When Janelle envisioned herself clerking on the United States Supreme Court, this is exactly what she pictured: a caffeine-fueled all night effort to win a narrow majority that might just save democracy itself. What she didn’t picture was her Justice dropping dead in the hours between the conference vote and the public announcement in which that vote would acquire the force of law. With the fate of the American experiment hanging in the balance, Janelle and her fellow clerk grapple with a difficult question: where should they hide the body?

The Justice Is Just Asleep is a humorous and horrifying examination of the contingent nature of our institutions. With dark humor reflective of our fraught political moment, The Justice Is Just Asleep probes the terrifying reality that our system is only as solid as the flawed people trying to make it work.

Ruben Grijalva (he/him) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based playwright exploring moral questions to which he has no good answers. This approach leads to plays that you might describe as comedies about tragedies, featuring protagonists that you might describe as seemingly good people doing seemingly bad things. His short plays include “Anna Considers a Cocktail” and the PianoFight ShortLived winning “All The Worlds Are Stages.” His full-length plays include “Anna Considers Mars,” the Edgerton New Play Award winning “Value Over Replacement,” and “Shoot Me When…,” winner of the 2022 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play in the Bay Area. He lives in San Rafael, California with his wife and daughter.

Susi Damilano, Director (she/her) is co-founder and producing director of San Francisco Playhouse. She is a five-time recipient of the Excellence in Theatre Award for Principal Actress in a Play from the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle for the Playhouse productions of Abigail’s Party, Harper Regan, Bug, Six Degrees of Separation, and Reckless. Susi has also performed leading roles here in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Yoga Play, The Effect, The Roommate, Red Velvet, Tree, Bauer, Abigail’s Party, Harper Regan, Coraline, Slasher, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Landscape of the Body, First Person Shooter, Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, The Crucible, Kimberly Akimbo, Our Town, and The Smell of the Kill. Directing credits include Playhouse productions of The 39 Steps, Clue, Indecent, Twelfth Night, Groundhog Day The Musical, Cabaret, Mary Poppins, Noises Off, She Loves Me, Stage Kiss, Company, Stupid Fucking Bird, Into the Woods, A Behanding in Spokane, Den of Thieves, and Wirehead (SFBATCC nomination), the West Coast premieres of Honey Brown Eyes (SFBATCC nomination), Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Coronado, The Mystery Plays, and Roulette, and the world premieres of On Clover Road by Steven Dietz, From Red to Black by Rhett Rossi, and Seven Days by Daniel Heath in the Sandbox Series.

Jeffrey Gan, Dramaturg (he/him) is a dramaturg, performance maker, and arts researcher. He recently completed a PhD in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin; his dissertation compared performance practices among Dutch-Indonesian diaspora communities in the Netherlands and California. His research has been published in Situations, Hyperallergic Magazine, and Performance Research. As a dramaturg, Jeff specializes in new work and experimental performance, particularly with Black and Asian American artists tackling issues of identity and audience. He has collaborated with playwrights like travis l. tate and dance makers including Charles O. Anderson and Benjamin Akio Kimitch. He served as dramaturg for Kimitch’s project “Tiger Hands,” a commission by The Shed’s Open Call program which won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator. Jeff is an artist working in movement and performance installation, and his work have been presented by Center Space Project and the Cohen New Works festival in Austin, TX and W139 in Amsterdam. Currently, Jeff is a company dancer with Gamelan Sekar Jaya, a Balinese performance ensemble based in South Berkeley, where he is proud to train with master artists and culture bearers like Cok Istri Putri Rukmini and I Made Suteja.

Kaitlin Weinstein (She/Her, Stage Manager) is an East Bay-based stage manager and arts administrator passionate about new play development. With Playwrights Foundation, she previously served as the Production Assistant on Harlem Canary/Tokyo Crow, the Producing Intern for the 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and a few years on the National Committee of Readers. Around the Bay Area, she’s worked with theater companies including American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Playhouse, California Shakespeare Theater, Shotgun Players, and Stanford TAPS, as well as Broadway at Music Circus and Capital Stage in Sacramento. She holds a B.A. in Theater & Performance Studies and English from UC Berkeley, where she received the Eisner Prize for Stage Management and Costume Design. She is currently the Producing Manager at The Marsh, a theater that specializes in developing one-person shows.

Gianna DiGregorio Rivera (She/They, Janelle) is a Bay Area-born actor and musician. Recent credits include Private Lives, A Whynot Christmas Carol (American Conservatory Theater), American Mariachi (Alley Theatre), Hurricane Diane, The Importance of Being Earnest (Aurora Theatre), Romeo y Juliet (California Shakespeare Theater), Quixote Nuevo (Hartford Stage/Huntington Theatre/Alley Theatre/California Shakespeare Theater), and Arcadia (Shotgun Players). They hold a BA in Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University.

