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The Segal Center presented our annual World Voices Festival: a three-day festival showcasing the work of renowned international theatre artists.
Thursday 1 May: Selected works by Kaite O'Reilly
*Followed by a panel on disability and performance.
On Thursday 1 May the festival features the work of Kaite O'Reilly, a playwright and dramaturg known internationally for her pioneering work in disability theatre and performance. A reading of selections of O'Reilly's plays, including from her most recent project The Sisters Grey, are followed by a talkback with the playwright and the reading's director Katie Butler and a conversation on disability in performance. Click here to watch the conversation on disabilty and deaf performance on HowlRound.
The Segal Center will present excerpts from O'Reilly's The Sisters Grey and The 'd' Monologues.
Written by Kaite O'Reilly, directed by Katie Butler.
Featuring: Bree Rothbart & Melissa Jennifer Gonzalez
Readings
2 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 4 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 5 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
The 'd' Monologues
Since the Ancient Greeks, disabled characters have appeared in plays, but rarely have the writers been disabled or written from that embodied or politicized perspective. The vast majority of disabled characters in the Western theatrical canon are tropes, reinforcing limited notions of what it is to be "normal" rather than broadening the lens and embracing all the possibilities of human variety. I wanted to make work solely for disabled and Deaf performers, informed by the Social Model of disability. From 2010 I embarked on this on-going project, writing fictional monologues informed by interviews and conversations with Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people, users and survivors of the mental health system and those with long term or chronic illness across the world. The monologues presented here include new, previously unperformed work alongside the following: my National Theatre Wales/Cultural Olympiad commission In Water I'm Weightless, celebrating the 2012 London Olympics/Paralympics; from the intercultural international Unlimited commission And Suddenly I Disappear, between Singapore and the UK and Something Wonderful, from the Beijing 'd' Monologues, created over lockdown.—Katie O'Reilly
The Sisters Grey
The work-in-progress is from a new performance text, revisiting the ancient Greek myth of The Graiai.
Saturday 3 May: Plays by Kathrine Nedrejord (Norway) and Christos Panagiotakis (Greece)
On Saturday 3 May, the Segal Center presented a double bill of plays by Kathrine Nedrejord (Norway) and Christos Panagiotakis (Greece). The readings are followed by a talkback with the artists, moderated by Frank Hentschker.
Almost Human by Kathrine Nedrejord (Norway), directed by Seth Bockley
12 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 2 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 3 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Featuring: Jeff Biehl, Michael Darby, Sophia Englesberg, Maude Mitchell, and Cael Sullivan
A refugee girl is welcomed into a blended, middle class family. The family’s internal frictions soon emerge—the older son is absent, and there's conflict between the younger son and stepfather, who takes a little too much interest in the girl. Though the mother tries to keep the peace, the girl's seeming salvation gradually becomes a nightmare.
The Blood of the Souls the Night Reaps by Christos Panagiotakis, directed by April Sweeney
2:30 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 4:30 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 5:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Featuring: Kathleen Chalfant, Ben Becher, Ryan Ruhl
It's night. A young man accepts the visit of a man who takes him in his carriage. To where? He is strict and solemn, but the young man's attitude intrigues him. He is the Boatman of Acheron, the Messenger of Death of Plouton, God of the Underworld. The young man speaks to him with courage, with frankness, and the coachman opens his soul. He tells him what he has seen and heard for so many centuries, transporting souls to the other world. They get out of the city, go past hills and forests. They reach the Acheron River. The young man suggests that they change the flow of things. Can things change in human destiny? The coachman will spare him his life. And before dawn the young man will be in his room. Was it a dream?
Monday 5 May: Highway 7 by Haeyoul Bae (South Korea), directed by Seonjae Kim
On Monday 5 May we presented a reading of Highway 7 by Haeyoul Bae (South Korea), directed by Seonjae Kim. The reading was followed by a talkback with the artists, moderated by Frank Hentschker.
