In Recent News:
WHERE YOU AND I GO WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT was selected for production in New York Theater Festival’s 2021 series WINTERFEST with The Pressure Players.
MASHA AND THE BEAR was selected by Everyday Inferno Theatre Co. for their 2019 reading series, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT . . .
Belle Shea was a Guest Playwright Mentor for the Young Playwrights Festival at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 2017.
She was selected as a Playwriting Apprentice for the Powerhouse Theater, part of New York Stage and Film’s Summer Season in 2014.
She was the Head of Drama at Pine Forest Camp in Greeley, PA in 2015.
She graduated in 2016 with a BA with Honors in Drama from Vassar College.
WHERE YOU AND I GO WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT
Selected by New York Theater Festival’s 2021 Winterfest & produced by The Pressure Players. Performances running 12/9/2021 - 12/12/2021 at the Latea Theater, NYC.
Chris and Erika are happily married (probably). Sex with Elsie is just a dream (likely). And Erika might be in love with the Monster Under the Bed, who goes by Amanda John (as far as we know). A dreamscape on gender, love, connection, and strange bedfellows.
4 roles, any gender
MASHA AND THE BEAR
Selected by Everyday Inferno Theatre Co. for their 2019 reading series, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT…
Everything is cold and damp in the village of Kimmelhutz, a small town on the Siberian border. It is a place where dreams fade into daylight, where winter reigns for many months of the year, and where the woods that surround the town and farms are never long forgotten. And Masha and her mother live very close to the wide, wild, and sometimes wicked woods, where wolves and bears listen to secrets told to the wind.
2 F / 2 M (plus or minus one talking bear)
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD
Set partially in a eugenics ward of a hospital in Southern California, 1920, and partially in the mind of Cora Teller, a young woman institutionalized there. Magical realism meets feminist political theory meets dance theater.
4 F / 1-2 M
First premiere Streep Studio Vassar College 2015
original cast and devising ensemble: Oriana Catton, Becca Jannou, Malinda Kathleen Reese, Sophie Lederman, Collin Knopp-Schwyn. Dir. Jasen Miyamoto and Belle Shea, Stage Managed Emily Omrod. Poster design by Becca Jannou.
PIANO KEYS
Chekhov in 1960s Vermont, for the Seven Sisters and other uncommon women. There is a fire, a piano key that will not play, a fully stocked liquor cabinet, a lesbian vegetarian houseguest, two sets of wedding plans, two broken engagements. "Don't be bitter, darling - there will be plenty of time for that in middle age."
4 F / 2 M
THE REWRITE
(co-written with Hannah Tobias)
What happens if Treplyov, the writer in THE SEAGULL, was writing THREE SISTERS all along? What happens when worlds collide? Drawing on similarities between Chekhovian characters, settings, and themes, THE REWRITE is the sort of madcap dramedy that Chekhov would either love or rise from the grave to spit on.
3 F / 5 M
THE PINE
Before THE TEMPEST begins, Ariel is imprisoned in a cloven pine by Sycorax, raven witch of Algiers. He wishes to leave. A performance text.
Any number of actors, any gender. One pianist.