Rolanda D. Bell (She/Her, Brianna) Born & raised Oakland Ca, Rolanda has had a career as a storyteller for the last 15 years, excited and honored to be back working with Playwright Foundation bringing new work to life. Some accomplishments include: Berkeley Rep Theater School as a director for 2024 High School Theater Festival,2023 RHE Artistic Fellow recipient and current BATCC nominee for both her role & cast in production A Thousand Ships. Recent Theater Credits include: World Premiere of A Thousand Ships with Oakland Theater Project, Shipping & Handling with Crowded Fire Theater, Midsummer Nights Dream with Shotgun Players, POTUS with Berkeley Rep, Is God Is with Oakland Theater Project and Paradise Blue with Aurora Theater. As her resume continues to grow you can see more of her work in original film Blindspotting, Netflix Original film All Day & A Night & voice actor in deleted scenes for PIXAR Animation films LIGHTYEAR & Inside Out 2. Rolanda is SAG-AFTRA & represented by JE Talent. @rolandadene

Jacob Henrie-Naffaa (He/Him, Clay, Marshall, Chief Justice, The Intruder) is a Bay Area actor, writer and director. He has been performing professionally since the age of seven and has been seen on Bay Area stages ever since. Recent theatre credits include Returning to Haifa (Golden Thread), Cabaret (CenterRep), and In the Heights (CenterRep, Berkeley Playhouse). When not acting he loves chilling out with his Legos.

Catherine Castellanos (She/Her, The Justice/Dolores) 

Victor Talmadge (He/Him, The Other Justice/Office Douglas/The Candidate) In the Bay Area, Mr. Talmadge has worked at Marin Shakespeare,  the Aurora Theater, Cal Shakes, Berkely Rep, ACT, Theater Works, San Francisco Playhouse, Z Space, OTP, The Magic Theater and Santa Cruz Shakespeare. He has worked extensively in New York and regional theaters and was on Broadway in the world premiere of David Mamet’s, November.  He played “The King” in the Tony Award winning production of the Broadway National Tour of The King and I and was seen as Scar in the Los Angeles production of The Lion King. Mr. Talmadge boasts extensive film and television credits as well and he was a recurring character on the TV series, Manhattan and Vegas.  As a playwright, his play, The Gate Of Heaven, was awarded The Nakashima Peace Prize.  It was the first live theater to be produced at The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and has been subsequently performed at The Old Globe Theater, Fords Theater, and The Annenberg Center, and various venues around the country. 

Marie- Claire Erdynast (She/Her, Stage Directions) 

Driving the Girls is a semi-autobiographical play about Mary, an ambitious Black college student in Vegas, whose escape from the city’s constraints is helped by an unexpected community of working women.

Cat Brooks (she/her) is an award-winning actress and playwright. She has spent the last three years touring her award-winning one-woman show ‘Tasha, based on the 2015 in-custody murder of Natasha McKenna in the Fairfax County Jail. ‘Tasha won the Best of the SF Fringe Festival in 2017, 3 Girls Theater Salon Series Playwright Festival in 2018 and was featured in the 2019 BAMBD Festival in Oakland. In her role as an artivist, she is also the host of “Law & Disorder” on KPFA and resident playwright and actress with The Lower Bottom Playaz in Oakland and 3Girls Theatre in San Francisco. As an organizer, she played a central role in the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, and spent the last decade working with impacted communities and families to rapidly respond to police violence and radically transform the ways our communities are policed and incarcerated. She is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) and the Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network. Cat was also the runner-up in Oakland’s 2018 mayoral election, facing incumbent Libby Schaaf.

Untitled, or The Rosaline Play examines how the opioid deaths of 21-year-old trap stars are romanticized like something out of Romeo & Juliet – and then leveraged for success on the Billboard Hot 100.

Leigh M. Marshall (she/her) is a multidisciplinary writer/performer and the Theater & Film Editor online for BOMB Magazine. Her plays have been selected for the Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival (FAME HEAUX), the Examined Life Conference (LATERALITY), the G&PS Government Research Award, the Prairie Lights/International Writing Program Reading Series (MARAT’S DEAD), the Jumpstarting Tomorrow Award, the Epic Mega Grant from Unreal Engine, Live Design International, and the Prague Quadrennial (MEDIA CLOWN). She trained in classical acting at American Conservatory Theater and has performed at Arena Stage in DC, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Public Theater of New York, New Dramatists, New Conservatory Theatre Center, and elsewhere. BA: Stanford University. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

In Opinion Emporium, Amy begrudgingly accompanies her friend Ethel to the Opinion Emporium thinking it will be a quick stop—a couple of questions asked, a couple of thoughts formed on topics of minor consequence. But then Ethel disappears, and Amy is left to go on a journey of her own to find her, nudged into action by an enterprising shoplifter.

Sloka Krishnan (he/him) is a playwright-lyricist interested in magic, extravagance, ritual, camp, and the disavowal of moral purity and coherent identity. His writing has been described as subversive, multilayered, and eviscerating (by a boy he once slept with) and as darkly surreal comedy (by a legitimate online publication). Now based in San Francisco, he was previously a 2020 recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, a 2017-2018 Horizon Theatre Playwright Apprentice (Atlanta, GA), and a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting. His full-length plays (THE BUGS, MAYBE POLITICS ARE OVER, THE GRAND TRANSSEXUAL DRAWETH NIGH) and shorter work have been developed and performed by Cutting Ball Theatre (San Francisco); Happy Accident Theatre, Horizon Theatre Company, Out Front Theatre, and Working Title Playwrights (Atlanta); Forum Theatre and the Rainbow Theatre Project (DC).