Caity-Shea Violette
Caity-Shea Violette
 

Playwright // Screenwriter

Caity-Shea
Violette

Caity-Shea Violette is a scrappy midwestern playwright and screenwriter obsessed with tenderness, spectacle, and women breaking out of systems. Her plays include RX MACHINA (Kennedy Center’s Harold & Mimi Steinberg Award, Clauder Competition Gold Prize, Judith Royer Award Finalist), REAP THE GROVE (Jean Kennedy Smith Award, ScreenCraft’s Stage Writing Award Runner-Up), SLOW JAM (Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival Winner, Gary Garrison National Ten-Minute Play Award), TARGET BEHAVIOR (National Partners of American Theatre Award), and others. Her work has been developed, commissioned, or presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, The Kennedy Center, Portland Stage Company, The New Harmony Project, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Commons, Climate Change Theatre Action, San Pedro Playhouse, Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Mirrorbox Theatre, Matrix Theatre Company, Commission Theatre Company, and more. Her pilot CULTURE FIT was a semifinalist for Austin Film Festival’s Drama Teleplay Pilot Competition and the AMC One-Hour Pilot Award. Caity-Shea’s plays are published by Concord Theatricals and Applause Books. MFA in Playwriting: Boston University, BFA in Acting: University of Minnesota, Duluth. When not writing, you can find her playing D&D, reading romantasy novels, and baking utterly average desserts. She lives in LA with her husband, daughter, and a menagerie of weird pets.

Select Plays

Select Plays
Rx Machina

Rx Machina (Full-length – 5W) An ambitious pharmaceutical sales representative’s relentless pursuit of a rigidly principled pain management doctor leads to an intoxicating, forbidden connection that comes with a cost. Ethical boundaries are blurred in a literal manifestation of doctors being in bed with drug reps, forming a love triangle fueled by money, sex, and power. Illuminating the everyday impact of pharmaceutical marketing in the opioid epidemic, Rx Machina searches for humanity in a healthcare system that profits from pain and asks who gets to get better and who gets left behind.

Reap The Grove

Reap The Grove (Full-length — 4W) Sandra's estranged family is reunited to spend her final days together before she ends her life on her own terms following a terminal diagnosis. While Sandra bounces from reality to a timeless space between life and death, her daughters are also in personal moments of transformation- one passionately committed to saving the planet even if she can't save her marriage, the other has recently found success in substance use treatment and arrives six months pregnant. Reap The Grove is a darkly comedic drama that interrogates what we owe to the people who raised us and asks if grief before death can create new beginnings.

Credible. (Full-length Solo Show — 1W) Credible is a raw, darkly funny, and boldly theatrical one-woman show exploring gender bias in the medical system and living with chronic pain during the opioid epidemic. This true story follows a decade-long d

Credible. (Full-length Solo Show — 1W) Credible is a raw, darkly funny, and boldly theatrical one-woman show exploring gender bias in the medical system and living with chronic pain during the opioid epidemic. This true story follows a decade-long discovery process from the inside out, illuminating the life-saving power of having your pain seen and believed.

Slow Jam

Slow Jam (Short play — 2 Any Gender) Following their sex therapist's advice, Jamie and Charlie try to set the mood as they practice staying present during physical intimacy. A tenderly clumsy attempt to reclaim sexual connection in the wake of trauma.

GASLIGHT SUPERNOVA

GASLIGHT SUPERNOVA (Full-length — 5W, 1M) Captain Niyah Adisa and her crew embark on an intergalactic mission to rescue her husband from a vicious tribe of humanoid women determined to get revenge on their perceived male oppressors. But the line between heroes and villains blur as these “strong female characters” realize they’re underdeveloped pawns in a scheme to save the career of a screenwriter embroiled in a salacious scandal. Weaving between a bright elevated sci-fi universe and the dark grounded reality underneath it, GASLIGHT SUPERNOVA is an action-packed, mind-bending journey through time and space to give female characters trapped in the male gaze the chance to fully realize themselves.

Target Behavior

Target Behavior (Full-length — 4W, 4M) After being admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit, Kendra is trapped in a world of safety scissors and suicide checks until she can overcome her target behavior. Caught between the ward and flashbacks of her fractured family, an older boy and the events that led to her hospitalization, she is accompanied by her fellow patients and their counselor determined to use therapy games and art projects to guide these teenage trauma survivors from break down to break through. Sharp-witted and unafraid to laugh with the darkness, Target Behavior explores blurred boundaries and the silence that turns them deadly.

The Stand

The Stand (Short play — 2W) After surviving years of abuse, Alicia is now being held in Cook County Jail in Chicago for her husband's murder. When her public defender presents a deal offered by the DA, Alicia must now choose between guaranteed jail time away from her young son or risking a life sentence to tell her story in court. The Stand is an exploration of the impossible choices created in the wake of domestic violence and the limited options the criminal justice system offers survivors.

Save The Date

Save The Date (Short Play — 2W) Hours from her wedding, Andrea meets her estranged lover in their park. A tug-of-war between passion and timing, they explore the expiration date of "the one that got away".

Take Care

Shadow Boy (Short Play, 1M 1 W) Before the nation turned its attention to the opioid epidemic, chronic pain patients and the people who loved them had long experienced the devastating consequences of overprescription. Once the impact was addressed, they faced the new challenge of abrupt changes in their care plans aimed to get people off of medications they never should have been given for long-term use. Take Care explores the impact an unexplained chronic illness has on a marriage where 'in sickness' loses the certainty of 'in health,' leaving a woman desperate to be free from her pain.