BIPOC LGBTQIA+ Voices and the Queer Experience

The Concord Theatricals catalog is a tapestry of authors and the dynamic perspectives they bring to storytelling. We’re putting a spotlight on queer playwrights of color who continue to amplify the triumphs and struggles of the LGBTQIA+ experience. Discover some featured writers and works below, and learn more at Concord Theatricals in the US or UK.

Trey Anthony

A playwright, producer, actor and comedian, British-born Trey Anthony is the first Black Canadian woman to have a prime-time television show on a major network. She has received NAACP Theatre Awards and the Queering Black History Award from Egale Canada for her work, among others. She is the creator of the wellness speaking series Black Girl in Love (with herself) and the popular viral TEDx Talk Coming Out of Your Box.

Featured Work: How Black Mothers Say I Love You (US)
Hard-working Daphne left her two young daughters in Jamaica for six years to create a better life for them in America. Now, thirty years later, proud and private, Daphne is relying on church and her nearby dutiful daughter to face a health crisis. But when feisty activist Claudette shows up unexpectedly from far away, her arrival stirs up the buried past, family ghosts and the burning desire for love, reconciliation and forgiveness.

John J. Caswell, Jr. 

John J. Caswell, Jr. is a playwright from Arizona, a recent fellow at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and a recipient of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award of the Vineyard Theatre. Caswell’s play Wet Brain (co-produced by Playwrights Horizons and MCC Theater) won the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award as well as the Obie Award for its creative team and director Dustin Wills. Wet Brain was the most nominated play of the 2024 Lucille Lortel Awards. Wet Brain also received nods from the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama League.

Featured Work: Wet Brain (US/UK)
Inspired by true events and hopeless imaginings, Wet Brain is a play about three distant siblings and their father’s possible repeat abductions by extraterrestrials during the height of his end-stage alcoholism. With recovery unlikely, organs failing and Dad’s death all but imminent, Ricky, Ron and Angelina look for a final closure many, many light years away.

Fernanda Coppel

The work of Fernanda Coppel has won the Asuncion Queer Latino Festival at Pregones Theater, an HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting and a Helen Merrill Award. Besides creating for the stage, she was a writer-producer for Queen of the South and Rise, among numerous television projects. Chimichangas and Zoloft marked her professional New York debut at the Atlantic Theater Company.

Featured Work: Chimichangas and Zoloft (US/UK)
Suffering from a profound sense of disappointment after her 40th birthday, Sonia flees her family and goes on a binge of prescription Zoloft and greasy chimichangas. Sonia’s rebellious daughter Jackie and her best friend Penelope hatch a plan to lure Sonia back home, while their fathers struggle with a secret association of their own. This irreverent story examines the search for happiness and the mysteries of sexuality through the eyes of two brazen teenagers.

Colman Domingo

Colman Domingo is a Tony, Olivier and NAACP Theatre Award-nominated, Obie and Lucille Lortel Award-winning actor, playwright, director and producer. He has been recently celebrated as a Newport Beach Film Festival’s Artist of Distinction and honored by the Vineyard Theatre for his 30-year body of work. He is on the faculty of The National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and has taught, guest lectured and mentored at numerous institutions around the country.

Featured Work: Dot (US/UK)
The holidays are always a wild family affair at the Shealy house – but this year, Dotty and her three grown children gather with more than exchanging presents on their minds. As Dotty struggles to hold on to her memory, her children must fight to balance care for their mother and care for themselves. Domingo’s twisted and hilarious play grapples unflinchingly with aging parents, midlife crises and the heart of a West Philadelphia neighborhood.

Isaac Gómez

Isaac Gómez is an award-winning Chicago and Los Angeles-based playwright and screenwriter originally from El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. His plays include La Ruta and The Way She Spoke. His television credits include the Netflix Original Series Narcos: Mexico, the first writers room for Kings of America on Netflix, and, most recently, the Apple TV+ Limited Series The Last Thing He Told Me starring Julia Roberts. He currently has a series in development with Stacey Sher and FX.

Featured Work: La Ruta (US/UK)
To the U.S.-owned factories in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, La Ruta is just a bus. But to the hundreds of women who live, work and often disappear along the route, it’s so much more than that. Inspired by real testimonies, and using live music to evoke factory work and protest marches, La Ruta is a visceral unearthing of secrets buried in the desert and a celebration of the Mexican women who stand resiliently in the wake of loss.

Jeremy O. Harris

Jeremy O. Harrisis an American playwright, actor and screenwriter. Harris gained prominence for his 2018 drama Slave Play, which received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. Harris is also known for his work in film and television. He produced and co-wrote the A24 film Zola, for which he received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. Harris acted in the HBO Max series Gossip Girl, the Netflix series Emily in Paris and the film The Sweet East.

Featured Work: Slave Play (US/UK)
Slave Play rips apart history to shed new light on the nexus of race, gender and sexuality in 21st-century America. The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantation – in the breeze, in the cotton fields… and in the crack of the whip. Nothing is as it seems, and yet everything is as it seems.

