Cate Wiley’s Sheltered, based on stories by women experiencing homelessness, was a finalist for the Fratti-Newman Political Play Award and will have a world premiere at The Cell in New York. Other recent work examines liberal white collusion in American racism past and present.
In Take It Back, inspired by the Republican party mantra of “taking back” the country, a former slave buys the plantation she escaped nearly two centuries earlier. In Like Horses, a Zoom play, two neighbors, one Black and one white, discover that despite living in the same building they don’t live in the same country.
Other plays investigate identity and the stories we tell ourselves and the world. Two Truths and a Lie is set in an adult education memoir writing class. A monologue from that play appears in The Best Men’s Monologues from New Plays, 2020, by Applause Books. The devised theater piece, Letters Home, was written for the Denver Public Library, and the single-word play Hello was a 2020 pop-up on the Fourth Street Arts Block “More Ways than Broad Ways” in New York.
Note to Self, which destigmatizes depression, is in The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2020 by Smith and Krauss and was produced by the International Human Rights Arts Festival in New York in addition to several community theater festivals. The Liberation, set during
the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, premiered in Seattle in 2018.
Cate studied community-based theater at Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and playwriting at the Kenyon Playwrights Conference. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, The Playwrights Center, and New Play Exchange.