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
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
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)