Cayenne Douglass, Playwright
Cayenne Douglass is a New York City based playwright. Her plays have been produced at New Perspectives Theatre Company, Dixon Place, The Midtown International Theatre Festival, The Big Apple Theatre Festival, ESPA Primary Stages Detention Series, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, The Players Theatre, FEAST: A Performance Series and The CalArts New Works Festival. She has had staged readings at The Village Playwrights and The Living Room Theatre. In 2017 Cayenne was awarded spots in two labs: The New Perspectives Theatre Woman’s Work Lab and The Living Room Theatre New Play Incubator. In the Woman’s Work Lab Cayenne wrote Oh My, Goodness a play about a woman who calls a suicide hotline and gets the wrong number. A monologue from this play will be published by Smith & Kraus in “The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2018” which will be released December of 2018. Smith and Kraus also selected a comedic monologue from “Taking Back Halloween” to be featured in “The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2018”. In The Living Room Play Lab Incubator Cayenne wrote a short play entitled, The Spare Change of Strange Angels that went on to be one of 8 plays accepted out of 400 submissions for The Edmunds Driftwood Players Short Play Festival in Seattle. In this festival this play won two awards: 1st Place Audience Favorite and 3rd Place Jury Award. In 2017 Cayenne was also a semifinalist for ESPA’s Drills. In 2018 Cayenne will be working with director, Daniella Caggiano under The First Stage Residency at The Drama League to develop an alternative musical, Brewsters, that centers on beer brewing women in 15th Century England and how their image became synonymous with that of the witch archetype. Additionally, Cayenne was recently awarded The Emerging Artists Residency (in association with the Jerome Foundation) at Tofte Lake in Ely, MN to further develop this project. She’s also working on two other plays: A full-length play called The Casualties of Need which deals with how people use each other to emotionally social climb, deportation under the Bush administration, and the internalized racism of a biracial character. The other is a one act called The Tragedy of Tyler Clementi written entirely in iambic pentameter Shakespearean verse. She attended CalArts in the theater department and graduated from Goddard College with a Bachelor of Individualized Studies.
TAP Work:
"My internship was at p.s. 316 in Crown Heights working with first graders. I observed Mary Cinadr and Shawn Ferreyra. Their disciplines are poetry and comic book illustration respectively. Together they had the residency goal of: How can students identify virtues and qualities for global citizenship and bring them into their classroom and the greater community? Xiaolin, my TAP partner, and I taught a lesson that was related to these goals. In our lesson, we used the characters that they created in their poems and related it back to the overall community goal that the children decided that they wanted to work on, which was the issue of homelessness. We had them use the qualities and characteristics of their animal friends to help the collaboratively developed character solve this problem."
Most Memorable TAP Moment:
“There have been many memorable moments in TAP, but I’ll speak to a moment that directly impacted my heart. It was very rewarding after the teaching day to hold up the mural that we helped the kids create. When we put it all together they were shocked and put their hands over their mouth in excitement. I loved seeing them impressed with their own work. In the reflection section of the lesson, they were able to clearly articulate what they got out of the lesson. The fact that we gave an offering and they were able to do it and retain the lesson was very fulfilling."
Find out more about Cayenne here:
Check out Cayenne's Lesson Plan she presented in her CWP residency.
Interested in TAP? Find out more about our 2018-19 Program.
See more of our 2017-18 Graduates in the 2018 TAP Anthology!