Escape: The Central Theme
This commission invited playwrights to explore escape: not as a simple act of running away, but as a lens for examining liberation, joy, avoidance, and transformation. We wanted work that is unabashedly theatrical, comedies, adventures, romances built on human spectacle, language, and physical presence. Plays that make us laugh, make us wonder, and make us question.
“Dana’s play embodies everything we were looking for,” said Jonathan Winn, Co-Artistic Director. “It pulls you in with comedy, romance, and the pure pleasure of watching unlikely people find each other.” Co-Artistic Director Jason Peck agreed: “And then, before you know it, it becomes something more: a conversation about who we are across generations, identities, and the distances we think separate us.”
Every Play in This Field Is Worth Writing
The 78 submissions we received this year were exceptional. The theme of escape, rigorous and open-ended, drew proposals of extraordinary range and ambition. Recognizing finalists means not recognizing others, and we want to be direct about this: there is no submission in this field that shouldn’t be written. We hope the playwrights who weren’t selected will keep going, and we hope producers and artistic directors reading this will take note.
Our finalists represent the depth of what was submitted. Each play below is a play we would go see.
Finalists
Earl Crittenden — The Kitchen A well-intentioned kitchen renovation triggers an eviction crisis in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, exposing three generations of family secrets and the brutal mechanics of housing inequality. A dark comedy that asks whether escape is avoidance, or the only honest choice left.
Franky D. Gonzalez — Money Macks or, the Monarch of Mackerels A tragicomedy set inside an increasingly oppressive prison, where one inmate builds a mackerel-based financial empire and another survives through silence and endurance. Both are chasing freedom. Neither can agree on what it means.
Donna Hoke — Untitled An engaged couple in their twenties accepts a challenge from a wealthy grandmother: go completely zero-contact for a year and split three million dollars. Only the audience knows what’s in both of their journals. An epistolary two-hander about what love actually is when you strip everything else away.
John P. McEneny — Hidden Hallows Three women in their seventies have kept a secret for fifty years. As age makes endless postponement impossible, they must decide whether finally telling the truth is liberation, or just another kind of harm. Fast, funny, and morally relentless.
D.A. Mindell — That Cousin A trans man in 2035, at the end of his rope, gets an unannounced visit from his young cousin who is questioning her own identity and looking for someone to look up to. Neither of them is ready. A tender, funny play about the responsibility we have to the future when we’ve lost faith in it ourselves.
Matt Minnicino — Holy, or, what do you think they’re gonna say about us when we’re dead: an exaltation On the night before one of them is named the first High Priestess of Ur, four teenage girls in ancient Sumeria play games, imagine futures, and accidentally invent poetry. A surreal oratorio spanning millennia, asking who decides which stories become the foundation of empires.
Raven Petretti-Stamper — Rent-A-Mom Three friends launch a business offering nostalgic mom-types, June Cleaver, Sassy Karen, Earth Mama, for two-hour sessions of customized emotional care. A dark comedy about whether you can invent the nurture you never got, and whether that makes it any less real.
Tlaloc Rivas — The Hurting Kind A Chicano man and an Irish woman, each escaping something they can’t name, fall in and out of love one summer in Ireland, haunted by the shared history of soldiers who switched sides and were hanged for it. A memory play about inherited grief and whether love can exist between people who are always half-somewhere-else.
Chelsea Sutton — Open Lines A woman with nothing to lose runs across America in response to a mysterious prize advertisement. A late-night radio host in Connecticut investigates. They find each other across the continent. A road-trip fable about connection, hope, and the scams that prey on both.
Caridad Svich — Paraíso On the outskirts of Las Vegas, a former show-person builds a harbor for the lost and the drifting. A two-character fable about chosen family, grief, and what love and freedom look like when you imagine beyond the limits of what the world says is possible.
We congratulate all of our finalists and are grateful to every playwright who submitted. The quality of this year’s proposals reminded us why we do this work. We look forward to sharing more about Gentlemen Hosts as it develops.
ABOUT THROWN STONE
Thrown Stone Theatre Company is the only professional theatre in Connecticut exclusively dedicated to new work. From commission to development to production, Thrown Stone empowers artists and audiences to engage with the important questions of our time.