Our newest project ! Currently in development -
a two hander with technology written for Evie Mason and Max Singer.

Mary & Elizabeth is a genre-defying exploration of identity, power, and self across time. This play—small in scale but grand in scope—interweaves stories from feuding schoolgirls, closeted men, early internet romance, and a future where memories are digitized. It traces the echoes of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I through a queer prism, connecting their histories to trans women, gay men, and forgotten souls. The play’s final conversation, set in a dying machine, asks what remains when all is lost.

Part I
In the early 20th century, two young women at a preparatory school prepare to play Mary and Elizabeth in Mary Stuart. Once friends, now bitter rivals, they rehearse the fictional confrontation that leads to Mary’s execution. This vignette explores the tenderness and cruelty of girlhood, and introduces two key elements: the foundational relationship between Mary and Elizabeth, and “Ecstatic Downloads,” where at the scene’s climax, a memory or fragment of soul is captured and disappears, unnoticed by the characters.

Part II
Fifty years later, two closeted gay men attend a costume party dressed as Mary and Elizabeth. In a locked bedroom after several martinis, they confront the significance of wearing a dress. For one, Mary’s, the dress is a lifeline and a promise of transformation; for the other, Elizabeth, the dress is a lark. Their mutual attraction challenges their desires, especially as Mary wonders what life would have been like had he been born a woman.

Part III
In 2000, a trans woman and a reclusive cis man meet in an online role-playing forum. Their chatroom-only relationship allows them to assume fantastical versions of Mary and Elizabeth, and of themselves - lovers in this reality, with access to magic and spells and fairies and dragons. And as they play out their erotic fantasies across the web, real life begins to creep in, until what remains is a prototypical young love on a young internet. 

Part IV
The year is 2150 and a new discovery has shocked the world: The existence of “Ecstatic Downloads,” in which, at times of heightened emotional disturbance, a person’s memory (or soul, or brain) creates a frequency so distinct, it allows a computer to capture it, download it, and reproduce it.

At a symposium, an unseen speaker, narrates and demonstrates exactly how this process works using Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth as examples. Mary and Elizabeth’s Ecstatic Downloads are conjured into cyber-space, essentially rendering living digital portraits. But, as the symposium continues, their portraits muddy as competing narratives and memories (the previous three vignettes) enter their consciousness, and the digital queens can no longer differentiate between their Downloads, and the Downloads of others.  

Part V
2300. A super-flu has wiped out the global population. A lone computer remains, living off what’s left of a generator’s energy, and in the computer are Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth, cognizant of their limited time together, maybe their first ever face-to-face conversation. They shift in and out of the lives they’ve led: gay men, trans women, school girls, and a million others, as they relitigate their relationship, their right to the throne, and the end of their lives.