top of page
logo (1).png
Global Forms Theater Festival

The Global Forms Theater Festival is back for the THIRD YEAR! This annual summer theater festival focuses on works by immigrant artists, a historically marginalized group. Since its inception during the midst of the pandemic, we have involved over 100 artists from 34 countries - truly bridging the world together when travel was made impossible.  This year, we are back - bigger and better.

​

We will be premiering:

​

  • Global Stage: 4 mainstage productions

  • Global Dialogue: Conversations with theater companies around the world

  • Global Learn: Workshops led by immigrant artists

  • Global Share: Artists sharing tidbits about their home country

 

GFTF 2022 will be a festive celebration of immigrant artists! Spread the word to immigrant artists you know.

​

More info coming soon! Follow us on Instagram @rattlestickny to stay updated on casting notices and other ways to get involved.

GFTF.png
All the Lonely Women

By Inés Braun (Argentina) and Leigh Flayton (America)​

​

All the Lonely Women is a comedic fairytale about the strangeness of dating during the pandemic. Through the lens of magical realism, the play explores the poignancy — and inevitable silliness — of love and longing during a time of isolation and separation.

All the Lonely Women.jpg
Inés Braun

Inés Braun (director) is a stage and film director from Buenos Aires. She moved to NYC to study theater at Columbia University, and received her MFA in Directing in 2017. Since graduating, she has worked in NYC as a director and writer for both theater and film. She was selected as a finalist for Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s 2021 Breakout Award, and was chosen as an SDCF's Observer for the Broadway production of How I Learned to Drive. NYC theater credits: Roundabout (Rattlestick Theater), Classic Six (Powerstories: Voices of Truth Festival), Sing, Goddess! and Closing Night (HERE Arts Center), The Russian and the Jew (The Tank), Dumpster Fire (SheNYC Theater Festival), The Time of Your Life (Hunter College), Alkestis (Connelly Theater), Trial by Fire and Eurydice (Columbia Stages). Regional theater credits: Living Dead in Denmark (U of Arizona). Film credits (as writer and director): Ocean Mother, The Silence, La Ronda, Bajo Figuras, Melancholy: an homage to Sarah Ruhl. Inés is thrilled to collaborate once more with Leigh Flayton, and to participate in the Global Forms Theater Festival.  www.inesbraun.com 

Ines Braun.jpg
Leigh Flayton

Leigh Flayton (playwright) is the author of eight plays, each of which can be found on New Play Exchange. In 2018, Too Close to Home was presented iLeigh is thrilled to collaborate once more with Inés Braun, and to participate in the Global Forms Festival.n an industry reading and starred Tony winner Judith Light in the lead role. The play was a semifinalist in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference that same year. In March 2021, Classic Six, directed by Inés Braun, was featured as a Zoom film in the Powerstories Theatre Voices of Truth Festival, where it won the Founder’s Choice Award. The play also was a finalist in the 2021 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference and a semifinalist in the 2021 Austin Film Festival Playwriting Competition. Leigh is thrilled to collaborate once more with Inés Braun, and to participate in the Global Forms Theater Festival. She lives in New York City. 

Leigh Flayton.jpg
Chava the Giant and the Oldest Bird

By Ran Xia (China)

​

​This is a story of arrivals, and survivals. Over the span of a century, we meet the Golem who grows into a part of the city that witnesses and remembers, the Jinni who hides from her identity but hopes to one day run her own metal shop, the Chinese witch who speaks about premonitions, believing herself to be a reincarnated snake goddess. And there's Bird, who comes around every year like clockwork

Chava and the Oldest Bird 1.jpg
Ran Xia

Ran is an interdisciplinary theatre artist from Shanghai, China. She’s the 2021/22 Beatrice Terry Resident at the Drama League, a resident director at the Tank where she received the inaugural Artist of the Year award. Her works have been developed with Pipeline (Chava the Giant and the Oldest Bird, PlayaLab2020), IRT (Pomegrenade, Arctic's Fridge Fest), HERE (Harmony), Dixon Place*, The Brick ([ai], an adaptation of Ayn Rand's Anthem), The Wild Project, The Tank (Prometheus Bound, In Blue, Echo; Independent Study by Ben Gassman, The Tallest Man in the World by Ailis Ni Riain, and many more). She also wrote and directed the theatrical interactive portion of Risa Puno’s The Privilege of Escape with Creative Time. A frequent collaborator of Exquisite Corpse Co.** (audio/visual installation Echo at the Memory House, on Governors Island), Assistant Directing credits include: The Invention of Tragedy (by Mac Wellman, Dir. Meghan Finn at the Flea); Baby Fat: Act I (A Screeching Weasel punk rock opera, Dir. Michael Scholar, Jr. with Columbia Stages and LA MAMA), The Great Leap (by Lauren Yee, Dir. Taibi Magar at the Atlantic Theater), and Refrigerated Dreams by Carrie Mae Weems, Nona Hendryx, Francesca Harper, and Niegel Smith at Joe's Pub. She’s a commissioned playwright at the Vanderbilt University in fall 2021 and will be directing Orlando (Sarah Ruhl after Virginia Woolf at Barnard College). ranxia.info | thearcticgroup.org

Ran Xia.jpg
Skin

By Yuriko Shibata (Japan) and Andrew Strano (Australia)

​

An elemental, impressionistic window into a world of yearning, queer identity, and parts of who we are that we so savagely cut ourselves off from, SKIN tells the story of Cath, Ed and their adult child Siobh as the tide of memory washes over them, threatening to reveal the secrets Cath has kept for years.

