“Pizza and a Play”, The Cherry Picked Playreading Series

National Queer Theater and Arts Project of Cherry Grove are proud to announce the ‘Cherry Picked’ New Play Series in Fire Island, NY. The festival will feature weekly staged readings of new plays throughout July and August 2025 at 8:00 pm EST at the historic Arts Project of Cherry Grove Community House & Theatre (180 Bayview Walk, Cherry Grove, NY).

The show lineup includes The Codex of Narma (07/07), Night Cities (07/14), Ocean Walk (07/21), Waco Boy Club (08/04), This is A Face (08/18) and Enders Gay (08/25).

The Codex of Narma
Date: 07/07
Playwright: Stacy Nathaniel Jackson

Director: Miranda Haymon

Cast: Ianne Fields Stewart, Kalonjee Gallimore, Naomi Lorrain, and Kai Davis

Synopsis: The Codex of Narma is a queer story about the fluidity of gender, ambition, attraction, and reconciliation. Set in the near future after the second US Civil War, data scientist and aspiring entrepreneur Narma X has been hired to teach Black history accurately to Dhalgren Higgs by his mother Hyacynth, despite being illegal in the Free States of the southeast.

Night Cities
Date: 07/14
Playwright: Roger Q. Mason

Director: Karl Hawkins

Cast: Leland Fowler, Kamal Sehrawy, and Geoff Hill

Synopsis: A young Bayard Rustin—before Civil Rights Movement fame—must choose between his private desires as a queer Black man and his public calling as an agent of social justice and civic change. Set against the vibrant labor movement of the 1930s and 40s, this piece embraces the musicality, dream imagery, and liberation of jazz playwriting to explore one man’s quest for complex humanity in a world that limits who we are to how we can be used for the good of others.

Ocean Walk
Date: 07/21
Playwright: Gianfranco Lentini

Director: Marc Acito

Cast: Lou Liberatore, Hero Marguirite, and Sam Gravitte

Synopsis: Fire Island is underwater. A cataclysmic storm finally breached the last of the island’s defenses. All residents have evacuated…except one: Harry, a longtime resident of the Pines, refuses to leave his submerged home even when Casey, a 17-year-old Senior Deckhand of the Sayville Ferry Service, shows up to fish him out.

Waco Boy Club
Date: 08/04
Playwright: Mack Lawrence

Director: Logan Gabrielle Schulman

Featuring: Sagan Chen, Max Raymond, Ema Zivkovic, and Shane Diamond

Synopsis: In a garage in Waco, TX, three friends tete-a-tete with ghosts, gender, and guilty pleasures. Over ouija board confessionals and chicken salad sandwiches, Waco Boy Club follows the looping and longing dialogues of Strider, Cosmo, and Phantom. The sturdiness of their relationships comes into question when gender ideation, sexual desire, 90s country music, and too much beer meet, but they can definitely agree on this: the best chicken salad does not have raisins.

This is A Face
Date: 08/18
Playwright: J.C. Pankratz

Director: Dominique Rider

Cast: Rad Pereira, Clew, and Lee Sharmat

Synopsis: B’s work as a potter trying to sculpt the perfect clay egg is interrupted when their partner, K, asks for a vitally important creation: a new face. Attempting the impossible will redefine what it means to see and be seen for both of them in this chimerical t4t love story.

Enders Gay
Date: 08/25
Playwright: J.C. Pankratz

Director: Zahra Budhwani

Cast: Amaal Saifudeen, Anahita Monfared, Jake Regensberg, and Alejandro Varela

Synopsis: Laiba is a queer teenage Muslim girl who is obsessed with proving that Ender from the 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game is gay, despite the author Orson Scott Card’s documented homophobia. She comes to believe she is Ender and must fall in gay love with her classmate Jannat to save the world. She is also told by her teacher Mr./Colonel Pratt to kill all the birds, who are the buggers, except they’re also gay, and they talk to her and want her to be their queen, but they’re also maybe in cahoots with Orson Scott Card, and by the way, the end of the world is tomorrow.

Several notable Broadway actors and actresses are set to take the stage in various performances. Kalonojee Gallimore, who featured in Broadway’s The Beautiful Noise, will play the role of “Dhalgrhen Higgs” in the Codex of Narma. Clew, who is in Broadway’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, will star as “Three Dreams” in This Is a Face. Sam Gravitte, who played “Fiyero” in the Broadway tour of Wicked, will take the stage in Ocean Walk.

RSVPs are now available to both APCG members and non-members through the National Queer Theater website (www.nationalqueertheater.org/cherrypicked). Those who purchase tickets for that evening’s play will also receive 10% off at Cherry Grove Pizza (179 Ocean Walk, Cherry Grove).

“We’re piloting this new series to bring the best of America’s queer theater to Fire Island, America’s premiere LGBTQ+ vacation destination. We are so excited to partner with TOSOS and National Queer Theater to bring top talent from New York City to our historic Community House and Theatre in Cherry Grove, and engage our community in new and old stories about our community,” says Arts Project of Cherry Grove Board Member Matt Freeman.

Founded in 1948, the Arts Project of Cherry Grove, Inc. (APCG) is the oldest known Gay/Lesbian theater in America. APCG is a 501 (c) (3) community service organization dedicated to presenting the arts in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, New York, one of America’s most colorful communities.

For more information about the Arts Project of Cherry Grove events, visit: www.artsprojectcg.org/upcoming-events-new.