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jessica charles writes

plays

A SELECTION OF FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

Antiquated F*ckery

Tired of an industry that sees them as both too Black AND not Black enough, two queer BFFs decide to fuck the auditions and take the future into their own hands.  When producers call after their genderqueer Juliet & Romeo goes viral, their friendship is put to the test by Karens, capitalists, and ultimately each other.  Antiquated F*ckery is a dark comedy/Black queer reality that begs the question: how do we move forward if we’re still performing the past?

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Hot Girls Making Out

Set within a community of queer POC who have built, sustained, and are now facing the loss of a vital queer space, the play centers Dru, Lulu, and Bec on the closing days of the Better Place - the last lesbian bar in Manhattan. Into this world stumbles Jane who is married to Mark, yet in the wake of her best friend's (a woman she loved more than a friend) sudden death, she confronts a life she has denied. In the end, she has to choose between the world she's built with her husband or something a little less comfortable: being true to herself.

 

A gay-bar-party-and-play-in-one, Hot Girls Making Out  questions the meaning of belonging within a disappearing world: who gets to claim space, to grieve it, and to imagine themselves inside it before it is gone. "This play encapsulates the joy that comes from inhabiting queer spaces with queer people."

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"the gen-u-ine n*gga show!"

_the genuine minstrel show!_ v2.jpeg

In this dysmorphic, dollhouse minstrel show, in parallel worlds, Iris, a Black Popstar in 2026, and Jimmy, an Irish-American minstrel in 1883, can only survive by the performance of Blackness. In this rival to Mark Twain’s beloved “nigger-show,” “the genuine nigga show!” is a darkly comedic play that explores American performance, Black representation, and survival.

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the real nigger-show—the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show, —the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience. We have the grand opera; […] and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide. But if I could have the nigger-show back again, in its  pristine purity and perfection, I should have little further use for opera. It seems to me that to the elevated mind and the sensitive spirit the hand-organ and the nigger-show are a standard and a summit to whose rarefied altitude the other forms of musical art may hope to reach. 

[Dictated Monday, November 30, 1906] 

-Mark Twain

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  • Keep Soul Alive: Micro-Development Series, National Black Theatre, 2026 

  • I AM SOUL Playwriting Residency, Finalist – National Black Theatre 24/26

  • WP Theater Lab, Semi-finalist – WP Theater, 2024

  • Honors Distinction, M.A. Text and Performance, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London '12-13

[THE BLACK WOMAN] and the Myth

A hurricane hits Harlem. A storm like no one has seen before. Eleven year-old girl, Malindy, goes missing in the storm. In one building, two apartments live modern-day versions of Her Stories’ nightmarish tales. Each inhabitant fears the worst as they fight the myths in their minds and the truth of what happens to missing girls. While lost in the hurricane, Malindy finds herself running, crawling, swimming and floating amongst the storm and from her Black Imagination – where the fairytales of Her Stories are true tales. As our little girl runs from the dangers of what seems to be the inevitable conclusion to all of the tales – [THE BLACK WOMAN]’s death – in this play, [THE BLACK WOMAN] has the agency to change her narrative.

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[THE BLACK WOMAN] and The Myth is a play that utilizes three myths in Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales told by Virginia Hamilton. 

- The Mer- Woman out of the Sea as told by John Bennett and Araminta Tucker (1867)

- Lena and Big One Tiger as told by a woman from the Sea Islands (1890)

- Malindy and the Little Devil as told by Southern black folk tellers (1890)

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  • New Works Lab Cycle 7, Finalist  – The Fire This Time, 2024

  • Development, SPACE on Ryder Farm, 2024

  • Staged Reading, LTC at Pregones/PRTT,  canceled due to COVID, (dir. Kim Brockington), March 27th, 2020

  • Development, Liberation Theater Company (LTC), 2020

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