Madison New Works Lab to introduce its first mainstage show

For the first time, a play workshopped by JMU’s Madison New Works Lab will take the stage as part of the Masterpiece Season of the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts.

Basement Demons and Trailer Saints, by Briandaniel Oglesby, will make its world premiere April 28 to May 3.

Seven years ago, Oglesby’s play was a finalist in the inaugural season of the MNWL, an incubator for professional playwrights to develop new plays and musicals through a 10-day residency with the School of Theatre and Dance. The Forbes Center’s Masterpiece Season has previously included plays workshopped at JMU but not through the MNWL — until now.

Seeing his play come to the stage at JMU is “amazing, wonderful,” Oglesby said. “It is a big freaking deal to me, for sure.”

Oglesby, a Northern California native, set his story in a small town where sisters Maria and Dirt try to navigate adolescence alongside their friends while dreaming of something more. What they don’t know is that Maria’s mysterious online connection, Hank Lord, is actually a catfishing demon. On his website, Oglesby wrote that a previous audience member described the play as “Clerks meets The Goonies.”

“This is a play that’s really about young people,” said Ingrid De Sanctis, playwriting professor and director of the MNWL.

While on the Internet, the characters meet a basement demon, “which really is the embodiment of loneliness,” De Sanctis explained. The “demon” character is not meant as a dark, sinister presence. “It brings them all together. It sort of gets a little magical in how one of them gets rescued by the whole group.”

The show is comedic, quirky and centered around teenage characters, but audience members should be advised that the production contains adult content and language.

“It is a really relevant play about how young people find friendship and connection, where they look for it, when they look for it through the internet, when they look for it through each other, or meeting at Taco Bell, and the ideas around what is loneliness and how is it manifested,” De Sanctis said.

Having the play reflect the ideas of young people is intentional, and Oglesby, director of theatre and communications at Appamada School in Austin, Texas, said his students were deeply involved in creating the world of the play.

“It’s a play that was written for a small group of high schoolers in my school, which is like mixed high school and junior high,” he said. In transitioning the play for a college-level cast, Oglesby said he aged up the language slightly, staying true to the teenage characters while removing the constraints of a script originally targeting a younger audience.

“It underwent a massive transformation here,” he said. “It also received a workshop at Capital Stage in Sacramento.”

Last fall, after Oglesby’s play was slated for the 2025-26 Forbes Masterpiece Season, he came to JMU for a week to meet with the cast and crew, so they could begin the rehearsal process and iron out details for the spring production.

“It’s as much for them to kind of experience it early as it is for me to have time to revisit it and revise it,” he said. “This is a way of creating that feel of it well in advance. You can have the benefits of hearing it, seeing it, ... creating the world, and then re-examining it and giving them a draft that’s even better than it was before.”

Basement Demons and Trailer Saints was the right play at the right time for this year’s Masterpiece Season. “We have a season-selection process, which is made up of faculty and students,” De Sanctis said. “Every year, I make sure that a couple plays are in the mix of what can be produced. They read so many plays, and they picked this one.”

Additionally, writers and composers featured as part of the New Works Lab have gone on to win awards and fellowships from the Theatre Communications Group, Dramatist Guild, and the Playwrights’ Center.

“Part of the vision is to find plays that we want to world premiere or produce here,” De Sanctis said. “It’s what we hope happens, that we have relationships with professional playwrights, that our students get to be part of watching and being in a rehearsal room and watching them work. And yeah, it feels great. I think that Madison New Works Lab is really doing well, in line with all the things that we’ve hoped for so far.”

MNWL emerged from conversations led by Rubén Graciani, dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, during his tenure as director of the School of Theatre and Dance. Through collaborative efforts with De Sanctis, Musical Theatre Coordinator Kate Arecchi and many other faculty, the idea was further shaped, developed, and realized. Together, they secured early support from the School of Theatre and Dance, the late Dr. George E. Sparks, who was dean of the CVPA at the time, and former JMU President Dr. Jonathan Alger. These collective efforts helped move the lab from its initial conception to an active program.

Their goal at the time was to bring new work to campus, De Sanctis said. Support by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Holland (’82) and his wife, Linda Yates, in 2019 has made it possible, she said. “Their generosity is keeping it alive, and our job is how to make it sustainable and successful.”

As the program has grown over the years, the team wondered how to make the shows they bring to JMU unique among all the new and creative work being developed around the country. “The question becomes, what is unique about what we do?” De Sanctis said. “And we really named those values when we came up with the mission originally.”

One of those values is their location, said De Sanctis, who views the Shenandoah Valley as “a space where you can sort of breathe and think creatively.”

Another is focusing on work suitable for students to perform and enabling them to produce their own shows, she said. “But what makes it unique is that we cater to what the playwright needs. There are many playwriting-development programs that have a set structure, but we ask the playwright, ‘What do you want to do? What is the structure that you want to set in place in your 10 days with us?’ So, we really try to nurture [that relationship]. Every play has different needs.”

As part of MNWL’s ongoing efforts, the lab has partnered with Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, which invited the 2025 MNWL show The Sparkle Wars, by Brendan Bourque-Sheil, to come to its Richmond stage to collaborate on two staged readings this fall.

“It’s a new collaboration,” De Sanctis said. “With the support of the dean and the [academic unit heads] and the faculty, we’ve made it possible that we have this collaboration, and they’re really interested in that connection with us. ... It’s an ongoing connection we have with them, which is great for the playwright, because they want their play produced somewhere, and this is a step to working with a professional theater, as well as the university.”

One of those playwrights was Maddie Kovach (’20), who produced her play, Study Group, at JMU in her senior year before workshopping her first musical, Grief Tour, with music by playwright and performer Alica Daine Benning, through the August 2024 MNWL. Since then, she has signed on to workshop Grief Tour at Firehouse in early 2026.

For Oglesby, bringing his play to the stage at JMU is the realization of many years of effort. “I work very, very hard on my plays, and I care a lot about them, and oftentimes they don’t go that far,” he said. “Sometimes the reason is because I don’t have the time to make them go out far into the world. Sometimes it’s because it’s a play for young people, and the characters or issues in it are being censored. We have queer characters in this, and many schools will make it hard for those for plays with LGBT characters to show up on stage, and sometimes those plays don’t exist. Like, how many plays out there have nonbinary characters in it? Very few. So, there is something really validating and moving about this play being the one that you picked.”

Having also produced several plays outside of the classroom, Oglesby said he’s enjoyed working with JMU on this effort. “Universities are the best incubators for new work because you guys have resources and people and time,” he said. “It’s a university where research is being done, so development is a big part of that.”

Visit the Forbes Center for tickets and other information.