2025 Matchbox Reading Series

Lenora II
by Aidaa Peerzada
directed by AeJay Mitchell
Friday, November 14th, 7pm

A 23rd-century geneticist must escape the AI-walled city where she lives when she discovers that her daughter is an experiment in harvesting a new human “labor class.” Lenora II explores how our access to freedom of speech, private thought, and cultural history inform our capacity to engage in civic society. In the story, the characters reclaim their lost inner resources of self-expression through song to break out of their apocalyptic reality, bent on repeating cycles of extreme environmental extraction and slavery.

Aidaa Peerzada (she/her) is a Black and Pakistani American theatre maker based in the Bay Area. Her plays have been developed with the Playwrights Foundation, Prop Thtr, Catalyst: C3T, Meet Cute LA, Northern Sky Theatre, and SFBATCO, where she is also part of the artistic staff. As an actor, Aidaa has performed with Magic Theatre, Marin Theatre, Word 4 Word, SFBATCO, Pittsburgh Public, Illinois Shakespeare, Utah Shakespeare, Steppenwolf and American Players Theatre. Aidaa studied at the Baltimore School for the Arts and went on to receive her BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

I Did Not Kill My Mother; and Other Lies I Tell Myself
by Anthony Doan
directed by Ely Sonny Orquiza
Saturday, November 15th, 1pm

On his “second 29th birthday,” or the first anniversary of his mother’s death, Vietnamese-American surgeon Con decides to abandon medicine and become a playwright. Wielding a typewriter to process his grief, he tries to control the story of her life and death, but three monstrous versions of his mother refuse to be written away. As Con’s fictions spiral into violence and self-justification, the play itself revolts. I Did Not Kill My Mother; and Other Lies I Tell Myself is a meta-theatrical horror-comedy that gorily rips apart a son’s relationship with his dead mother in a visceral confrontation of the ethics of memory, myth, and storytelling.

Anthony Doan (he/they) is a queer, first-generation Vietnamese American theatre artist currently based in the Bay Area. He writes to excavate and process truth from and for the interconnected and complex human experience. Through an anti-racist, culturally-informed lens, they strive to viscerally entertain and challenge audiences, provoke political thoughts, and inspire people to empathetically listen to the world in a different vibration.

Tehran Baby
by Yasmin Van Deventer
directed by Nailah Unole dida-Nese’ah Harper-Malveaux
Saturday, November 15th, 4pm

When a chain-smoking, asthmatic Iranian-American woman—trapped between an unraveling relationship and her job in a Paris prison—learns her mother is hovering between life and death in Los Angeles, she takes the route through the underworld. What follows is a darkly funny and haunting journey into her mother’s hidden past during the Iranian Revolution—and a reckoning with love, loss, and the impossibility of belonging in exile.

Yasmin Van Deventer (she/her) is an Iranian-American actress, writer, and producer based between Paris and Los Angeles. She began acting as a child at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California before training at the Maggie Flanigan Studio in New York and L’École Périmony in Paris. Yasmin appears in La Bête alongside George MacKay and Léa Seydoux and served as associate producer on Ambush by award-winning filmmaker Yassmina Karajah. She is executive producer on upcoming films by Sara Boutarabi and Alireza Ghasemi. Through her company, One Thousand & One Nights Productions, Yasmin champions soulful, character-driven stories. She recently wrapped two shorts as executive producer, producer, and actress, opposite Oulaya Amamra (Divines) and Julia de Nunez (Bardot). She has just completed production on Pomegranate, a short film adapted from her play Tehran Baby, which she wrote, directed, and produced, and in which she stars opposite Sandor Funtek (Suprêmes, Blue Is the Warmest Color).

Presently Untitled Spysh✨t
by Leigh M. Marshall
directed by Will Detlefsen
Saturday, November 15th, 7pm

Something big is about to happen in this country. Victoire doesn’t know what it is, but she’s begun to pick up on unsettling details in gossip sessions with her socialite friends. For a while, the signs of trouble are easy to ignore, and Victoire focuses on the only things she cares about as an engaged aristocrat: hearing people’s secrets, hunting game animals, and hitting up her hot plug, Cockaigne, to supply her elite parties. At a time when her aristocratic bubble may no longer guarantee her safety, Victoire must choose between siding with danger to stop whatever’s coming or partying hard until disaster hits.

Leigh M. Marshall (she/her) is a multidisciplinary writer/performer and the Theater & Film Editor online at BOMB Magazine. Her work has been selected for Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency, the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, Iowa New Play Festival, the Examined Life Conference, the Prague Quadrennial, and Live Design International. She is a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation. BA: Stanford University. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop.