Workshop production as a part of the Public Theater’s 2024 Judith Champion New Work Series. By Else Went, directed by Emma Rosa Went. Dramaturgy by Sarah Lunnie. Featuring Tyler Nowell Felix, Juan Arturo, Zachary Desmond, Christopher Dylan White, and Olivia Rose Barresi. Performances on October 28th and 29th, 2024.
The boys aren’t doing so hot. In an obscure corner of the internet, they form an incel community on the bedrock of their shared and infinite miseries, offering each other proof that the game is rigged against men; it was over before it began, they will never be loved, better just to lay down and rot. When an unexpected relationship begins to unravel their dismal fraternity, the consequences of their fatalism are revealed — who might get out, and who might not?
Dogman I
Premiere screening (with talkback) of short film by Olivia Rose Barresi and Emily Barresi, taking place at BRIC Media Arts in Brooklyn on September 24th, 2024. Presented as a part of the BRIClab 2023-24 Video Art Fellowship. Fellowship cohort includes Olivia Rose Barresi and Emily Barresi, DaeQuan Collier, Eliza Lu Doyle, Rachael Guma, and Yasi Ghanbari. Talkback moderated by Andrea Monti of Microscope Gallery.
In the experimental short Dogman I, analog and digital AV equipment are woven together to portray a cryptozoological sighting. Created by sisters and artists Olivia Rose Barresi and Emily Barresi, Dogman I delves into the universal human fascination with the supernatural, and the blurred boundary between reality and fabrication. This first foray into the Dogman Universe explores the challenge of imbuing authenticity into the extraordinary and interrogates our faith in the moving image.
Feelings Are Tasty, but They Also Make Me Sick
World premiere reading of Madeline Rouverol’s play on September 14th 2024, in Brooklyn. Featuring Raquel Chavez, Annie Fox, Bartley Booz, Brian Bock, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
Uh oh! A girl who’s 29 needs her feelings sopped up. They’re coming out of her like blood or water or bile. The only people who can help her are her bad bitch doctor, her budding filmmaker bf, and her super cool chill parents. Feelings are Tasty is a new play about loving too much, feeling everything and getting drained by leeches.
Twelfth Night
Workshop production of William Shakespeare’s comedy at the Decatur Audio Laboratories, presented on August 2nd 2024. Directed by Emma Rosa Went, with original music and orchestrations by Ray Duncan.
Featuring Kara Arena, Will Cary, Liam Gerard, Zoë Goslin, Daniel Holme, Ben McNamara, Soph Metcalf, Logan Sutton, Esther Williamson and Olivia Rose Barresi.
The Cause
Workshop production of Else Went’s new play The Cause, presented as a part of WP Theater’s 2024 Pipeline Festival. Directed by Dina Vovsi. Featuring Yansa Fatima, Jovan Davis, Esther Williamson, Felix Teich, Delaney Feener, and Olivia Rose Barresi. Performing May 2nd through 4th, 2024.
In this house of mirrors, a group of actors and a director gather at a newly formed artist residency, The House Upstate, for a week-long workshop development of The Cause - a new play about a group of actors and a director who gather in a house upstate for a week to shoot The Cause, an experimental film retelling of Othello. As daily rewrites from the absent playwright elevate coincidence to paranoia, jealousy and desire fill the rehearsal room thick as the nightly mist in this quiet, empty town.
Photo by Maria Baranova-Suzuki, 2024.
"With Ash on Their Faces" by Cathy Otten
Audiobook version of Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State, first published in 2017, read by Olivia Rose Barresi. Produced with the original publisher, renowned alternative publishing house OR Books, the audiobook will be released in late 2024.
ISIS’s genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in Northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world’s attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children in the areas surrounding the Sinjar Mountains. While the armed conflict has ended and the headlines have moved on, thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity - and many more are still displaced. This genocide is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of journalist Cathy Otten, who challenges common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood by focusing on deeply moving personal narratives of resistance - those passed down over generations, and those here made new.
Unresolved Rage Game
Public playtests as a part of Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab for 2022-23. Presented the week of September 18-23rd, 2023. Realized by Risa Puno and Ran Xia. Lab co-chaired by Jackie Sibblies Drury and William Burke.
Unresolved Rage Game is a playable, theatrical experience about the creation of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) designed as a tool for Asian femmes to access and express rage. These playtests encapsulate the creative processes of Puno and Xia, while also aiming to empower individuals with a similar cultural background to safely, openly explore and articulate their emotions.
System Admins played by John Racioppo, Ella Raymont, Antony Jenkins, and Samuel Reeder. NPCs played by Max Henry and Olivia Rose Barresi.
