Plays

Works in Development

  • CAST SIZE: 6
    Can you really redress harm? A group of unnamed ex-associates gather for a restorative-adjacent circle with their former tormentor to find out. They’ve all signed an agreement before entering the space–which includes taking a turn in a “hot seat” at the circle’s center–but finding stable footing while standing on quicksand proves challenging. Hot Seat invites audiences to join the circle alongside them, encouraging everyone to question what justice, healing, and harm mean and how it all can shift depending on what you see, hear, know, and understand about the people around you.

    • finalist, Fault Line Theatre Irons in the Fire (2025)

    • reading, Untitled Play Development Lab (2025)

    • work in process showing, Brick Aux Quick + Dirty (2023)

    • development, ATG BIPOC PlayLab (2025); Page 73 Writers Group (2024); Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group (2022)

  • CAST SIZE: 8
    A century has passed since the United States’s tech-fueled Icarian collapse. Many new things emerged in its wake, from cults and guerrilla groups to quasi-utopias and mutual aid societies. One presence has outlasted them all: the Grioraphet — a lineage of orators with an enduring purpose of looking back in order to move forward. But, on this Sunday, as the Grioraphet addresses their gathering of followers, naysayers, and the generally curious, the world as they know it has shifted again and the legacy of care they’ve built their life on may no longer exist. 

    In The Grioraphet Speaks on Sundays, apocalypse & human connection, bunkers & saviors, and past & present all collide as the Grioraphet asks: what becomes of us in an unmade world?

    • development, National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Residency (2022-Present); Page 73 Writers Group (2024)

  • A play trilogy with each play set in a different decade during the 1800s in the American South. The trilogy focuses on what it took for Black folks to make choices, create a self, create agency, and navigate within a nation going through various moments of transition and upheaval (the impending Trail of Tears in the 1830s, the impending Civil war in the 1850s, and the impending failure of Reconstruction/rise of Jim Crow in the 1870s).

    IVY, 1859.

    In 1850s coastal Georgia, a young enslaved woman named Ivy has inherited many things from her recently deceased sister (namely, her daughter Winny) and must decide if she wants to keep any of them or abandon it all. But when a figure from the future appears specifically looking for Ivy (or rather, what becomes of her), Ivy chooses to follow her lead and see what she can discern about her own life from the future's perspective.

    • 29 hour workshop & reading, Fault Line Theatre (2026)

    • development, MacDowell (2022); Liberation Theatre Company Writing Residency Program (2022-2023)

Full Length Plays

  • CAST SIZE: 11
    Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and social uprising, The Story and the Teller follows the resident acting company of a fictional Memphis theatre tasked with devising a play about the 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic and its effect on Memphis’s Black, white, and immigrant citizens. Challenging enough on its own, the process is marred by questions and disagreements about history, race, gender, safety and storytelling, issues that played out in both 1878 and 2020 in dizzying ways.

    • commission, development and workshop production, University of Memphis Dept. of Theatre and Dance (2020-2021)

  • CAST SIZE: 6
    After his recent mental breakdown, 15-year-old Bradley just wants life to return to normal. But when a haunting figure wearing a dapper suit made of alligator skin begins tormenting him, Bradley must turn to the only person who might be able to help: his estranged father. The Alligator is a Southern gothic tale of legacies, secrets, fear, and coming-of-age in Blackness.

    • reading, Untitled Play Development Lab (2025)

    • finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2023)

    • development, Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellows (2020-2021)

  • CAST SIZE: 6
    Today should only be about one thing: Gwendolyn Tarver’s homegoing. But at 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday at Seventh Baptist Church, the Tarver family’s attention is fractured once her will is read. Something that her daughter Cassandra assumed would be quick and simple is primed to shake the foundations of this family. Interlopers is a play about legacies, grief, belonging, and how we become who we are—especially as mothers and daughters.

    • finalist, Fault Line Theatre Irons in the Fire (2024)

    • semifinalist, O’Neil National Playwrights Conference (2023)

    • reading, Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group (2022)

    • development, American Theatre Group BIPOC PlayLab (2022)

  • CAST SIZE: 7
    What happens when we relegate a place and its people to a moment in history they had no say in? What does this conflation do to its citizens—culturally, politically, socioeconomically, even psychologically? What does all of this mean for a playwright who tries to write a play about it? Someone Else’s Bullet considers what happens when violence leaves an irreparable stain on a city that its citizens can’t quite repair—namely on Memphis, TN: the site of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Using interviews of both native Memphians and non-Memphians of all generations, Calley the playwright works to investigate trauma, place, collective memory, and if there’s a world beyond what has become her hometown's unwanted legacy.

    • development and reading, The Civilians R&D Group (2022)

  • CAST SIZE: 6
    Six actors and one narrator take us through a meta-theatrical journey that asks an essential question of August Strindberg's classic: who is Miss Julie? Set in multiple time periods and locations in the United States, The Julies analyzes the power dynamics at play in the canonical play and shifts them beyond their current boundaries of identity, gender, and place. This one-act play is an attempt to push adaptation further and create more space for questions than interpretations or answers.

    • production, UNC Greensboro (2021)

  • CAST SIZE: 5
    In the world just beyond a mirror's reflection, five co-workers try their best to do their jobs well: be a voice in someone's head and make them happy. But what happens when the world outside the mirror blends with the world inside it?

    • workshop production, The New School for Drama (2019)

Short & 10-Minute Plays

  • CAST SIZE: 5
    Five research study participants gather in a conference room. Their task appears simple and straight-forward: select 10 events from the year 1968 that they feel impacted the nation’s consciousness and view of empathy. What transpires is a reflection of what is seen, heard, and missed when history, memory, and living bodies must merge in unflinching ways.

    • production, Downtown Urban Arts Festival (2024)

      • received second place for Best Short

      • received Audience Award

    • production, Three Six Nine Monologue & Short Play Festival (2023)

  • CAST SIZE: 8
    For Hylas: A Playlist or 12 Labors of Guilt, Shame, and Loveis the story of Hercules and Hylas told through song, poetry and dance. It is a playlist made by Hercules for the love of his life. . . Hylas. This adaptation explore queerness in Ancient Greek mythology focusing on a love story that hasn’t been traditionally told.

    Conceived/Adapted by Nigel Semaj 
    Written by  Calley Anderson and Nigel Semaj 

    • workshop production, The New School for Drama (2019)

  • CAST SIZE: 2
    Inspired by Katherine Morgan's fall 2020 article "About That Wave of Anti-Racist Bestsellers Over the Summer...," this play tackles the realities of difficult conversations, the nature of allyship and activism, choosing wins and battles, and what it means to have to do any of this while you fight for your life.

    • production, Grand View University (2026)

    • production, Fade to Black Play Festival (2022)

  • CAST SIZE: 4
    There's a cultural touchstone in Black America that, if you see another Black person running, you follow without question. But what happens after you've followed? Where do you run? What do you discover? Trick or Treat? gives comedic answers to those questions while highlighting the realities of what it means to be a Black man in America.

    • production, Fade to Black Play Festival (2018)

  • CAST SIZE: 2
    Does a spark always start a fire, or can it die out? In this 10-minute play, two young men engage in a tête-à-tête about truth, self, and love at a lonely airport baggage claim.

    • production, Emerald Theatre Company (2017)