JOY NESBITT
WRITER
JULIUS CAESAR VARIETY SHOW
2024
Fishamble New Writing Award Shortlist
Fishamble - Dublin, Ireland
Radical Spirit Award Shortlist
Project Arts Centre - Dublin, Ireland
Solas Nua New Voices Award Shortlist
Solas Nua - Washington, D.C.
A Black actor, a Woman actor, and a Straight White Male actor walk into a Shakespeare audition. What could go wrong?
Three actors from diverse backgrounds audition for a role in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Amidst a riot outside the theatre, they face an intensely respected director who is determined to reinvent the play through “unorthodox” methods, often at the expense of the actors' personal integrity. The audition becomes a battleground where the actors' identities are scrutinized, with an accompanist intensifying the director’s demands. As they navigate the director’s expectations, the actors grapple with how their identities alter the meaning of a play and the role that diversity and inclusion plays in reshaping the theatre industry.
Dear Rosa
2024
"Nesbitt’s snappily sharp script, like Morgan Parker’s poetry, navigating the personal and political life of the modern black woman with insight and ease."
The Arts Review
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
"the writing and the playing are themselves so clever and so committed"
The Irish Times
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A young Black Irish woman writes letters to Rosa Parks to apologise for being a "Bad Black," but as she writes more letters, she finds that her silence in the face of microaggressions is worse than speaking up.
Part confessional, part peep-show booth, and completely visceral, 12 short 5-minute plays were performed by one actor for one audience member at a time in a purpose-built booth as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2024.
Theatre for One: This Ireland featured the six original writers from the 2019 presentation at Cork Midsummer Festival (Marina Carr, Stacey Gregg, Emmet Kirwan, Louise Lowe, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh), working with an electric line-up of new writers (Iseult Deane, Susannah Al Fraihat, Aoibhéann McCann, Joy Nesbitt, Ois O’Donoghue and Aoife Delany Reade), whose short plays were selected from a nationwide public call-out.
One booth, 12 voices and a uniquely intimate experience for every single audience member.
Good
2023
Verity Bargate Award Longlist
Soho Theatre - London, UK
Bullock Creek, SC. 1862. Ginnie is an enslaved woman enwrapped in a 10 year relationship with her captor, Doc. Navigating oppression of plantation life with 5 children, Ginnie attempts to conduct a romantic relationship with Doc as the civil war rages around the plantation. On the eve of emancipation, she must make a decision: to stay with her captor or free herself. Based on the true family history of the playwright, Good explores freedom, coercion, and ways in which Black women have had to navigate misogynoir throughout history.
This piece was written and performed for the Rachel Baptiste Programme at Smock Alley Theatre. A reading was directed by Annie Ryan at Smock Alley Theatre.
Barbie, Girl
2022
Short play performed as part of a collaboration between The Williamstown Theater Festival 2022 and the Williams College Museum of Art entitled Working in Desire: The Political Economy of Black Feminine Labor.
This piece was directed by Veshonte Brown and performed by Jessica Caputo. View the performance here. (Starting at 10:07)
Meditations on Somebodiness
2022
An afrosurrealist play about what it means to be in the process of identity-making as a Black person in America (and any other place).
This play was workshopped under the direction of Eoghan Carrick at the Lir and under the direction of Joy Nesbitt at the BIPOC Early Career Theater-makers Program at The Williamstown Theater Festival 2021.
Speed Dating
2020
Short play about online speed dating workshopped at the Harvard Black Playwrights Festival 2021.
Call, Response, and Go-Go Live: Making a Musical Movement for Black Lives in Washington, D.C. in 2020
2020
Honors joint thesis written in the departments of Anthropology and Music at Harvard University. The thesis documents the work of the Washington, D.C. organization “Long Live GoGo” in the summer and fall of 2020. An engaged scholarly project with rich theoretical dimensions, it highlights Go-Go’s recurring role in resisting antiBlackness and the organization’s grassroots techniques for generating political momentum and strategy.