nj arts maven: NJPL Announces 2022 Residency Plays!

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The New Jersey Play Lab is proud to announce our 2022 Residency plays!

And Every Creeping Thing
by Eric Craft

In the beginning, the angels are hard at work designing and managing logistics for Creation, but in the Department of Beasts, an unbalanced food chain threatens to destroy the world before it even starts. One little angel’s passion project may just hold the key to saving Creation, and the creatures that may just be the world’s secret hope. Bugs. In this office comedy of biblical proportions, corporate politics clash with spiritual and artistic fulfillment in a story from before time itself.

Come Rain, Come Hurricane
by Edwin Rivera-Arias

"I survive Hurricane Flora, Batista, the zafra, el calabozo, y el paredon. I survive anything." So says feisty old Cubano, Don Berto Remedios, who awakes one rainy morning to discover that he's been robbed of the $9,000 he was hoping to take back with him to his homeland paradise. And the thief, a young Boricua with dreams of his own, is closer to him than he ever could have imagined.
Come Rain, Come Hurricane explores the bonds (and bounds) of friendship; working-class Latino families; and the agony of forced migration. Who can stand tall when the storms ring down and lives are blasted to pieces?

Dining on the Truck-Side, Or The Untold Story of the Turnpike Greats
by Ravin Patterson

Mistrust, misgivings, and the American Dream. Oh, my. Dining on the Truck-side, or the Untold Story of The Turnpike Greats is a tale about unlikely heroes struggling to overcome the challenges of their often dysfunctional and determined existence, one hour at a time.

The Golden Door
by Lia Romeo

What does it mean to be an American, and how much is it worth giving up? In 1902, an Italian peasant girl is detained at Ellis Island. In 2047, an American teenager tries to cross the border into Canada to escape a country ravaged by disease. The Golden Door explores immigration through the ages and asks what truly makes America great.

Un Hombre
by Stephen Kaplan

Un Hombre is a modern-day golem story about Rebecca Wolfson, a recently widowed single mother, who makes a clay man that comes to life and serves as a Bar Mitzvah and Spanish tutor for her 12-year-old son. As mother and son get wrapped up in the distractions that this seemingly perfect solution to their problems offers, the clay man begins questioning his own existence and purpose, forcing all three to confront the truths they’ve all been avoiding.

The Cousins (Rhymes with Dozens)
by Benjamin V. Marshall

A new play revolving around two cousins who lived in Newark's Central Ward during the tumultuous year of 1967: Miriam, who moved away years ago, and Delores, who has stayed and grown more embedded in the neighborhood and in her own recollections of the past; ‘Things they don’t put in those history books.’ When Miriam's son asks his Aunt Delores to help him with a historical documentary he is filming, she is forced to confront whether she is holding on to the past, or if the past is holding on to her.