ANNOUNCING OUR 2026 ROO FINALISTS!
Learn more about them and their projects!
Long before Ru Paul’s drag race and drag queens ruled the lands of gender performance, male impersonators triumphed on the American and British variety stages. In the late nineteenth century, the hype wasn’t about men dressing as women - it was about women (or at least, female people), dressing as men. These performers were some of the best paid and most in demand of all performers on the variety stages, and their stories have mostly disappeared - until now.
After travelling to Yunnan, China, and Sumatra, Indonesia, to learn about two thousand-plus-year-old matrilineal societies, how might one create a participatory cultural event that gives rise to a natural inclination—nay, compulsion—to place women at the center of society, that is at once theatrical and authentic, and unique to our corner of the world?
Kimberly Senior - THE REINVENTION OF ANNIE BESANT
Annie Besant (1847-1933) transformed herself multiple times across her extraordinary life—from minister's wife to birth control advocate, from labor organizer to theosophist, from scholar to guardian of Krishnamurti. At each turn, she did transformative work. How do you know when to reinvent yourself and when to stand your ground? What does it cost to keep starting over?
Sandy Rustin - LADIES' HOME JOURNAL PROJECT
In 1970, 200 women stormed the Ladies’ Home Journal offices, on the Upper East Side demanding that the all-male run/written publication stop perpetuating reductive depictions of femininity. This protest - powerful, theatrical, and practically erased from cultural memory - catalyzed change in American media. By animating misogynist mid-century advertisements and juxtaposing them with the raw urgency of feminist protest, this play will highlight the sexist history of American media and shine a light on this as-yet-unresolved dichotomy.
Jayne Deely - LEGACY
Megan Medley - I'M GOD
God has returned to earth, and she’s a young black girl at Holy Mary’s Catholic High School. Hijinks ensue as Hannah must face off first against the local priest, followed by a Bishop, an Archbishop, a Cardinal, defeating them each one by one, all the way up the chain to the big man himself: the Pope.
Zoë Kim - FAMISHED
At its core, the play is about a family trying—imperfectly, desperately—to love one another while carrying a violent secret. This story uses genre, imagination, and the language of monstrosity to explore racial trauma, assimilation, and the deep human hunger to be seen.
Women’s sports command serious power and influence, and with this comes big questions, of legacy and progress, of generational feminism and evolution, of the power of media, of the responsibility of a platform. This play examines these questions through the lens of basketball and female bodies on stage, utterly unrelated to or positioned against their male counterparts.
Lyndsey Bourne - SOME PLACE YOU DON’T HAVE TO TAKE YOUR BODY WITH YOUFrom October 2018 to November 2019, after her Saturday afternoon shifts as a patient support volunteer at a reproductive health clinic, Lyndsey wrote notes and impressions as a practice of witnessing and a ritual of release. This raw, first-person account—part reportage, part storytelling, part lyric—is interwoven with a fragmented examination of artists who probe the explicit female body.
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