Announcing Rogue Machine’s 2025 Playwright's Roundtable Festival
August 27–31 | Seven Plays in Five Days!
At the historic Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood
Roundtable Director: Lina Patel
Festival Producers: Emily Jerez, Lina Patel and Justin Okin
The Playwright's Roundtable is Rogue Machine Theatre’s incubator for bold, boundary-pushing new work. Over the course of a seven-month residency, participating playwrights meet biweekly in a peer-led environment to develop original plays from the ground up.
Rooted in Rogue Machine’s belief that storytelling builds community and sparks change, the Roundtable empowers a diverse group of emerging and mid-career writers to create theatrical works that speak to the present moment—while standing the test of time.
2025 PW Roundtable Festival Schedule
Wednesday August 27th at 8PM
(0)n THE 5:31
Written by Mando Alvarado (2024 PW Roundtable alum)
Directed by Victoria Hoffman
Cast: Tania Verafield, Rori Flynn, Peter Mendoza
Stage Directions: Lina Patel
(O)n THE 5:31 travels back and forth across the ten-year span of a relationship. As he struggles to complete his wife's dying wishes, a grieving Benny tries to piece the fragments of their life together from memory. In the end, he'll come to understand that he wasn't the only one who lost the love of their life.
Thursday August 28th at 8PM
The Deliverer
Written by Megan Tabaque
Directed by Josh Bitton
Cast: Jeff LeBeau, Jennifer Laks, Landon Tavernier, Alex Neher, Elmira Rahim, Michael Hackett
Stage Directions: Hannah Kenah
A vacationing family that takes forever to agree on their dinner order is forced to face new truths when their Uber Eats driver alters their sense of reality. The Deliverer is a comedy using karaoke and take-out as meditations on marriage and eternity.
Friday August 29th at 8PM
Séance
Written by David Myers
Directed by Abigail Deser
Cast: Taylor Gilbert and Marc Jacobson
Stage Directions: Hannah Kenah
A mother and son fight over their lives, their deaths, and ultimately, what they've meant to each other. One of these two is a ghost, but then can't agree which one. An intimate look at the only human relationship where one party pulls the other from the void into the living.
Saturday August 30th at 1PM
Matron
Written by Makeda M. Declet
Directed by Carly DW Bones
Cast: June Carryl, Camila Rozo, Frank Collison
Stage Directions: Joy Gregory
Sandy is a wealthy patron who’s just beaten cancer. Alice is a rising artist who’s just destroyed her magnum opus. When they meet—on the eve of Alice’s vanished exhibit—they collide: one desperate to worship, the other dodging absolution.
Saturday August 30th at 8PM
Saint Megan
Written by Joy Gregory
Directed by Lina Patel
Cast: Caitlin Zambito, Meg Cain, Rachel Sorsa, Zack Rocklin, Ali Axelrad
Stage Direction: Megan Tabaque
Like everyone who loves their family, Megan Phelps is a true believer. But what happens when you slowly realize the world you know and love is based on a twisted philosophy of hate? Based on the life of Megan Phelps-Roper, a daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church who found salvation through Twitter.
Sunday August 31 at 1PM
Carla Gives a Series of Press Conferences
Written by Hannah Kenah
Directed by Hollace Starr
Cast: Hannah Kenah, David Myers, Makeda Declet
Stage Direction: Megan Tabaque
Carla Gives a Series of Press Conferences drags a private family crisis into the public sphere. Through a series of increasingly deranged operational updates, Carla constructs a defense of the indefensible that collapses time, morality, and delusion.
Sunday August 31 at 8PM
Cry .
Written by Rich Wong
Directed by Michael Matthews
Cast: Sophina Brown, June Carryl, Arianna Williams, Tucker Smallwood and Josh Bitton
Stage Direction: Lina Patel
When the prodigal mother returns home, she attempts to reclaim a life and family that have outgrown her, leaving them all with one wound that all the time in the world cannot seem to heal.
MAKEDA M. DECLET
Playwright
Makeda M. Declet is a Guyanese-American playwright, TV writer, and performer originally from Brooklyn, NY. Her work, shaped by network television, bootleg CDs, and Y2K, explores themes of nostalgia and the American Dream. Makeda holds an MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University and a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has developed work at EST/LA, Moving Arts, and Mara Brock Akil’s Story 27 Writer’s Colony. Her play Darlings was an honorable mention for the prestigious Leah Award in 2024. Looking ahead, Makeda is excited to continue queering Black stories for both the stage and screen.
JOY GREGORY
Playwright
Joy Gregory (she/her) is a proud LA theater nerd. Member of Ammunition Theatre Company and EST/LA Playwrights Unit, founding member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company. Her newest play, The Lonely Ape, A Melancholy Comedy, was a semifinalist in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference and has had readings at The Road Theatre, Echo Theater Company and Ammunition Theatre Company. Her musical The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World at Playwrights Horizons was nominated for a Drama Critics’ Circle Award and Lucile Lortel for Book and Lyrics of a Musical. Currently writer/producer and show runner for the Hallmark Television series, When Calls the Heart. Other TV writing credits include Madam Secretary, The Resident and Switched At Birth.
LINA PATEL
Playwright/ 2025 Roundtable Director
HANNAH KENAH
Playwright
Hannah Kenah is a playwright, performer, and devised theatre artist. She has developed work with the Rude Mechs, Salvage Vanguard, New Dramatists, and Yale University, among others. Hannah has performed in national and international tours, including runs at Lincoln Center, Humana Festival, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Her plays have been finalists and semifinalists for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and the Relentless Award, among others. Hannah received a BA from Dartmouth College, a certificate of physical theatre from Dell’Arte International, and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
DAVID MYERS
Playwright/Moderator
David Myers writes for stage and screen. His plays have been developed at Center Theater Group, Berkeley Rep, South Coast Rep, The Skylight Theater, and Labyrinth Theater Co. and more. Produced in London at Riverside Studios, in NYC at Rising Phoenix Rep, in Denver with Local Theatre Co. For TV, he’s worked on The Resident (Fox), Devil in Ohio (Netflix), Cruel Summer (Hulu), Cross (Amazon) and The Greatest (Amazon). MFA, UCSD, BA, Brown University. Originally from Houston, Texas, David writes about impossible dreamers wrestling with their place in history.
MEGAN TABAQUE
Playwright
Megan Tabaque is a playwright, actor, and arts educator. Her work has been developed, commissioned, and produced by the Alliance, The Road, Salvage Vanguard, Tofte Lake, Workshop Theater, Vanderbilt University, Inner City Arts, and Theatrical Outfit among others. She’s James A. Michener Fellow, Kundiman Fiction Fellow, Seattle Public Theater Emerald Prize finalist, the 2021-2023 Emory Fellow of Playwriting, and is the current 4 Seasons Resident Playwright in cooperation with the Seven Devils Conference, Tofte Lake, UCSB, and Ignition Arts. She has an MFA in Playwriting from the Michener Center for Writers and lives in Los Angeles, where she’s an Assistant Professor of Playwriting, Screenwriting, and Acting at UC Riverside.
RICH WONG
Playwright
Rich Wong is a graduate of UCLA where he earned a BA in film and television. His theatre credits include Company of Wayward Saints, Reservations For Two, Gruesome Hotel, Measure For Measure, Come Get Maggie, Blue, The Shadow, Lines in the Dust, Sukkot, H*tler’s Tasters, Psycho Beach Party, and A Good Guy. When he’s not stage managing, you may find him forcing blood from a stone (or what he likes to call writing).