PlaYlab
Pipeline’s PlayLab is a playwrights’ group that aids and encourages artists in growing their biggest, wildest ideas into imaginative and daring new plays. Through monthly meetings, one-on-one dramaturgical support, and workshop-events, each writer is supported in developing their ambitious initial concept into a new script over the course of a year!
In line with our vision, we want your most impossible idea for a play that you can’t wait to write. We’re looking for plays that bend the rules, and playwrights who crave a space in which they can dive into new, uncharted territory. We are interested in fostering projects in their earliest stages of conception – the closer you are to first putting pen to paper, the better!
This fall, we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our PlayLab. Click here to learn more about the program from our playwrights and staff (including a PlayLab Retrospective by Co-Director Philip Santos Schaffer), see photos of the festivities, and support our PlayLab artists this season.
CURRENT Pipeline Playlab Playwrights
YIDE CAI
PlayLab 2026 Playwright
From Shenzhen, China, Yide Cai (蔡逸得) grew up between languages and borders, carrying stories wherever he went. Now an MFA Playwriting candidate at Boston University, he writes about art, history, and the tangled threads between cultures. His play The Rice Eaters debuted Off-Broadway at the 2025 Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, while his short play A Middle Passage won the 50th Annual Off-Off-Broadway Festival and is set to be published by Concord Theatricals. He is developing his new play Steeped with Pipeline Theater’s Playlab in 2026, and is also one of the playwrights for The Episodic Theatre Project Season 3. As a fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics and a member of Theatre Producers of Color, he is always chasing connections across distance.
Project: Steeped
A teabag who died a thousand deaths. “Steeped” reimagines the Boston Tea Party from the perspective of the tea itself. It goes beyond the night of 1773 by following Tea’s journey from the mountains of China, through a Labubu factory, a rock music club, to a present-day college lecture, to its final plunge into Boston Harbor, and a museum/tourist site. The play reveals how a commodity can carry within it, entire histories of culture and survival, as the tea insists on being seen and remembered.
SALWA MEGHJEE
PlayLab 2026 Playwright
Salwa Meghjee is a Muslim-Indian-Floridian writer. She is currently in the playwriting program at Juilliard, and holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Northwestern. She has developed work with her producing org Pizza Party Press co-founded with Sarah Marlin, as well as Trove, Mudlark Theater, 24 Hour Plays: Nationals, Sanguine Theatre Company, National Queer Theater, The Tank, The New Victory Theater, UC Berkeley, The Golden Theatre Company, Soho Rep, Pipeline Theatre, and Playwrights’ Center. Her plays are surreal, darkly comic, lean into the serendipity of live theater, and illuminate the big feelings we all have that we can’t explain. They have fun titles such as Love Jihad <3, Obligate Carnivores, Make Happy, U-Haul Mesbians, Ender’s Gay, Never Forget That Jasper Cullen Was a Confederate Soldier, and, written with her twin sister Samah, The Mysterious Mystery of the Lost Letters (Brooklyn Publishers). salwameghjee.com
Project: A Play For Me and For You
An actor gives an audience member a script and a mission: by the end of the hour, the audience member must help the actor find their soulmate.
KANISHK PANDEY
PlayLab 2026 Playwright
kanishk pandey is a writer, director, and producer. His efforts are unified by the belief that consciousness can only exist through dialogue. He prefers theater because he doesn’t like to be alone. His work has been recognized by institutions such as The American Playwriting Foundation, The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Austin Film Festival, New York Stage and Film, The Jerome Foundation, New York City Trust, and Synecdoche Works. His playwriting has been supported by companies such as Ars Nova, Rattlestick Theater, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Fresh Ground Pepper, Pipeline Theatre, The Barn at Lee, Exponential Festival, Invulnerable Nothings, The Brick, LPAC’s Rough Draft Festival, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Lark, Sanguine Theater, and Boomerang Theater.
Project: Too Much Time
Everyone comes over to pick up their drugs. No one comes over to entertain the Daemon.