SKIN.jpg
Yuriko Shibata 

Yuriko Shibata is an NYC-based Japanese woman working as a musical theater composer and storyteller. Her passion is creating captivating rhythms and melodies to help audiences feel nuanced emotions such as joy, sorrow, relief, fear, calm, tension, and so on. 

​

Aside from a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition for Movies and Broadcasting from Tokyo College of Music, she has just obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theater Writing from The New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

​

She has vast experience in a wide range of media forms including film, theater, and commercials. Her work in film includes "Jesus", which was announced to be the winner of the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Her theater works have been presented at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Don’t Tell Mama, Green Room 42, and Lincoln Center in NYC. She also had the chance to hold two concerts after receiving the City Artist Corps Grant funded by NYFA in 2021.

Yuriko Shibata.jpeg
Andrew Strano

Andrew Strano (they/them) is an Australian writer living and working in New York. They’re a Fulbright Scholar, a NYFA City Artists Corps member, and were awarded the Australian American Arts Fund Grant, George Fairfax Memorial Award, major Mike Walsh Fellowship and Performer’s Trust Foundation Grants.

​

Their work was selected for the Lincoln Centre’s ‘Future Broadway Songbook’, and short works ‘STARSONG’ and ‘Anticipation’ debuted Off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre.

​

Full length works include ‘Nailed It!’ (Winner: Greenroom award, ‘Best original songs’), ‘Jack Of Two Trades’ (Winner: Jeanne Pratt Artists in Residence Program), Voyagers (Winner of the City Of Melbourne 2020 Arts Grant, Commissioned by Wagga Wagga Civic Theatre), and ‘SKIN’, debuting Off-Broadway.

​

Andrew holds an MA in writing for performance from the Victorian College of the Arts/Melbourne University, an MFA from the NYU-Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Shubert and Peerce named scholarships), and has taught extensively in theatres worldwide.

Andrew Strano.jpeg
The Aliens Make Thanksgiving Dinner (or the Next Great American Play)

By James Clements (Scotland), Maamoun Tobbo (Lebanon), and Derya Celikkol (Turkey)

​

The Aliens Make Thanksgiving Dinner (or the Next Great American Play) is a new experimental play-in-process exploring immigrant identities through art and food. Set in an empty theatre on Thanksgiving, this absurdist piece depicts three immigrant artists desperately trying to create an All-American spectacular - to secure their ever-elusive green cards.

Aliens Make Thanksgiving Dinner.png
James Clements 

James Clements (he/him) is a Scottish writer, actor, director and educator based between New York and the UK. Clements has performed at venues including La Mama., HERE and MITU580, and has been on the creative team for projects at Lincoln Centre, the Public and the 92nd Street Y. His plays, described by critics as "magnifying" (TimeOut), "affecting" (Playbill), and “compelling” (the Guardian), have been performed in cities across the US, Canada, and the UK. He has taught at CUNY Queens College and the Wuhan Institute of Design and Science, and is an Affiliated Instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is Co-Artistic Director of What Will the Neighbors Say?, an Artist-in-Residence in Culturelab's Emergence Residency and a SU-CASA Artist-in-Residence with the Brooklyn Arts Council. His work has been recognized by the DCLA, NYFA, A.R.T./NY and Donn Russell of the Peg Sandvoort Foundation. www.james-clements.com.  

James Clements.jpg
Maamoun Tobbo

Maamoun Tobbo (he/him) is an interdisciplinary Lebanese artist, equally at home in the worlds of theater/film, performing and visual arts. Practicing storytelling through directing, painting and writing, Maamoun aims to introduce art as medicine, using theater/performance as a therapeutic tool to heal our individual and collective experience. He performed in many productions in Lebanon and around the Middle East, such as Alexandria Opera House in Egypt (2015) and The Royal Cultural Center in Amman, Jordan (2016). In 2015, he started designing films and plays. In 2018, the film “Brine” won at the 24th European Film Festival. In 2020, he graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA in Theatre and Film Design. Since graduating, he has assisted well-accredited designers, designed films and created various art installations. 

Maamoun Tobbo.jpg
Derya Celikkol 

Derya Celikkol (she/her) is a Turkish actor and production designer based in New York. She has had the pleasure of performing in theatrical productions at La Mama, Dixon Place and Players Theatre amongst other NYC venues. She has performed in over 100 shows of Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec, for which she was an original devising member. Her notable film credits include Daria the Great for which she received a Best Actress Award at the Lionshead Film Festival and Fairytale of New York which enjoyed wide distribution in theaters in Turkey. Her production design work consists of award winning short and feature films, TV shows and commercials. She is a proud graduate of the Experimental Theatre Wing of NYU Tisch. www.deryacelikkol.com. 

Derya Celikkol (1).jpg
​Advisory Board Members

  • Pun Bandhu

  • Catherine Coray

  • Derek Goldman

  • Martyna Majok

  • Arian Moayed

  • Penny Pun

  • Chay Yew

Selection Committee

  • Pun Bandhu

  • Catherine Coray

  • Jody Doo

  • Danilo Gambini

  • Yue Liu

  • Penny Pun

  • Salma S. Zohdi

bottom of page