TimeLine Theatre Company is pleased to announce that four new playwrights have joined our Playwrights Collective, the company’s new play incubator.
Kimberly Dixon-Mays, Terry Guest, Omer Abbas Salem and Catherine Yu are now in residence with TimeLine’s Playwrights Collective through December 2027.
Over our first 29 seasons, TimeLine has produced 16 world premieres and 43 Chicago premieres, making an ongoing commitment to developing, supporting and featuring new work. The TimeLine Playwrights Collective continues that effort, offering a supportive environment for emerging Chicago playwrights to create an original play inspired by TimeLine’s mission of presenting stories inspired by history that connect with today’s social and political issues.
The Playwright Collective is a two-year writing residency program, hosted and facilitated by TimeLine under the new leadership of Company Members Anish Jethmalani, Director of Playwrights Collective, and Maren Robinson, Resident Dramaturg. The Collective meets regularly, and playwrights choose their own projects that fit TimeLine’s mission. Together the group reads and hears scenes from work under development, asks questions, discusses challenges and shares progress with peers. TimeLine provides support throughout the process, including readings, and any works developed with the Playwrights Collective may be considered for future development and production.
We are so excited to bring together four incredible Chicago-based writers who come from such different backgrounds and lived experiences. Together, they represent a multitude of diverse voices that define our beautiful city. We’re looking forward to working with them to bring to life an amazing collection of new plays that will lift their view of the human condition and embody TimeLine’s mission.
— Anish Jethmalani, Director of Playwrights Collective
“TimeLine is thrilled to further our commitment to developing new works, with an emphasis on nurturing Chicago writers,” said TimeLine Artistic Director PJ Powers. “This fourth cohort of the Playwrights Collective coincides with the move into our new home in Uptown, embarking on a new era for the organization and expanding ways in which our mission is supported and shared. We look forward to supporting these four exciting, emerging writers as they craft plays that probe history and spark dialogue about today’s social and political issues.”
Anish and I are really excited to co-facilitate a space for this talented group of Chicago playwrights. The Playwrights Collective is designed to meet as a cohort over two years, which gives the playwrights space for experimentation and play in the process of creating new work. Of course we want to see four wonderfully different new plays at the end, but we’re also committed to making the process of getting there a supportive and rewarding experience. — Maren Robinson, Resident Dramaturg
Kimberly, Terry, Omer, and Catherine are the fourth cohort to join TimeLine’s Playwrights Collective. The inaugural Collective, created in 2013 and originally led by former TimeLine Company Member Ben Thiem, included Alice Austin, John Conroy, Emily Dendinger, Frances Limoncelli, Susan McLaughlin Karp, and Brett Neveu. The second cohort, including Tyla Abercrumbie, Will Allan, Maureen Gallagher and Calamity West, convened in 2017 and culminated in TimeLine’s inaugural FIRST DRAFT: Playwrights Collective Festival in December 2018. The third, Dolores Díaz, Kristin Idaszak, Osiris Khepera, and David Rhee, were in residence at TimeLine from 2020-2021, and had their works read in TimeLine’s second FIRST DRAFT festival in December 2021.
To date, the Playwrights Collective has resulted in four productions going on to receive their world premieres at TimeLine Theatre: To Catch a Fish by Brett Neveu (2018), Relentless by Tyla Abercrumbie, which was subsequently remounted for an extended run at Goodman Theatre (2022), Campaigns, Inc. by Will Allan (2022) and Black Sunday by Dolores Díaz (2024).
This new Playwrights Collective will begin their monthly meetings in early 2026, culminating with public staged readings of each play as part of TimeLine’s First Draft: New Play Festival, in late 2027 or early 2028.
The first year of TimeLine’s 2026-2027 Playwrights Collective has already received generous support from Timothy C. Sherck, a longtime supporter of the Collective.