Photo by Brett Barnes
Photos from Blue Theatre Company's rehearsals of "Campari Soda", which ran at the New Marigny Theatre in April 2026. The show, and the company itself, are emblematic of a wave of introspective, experimental independent theatre endeavors emerging in New Orleans.
The modern world offers an endless supply of stories polished for streaming, shortened for scrolling, and designed for consumption via the confines of a screen. Yet there persists a form of theatre that asks its audience to sit still, lean forward, and encounter others, with none of the protection of distance.
This newer wave of work does not rely on spectacle or the certainty of a story already settled. It embraces people who are still becoming, still making mistakes, and still negotiating the space between who they are, and who they once hoped to be. Across New Orleans, playwrights, performers, and independent theatre companies are developing productions that feel immediate, emotionally exposed, and closely connected to the lives that audiences are living now.
Dirty, Southern Gothic
This past April, black chairs sat empty before the stage at New Marigny Theatre, waiting for an audience that, in only a few days, would be drawn into the disorder taking shape in the room. Two French windows stood upstage, framed by flats. A bar anchored downstage left, while fluorescent lighting illuminated a piano on the opposite side, giving the space the feeling of an after-hours conversation that has continued beyond the point of comfort.
Nothing about the set felt sterile or safely removed. The atmosphere was tense, conversational, unmistakably Southern Gothic. What would happen here would unfold through exposure and the possibility that something private might suddenly explode into view.
Overlapping conversations mixed with nervous laughter and the soft turning of script pages between scenes. Actors carried marked-up copies that had already begun to bend and soften in their hands, pausing to reconsider a line, a movement, or the emotional logic of a moment. One performer lost a word, laughed, and immediately returned to the scene. No one seemed rattled. The interruption only reinforced the sense that everyone was still building this production together.
Two actors moved through an opening exchange as the room gradually quieted around them. Their conversation sharpened. A countdown began somewhere offstage, signaling the arrival of a new year and the sense that something irreversible was approaching. A half-finished drink was sweating near the edge of the rehearsal space while someone searched hurriedly through a script for the next line.
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Photo by Brett Barnes
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Photo by Brett Barnes
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Photo by Brett Barnes
Blue Theatre Company's production of New Orleans playwright Alex Anthony Vazquez's original play, Campari Soda, would go on to run from April 18–30. But on this evening it was already beginning to take shape, before the first audience member had even entered the room.
Set in New Orleans during the early 1970s, Campari Soda moves through betrayal, longing, lust, shame, and shifting struggles for power. Its characters circle one another inside an increasingly confined world, each carrying some private need and threatening, intentionally or otherwise, to expose what the others would prefer to keep hidden. Vazquez describes the work created by Blue Theatre Company as “not safe,” dealing as it does with raw themes, ambiguous characters, and confronting taboos.
“Bold but not preachy,” he said. “I’ll give you the situation and you take away from it what you will.”
His reason for writing Campari Soda was equally direct: “To tell a story that people aren’t tackling,” he said. “People need to feel something.”
“Dirty, Southern Gothic” is how Vazquez described the emotional world of the production, a fitting phrase for a play in which glamour and desperation, affection and cruelty often occupy the same room. The show does not soften its characters into easily understood examples of good or bad behavior. Their actions are selfish, impulsive, and deeply flawed, but never entirely removed from the possibility of recognition.
Kyler Porche, who portrayed James—the son of the play's patriarch, August—considers that humanity to be essential to the role. Porche described his character as an outsider, immature and resistant to accountability, though not incapable of remorse or transformation. “Just because someone fails, makes mistakes, gives into something they shouldn’t, they aren’t bad,” he said. “They are human. Just because something happens once doesn’t mean someone can’t make amends.”
Kaytlin Borgen played Robin, the mysterious and emotionally layered stepmother caught between the life she inhabits and the one she believes she was meant to have. Glamorous, inquisitive, and hardened by the world around her, Robin exists in a state of constant negotiation between desire and restraint—between what she wants and what she is willing to admit wanting. “Longing for something more,” Borgen said. “What could have been. Nostalgia. Wanting a bit of extravagance.”
The intimacy of the New Marigny Theatre's performance space made that longing difficult to disguise. “It’s like being naked,” she said. “Your emotions are laid bare.” A raised eyebrow, a pause held a moment too long, or the slight tightening of a mouth can communicate as much as a shouted line. The characters of Campari Soda cannot hide behind theatrical gesture. Their mistakes, appetites, jealousies, and moments of tenderness remain visible enough for an audience to recognize, even when that recognition is less than flattering.
Still Becoming
Productions like Blue Theatre Company's Campari Soda belong to the output of a broader network of smaller theatre companies, independent artists, and developmental organizations in New Orleans that are prioritizing emotional immediacy over commercial security.
Sharing this philosophy is Blue Roses Project, which supports emerging queer playwrights through workshops, readings, and sustained artistic development. Co-artistic directors James Will McBride and Gideon Glick founded the organization in 2023 and began official playwright workshops in 2025. “Well, we weren’t anything until a few months ago,” McBride said with a laugh.
“It was something very attractive to us…the idea of telling American queer stories in the South and incubating them in the South."
—Gideon Glick, co-founder of Blue Roses Project
The founders describe Blue Roses Project as “an artist retreat for queer playwrights at the beginning of their careers.” Their work rests on the understanding that a developing play does not need to arrive polished in order to contain something worth pursuing.
The twenty-nine-hour reading sits at the center of that process. This Actors’ Equity workshop structure allows writers to hear their work aloud, collaborate with performers, reconsider entire scenes, and radically reshape a play within a concentrated period. The purpose is not to prove that a script already works, but to discover what else it might become.
