Announcing the Spring 2025 CA$H Theatre Grantees
We are proud to announce the following recipients of the Spring 2025 CA$H Theatre Grants. Learn more about CA$H Theatre.
CA$H Performs
CA$H Performs is a $5,000 grant that supports fully produced performances of theatre projects that are open to the public.
The Chikahan Company
The Chikahan Company will develop and present its newest project through a documentary theatre writing workshop. This intergenerational workshop will gather twelve participants of various ages, genders, classes, and immigration statuses, centering the unique and untold stories of first- and second-generation Filipino Americans and their descendants. Through a structured, community-rooted process of storytelling and guided writing, participants will explore personal and collective histories to create original narratives reflecting the complexity of the Filipinx American experience. These collected stories will be the foundation for a collaboratively crafted performance script. The resulting theatrical piece will be presented in October or November 2025 in celebration of Filipino American History Month.
Melina Cohen-Bramwell
Please Don’t Slow Me Down is a multi-disciplinary world-premiere play by Melina Cohen-Bramwell. It explores the euphoria, struggle, and, ultimately, acceptance of mental illness, through an intertwining narrative of music, dance, and text. The world premiere will be an immersive theatrical experience in non-traditional spaces across the Bay Area, featuring live music opening acts, and ending in an inclusive dance party. The play, which is set in a rave, is ephemeral in nature. Did any of this really happen? Or was it all just one wild night of the mind? In part as a reflection of the play, and in part to reach Millennial and Gen-Z audiences, Cohen-Bramwell plans to use multiple venues, touring the Bay Area.
Left Coast Theatre Company
Left Coast Theatre Company’s production of The Future is Queer is an anthology of plays about the future we either dream of or dread for the LGBTQ+ community, performing at The Phoenix Theatre July 25 to August 9, 2025. The anthology of short, original plays envisions many possible futures and what they might look like for LGBTQ+ people. During the current administration, when members of marginalized communities (trans people, especially) are having their rights stripped away, challenged, and eroded, it is important for the LGBTQ+ community and its allied communities to take a frank look at what the future might have in store.
(Photo of Puja Tolton and Delaney Bantillo in Left Coast Theatre Co.’s Found Family Photo by Alandra Hileman)
Isaiah Mateas
Isaiah Mateas is proud to present Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles by Luis Alfaro as the inaugural production of his new company, That Theater Company. A bold, haunting reimagining of Euripides’ Medea, Mojada centers the experience of a Mexican immigrant woman living in East L.A., weaving classical tragedy with contemporary struggles around displacement, assimilation, sacrifice, and survival. Through Alfaro’s poetic language and emotionally charged storytelling, Mojada offers a powerful lens through which we can explore the intersections of gender, migration, cultural memory, and systemic violence—all core to our artistic mission.
Queer AF
Queer as Fuck Presents: Resistance & Rebellion is a short play festival featuring Bay Area queer and trans writers, directors, and actors of color, to be presented at Bindlestiff Studio in August 2025. The theme is meant to celebrate the many ways in which queer and trans communities engage in resistance and rebellion: big and small, subtle and in your face. Through utilizing Queer AF’s Writer’s Circle, as well as through an open call for submissions, Queer AF will select seven short plays and sketches to mount in August 2025 that center around “Resistance and Rebellion.”
Salim Razawi
Salim Razawi will direct Arab Spring, a dark comedy by Denmo Ibrahim about two estranged Muslim-American siblings who reunite on the 4th of July to bury their father—and maybe their ghosts. What begins as a logistical nightmare unravels into a surreal, theatrical confrontation with grief, family legacy, cultural erasure, and inherited trauma. Cassette tapes, haunted furniture, political conspiracies, and old holiday decorations become unexpected portals into truth. With absurdist humor and lyrical precision, the play captures what it means to grow up in multiple realities—and what happens when those realities collide.
Aisha Rivera
Aisha Rivera’s new play, Belly of the Beast, explores the reality of eating disorders through a perspective that rejects the stereotypical narrative of eating disorders in the media. Belly explores these issues through a trans, fat liberation perspective. It uses moments of heightened reality/fantasy to further tell the story of “fighting” not only the disorder, but societal pressures and ultimately the line between life, death, and rebirth. Belly of the Beast will be presented at the Potrero stage in August 2025.
CA$H Creates
CA$H Creates is a $2,500 grant that supports the development of artistic theatre projects or capacity-building projects not directly tied to a fully produced performance of a piece.
Rebecca Pingree
Rebecca Pingree will lead a three-week puppetry intensive for three local performers, who will design and develop a three-operator puppet, develop their expressiveness with it, and present it at Mask Monday at Standard Deviant in San Francisco on August 25.
