Courtney Bailey is a St. Louis playwright, making weird plays in the middle of the country.
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“And I thought, Is this what I’ve wanted my whole life? For someone to do me a kindness that burned them just a little?”
— from Brontë Sister House Party
THE BRECHTFAST CLUB, co-written with Lucy Cashion for Equally Represented Arts, premiered in Summer 2023. It’s an adaptation(ish) of The Breakfast Club, but make it Brechtian and set in East Germany before the Berlin Wall falls. (Pictured: Reginald Pierre as Comrade Bruno.)
To watch the full production online, visit ERA’s website.
The Riverfront Times Best St. Louis Playwright of 2023
From The Riverfront Times:
A well-respected performer, Courtney Bailey has turned to playwriting with equally impressive success. Her plays imaginatively slip between time periods historic and fictional with snappy dialogue and playful plots, creating refreshingly spirited stories that resonate with audiences. Bailey deftly mixes literature, pop culture and complex philosophies into worlds that are plausibly absurd. And she possesses an uncanny talent for teaching and provoking thoughtful discussion even while making audiences laugh out loud. Bailey's locally developed script, Brontë Sister House Party, recently won the St. Louis Theater Circle's awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Production of a Comedy. Bailey also curated and framed work from Prison Performing Arts programs to create The Golden Record and co-wrote the darkly funny and subversively weird The Brechtfast Club with Lucy Cashion. She's currently working on Margaret Fuller Magick Show — and smart theater fans eagerly await its premiere. —Tina Farmer
next up:
💐 LITTLE WOMEN TOWN 💐
This play was commissioned by Prison Performing Arts of St. Louis for a Spring 2025 performance at Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, & Correctional Center. The residents of Little Women Town must tell the story of Louisa May Alcott’s novel every day, living out the story’s most famous scenes in perpetuum. Each March sister must play her role, but at what cost? When do they get to define for themselves the parameters of their own little life? Written in collaboration with incarcerated artists at WERDCC.
March 2025
just finished:
🍸 GATSBY OF A THOUSAND FACES 🍸
This play was commissioned by Prison Performing Arts of St. Louis for performance at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center. The play follows a troupe of Jay Gatsbys who wish to confront their maker (F. Scott Fitzgerald himself) and offer a few “literary corrections.” Unclear if it’s an amiable discussion or an ambush. Written in collaboration with incarcerated artists at MECC.
Public Performance August 1, 2024 (MECC)
🦝 ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE: a purgation play 🦝
The Tsar and his family are dead. The distant cousins of the Romanov dynasty hold a yard sale and tell their story for American filmmakers. There is a raccoon choir. World premiere with Equally Represented Arts, directed by Lucy Cashion.
July 4-20, 2024 (The Kranzberg, STL)
🚙 THE PAVEMENT KINGDOM: a clinic escort play 🚙
The development and workshopping of this new script was fully funded by the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis for the 2023-24 grant year! This play is based on my nearly three years of experience as a volunteer clinic escort at an abortion clinic over the eastern border of Missouri (where abortion care is illegal). This is an open-access script, free for anyone to perform or produce. You can find it on my For You page.
She’s promising!
St. Louis Magazine named me to the Arts & Culture A-List as a “promising playwright.” Definitely the coolest picture ever taken of me in my life. Same page as Nikki Glaser!!
some production photos.
recent(ish) things I’m proud of.
I put the Brontë sisters in a purgatorial, house party time-loop.
St. Louis Shakespeare Festival commissioned my new play, Brontë Sister House Party, as part of their Confluence Writers Project. It had its first full production with Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble (SATE) in St. Louis, August 17-27, 2022.
The play received the 2023 St. Louis Theatre Circle Award for Outstanding New Play.
I made a “magick show” for Margaret Fuller.
Thanks to a very generous individual artist grant from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, my new full-length play Margaret Fuller Magick Show was fully supported during the drafting and workshopping phase. In this play, the nineteenth-century feminist, Margaret Fuller, has to perform a “magick show” on a ghostly cruise ship to escape an early death.
I wrote a book about crossdressing.
My academic book about Elizabethan theatrical crossdressing and gender(ed) presentation, Spectrums of Shakespearean Crossdressing: The Art of Performing Women, was published by Routledge Press in November 2019.
I’m also deep into some long-form fiction, which you can read all about in my newsletter.
Production still from IMMERSION PLAY. SheNYC Arts Off-Broadway Festival, The Connelly Theater NYC, 2019
You can find a full listing of all my plays on my New Play Exchange profile.
Cassidy Flynn as Anne Brontë in Brontë Sister House Party (SATE, St. Louis 2022)