Visiting Resident Playwright: Sean Dunnington

Playwright Sean Dunnington joins us as our inaugural Visiting Resident Playwright from September 2024 to July 2025. This 10-month residency is sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation as part of Sean's 2024 - 2025 Henry Luce Scholarship. 

Sean is a queer/Jewish playwright from Hawai'i Island. His work has been presented Off-Broadway, in regional theatres across the country, local libraries and galleries, state museums, old attics, public radio stations, film festivals, and LGBTQIA+ centres. He's been in artistic residence with the East-West Center, Waiwai Collective, and the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Campus Center. He's been a fellow with the Dramatists Guild Foundation, Orchard Project, Magic Theatre, Creative Labs Hawai'i, National Collaborative for Health Equity and California Arts Council. Sean received his MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2024. 

During his time in Singapore, Sean’s goal is to have an honest exchange of work and ideas with Singapore theatre-makers and community members - to build understanding, spark ideas, and create new work.

As part of my Luce Scholarship, I was challenged with the really cool opportunity to choose a country in Asia to reside in for a year, and a placement organization to collaborate with. Well, I was fresh out of grad school, having just completed my MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch - and I mean FRESH. I was at my graduation ceremony in New York, and just three weeks later I was in Singapore. It was disorienting, and I just kept thinking, “Where the fuck am I?”

I think I'm jumping ahead. Before I got here, I made this big list of all the organizations I thought I could have an interesting collaboration with. Centre 42 was at the top of the list. I was initially drawn to their developmental nature, given their focus on playwrights rather than productions. I wasn't interested in moving here, producing something, and then leaving. I wanted to build community - and develop an equitable exchange - one where I could offer what I had and absorb what I could. That probably sounds vague, so I'll tell you what it's looked like so far.

I've had brilliant minds provide me with Singaporean plays (still don't know what that means), and I've made it a goal to read one play a day - which sounds lavish, but I promise you it's not. I’ve also had the chance to sit in workshops and readings - and build a comprehension of how theatre operates here. From a glance, it might seem quite familiar to what's in the US, but I actually think it's quite different - not just in content, but in process, form, and theatricality. And by theatricality, I'm thinking largely about a play's relationship to the audience.

That's probably why I've been facilitating a workshop series on theatricality called Tools, which is basically an offering of mine where I gab about a tool that's been imparted to me by a friend or mentor I love, and then me and a bunch of smart playwrights discuss that tool as a way to approach theatricality. It's mostly games, thought experiments, conversations, and readings. It's also a pretty American approach, which at first I was shy about, but over time I've come to lean into the nature of my cultural exchange here. Oh, I also did a Bake Off (credit to Paula Vogel - look it up and do one!) and also a sharing of excerpts from five of my plays surrounding questions about plays and queerness.

Oh! I'm also writing a play. Duh. How could I not? It's in response to my time here. So I guess you could say it's a play about Singapore, disguised as a play about Mars. I've convinced myself that the first colony on Mars will be a lot like Singapore. And I'm curious how it will get made, what rules will come into play, where they'll come from, why they are what they are, who got to decide them, where their beliefs came from, why they believe in them, etc. These are really just the questions I have for Singapore. And that's what's leading this play - questions. I'm not making a statement about what I think about Singapore. Why would I put anyone through that? Anyway, stay tuned for that and we'll see what happens.

During this term, Sean will participate in Centre 42's ongoing new writing development programmes, lead writing workshops for Singapore's playwriting community, and write a new play from scratch in response to his year in Singapore.