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Creative Cauldron Stage will give theatergoers a role in choosing a future mainstage production when its “Bold New Voices” Festival returns to Falls Church from April 11 through May 9, 2026.
The festival features professionally staged readings of four new plays and musicals by underrepresented writers and composers, with an emphasis on supporting women of color. Audience feedback will help the Bold New Voices Selection Committee decide which work will join Creative Cauldron’s 2026-27 mainstage season.
All performances are free and will take place at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturdays at Creative Cauldron, 127 East Broad Street in Falls Church.
Founding Artistic Director Laura Connors Hull leads the selection committee with board members Carol Lee Campbell and Krista Grimmett-Adams. Hull said the program is intended to provide an inclusive setting where works by women can be developed, premiered or given another opportunity to reach the stage.
Established in 2019, the initiative seeks to address gender disparities in theater while inviting audiences into the development process.
Four works on the schedule
The festival opens April 11 with The C Word, written by Sarah Lina Sparks and directed by Sally Imbriano.
The play follows five girls awaiting interviews for an associate curator position at a museum. Their plans unravel when they become trapped by an oracle known as the Hystoracle and learn that escaping will require choosing someone as a sacrifice to the C-monster.
Sparks is a Filipina playwright and recent UCLA graduate based in Southern California. Her writing draws on her Filipino heritage, women’s experiences and coming of age in the new millennium. Her plays have been staged internationally, and her work has received recognition from the International Thespian Festival, Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Competition, Third Culture Theater and Southern California Youth Playwrights. Concord Theatricals and Dramatics Magazine have published her writing.
On April 18, the festival will present Live From My Dad’s Couch, written by Gaelyn D. Smith and directed by A. Lorraine Robinson.
Part stand-up show, part cabaret and part deliberately imperfect shower concert, the semi-autobiographical work examines what it means for members of Generation Z to enter adulthood after being handed promises that failed to materialize. From a set modeled on her father’s living room, Smith mixes political observations and comedy before a live audience.
Smith, a Washington, D.C., native, is an actor, writer, director, teaching artist and digital creator whose work explores the Black experience. She earned a bachelor’s degree in acting and a master’s degree in television, radio and film from Syracuse University. Her half-hour dramedy Chasing Viral won the Gordon J. Alderman Award and later advanced in two screenwriting competitions.
The April 25 selection is His Girl Friday, featuring a book by Danielle Moore and music and lyrics by Moore and Zachary Sloan. Matt Conner will direct.
The new musical comedy is based on the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell film and its source material, The Front Page, which entered the public domain in time to become adaptable in 2024. Set to a big-band score, the show celebrates screwball comedy while examining journalism’s role in confronting corruption.
Moore is a writer, composer and producer whose Audrey: The New Musical received a regional premiere at Creative Cauldron in 2023. She belongs to the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. Another of her projects, Ink & Paint, co-written with Marjorie Duffield and starring Sierra Boggess and Gizel Jiménez, received a Roundabout Theatre Company reading in January 2026 and was selected for the inaugural Newport New Works Festival.
The festival concludes May 9 with Policarpa: Apocalypse Sur Amerikka, written by Diana Burbano and directed by Elena Velasco.
Set in the near future, the play imagines an unexplained plague spreading through La Gran Colombia. Ingrid Bolivar, the brilliant but unstable former wife of Colombia’s leader, discovers that young women living on the streets carry the plague. She takes them in and turns them into weapons against the government.
One of those girls, Policarpa, possesses magical abilities and is expected to become Ingrid’s apocalyptic weapon. After falling in love with a senior government official, however, Policarpa rejects that role and searches for a way to save others through sacrifice.
The work has been developed through programs operated by The Drama League, Theatricum Botanicum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Milagro Theatre. It received an honorable mention for the 2017 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, became a semifinalist for the 2018 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Festival and was a finalist for the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
Burbano is a Colombian immigrant, playwright, Equity actor and teaching artist. Her productions include Ghosts of Bogotá, Sapience and the Latinx punk-rock play Fabulous Monsters. She has received commissions and residencies from theater organizations across the country and represents Southern California on the Dramatists Guild council.
Admission and festival support
Tickets to every reading are free, though reservations are required through Creative Cauldron’s website.
Diener and Associates is sponsoring the festival, which also received project grants from ArtsFairfax and the Arts and Humanities Council of Falls Church.
Creative Cauldron was founded by Hull in 2002 as a nonprofit theater and educational arts organization. After raising approximately $725,000 through its New Home-New Horizon campaign, the organization moved into its permanent space at the Broad and Washington development. The theater is expected to remain there for the next 30 years as part of Falls Church’s planned arts and entertainment district.