Highway 7
3:30 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 5:30 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 6:30 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
by Haeyoul Bae, directed by Seonjae Kim
Highway 7 addresses the death of a semiconductor factory worker and the suspicious deaths around the military, portraying the lives of those whose paths are inevitably intertwined. The play explores the conflicts, clashes, and transformations between five different characters. It reflects these issues not just as problems of the individuals involved but as realities that we are all facing. The play questions whether we, and the theatre itself, can confront victims without being trapped by conventional ideas and without resorting to stereotypes.
Segal Center 2025 World Voices Playwrights
Haeyoul Bae is a playwright from South Korea. Works include: Highway 7; Stir-Fried Memories with Vienna Sausages; Here, Once, Gaga; Once Upon a Time, There Was an Asian Small-Clawed Otter Living in Seoul City; Temple of April; Saving the Goat; 1994, 2014, and the Space in between; Magnolia Balloon; Dogs Without Masters. Awards include: 2021 Byuksan Culture Awards, Play Award; 2022 Donga Play Awards, Best Play; 2024 New Play Contest by National Theatre Company of Korea, Excellence Award; 2025 Lee Yeong-man Theatrical Awards for Playwright.
Kathrine Nedrejord is a playwright and author from the indigenous Sami community in Norway. Nedrejord is especially interested in exploring hierarchies, colonialism and the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator in her works. For her first play Brent jord (*Scorched Earth) she was nominated for the Ibsen Prize in 2015. In 2018 she became the first female playwright in residence at the National Theatre in Oslo. Stagings and readings of her plays have been done in several countries like France, Luxembourg, Germany, Sweden and Finland, as well as Norway. She has written and published twelve books in Norway. Her novel Forbryter og staff (*Criminal and punishment) was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literary Award and was recently staged at the Det Norske Teatret. Her latest novel Sameproblemet (*The Sami Problem) has won the Brage Literary Award as well at the Oktober award, and is set to be published in six other countries.
Kaite O’Reilly is a multi-award winning playwright and dramaturg, who writes for radio, screen and live performance. She is known internationally for her pioneering work in Disability culture. Prizes include the Peggy Ramsay Award, Manchester Theatre Award, Theatre-Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for Persians (National Theatre Wales). She is a two time finalist in the International James Tait Black Prize for Innovation in Drama (2012, 2019) and The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She was honored in the 2017/18 International Eliot Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy for developing "Alternative Dramaturgies informed by a Deaf and disability Perspective." She was associate dramaturg for National Theatre Wales and production dramaturg/narrative director for Rambert’s Peaky Blinders dance theatre, The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, currently touring. Kaite’s plays Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors and The ‘d’ Monologues are published by Oberon/Methuen/ Bloomsbury. International work includes the 2018 Unlimited Commission And Suddenly I Disappear: The Singapore/Wales ‘d’ Monologues, a collaboration between Deaf and disabled artists and Something Wonderful, inspired by lived experience of disability in China. Her plays the 9 fridas and The ‘d’ Monologues had their Korean premiere in Seoul, 2021. Her first feature film, The Almond and the Seahorse won the Special Jury’s prize at Dinard Film Festival. Featuring Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg, it was released in the UK in 2024. She is currently part of the writers’ lab at Royal Opera House Covent Garden and developing a television series with a disabled female protagonist.
Christos Panagiotakis was born and raised in Antiphilippi, Kavala, a village at the foot of Mount Pangaion in Greece. A graduate of the Drama School "Karolos Koun” Art Theater (1986), he worked in theatre as an actor until 1997 and acted in the cinema and television series. As a writer he published the poetry collection Acrobat at the Edge of Time (2018). Later he published the first part of his trilogy, based on fifteen-syllable verse, entitled, The Blood is of Souls that the Night Reaps (2020), and the second part, entitled The Centrifugal (2023). The Executioner (2023) is the third part of the trilogy: a tribute to the homonymous fifteen-syllable verse known since the 10th AD and popular in traditional Greek folk songs. Some of his poems have been set to music. At present he is working on his first novel.
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