ACT, Fordham, NYU, and Bard College. May has served on faculty at David Geffen School of Drama and Brown/Trinity MFA program. M.F.A., David Geffen School of Drama. She is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Theatre Program at Fordham University. mayadrales.net

Steve Carter – Horace E. “Steve” Carter, Jr. was an American playwright, best known for his plays involving Caribbean immigrants living in the United States. Mr. Carter received the Living Legend award at the 2001 National Black Theatre Festival. He was Victory Gardens Theater’s first playwright-in-residence beginning in 1981, and he also served as playwright-in-residence at George Mason University. Carter’s Pecong (winner of the Joseph Jefferson award for New Work) premiered at Victory Gardens in the 1989–1990 season and received subsequent productions at London’s Tricycle Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and Newark Symphony Hall. His plays Eden (winner of an Outer Critics Circle Award, an AUDELCO Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award) and Nevis Mountain Dew received Midwest premieres; and Dame Lorraine, House of Shadows, Shoot Me While I’m Happy, Spiele ’36, or the Fourth Medal, and Root Causes all premiered at Victory Gardens. Mr. Carter died at the age of 90 in 2020.

Brandon J. Dirden recently appeared on Broadway starring in the Tony Award-winning production of Take Me Out and Skeleton Crew for which he received a Drama Desk nomination.  He also appeared on Broadway as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award-winning production of All the Way, with Bryan Cranston; as well as in the Tony Award winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney; Clybourne Park; Enron; and Prelude to a Kiss. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in The Piano Lesson, for which he won OBIE, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards; The First Breeze of Summer, Day of Absence (Signature Theatre); Detroit ’67 (The Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem); Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop); and as Brutus in Julius Caesar (Theatre for a New Audience). On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, For Life, Evil, The Big C, Public Morals, Manifest, The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf, Blue Bloods, The Quad, the FX miniseries Mrs. America, and four seasons of FX’s The Americans as Agent Dennis Aderholt. He has directed numerous plays by Dominique Morriseau and August Wilson and recently Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress for Two River Theater. Brandon is an Associate Arts Professor on the faculty of Tisch Grad Acting at NYU; a frequent volunteer at the 52nd Street Project; and a proud member of both Actors’ Equity Association and Fair Wage On Stage.

Mara Vélez Meléndez she/her is a playwright born and raised in Puerto Rico. Her Off-Broadway debut took place in 2022 with Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, produced by Soho Rep and The Sol Project. Mara was a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, and a member of Ars Nova’s PlayGroup. She also adapted the Spotify/Gimlet podcast, Case 63, starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac. Other plays include Baby, I Fell In Love With The Computer (2023 Ars Nova Out Loud), This Is Not The Oxcart (Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission Finalist), and Thelma and Louise and the Time Machine (2022 Breaking The Binary Theater Festival). Playwriting M.F.A.: Hunter College.

Javier Antonio González is a playwright, director, and filmmaker who has served as the founding artistic director of CABORCA. Some of their authorial work with the company includes Lying Lydia; Distant Star (adapted from Roberto Bolaño’s novel); Zoetrope; Open up, Hadrian; Barceloneta, de noche; FLORIDITA, my Love; and their first feature film, The Entitlement. In 2016, they directed their original translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for Teatro en el Parque. Their work has been published in the anthologies Plays and Playwrights 2011 (New York Theatre Experience), Encuentro: Latine Performance for the New American Theater (Northwestern University Press), and in the journals Revista Conjunto (Casa de las Americas, Havana), The Puerto Rico Review, and Los Bárbaros (Spain). Javier holds a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.F.A. from Columbia University School of the Arts. They were a Van Lier Directing Fellow and a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. Recent directorial work: Electra and the devised work Inspired by French Cinema at Barnard College, The Lower Depths at NYU, and Iphigenia Among the Taurians at The New School.