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter (and occasional dramaturg) from London. She was awarded a scholarship from BAFTA and Warner Brothers to study a Masters in Playwriting & Screenwriting. self-described “bionic, queer playwright,” Ibini centers stories from the margins, including from queer and disabled people, and brings them to life with their signature magical realist splendor. Her plays have been produced widely across the UK and even been broadcast on BBC radio.

Featured Work: Sleepova (UK)
“We don’t get to choose when we become women, y’know?” Join Rey, Elle, Shan and Funmi, who have finally convinced their parents to let them hold their very first sleepova. With sugary snacks, school gossip, and secret questions they can only ask each other, their sleepovas become pretty much a sacred space for them. As each year tugs them further into adulthood and life doesn’t pan out quite as they imagined, they struggle to hold on to a friendship that they swore would last a lifetime. A frank, funny and moving coming-of-age story, Sleepova is an ode to black women, their boundless spirits and wild dreams.

Michael R. Jackson

Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop won the 2022 Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical. It was also the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His next musical, White Girl in Danger, premiered as a co-production between Second Stage Theater and the Vineyard Theatre. Michael is the recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant, Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting and a Dramatist Guild Fellowship. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in Playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Featured Work: A Strange Loop (US/UK)
Meet Usher: a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer writing a musical about a Black, queer writer. Winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical, this Pulitzer Prize-winning, blisteringly funny masterwork exposes the heart and soul of a young artist grappling with desires, identity and instincts he both loves and loathes. Hell-bent on breaking free of his own self-perception, Usher wrestles with the thoughts in his head, brought to life on stage by a hilarious, straight-shooting ensemble. Bold and heartfelt in its truth-telling, A Strange Loop is the big, Black and queer-ass Great American Musical for all!

Hansol Jung

Whiting Award winner Hansol Jung, whose productions include Wild Goose Dreams, Among the Dead and No More Sad Things, hails from South Korea. She has translated over thirty English musicals into Korean while working on several musical theatre productions as director, lyricist and translator in Seoul. She is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers Lab, NYTW Usual Suspects and The New Class of Kilroys.

Featured Work: Wolf Play (US/UK)
A Korean boy is ushered into a new house by his adopted American father. This new house belongs to an American boxer and her wife. The American father un-adopts the boy with a single signature. But when he discovers that the new parents are a lesbian couple, the ex-father fights to get the boy back. Wolf Play is a messy, funny, disturbing theatrical experience grappling with a wolf, a puppet, and the very prickly problem of “What is a family, and what do we need from families today? Is it very different from what humans have needed from families before?”

Eduardo Machado

Eduardo Machado, playwright, screenwriter, director and arts professor, was born in Cuba and came to the United States when he was eight. He is the author of over forty plays, including Havana is Waiting, In the Eye of the Hurricane, Kissing Fidel and The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa. He is a member of the Actors Studio, The Ensemble Studio Theater, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Featured Work: Havana is Waiting (US)
This comedy-drama takes a strong political stand on the divisive issue of the United States’ embargo on Cuba. The play begins with flamboyant writer Federico making his first trip back to Cuba, thirty-some years after he immigrated to the States as a child. In Cuba, Federico and his friend Fred meet Ernesto, a car driver and lifelong resident of Havana. The three men get to know each other better and soon learn where the real boundaries of the world lie. The play examines of the complex relationships that exist not only between men, but between the countries in which they live.

Robert O’Hara

Playwright and director Robert O’Hara has received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, Obie Awards, the NAACP Best Director Award and the Oppenheimer Award. He has been an Artist in Residence at the American Conservatory Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, Theater/Emory, and the Mellon Playwright in Residence at Woolly Mammoth. Most recently, he received a Tony Award nomination for directing Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris.

Featured Work: Bootycandy (US/UK)
The semi-biographical subversive comedy tells the story of Sutter, who is on an outrageous odyssey through his childhood home, his church, dive bars, motel rooms and even nursing homes. O’Hara weaves together scenes, sermons, sketches and daring meta-theatrics to create a kaleidoscope that interconnects to portray growing up gay and Black. The uproarious satire crashes headlong into the murky terrain of pain and pleasure and… Bootycandy.

A. Rey Pamatmat

A. Rey Pamatmat grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, acting in a local community theatre and surrounded by few peers who looked like him. Influenced by María Irene Fornés and August Wilson, he has been the Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers Lab, the nation’s largest resident company of Asian-American playwrights, since 2004. The Filipino-American author has won the Princess Grace Award for Playwriting and a GLAAD Media Award, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

Featured Work: House Rules (US/UK)
Rod thinks the game is fixed. Momo’s still learning the rules. Twee doesn’t think winning is enough. JJ hates his hand. And why the hell is Henry still playing? Two families (and some guy named Henry) panic with hilarious and heartbreaking results when they realize their parents won’t be around forever. Can anybody prepare for the inevitable moment when they’re the ones left holding all the cards?

a.k. payne 

a.k. payne is a playwright, artist-theorist and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh. Their plays engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find and remember language that might move audiences towards collective liberation. They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from the Yale School of Drama. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, they were named a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. Payne’s work has been a 3x finalist and a 2025 winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the oldest and largest international prize honoring women+ playwrights.

