Event Description
This Fall’s Rough Draft Festival features invited artists sharing works in progress through performances and conversations with participating artists. Audiences are invited into the creative process, gaining insight into how new work evolves through experimentation, revision, and collaboration.
As part of LPAC’s commitment to supporting new work, the festival creates opportunities for artists to strengthen their storytelling, test new possibilities, and build meaningful connections with audiences and fellow artists.
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THE LINE UP:
​​​Skin to Skin
Created by Trixie Ndanu Kioko and Jeremy
J. Kamps
Presented in partnership with Houses on the Moon Theater Company ​
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October 27th - 7pm,
October 28th - 2:30pm Followed by a talkback moderated by Aaliytha Stevens, the Director of Cultural Affairs at Houses on the Moon Theater Company.​
Little Theater
About the piece:
SKIN TO SKIN puts the experiences of Black women at the center of a theatrical exploration of health, care and survival.
Moving between the deeply personal and the systemic, the work asks what it means to live in a body whose pain, needs and experiences are too often filtered through institutions and assumptions beyond its control. At once intimate and urgent, SKIN TO SKIN opens a conversation about who receives care, who is heard and what it means to claim authority over one’s own body.
While SKIN TO SKIN is new to Rough Draft, Houses on the Moon Theater Company has a longstanding artistic relationship with LPAC and has previously developed and presented new work at the venue.
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​​MAMA/RUN
Written and created by Lester Eugene Mayers
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Oct 28 - 7pm
Oct 29 - 2:30pm Followed by a talkback moderated by LaGuardia Theater professor Jermaine Rowe
Mainstage Theater
About the piece:
Part poetry, part movement, part ritual, MAMA/RUN journeys into the complicated terrain between mothers and children, where love, abandonment, survival and memory can occupy the same space.
Through breath, language and the body, Mayers explores what we inherit from our mothers, what happens when care and absence become intertwined, and how the stories carried through a family continue to shape the people left to tell them.
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MAMA/RUN received its first Rough Draft reading at LPAC in spring 2026. Just months later, Mayers returns with a workshop that moves the piece beyond its first encounter with an audience and further into its physical and theatrical life.
Event Date:
October 27 - 30
Location:
Mainstage & Little Theater
Rough Draft is free to attend.
Reserve your seat with a Free RSVP or choose a $25 Supporter Ticket if you’d like to help support the artists and the development of new work at LPAC.
Want to see all three productions and support the festival? A $50 Festival Supporter Pass includes admission to all three Rough Draft events.
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​​FURBALL
Written by Jeana Scotti and directed by Tara Elliott
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Oct 29 - 7pm Followed by a talkback moderated by LaGuardia Theater professor James Caldwell
Oct 30 - 7pm​
Little Theater
About the piece:
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FURBALL enters the festival from an entirely different direction: funny, strange, provocative and willing to follow an uncomfortable question wherever it leads.
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Using humor, absurdity and unexpected encounters, Scotti turns an eye toward sex, relationships and the body, exploring the private anxieties, curiosities and contradictions women carry about themselves and one another.
Previously presented at LPAC, FURBALL returns in a further-developed workshop presentation, giving Scotti and Elliott another opportunity to push into the work’s comic, intimate and unsettling territory.
EVENTS CALENDAR
Indicates event followed by a talkback