Red Bull Theater Announces Cast for 2026 Short New Play Festival

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The cast will feature Shirine Babb, Brandon Contreras, Rebecca Ho, Michael Karadsheh, Ella Loudon and more.

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Red Bull Theater has revealed the cast for their annual Short New Play Festival 2026 to be held on Monday, June 22 at 7:30 PM at Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Peter Norton Symphony Space .

Get all the top news & discounts for Off-Broadway & beyond.

The event will feature Shirine Babb , Brandon Contreras , Rebecca Ho , Michael Karadsheh, Ella Loudon , Alfredo Narciso , Maria-Christina Oliveras , David Ryan Smith , Derek Smith , Amara Webb, and Jaine Ye . Directed by José Zayas and Tatiana Baccari , the one-night-only event will feature eight world premieres and will spotlight works by some of the most exciting writers from across the country, penning classically inspired 10-minute plays.

This year's theme is “REFINISHED” and will include new, commissioned plays by Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You) and Betty Shamieh (Malvolio, Roar), alongside six plays from up-and-coming playwrights selected through an open submission process: Sabrina Caruso, Nate Currier, Nadel Henville, Nick Martorelli and Justin Muschong, Karen Ogle, and Chris Browne Valenzuela. SHORT NEW PLAY FESTIVAL 2026 is made possible by the leadership support of The Noël Coward Foundation.

Red Bull Theater’s annual SHORT NEW PLAY FESTIVAL has generated over 4,000 new short plays of classic themes and heightened language, presenting over 100 of them in a one-night-only Festival performance with some of New York’s finest actors and directors. In its first 14 years, the commissioned playwrights have included Will Eno Larissa FastHorse , Marcus Gardley , Madeleine George , John Guare , Stephen Adly Guirgis , Jeremy O. Harris , David Ives , Craig Lucas , Robert O’Hara, Dael Orlandersmith , Heather Raffo , Theresa Rebeck , José Rivera, Anne Washburn , Doug Wright , Anna Ziegler , and winning entries by writers such as Anchuli Felicia King , Patricia Ione Lloyd , Lynn Rosen , and Jen Silverman . Stage Rights has published a 5-volume collection of the plays from the first 10 years of Red Bull Theater’s annual Short New Play Festival as Red Bull Shorts.

COMMISSIONED PREMIERES:

It’s 1623 in the print shop of Isaac Jaggard, where the final pages are being prepared for William Shakespeare ’s First Folio. Eager to celebrate the triumph that will preserve their late friend’s plays for all time, John Heminges and Henry Condell make a terrible mistake that could ruin The Tempest. Can they recover the text and rescue the folio? This new short comedy by Ken Ludwig is a hilarious love letter to the men who saved Shakespeare’s plays.

The great poet Dante had a muse and a wife. They weren't the same woman. In this short play about marriage, exile and art, Gemma, Dante's wife and mother of his children, takes center stage.

THIS YEAR’S WINNING SELECTIONS:

Just before Act 2, Scene 3 of Henry IV, Part 1 begins, Lady Percy arrives onstage a moment too soon. In a private moment, she discovers something impossible: the audience can hear her thoughts-a privilege usually reserved for Shakespeare’s more prominent characters. In the play as written, she cannot stop Hotspur from leaving for war. But if the audience can truly hear her… perhaps he can too. As the familiar Shakespearean scene unfolds, Lady Percy searches for a way to reach her husband between the lines of the text, testing the fragile boundary between character and will, script and choice. Tonight, she may have the chance she has never had before-to try to change what has already been written.

Vengeance is a dish best served yellow and cross-gartered. Nadel Henville’s Here Lies the Hydrangeas Ophelia, stricken with grief after her father's death, attempts to kill Gertrude.

Imagine if divorce were an option. Would Medea still have committed infanticide? Medea and Jason Get a Divorce explores the breakdown of their relationship, the attempt at negotiation and reveals what is most important to both parties. Ah, the civility.

“exit, pursued by a bear” is perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction. The reasons why he chose this seemingly random devise to get rid of Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale are obscured by history, but it was likely at least partly practical: His company probably had a bearskin they wanted to use. The part of “the bear” was therefore (and most usually since) played by a man in a costume. Enter, Pursued by a Bear follows the man under the bearskin as he unknowingly pursues Antigonus romantically. Strangers to each other in every meaning of the word, they struggle to understand each other as they get lost and found again in translation. The play refinishes Antigonus’s unceremonious exit as a Queer love story that ennobles both man and bear.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/Cast-Set-for-Red-Bull-Theaters-SHORT-NEW-PLAY-FESTIVAL-2026-20260617)._