PLAYWRIGHTS’ GROUP
New voices. New plays.
Boston Court has a passion for new play development and 2026 is another exceptional year of the B/C Playwrights’ Group!
The three playwrights were selected from our annual play submission window. Each play will be presented with a public workshop. More details to come soon!
THE 2025/2026 PLAYWRIGHTS
Makeda M. Declet is a Guyanese-American playwright, TV writer, and actor. Her play FKA GOLD IS DEEP is a semi-finalist for the 2026 O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference. DARLINGS was a finalist for the 2025 Ojai Playwrights Conference, a semi-finalist for the 2025 O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, and an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Leah Playwriting Prize. Makeda served in the mini-room for FX’s Suckhole. Her stage plays include SERVICE/PLAY (EST/LA, Los Angeles; The Understudy, Chicago), Issa Was Here (Perceptions Theatre, Chicago), Hammer (The Belfry Stage, Los Angeles), Camp (MeetCute, Los Angeles), and FKA Gold is Deep (Ethel M. Barber Theater, Northwestern University).
She has participated in Rogue Machine’s Playwrights Roundtable, EST/LA’s New West Playwrights Under 30, Moving Arts’ MadLab, and Mara Brock Akil’s Story 27 Writers’ Colony. She holds a BFA in Experimental Theater from NYU and an MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University.
Makeda grew up in Brooklyn and now splits her time between Chicago and Los Angeles.
Born and raised in China, Xiaoyan Kang started writing plays in English while studying under Philip Gotanda at Berkeley. She is a current member of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood Group and a recent MFA graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her plays have been developed with The Playwrights Realm, Great Plains Theatre Commons, Et Alia Theater, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been recognized as a runner-up for the Jane Chambers Award, a finalist for the Alliance Theatre/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award, and a regional winner (The Americas) of the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition. Some of her short plays have been developed at The Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival and 24 Hour Plays: Nationals.
Deepak Kumar is a playwright, lyricist, composer and professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego. He writes about the questions that keep him up at night, whether they be about Asianness, technology, youth, board games, or soul-eating demons. His shows have been developed and produced all over, with some highlights including The Old Globe, Ojai Playwrights Conference, and The Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. He is a MacDowell Colony fellow and is currently on commission from Arena Stage.
THE 2024/2025 PLAYWRIGHTS
Agyeiwaa Asante (she/her) is a Ghanaian-American playwright and administrator from Maryland. Some of her full-length plays include, DAINTY (BOLD NYC’s 2020 Festival, Mosaic Theatre, Playwrights Realms Scratchpad series), AGAPE; or The Church Play (Cygnet’s Finish Line Commision, Round House’s Capital New Play Festival, Boston Court Pasadena’s Playwrights Group) and The Half-Sibling Play (Fire This Time Festival). She holds commissions for UMD’s NextNow Festival, Single Carrot Theatre and Round House Theatre. She is the 2020 recipient of The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation’s Ollie Award and a member of The Kilroys Web 2023 and The Playwrights Cohort at PlayPenn, Class of 2024-25. B.A. in Theatre from the University of Maryland, College Park. MFA in Playwriting at UC San Diego.
Nicholas Pilapil (he/him) is a Filipino American playwright. His plays include God Will Do The Rest (world premiere with Artists at Play & Latino Theater Company), The Bottoming Process (world premiere with IAMA Theatre Company, Victory Gardens Ignition Festival of New Plays), and if all that You take from this is courage, then I’ve no regrets (winner of the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival). His work has also been developed with Geffen Playhouse, Playwrights Foundation, Abingdon Theatre Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, Theatre Rhinoceros, and The Workshop Theater, among others. His plays and essays are published by Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Astringent Press, 1319 Press, and Kuwento Co. Nicholas is an alum of The Writers’ Room at the Geffen Playhouse, IAMA Theatre Company’s Emerging Playwrights Lab, and artEquity.
Chelsea Sutton (she/her) is a writer and theatre maker of what she likes to call gothic whimsy. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award-winner, a 2015 O’Neill Conference Finalist, a 2018 Sewanee Writers Conference Playwright Fellow, and a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. The second production of her macabre steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio, Wood Boy Dog Fish (created with Rogue Artists Ensemble) was nominated for five Ovation Awards and five Stage Raw Awards and appeared in the inaugural season at the Garry Marshall Theatre. Her play The Abundance, written in Moving Arts’ 2023 MADlab, was a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Conference and was recently developed at the 2024 Valdez Theatre Conference Play Lab and the 2024 Kayenta New Works Lab. Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin, a piece she co-wrote with Lisa Sanaye Dring, was nominated for 8 Ovation Awards including Best Production (winner of 5). She co-wrote the Emmy-nominated 2020 Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive film event for Blumhouse/Amazon and The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, an award-winning virtual event for TNT + Little Cinema Digital. Also a fiction writer, her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing, and her debut novella is forthcoming in 2026 from Split/Lip Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. chelseasutton.com