BOSTON: Company One Theatre (C1) has announced the playwrights selected for the Season 21 PlayLab Unit Playwrights. The cohort will include Ashley-Rose, Amy Merrill, A. K. Morgan, Eli Nixon, Nico Pang, Catherine Stewart, Bess Welden, and Dillon Yruegas.

The selected writers will participate in group workshops and professional development classes. Under the leadership of director of new work Ilana M. Brownstein, C1’s PlayLab aims to teach the writers how to maximize collaborative relationships in new-work processes with dramaturgs, actors, and directors. Kirsten Greenidge, an alum of the program, leads the PlayLab Unit Cohort as C1’s Mellon Foundation/HowlRound Resident Playwright.

“We are thrilled by the artists joining us this year in Unit,” said Greenidge in a statement. “The cohort exemplifies New England’s dynamic new-works scene and I am excited and honored to spend the next bit of time creating theatre with these amazing humans. This year our unit focus will shift ever so slightly to make space for devised work, as well as continue to support more conventional, playwright-driven pieces. These theatremakers will each bring their vibrancy and skills into this season’s endeavors in wonderful ways. I am truly looking forward to getting started.”

“This year’s unit is wildly exciting to me,” said Brownstein. “Not only do we have folks from an extremely wide variety of lived experiences, the diversity of their aesthetics demonstrates the richness of our regional arts scene—including puppetry, performance art, QTPOC (Queer & Trans People of Color) stories, spoken word, music, and historical drama. Boston’s theatre landscape reaches far beyond the city limits, and for the first time, we’ve been able to add participants from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine who consider Boston an artistic home.”