Christopher Wemp
Signs of the Kingdom is a new full-length musical in development, targeted for a developmental staged reading in late 2025. Signs of the Kingdom is an empathy-building musical about modern day homelessness and our opportunities to respond. Wemp will be casting a diverse slate of actors, including as many people with lived experience of homelessness as possible, to perform the play authentically and with dignity towards the unhoused.
Oakland Public Theater
Oakland Public Theater will develop a new musical based on the children’s book 10,000 Beautiful Dresses. Bailey dreams of amazing, impossible dresses, like ones made of mirrors, or butterfly wings. But when they tell their parents, everyone says the same thing, “Boys don’t wear dresses!” Composer David Seigel has been developing songs for this piece for years, with the blessing of the original children’s book author, Marcus Ewert. With the help of theater artist and playwright Sean Owens, Oakland Public Theater will develop the book to accompany this music and create a first draft of this new play. Oakland Public Theater to showcase it in a concert reading this fall at Potrero Stage.
(Photo The Baldwin Centennial Project at Oakland Public Theatre)
Spring 2025 CA$H Panelists
Tierra Allen
Tierra Allen is a multi-hyphenate artist and activist creating for collective liberation from her home in Occupied Huchuin/Oakland, CA. As a theater artist and cultural producer, they have co-created spaces braiding performance, activism, healing, and critical consciousness-raising at theaters, community-based organizations, schools, and parks, behind prison walls and in the streets. They recently performed in Shipping & Handling (Crowded Fire Theater), House/Full of Blackwomxn: This Too Shall Pass (Deep Waters Dance Theater), Josephine’s Feast (Campo Santo/Magic Theater), Babes in Ho-Lland (Shotgun Players), Sign My Name to Freedom (SFBATCO), and a workshop production of ALAA: A Family Trilogy (Golden Thread Productions). She’s won an Isadora Duncan “Izzie” Dance Award, earned award nominations from Theatre Bay Area, directed for 3Girls Theater, Playwrights Foundation, and PlayGround, and choreographed for the National Queer Arts Festival, Spectrum Queer Media, and TheatreFIRST. Their speculative abolitionist short film THE REMEMBERING TIME screened at the 18th International Queer Women of Color Film Festival. Listen to her podcast THE REAL WORK: A PODCAST ABOUT THEATER CULTURE AND TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE, co-produced with We Rise Production, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In partnership with Cal Shakes & Youth Speaks, Tierra co-curated & co-produced the theater stage at the Life is Living Festival for six years. They hold a B.A. in Theater & Dance from Amherst College.
Debi Durst
Debi Durst is an improvisor, actor, director and producer. She’s performed with every improv group in the Bay Area starting with The Committee all the way up to The Bad Aunties. Debi has appeared with Marin Shakespeare Company in Romeo & Juliet, Cymbeline, (2015 BATCC Award), and Much Ado About Nothing. She appeared with Palo Alto Players as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit and as Penny Sycamore in You Can’t Take It With You. As a director she’s helmed productions of Bullshot Crummond, Noises Off, The Sunshine Boys, Father of the Bride, It Can’t Happen Here, and The Savannah Sipping Society for the Pacifica Spindrift Players. She directed her first pandemic era Zoom show “An Act of God” for the Palo Alto Players in September of 2020. She is the producer and President of San Francisco’s Comedy Celebration Day.
Dana Lewenthal
Dana Lewenthal is a Bay Area native, Cal alum, and a proud multi-decade member of Theatre Bay Area. Known for her comedic timing, Dana holds an MFA in Acting from The Theatre School in Chicago. She blends enthusiasm with entrepreneurial acumen, offering creativity, clarity, and connection—from stage to strategic support for clients across the Bay Area.
Dedrick Weathersby
We would like to introduce you to Dedrick Weathersby, a highly accomplished Emmy, Broadway World, and NAACP Award winner. Born in Marshall and raised in Longview, Texas, on April 6, 1990, Dedrick realized his childhood ambition of becoming a professional actor and singer dedicated to community impact through his work in storytelling, producing, and music. His commitment extends to providing over $100,000 in scholarships to support students of color in business entrepreneurship and performing arts.
As a proud member of Actors Equity, SAG-AFTRA, Writers Guild, and the Dramatist Guild, Dedrick is the Founder and Executive Director of Super Bad Theater Company and Weathersby Productions. He has independently released two studio albums, “Remembering James (Tribute to James Brown)” and “5 Minutes Til Places” (Songs of Broadway), both of which are available on all major streaming platforms. In addition to his musical endeavors, Dedrick is the author of six published books, including his recently successful How I See Myself: Short Inspirational Vignettes for African American Youth. His notable theatrical works include the plays and musicals Remembering James – The Life and Music of James Brown and The New Teacher (A Stage Play Comedy with Music). Dedrick recently premiered his latest show, Tutti Frutti The Musical (Life and Music of Little Richard), in Dallas, TX, and is currently on a Spot Date Tour. This production is exclusively licensed through SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING. For more information, please visit www.dedrickweathersby.com