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, will be remounted at SIUe’s X-FEST, an experimental theatre festival.

To watch the full production online, visit ERA’s website.

next up:

“GATSBY OF A THOUSAND FACES”

This play was commissioned by Prison Performing Arts of St. Louis for performance at Missouri Eastern Correction 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.

“BRITCHES! A PLAY FOR LADY ROMEOS”

This is a new play I’m developing as part of an Artistic Research Grant from The Folger Shakespeare Library. The play tells the story of the nineteenth-century actor Charlotte Cushman’s famous performance as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. For eventual performance, the play will be written in collaboration with incarcerated artists at Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic Correctional Center (WERDCC) in Vandalia, Missouri.

“THE PAVEMENT KINGDOM: A CLINIC ESCORT PLAY”

The development and workshopping of this new script is 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).

She’s “promising”!

This July, *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!!

a few production photos.

Some recent things.

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.