"Zero-Sum" by Joyce Carol Oates
To be published in mid-July 2023. By Joyce Carol Oates, with audiobook produced by Penguin Random House Audio. Read by Amy Jensen, Max Meyers, Linda Jones, Karissa Vacker, Cassandra Campbell, Robert Fass, and title story read by Olivia Rose Barresi.
Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of Blonde. In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.
Available to purchase/listen here, through Penguin Random House.
Initiative
A reading of Else Went’s Initiative, developed as a part of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. Performing at the Public on both May 8th and May 9th. Directed by Emma Rosa Went. Featuring Carson Scott Higgins, Greg Cuellar, Jamie Sanders, Christopher Dylan White, Harrison Densmore, Andrea Lopez, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
Between first loves and first betrayals, the SAT and D&D, house parties and homecomings, it's a wonder any of us survive high school. Initiative is an epic microcosm, charting the fatefully intertwined lives of seven teens' struggle to grow up in and get out of Coastal Podunk, California, at the dawn of the new millennium.
Degenerates
A reading of Else Went’s post-digital play Degenerates, presented at Ars Nova, on April 21st 2023 at 3pm. Directed by Emma Rosa Went. Featuring Zachary Desmond, Tyler Nowell Felix, Christopher Dylan White, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
The boys are not doing so hot. In an obscure corner of the internet, they form a community on the bedrock of their shared and infinite miseries, offering each other proofs that the game is rigged against men. When an unexpected relationship shakes the foundations of their miserable incel fraternity, the consequences of their fatalism are revealed.
RSVP for free at Ars Nova’s website.
An Oxford Man
A reading of Else Went’s An Oxford Man at New York City Center, produced as a part of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Ted Snowdon Reading Series. Performance on March 27 at 4pm, directed by Emma Went.
Join us, dear audience, for a buoyant and raucous mythologization of the life and times of the first "modern" transgender man, Laurence Michael Dillon! Commissioned by MTC through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, An Oxford Man is a witty, surprising, and tender theatrical rollick.
Featuring Han Van Sciver, Hari Nef, Zoë Goslin, Amy Jo Jackson, Rami Margron, Erin Noll, Sam Gonzalez, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
Degenerates
A reading of Else Went’s post-digital play Degenerates, presented at New York Theatre Workshop. Featured as a part of NYTW’s Dorothy Strelsin Monday @ 3 Reading Series, on Monday November 21st, 2022. Directed by Emma Rosa Went. Casting by Claire Yenson.
In an obscure corner of the internet, a group of young men find community over their shared disillusionment with romance and dating. They gather to express their frustrations with society and to offer one another increasingly cynical proofs of the world's hatred for men. But, as one of their number seems to find some unexpected success in romance, hope shakes very foundations of their miserable fraternity.
Featuring Zachary Desmond, Joshua De Jesus, Tyler Nowell Felix, Christopher Dylan White, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
Mine
A short film, produced by Olivia Rose Barresi and Erin Noll. Screenwriter Matthew Minnicino. Directed by Dan Hasse, with Director of Photography Emily Barresi. Starring Olivia Rose Barresi as Jenny Green, and Erin Noll as Nell Long.
Jenny Green, mysteriously unwell, arrives at a remote lake for some personal “rejuvenation.” A threatening presence is in the wilderness with her, however - and seems to want for themselves everything that Jenny holds dear.
To be released in Spring 2023.
An Oxford Man
An internal workshop of Else Went’s An Oxford Man, commissioned through the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Sloan Initiative to support plays about math, science, and technology. Staged reading directed by Emma Rosa Went and presented on August 16th, 2022.
A play dramatizing the life and times of Laurence Michael Dillon, a British physician and the first trans man to undergo gender affirmation surgery in the early twentieth century. Featuring Han Van Sciver, Zoe Goslin, Chris Thorn, Sam Gonzalez, Amy Jo Jackson, Rami Magron, Erin Noll, Joslyn DeFreece, and Olivia Rose Barresi.
All's Well That Ends Well
A one-night-only staged reading performance on July 21st 2022, presented as a part of the Scranton Shakespeare Festival. Directed by Emma Rosa Went, and starring Olivia Rose Barresi as Helena.
Three day workshop of William Shakespeare’s globetrotting “problem play,” culminating in a one-night-only staged reading featuring the SSF 2022 Company and guest Olivia Rose Barresi as the lovelorn Helena.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong
Narrative, triple A RPG video game developed by Big Bad Wolf, the latest in the legacy Vampire: The Masquerade series. Cross platform release on May 19th, 2022. Featuring Olivia Rose Barresi as Burgos The Archivist.