TIDTAYA SINUTOKE
PlayLab 2026 Playwright
Tidtaya Sinutoke (ฑิตยา สินุธก) is a Jonathan Larson Grant, Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and Fred Ebb Award-winning theatre composer and writer. Select composition and writing credits: DEAR MR. C, with lyricists Lily Ali-Oshatz and Naomi Matlow (Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative Award, Polyphone, Village Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals, LMCC Grant); WITH RICE (MOCA’s Performing Artist-in-Residence); KHAM (Drama League Special Residency, Dramatic Question Theatre’s American Fellowship, Step1 Theatre R&D); and THE ADVENTURES OF SKY AND FRIENDS (New Victory Theater’s LabWorks, Filament’s SPARK Residency). Her works have been developed and supported by the Composer-Librettists Studio at New Dramatists, Yale Institute for Music Theatre, Johnny Mercer Foundation, NYFA IAM Mentoring Program, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Kurt Weill Foundation, American Opera Projects, Tofte Lake Center, Loghaven Artist Residency, MOCA, and Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. A proud member of ASCAP, Dramatists Guild, Maestra, MUSE, Siamese Collective, and Thai Theatre Foundation. MFA: NYU. tidtayasinutoke.com
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Project: Things I Drew & Songs I Wrote
A musical exhibition that blends music, storytelling, visual art, and art-as-therapy, inviting audiences into an immersive experience of recovery, self-rediscovery, and healing.
Our Previous Pipeline Playlab Playwrights
Class of 2024-25
House of Parasite by Minna Lee
Learning How to Squirt by Daniela Gonzalez y Perez
[Name Redacted] by Jesús I. Valles
Class of 2023
The Hills by Jonathan Alexandratos
There Are Black Roses Under the Sea by Cris Eli Blak
The Great American Holiday Crafting Show by Jeffrey James Keyes
Class of 2022
1898 by Nelson Diaz-Marcano
do this in [x] of me by Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin
Radclyffe and the Archivist by Kairos Looney
Class of 2021
Teach by Karina Billini
Good Hair by Phaedra Michelle Scott
A Silkworm Play by Minghao Tu
Class of 2020
righteous kill, a requiem by Nissy Aya
Red Clay Halo by Andy Boyd
BUST by Zora Howard
Untitled Cruise Ship Horror Play by Molly Beach Murphy & Erica Mann
Nasty Yatra by Utkarsh Rajawat
Chava the Giant & the Oldest Bird by Ran Xia
Class of 2019
Society by Skylar Fox & Simon Henriques
When Bees Last Whispered by Sevan K. Greene
Office Comedy by Sukari Jones
Coop by Sam Max
The Ortiz Twins Are Coming Home by Andrew Siañez-De La O
Let’s Hex the President by Kristin Slaney
Class of 2018
Five Hundred by Rick Burkhardt
Bundle of Sticks by J. Julian Christopher
feminine octagon [or, aristotle can eat me] by Amy Gijsbers van Wijk
Earth is Greedy by Jae Kramisen
House of Telescopes by Kairos Looney
Rise of the River by Divya Mangwani
wyrd by Matt Minnicino
Class of 2017
Bruise & Thorne by J. Julian Christopher
Heart of Duckness by A.J. Ditty
The Holdfolk by Freddy Edelhart
The Troll King by Aeneas Sagar Hemphill
Wunderkammer by Francesca Pazniokas
Trick of the Light by Charly Evon Simpson
Class of 2016
Princess Clara of Loisaida by Matt Barbot
Hags, Mopes, and the End of All Existence by Jen Browne
The Mermaid Parade by Gina Femia
The Puppet Show by Reina Hardy
Cracks by Jacob Marx Rice
Girl Becomes Bone by Callan Stout
Eleven Shades of Blue by Amy E. Witting
Class of 2015
Let Me Be Frank by Salty Brine
Untitled Time Dilation Play by Colby Day
The Convent of Pleasure by Sarah Einspanier
The Serpent in Quicksilver by Adam Fried
Pilgrims by Claire Kiechel
Nostalgia is a Mild Form of Grief by Jerry Lieblich
Hiding in Sanity: A Tragicomedy by Rachel Music
Proximity by Jeremy Wine
Class of 2014
Optimism, Or by A.P. Andrews
The Great Molly by Colby Day
Tom’s Nightmare by Andrew Farmer
Show of Hands by Jessica Fleitman
Mystery of Fucking by Scott McCarrey
The Carrion Man by Alex Malcolm Mills
I’s Twinkle by Nate Weida