Featured Work: Amani (US/UK)
Amani grows up building a rocket ship with her father, who vows to make it to outer space… where his child can breathe easy, where there are no gangs to take his first love’s life, nor prisons to take Black boys’ best years. As Amani moves into adulthood, she seeks her voice and her own dreams. Will Amani make it to the moon?

Andrew Rincón

A Queer Colombian-American playwright, screenwriter and world builder, their work blends fantasy, modern Latine mythology and Queer fabulation. They have received the Chesley/Bumbalo Grant for writers of Gay and Lesbian Theatre and New Light Theatre Project’s New Light New Voices Award, among others. Other plays include That Rhythm in the Blood, The Lonely (A Fictionally Non-Accurate Historical Kiki) and El Mito or The Myth of my Pain.

Featured Work: I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet (US/UK)
Moving from the heavens to Hackensack, Andrew Rincón’s comedy is a love story of epic proportions playing with gods and mortals, realism and fantasy, and the shame and joy found in queer love.

Harrison David Rivers

Harrison David Rivers won the Relentless Award (2018, New York Stage & Film), and was named a Runner-up for the 2018 Artist of the Year by the Star Tribune and a 2017 Artist of the Year by City Pages. Harrison is an alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Interstate 73, NAMT and The Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab. He is a NYTW Usual Suspect and a member of the Playwright Center’s Board of Directors.

Featured Work: The Bandaged Place (US/UK)
Struggling to recover after an assault, Jonah realizes the only way to heal is by mending the relationships with his family. A brutal and lyrical portrait of the things we hang on to and the price of moving forward, the bandaged place tells of one man’s attempt to free himself from the abuses of his past.

Tanya Saracho

Tanya Saracho was born in Sinaloa, México. She is a playwright and television writer who’s worked on How To Get Away With Murder and HBO’s Looking, among other shows. Currently, she serves as creator/showrunner of the series VIDA on Starz. She is also developing a television series called Brujas with Big Beach, which deals with the intersection between Brujería culture and feminism. She is the founder of Teatro Luna (all-Latina Theatre Company) as well as the founder of ALTA (Alliance of Latino Theatre Artists). Her plays include El Nogalar, Enfrascada, Mala Hierba and Fade.

Featured Work: El Nogalar (US/UK)
In present-day Northern Mexico, the Galvan family returns to reclaim their pecan orchard after matriarch Maité has squandered the family’s money. Tragically, the land they once knew has slowly been taken over by a drug war. This modern adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard explores the complex relationships among a mother and her daughters as four women face the challenges of a dangerous and rapidly changing environment.

Tatenda Shamiso

Tatenda Shamiso is a theatre-maker, writer and musician with origins from Zimbabwe, Belgium, the United States and Switzerland. He is also a scholarly researcher in Afrofuturism and its potential to deconstruct and rebuild our notions of gender, space and time. Tatenda freelances as a writer, director and facilitator, and guest lectures in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Featured Work: NO I.D. (UK)
With laughter, music, and a healthy dose of care, NO I.D. is a love letter to gender transitions and an examination of how absurd our bureaucratic systems can be. The story of Tatenda Shamiso’s experience as a Black transgender immigrant in the UK is presented through the songs he wrote throughout his first year on testosterone alongside letters, signatures and a whole lot of paperwork. The show highlights what it takes to validate Black and queer identities in the eyes of the law.

Kit Yan & Melissa Li

Kit Yan, a Vivace Award winner for big ideas in musical theatre, is a New York-based artist born in Enping, China, and raised in Hawaii. Kit is a former Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow and MacDowell Fellow, and their work has been produced by the American Repertory Theater, the Smithsonian, NAMT, Musical Theater Factory, the New York Musical Festival, Mixed Blood and Diversionary Theater.

Melissa Li is a composer, lyricist, performer and writer based in New York and Baltimore. She is a recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow, a Lincoln Center Theater Writer-in-Residence, a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a former Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellow. Melissa has released music solo and collaboratively, including 2 Seconds Away, Drive Away Home (as Good Asian Drivers), and The Beginning (as Melissa Li & The Barely Theirs).

Featured Work: Cancelled (US) (book by Kit Yan, music & lyrics by Melissa Li)
A scandal breaks in a progressive high school when Joey, the popular lesbian President of the GSA, accidentally sends an offensive tweet directed at Evan, a trans classmate. Tensions rise when their friends scramble to take sides, leaving Joey and Evan caught in the center of the drama. With humor and heart, this one-act musical explores how broken relationships can be repaired by putting aside snap judgements and owning one’s mistakes.

For more work showcasing BIPOC LGBTQIA+ voices, visit the Concord Theatricals website in the US or UK.