The Village Theater Group presents their inaugural Winter One-Act Festival—a powerful evening of live theater featuring one original one-act play and two classic one-acts reimagined by today’s rising voices.
This Winter One-Acts Festival is not just a show—it’s a platform for passionate young artists, new playwrights, emerging directors, and the professional talent of our new company to take the stage and make their mark.

3 Plays - One Night

INTERVIEW by Jean-Claude Van Itallie
Directed by Richie Byrne, Assistant Directed by Ana B. Gabriel
The topic under examination is an employment interview treated in a satirical, imaginatively stylized, darkly humorous way. Four interviewers interview a scrubwoman, a house painter, a banker and a lady's maid, While commonplace enough, suddenly the most innocent statements are foreboding, revealing absurd bureaucracy and dehumanization. The interviewers are trying to destroy the dignity of the four clients, and the latter fight to hold their self-respect. We, the audience, are thrust into awareness.

LAST MEALS by Edward Gibbons-Brown
Directed by Edward Gibbons-Brown, Assistant Directed by Jasmine Jade Binder
In a private dining alcove of a world-class restaurant, The Diner arrives for a bespoke “last meal,” a carefully curated ritual meant to honor a lost friend and soothe lingering guilt. As the night unfolds, it becomes clear that The Server has orchestrated the meal as a confrontation, not a service. What begins as an exercise in nostalgia and control becomes an urgent moral reckoning, culminating in a single, costly decision that transforms grief into action.

THE GROVES OF ACADEME by Mark Stein
Directed by Sean Hoagland
In the cramped office of Professor Bill Groves, is visited by Paul Morris, a rather quirky undergrad who asks to be admitted to an honors seminar on comedy. In a series of quick-changing scenes which span the school year, the two discuss Paul’s academic record, the subject of his term paper and, as they become more at ease with each other, their private lives and feelings. Paul’s opinions and behavior are gradually influenced as much by Groves’ individual qualities as by his intellectual attainments. Highly amusing and sharply observant, the play conveys much about the academic “treadmill,” but even more about the special strengths that can be nurtured when student and teacher reach beyond the formal relationship that, so often, is all that exists between them.

PLAYWRIGHT’S STATEMENT - Edward Gibbons-Brown
Last Meals was born out of my own experiences of grief, both personal and national, and my reflections on the role of ritual and nostalgia in remembering, soothing, and momentarily suspending loss. Like many people, I have used meals to summon the presence of those who are gone, to recreate a feeling of safety or intimacy, and to give shape to emotions that resist language.
I became interested in the line between care and control: when ritual nourishes us, and when it allows us to aestheticize pain instead of confronting its causes.
Last Meals places that tension on the menu.
Food felt like the right medium because it sits at the intersection of intimacy and systems: nourishment and labor, culture and capital, memory and survival. A meal can be communion or it can be spectacle. It can be care or control. I wanted to explore those contradictions and refuse to let them resolve cleanly.
Last Meals ultimately argues that there are no clean endings, only choices made in real time, with real consequences, and the responsibility to keep setting the table anyway.

We are a group of artists not waiting for work, but creating it ourselves.

​​​The Village Theater Group is a New York City–based collective of actors, writers, and directors committed to producing bold, truthful, and accessible theater. We create a safe platform for artists to work on both time-honored classics and the new plays that will become tomorrow’s classics — bringing Broadway-level quality to an intimate, affordable venue.