10th Anniversary
A Bill and Judy Garrett CommissionThe Finish Line
Dottie Studio
New Play Series 2026
Join us for our annual new play reading series The Finish Line: A Bill and Judy Garrett Commission. This multi-day event includes a reception, staged readings, and talk-backs that are all free to the public. In partnership with the UCSD MFA Playwriting Program, the commission supports Cygnet’s commitment to new theatrical works, written by groundbreaking local playwrights as well as nationally recognized playwrights.
Playwrights awarded The Finish Line Commission will be given a week-long workshop culminating in a public reading, a financial reward, and an assurance that the play will have an opportunity for a world premiere production at Cygnet.
Public readings of the plays will take place November 5-7, 2026 in the Dottie Studio Theater. Attendance is free but reservations are required.
Reception immediately following the final reading and talkback.
Plays
Magda is a binational artist who really really wants to be a mom despite what that might mean for her mental health and her marriage to Jazmin. Jaz prefers to preserve the life they have built and pursue the career she’s always dreamt of. Together they confront family ties, competing ambitions, and the demands of their marriage. Can a marriage survive when one person desperately wants a child and the other does not?
Drew, Michael, Errol, and Toby have been assigned a final pledge task before joining a fraternity— stranded in the basement, they must decide which one of them must f**k a goat. Over the course of the night, the boys are forced to reckon with what, and who, must be sacrificed in the name of brotherhood.
Leslie never expected to take a job at H-E-B, the best grocery store chain in Texas, after getting a divorce at 54 years old. But she also didn’t expect said job, and the motley group of co-workers that came with it, to completely change her life for the better. From early morning shelf stocking, to break room Christmas parties, with a lot of intergenerational quips along the way, Here, Everything’s Better tells the story of how unforeseen friendships, made in the back-rooms of the biggest grocery stores, can show us why we matter, and provide us a new way forward.
Ivy, a brilliant young robotics engineer, returns to work at her mother’s robotics company after two years away. Reuniting with her coworker and best friend Forrest, they are tasked with troubleshooting a new, lifelike AI companion robot named Adam. But as she navigates the pressures of the project, the expectations of her mother, and her own personal demons, Ivy finds herself unexpectedly drawn into a complicated relationship with Adam, and what began as a professional homecoming becomes a reckoning with memory, identity, and what it means to feel something real.
Playwrights
Carla Navarro
Carla Navarro is a Chilean-American playwright and actress whose work explores complex human relationships, identity, family, and the emotional contradictions that shape contemporary life. Her plays examine themes of belonging, caregiving, mental health, cultural identity, and resilience through stories that are both intimate and socially resonant. Her award-winning play Fragment/o/s of Air/e received a full staged production at OnStage Playhouse in 2025 and earned a Craig Noel Award nomination and award for Outstanding New Play. Her work has also been featured in Moxie Theatre’s 2025 Lamoise New Works Festival (Always), The Roustabouts Theatre Co.’s Celebration of New Writers (Always in 2023 and Orange Tulips in 2024), Riot Productions’ Cats Can’t Eat Yarn and Other Plays, and OnStage Playhouse’s Monumental History series in 2022.
As an actor, Carla’s recent credits include Derecho (La Jolla Playhouse), El Huracán (Cygnet Theatre), and Turning Off the Morning News, The Drowning Girls, and A Bright New Boise (OnStage Playhouse). Drawing on her experience both onstage and as a writer, she creates work that challenges, provokes, and invites audiences into conversations about the complexities of human connection.
Chesed Chap
Chesed Chap is a Mexican-American playwright originally from Patagonia, Arizona. Her plays aim to capture the shameful, hilarious, and unavoidable venture young people take to connect and to be known. She is a recipient of the 2025 Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting for F**k the Goat. Her other plays include Someone North Loves You and Education, which have been produced at the Wagner New Play Festival and Yale Playwrights Festival. Chesed’s work has additionally been produced by the Westmont College Fringe Festival and Yale Dramatic Association. Chesed received her BA from Yale University, and is currently a second-year MFA Playwriting student at UC San Diego.
Mack Lawrence
Mack Lawrence is a trans playwright, movement artist, and a sixth-generation Austinite whose work traverses foundationally queer stories with a distinctly southern voice. Their play Waco Boy Club, will have its premiere in Brooklyn, NY as a part of National Queer Theater’s 2026 season. Mack’s project DINNER, a devised multimodal dance theater melodrama, had a sold out run at the Brick Aux in Brooklyn in 2025. They were a part of MOtiVE Brooklyn’s For the Artist! Residency program. They also are a long time collaborator with ARCOS Dance, most recently as a part of Ether Dust, a movement tour through rural West Texas.
Mack received their BFA in Dance from UT Austin. They are an MFA Playwriting candidate at UC San Diego. They love their niece, Loretta, more than anything
Tom Zohar
Tom Zohar is a San Diego based actor / playwright. Some recent performance credits include Bad Jews (Jonah), Sweeney Todd (Tobias), and The History Boys (Posner) at Cygnet Theatre; The Waverly Gallery (Daniel) and Tarrytown (Ichabod) at Backyard Renaissance; Significant Other (Jordan), A New Brain (Gordon), and Harmony, Kansas (Julian) at Diversionary; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Chip) at La Mirada Theatre; Zhivago (Male Swing) at The La Jolla Playhouse; and Old Wicked Songs (Stephen) at North Coast Rep. Playwriting credits include A Claus for Alarm, produced in 2006 by Moxie Theatre, and Off the Ground, produced in 2007 and 2008 by New Village Arts. He has also been writing and developing staged readings for Backyard Renaissance for over a decade as part of their Unleashed program.
Performance information
For wheelchair or ADA seating options, please contact the box office at 619-337-1525
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10th Anniversary
A Bill and Judy Garrett Commission