Bisexual Sadness play to open season at The Road Theatre Company
The Road Theatre Company has announced new play Bisexual Sadness by India Kotis as part of its 2023-24 season.
The Road Theatre Company and Taylor Gilbert, Founder/Artistic Director together with Sam Anderson, Artistic Director, have announced their 2023/2024 season of plays. Opening with the world premiere of the previously announced Bisexual Sadness, written by India Kotis and directed by Carlyle King, with previews beginning on Saturday, September 23.
Bisexual Sadness is about what it sounds like. Faye is getting married to a man. The best man. A man whom she loves and who loves her. But as Faye prepares to marry him, she begins to grieve. The community that embraced her when she was the girlfriend of Genevieve, the sturdy, charming butch who helmed her college’s LGBT scene, has taken on an attitude of something halfway between resentment and indifference. It’s breaking Faye’s heart. When Faye’s older sister Miranda, whose cheating-scoundrel husband has recently left her for a woman half her age moves in along with Faye’s niece Naomi, a precocious 12-year-old questioning their gender, deeper themes of identity, choice, and intergenerational change emerge.
Bisexual Sadness is about the inconvenience of fluidity, the legacy of recently-assimilated marginalized identity, and the uncomfortable tensions between personal and social identity. Faye has reaped the benefits of the gay rights movement and used it to marry a man. Now she’s suffering the consequences.Deftly illustrating bisexual women’s fragile place within contemporary queer communities alongside universal questions of love and belonging, it is a play for the progressive 21st century in all its liberated, solipsistic glory. Faye’s mourning is cringe. It’s B.S. It’s Bisexual Sadness.
About the playwright
India Kotis is a playwright and anthropologist, chiefly interested in why and how the meanings of things change. She is currently a member of the BMI-Lehman Engel Libbretist’s workshop, where she is developing a Roller Derby Musical with composer Sabrina Halavi; the Women Playwrights Circle @ Speranza Theatre, The Road Theatre’s Under Construction 2021 cohort and is under commission with The Truth, of Radiotopia.
Plays include PHILIA (James E. Michael Prize in Playwriting, Young Playwrights, Inc. National Competition); THE TANGIBLES (Playscripts); HERE BE MONSTERS (G45 Productions); PHONEBANK KISMET (The Truth) and THE SECRET LIFE OF BICYCLES (The Blank), among others. Her work has been developed, produced, and recognized by The UCross Foundation, The Blank Theatre, The Tank, The Road Theatre, The Secret City at Dixon Place, The 24 Hour Plays Nationals, Young Playwrights Inc., Manhattan Repertory Theatre, G45 Productions, Rascal Arts, The Scholastic Awards, The Drama Bookshop, The Alliance for Jewish Theatre, and Downtown Art.
She has performed with Dzieci Theatre Company, and can be seen in Marjorie Prime (2017), Cymbeline (2014), and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. Kotis’s numerous accolades include the Robert L. Baker Prize in History, the Margaret Mead Award for Excellence in Anthropology, the Muriel B. Kahrl Award for studies in American Women’s Culture, Young Playwrights Inc.’s National Competition, and the James E. Michael Prize in Playwriting.
Kotis recently completed a Collections Fellowship at the Museum of the City of New York, identifying unsigned mid century Broadway costume and set designs. Her research on the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay can be read in Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which was edited by Daniel Mark Epstein and is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
For information about the full season at the Road Theatre, go here.
