Judith & Salome

This original full length play follows two female performance artists who are in a race to be the first in their medium to kill a man, live on stage. However, their growing desire for each other complicates their violent artistic ambitions.

Judith is an English performance artist who is looking for a creative way to fix her reputation after a “happening” goes awry (and she ends up stabbing a young man in the leg). Her publicist proposes that she start a nationwide search for a mentee, an underprivileged performance artist looking for funding and guidance to break into the scene. She encounters Salem Shelby, an artist and dancer with a controversial portfolio, and is instantly smitten. The two navigate their growing chemistry and intimacy as they dream of pushing the bounds of performance art, also navigating how much they can experiment in the medium before it becomes an act of terrorism. 

This play grapples with the eroticization of violence, obsession and desire, and the dramaturgy of terrorism and spectacle. I was very interested in exploring the elements of self-harm that are often prevalent in performance art by women, more specifically the lengths that women go to in order to be heard. As much as I am interested in asking these questions on the nature of violence and art, I was also interested in writing a hideous and grotesque love story, attempting to capture the way that the artistic drive so often dances with the erotic. 

Developmental History 

• Semi-Finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference 2025

• Rehearsed reading at Drayton Arms Theatre through the Script Surgeries Initiative (dramaturgy by Audrey Thayer) 2025 

• Rehearsed reading with Etcetera Theatre/Counterminers 2025

• Selected for Workshop Theatre’s Spring 2025 Intensive 

• Rehearsed reading with Side/Step Festival 2025 (produced by Dominika Uçar and Deadweight Theatre Company)

• Performance (Extract) at American University New Play Festival 2024

Cast: 4F, 1M / Run time: 120 minutes