That process recently unfolded through a workshopping of Red Tide by Dom Martello, a supernatural queer romantic comedy set against the impending chaos of a Gulf Coast hurricane. One character, Guin, refuses to evacuate the possibly haunted home of her deceased brother as a storm moves toward Tampa Bay. Another, Parker, is emotionally stranded after a devastating breakup and chooses isolation over safety nearby. Rising floodwaters and a house intent on revealing what has been buried inside it eventually force the two neighbors to confront grief, loneliness, desire, and the emotional wreckage both have spent years attempting to outrun.
The work is funny, strange, politically aware, and emotionally exposed, containing the kind of complicated threads that reveal their full purpose only through experimentation. “When we spoke with them, they were just so eager to interrogate the play and rip it all apart,” Glick said of the creators of Red Tide. “They’d completely rewritten it by the end of the twenty-nine-hour reading. And that was thrilling.”
Transformation is not an unfortunate consequence of the Blue Roses process. It is the reason the process exists. “We’re not necessarily looking for the most polished draft or playwright,” McBride explained. “We want something that’s sort of nebulous and that there’s a lot of incredible ingredients and a lot of room to grow. Real life isn’t perfect. Real life is gritty. It is unpolished.”
The organization’s commitment to unfinished work arrived at a moment when the infrastructure supporting new plays has become increasingly fragile. “Funding for new play development across the country, even before COVID, but especially since COVID, has been dramatically cut,” McBride explained.
Larger institutions have become more cautious, leaving grassroots organizations like Blue Roses Project to occupy the spaces left behind. Their work gives emerging playwrights something increasingly rare: the time and permission to arrive without all of the answers.
Blue Roses Project also intentionally centers queer storytelling in the South, a decision its founders considered especially important amid growing political hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities and the national rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“It was something very attractive to us…the idea of telling American queer stories in the South and incubating them in the South,” Glick said.
New Orleans has long allowed performance to move freely between theatre, music, ritual, nightlife, ceremony, and everyday life. Theatricality is not reserved for the stage here. It walks down the street, gathers in courtyards, joins a parade, enters a barroom, and continues long after the formal performance has ended.
That natural overlap between life and theatre offers fertile ground for artists interested in stories that resist easy answers. Blue Roses Project and Blue Theatre Company approach their work differently, but both are creating a space for theatre that feels alive enough to change, personal enough to unsettle, and current enough to matter.
A Theatre of the Now
Reactions are difficult to conceal inside New Marigny Theatre. During live performances of Campari Soda, viewers laughed sharply at moments that felt almost too personal, then subsided into uneasy silence seconds later. Heavier scenes left the room still enough to hear bodies shifting in seats, and glasses being placed quietly upon tabletops.
In this way, the emotional life of the play steps out from the stage. Audience members sit only feet away from characters making poor decisions, revealing private desires, and attempting to understand consequences they cannot undo. Silence stretches visibly between performers, and the tension ripples outward through the people seated in front of them.
Photo by Brett Barnes
That immediacy is only part of what makes this newer wave of theatre feel particularly relevant. New works like Campari Soda and developing works like Red Tide reflect a larger movement away from characters polished into heroes, villains, or easily understood archetypes. Their people remain selfish, vulnerable, impulsive, ashamed, funny, frightened, and often contradictory. They resemble the people audiences know and, perhaps more uncomfortably, the people audiences recognize within themselves.
Contemporary life is filled with performances of another kind. Personal identities are carefully arranged online, emotions are edited into digestible fragments, and vulnerability itself can be shaped for public consumption. These plays resist that kind of polish. They allow people to behave badly without becoming entirely bad, to want conflicting things, and to continue searching for connection while repeatedly getting in their own way.
A play does not have to provide a solution to create connection. Sometimes the connection comes from watching someone struggle with the same question."
Audiences appear increasingly hungry for that recognition. They do not necessarily want to leave themselves behind for two hours. Many want to see the emotional realities of the present reflected back at them: loneliness despite constant communication, desire complicated by fear, identity shaped by expectation, and the persistent difficulty of being fully known by another person.
The work emerging from Blue Theatre Company and Blue Roses Project responds to that desire without offering easy reassurance. These productions trust that identification does not always come through likability, and that a deeply flawed character can still make someone in the audience feel less alone. A play does not have to provide a solution to create connection. Sometimes the connection comes from watching someone struggle with the same question.
New Orleans provides an especially fitting home for this kind of theatre, not simply because the city values performance, but because life here rarely divides itself cleanly between the public and private. Celebration carries grief. Humor interrupts hardship. Extravagance exists alongside deterioration, and strangers frequently become participants in one another’s experiences. The city understands that intimacy can develop quickly and that contradiction does not make an emotion less sincere.
The new plays emerging here carry that understanding onto the stage. Their stories feel immediate because they are less concerned with presenting life as it should be and more interested in examining life as it currently feels. They speak to audiences living through uncertainty, isolation, political hostility, shifting identities, and a growing desire for something more honest.
The lights eventually rise, but the performance does not end cleanly with them. Conversations continue as the audiences move toward the doors. Some viewers laugh while recounting scenes that came unexpectedly close to their own lives. Others leave more quietly, still considering something they saw in a character they had not expected to understand.
That recognition may be what audiences are searching for now: not escape, exactly, but evidence that the messier parts of being human are shared. Theatre cannot resolve those contradictions, but when the distance between a story and its audience becomes small enough, it can remind people that they are not experiencing them alone.
Blue Theatre Company
Instagram: @bluetheatrecompany
Blue Roses Project
Instagram: @bluerosesnola
