Featured Playwright
Bethany Gemmell
About Me: I am a Northern, disabled, nonbinary playwright. I have been writing plays since 2019. I had some of my work staged, either as work in progress sharings or commissioned pieces. Examples include being a co-writer for Royal Court Theatre's Listen Local project in 2019, 'WOLF' at Theatre503 in 2023, 'well, you could be a guy (non-binary edition)' for Baron Court Theatre's Queering the Canon in 2023, and 'The Trial of Thomas Greene' at Hope Mill Theatre in for Qweerdog Shorts/Hope 200 in 2025. I was selected for Young Vic's inaugural Creators Program and for Soho Theatre's 2023/24 Writers' Lab.
Featured Play
Spit In Your Face
“Spit In Your Face” is a political comedy/satire for three actors that employs a simple set. Our bi-national collaboration in English chronicles how Liliana Tzintzún, a young Mexican American of indigenous origins, overcomes the oppression imposed on her by two men, one an American theater producer and the other a Mexican guest director. The play explores the historical conflict between Mexico and the United States by dramatizing the power struggle between these two men, with Liliana caught in the middle. In the end, Liliana rejects the conflicting cultural labels imposed upon her by the two men and defines her own identity as a Mexican American. We wrote the play in close consultation with Esmeralda Xochitl Flores –a Mexican American cultural advisor– and with translation of selected terms into the P'urhé language from Antonio Flores, General Coordinator of Ireta P'urhépecha.
Playwright: Paul Heller