What if vampires were real? What if bloodthirsty predators lived hidden among us, engaged in a never-ending game of desire, conspiracy and betrayal? What if you became one of them?
In Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong, you play as these alluring monsters in a world where the lines between the real and supernatural are always blurred. With its unique approach to gameplay, Swansong puts the emphasis on consequence. Analyze each situation carefully, the choices you make during the investigation, and your social interactions with characters can have a lasting impact on the fate of your heroes’ lives and the fate of the Boston Camarilla.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The inaugural production of Playhouse On Park’s Connecticut Shakespeare Festival in West Hartford, CT, from July 7th through 17th, 2021. Directed by Emma Rosa Went, with Olivia Rose Barresi as Helena.
Magic blows into town as a Duke and a Duchess prepare for their wedding day, some amateur actors rehearse a play, and four young lovers run into the woods – where a kingdom of fairies emerges to enchant, transform, and entangle us in their dreams. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one of the most enduringly popular plays of all time – is a wild and whimsical celebration of love, nature, and the magic of theatre itself.
Featuring Olivia Rose Barresi, Kara Arena, Chris Bellinger, Jack Dillon, Robert Denzel Edwards, Zoë Goslin, Patrick Harvey, Tania Kass, Miss Sandra Mhlongo, Resa Mishina, Katrien Van Riel, Katie Brough, Isaac Kueber, Trishawn Paul, Bianca Day Feiner, Hallie Friedman, and Danny Kelly.
Prometheus Bound
A filmed performance of Howard Rubenstein’s translation of Aeschylus’ tragedy, premiering on CyberTank and available to stream from March 24 to April 11, 2021. Directed by Ran Xia.
This modern adaptation of the ancient tragedy examines the discrepancy between what is legal versus what is just, to dismantle the concept of injustice veiled as order. Prometheus Bound is fully designed and staged for an audience of no one in The Tank’s 98-Seat theater. It is captured for the screen by Iris Media Works as a purely cinematic experience, with mask, original music and deeply compelling performances of the late Rubenstein's visionary text.
Featuring Brenda Crawley as Prometheus - with Macy Lacenta as Io, Iván Hernandez as Okeanos, Juan Arturo as Hephaestus, Olivia Rose Barresi as Hermes, and Alice Marcondes, Chloe Simone Crawford, Kaila Wooten, and Sophia Aranda as Water Nymphs.
Gallathea
Livestream performance on March 15th, 2021 at 7:30pm EST. Tickets available now!
A benefit reading presented by Red Bull Theater and the Drama League, as a part of their DirectorFest 2021. Directed by Emma Rosa Went. Featuring Olivia Rose Barresi as Gallathea.
First performed in 1588, John Lyly's Gallathea is a queer love story set inside the landscape of classical myth. In order to avoid becoming dinner for a sea monster, Gallathea and Phillida are sent into the forest dressed as boys. Meanwhile, three shipwrecked brothers set out to seek their fortunes, Cupid stirs up his usual trouble, nymphs fall for mortals, and Neptune–God of the Sea–waits to make his move. This playful pastoral of love, desire, and finding yourself is an affirmation of identity–joyfully reclaimed for 2021.
This event will premiere live on Monday, March 15. A recording of the livestream will be available until 7:00 PM EST on Friday, March 19 26 – then it disappears!
"King John" and "Hamlet"
Full radio versions of Shakespeare’s “King John” and “Hamlet,” presented as a part of Tabling: The Podcast and the Radio Shakespeare Lab. Produced by the International Shakespeare Center and Ariana Karp.
Listen to “King John,” with Olivia Rose Barresi as The Bastard (Phillip Faulconbridge) here - and “Hamlet,” with Olivia Rose Barresi as Laertes, here. Subsequent acts and scenes are listed at the bottom of these pages!
As a part of both Tabling: The Podcast and the Radio Shakespeare Lab, the International Shakespeare Center is producing full radio versions of all of Shakespeare’s plays over the course of the next year. Two in the first of this series are history play “King John,” and tragedy “Hamlet.” For the Tabling podcast, each play will have five-six episodes of “table work” discussions. New discussion episodes are released on Mondays and Thursdays. For the RSL podcast, each play is voiced by actors from across the country and incorporates sound effects and original music. Scenes from the plays will be released Tuesdays and Fridays.
“King John” has been directed by Ariana Karp, and “Hamlet” has been directed by Emma Rosa Went. Find more about all of the actors involved here.