Utah Shakespeare Festival’s Words Cubed Program Announces Two New Plays

The Utah Shakespeare Festival announces the selection of two new plays and welcomes their playwrights for the annual Words Cubed new play program. Morphology by Jillian Blevins and The Forgeries of Jealousy by Grant Goodman will be presented on select dates August 7 through 22 in the Anes Studio Theatre. Tickets are $20.

Words Cubed is the Festival’s new play program and seeks to nurture and develop openly submitted and selected plays. It provides a professionally supported platform to provide readings and workshops during which playwrights spend a week at the Festival in rehearsals with directors, actors, and stage managers as they refine and rework their plays. At the end of the week, the revised plays are presented as staged readings, followed by a lively, interactive discussion between the playwright, actors, and audience.

“The selection process begins about a year in advance,” says Festival Artistic Director John DiAntonio. “Our dedicated team of twenty play readers thoughtfully reviewed over 200 play submissions to narrow them down to the final two selections.”

“While the Festival often focuses on the classics, it’s worth remembering that every play was once a world premiere,” DiAntonio continues. “They were tested in front of early audiences, characters and scenes were cut and changed, and adjustments made in order to become the versions that are eventually premiered to the world. We honor that same spirit of theatrical discovery and evolution.”

Join us this August for these two new works, and play a part by contributing to their development. In general, the plays in this series are written for contemporary adult audiences, and may contain themes and language not appropriate for children and that some may find offensive.

MORPHOLOGY by Jillian Blevins
August 7, 8, 19, and 21, 2026
9:30am, Anes Studio Theatre

Nico, a nonverbal Autistic teenager, longs to be understood by his mother Claudia, a former academic who longs most for him to speak. When Claudia’s own mother Arlene intervenes and tries to convince Claudia to place Nico in a group home, their attempts to reach each other grow more desperate, Nico reaches out to one creature he thinks might understand him, and their carefully balanced world starts coming undone. Written in a mix of verse and prose, Morphology explores the power and inadequacy of language, what it means to know one another, and what we can learn from deep sea biology.

Playwright Jillian Blevins is an award-winning New England-based playwright whose work engages with literature, myth, and history, exploring how the stories we think we know resonate in our present. Other plays include Mere Waters (Winner ‘Best Script’ SheNYC Festival 2024); Romeo & Her Sister; The Polycule: A Comedy of Manners; Space Laser, in Space! (Semi-finalist Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway New Play Festival 2023); and Pilloried (Winner, Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway New Play Festival 2024, Concord Theatricals 2025). Jillian’s plays have been featured on audio drama podcasts Gather By The Ghostlight and The Ugly Radio. She is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.

The cast for this reading includes Kathryn Tkel as Claudia, Jacob Rosengren as Nico, Evelyn Carol Case as Arlene, and Chloe McLeod with stage directions. It will be directed by Patrick Vest.

Please note: This production contains strong language and depictions of ableism, Autistic meltdown, and self harm.

THE FORGERIES OF JEALOUSY by Grant Goodman
August 14, 15, 20, and 22, 2026
9:30am, Anes Studio Theatre

It’s 1795, and Bardolatry is at its height. Georgian theatre audiences are ravenous for Shakespeare, while literary London longs to uncover any forgotten work by the “Sweet Swan of Avon.” The Forgeries of Jealousy tells the astonishing true story of William Henry Ireland, the teenager who so convincingly forged Shakespearean letters, manuscripts and even an entire “lost play” that he deceived much of eighteenth-century England. Beneath the sensational literary fraud, however, lies the deeply personal story of a son desperate to win the love and admiration of a father incapable of giving it. Exploring authorship, authenticity, ambition and identity, The Forgeries of Jealousy asks not only what makes a masterpiece, but whether the truth matters as much as the story we yearn to believe.

Playwright Grant Goodman is an actor, director, and playwright who recently became a member of the Acting and Directing Studio at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Grant’s play Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an adaptation with music of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem, was a finalist for the Frank Moffett Mosier Fellowship in Heightened Language. Other plays include American Cyclone, which dramatizes the story of Marshall “Major” Taylor, the first Black American sports superstar; and These Gilded Monuments, which tells the story of brothers Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Brutus Booth during their only theatrical performance together in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Grant’s radio play adaptations of The Waxwork by A.M. Burrage, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe and The Vengeful Corpse by Ed Adamson and Robert Sloane have been commissioned and produced at the IU Auditorium. Currently in development is A Crew of Patches, a comedy loosely based on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s collaboration with amateur actors on their 2016 touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Festival patrons may remember Grant as a member of the 2008, 2010, and 2014 performing companies, during which he performed Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew; the title role of Macbeth; Bernard in Boeing, Boeing; Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night; and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, among others.

The cast for this reading includes Nick Case, John Harrell, Jackson Poulin, Heidi Carann Snider, Blake Henri, Emily Fury Daly, Thom Rivera, and Mat Hostetler. It will be directed by Rodney Lizcano.\

For more information or to purchase tickets for Words Cubed or for the 2026 season at the Festival, please visit here, the Festival Ticket Office, or call 800-PLAYTIX.