ALL IT TAKES IS ONE ACT 2025
A is For’s One Act Play Festival
This year’s festival happened at the Judith O. Rubin Theater at Playwrights Horizons on June 26, 2025.
All proceeds from this year’s ONE ACT Festival go directly to A is For’s Beneficiary Program that provides unrestricted, critical funds to abortion funds and reproductive justice organizations across the country.
Check out the winners and pictures from the night below
This Year’s Winners
First Place- Getting Attached
by A.M. Palson
Max has traveled for miles to see the octopuses at a small marine lab in Florida, only to find that one of them has died. Sara, a lab technician, tries to explain that it’s natural and beautiful for female octopuses to die after laying their eggs. Max isn’t buying it. Together, the duo navigates questions of motherhood, biology, and gender through their mutual love and fascination with octopuses. Above all, Getting Attached explores feelings of biological betrayal and the human need for care.
Second Place- All the Things She Never Said
by Sophie Goldstein
In present day Los Angeles, sisters Lupita and Mari are cleaning out the house of their recently deceased mother, Monse. As they go through boxes, they discover that she was part of the Madrigal 10. A group of Latina women who sued the LA County Medical Center back in 1978 for committing forced sterilization.
Third Place- Safe House
by Kendall Grenolds
At a safe house in New Mexico, people come and go as they cross state lines to get reproductive care. When a new arrival’s past is revealed, the entire house is jeopardized as a brutal question is asked: how much responsibility must we take for laws we didn’t pass?
The following plays placed in the top 10 out of 512 submissions!
All the Emilies in All the Universes by Ian August
Made by God by Ciara Ni Chuirc
He’s Not Like That by Eleanor Evans-Wickberg
Sarah and Sally by Vickie Hampton
The Nearest Far Away Place by Aleks Merilo
The Waterfall by Phanesia Pharel
Tropopause by Dejing Eloise Wang
Meet the Playwrights
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1st Place
A.M. Palson’s plays revolve around the exploration of complex emotions and identity through heightened, often fantastical circumstances with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ experiences. Works have been seen at Bristol Valley Theatre, Theatre Nova, Flint Repertory Theatre, American Stage's 21st Century Voices, and elsewhere. Awards include The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Gary Garrison Award for Outstanding Ten Minute Play (National Winner 2021), City Theatre's National Award for Short Playwriting (Finalist, 2019 and 2020), and The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival John Cauble Award for Outstanding Short Play (National Finalist, 2021). Works have been included in We/Ourselves: Twenty-Five 10-Minute Plays Celebrating Gender Diversity (2025), We/US: Monologues for the Gender Minority (2022), Best Women's Monologues of 2021, The Kilroys List (2020), and Best Men's Monologues of 2019. Palson was Artist-in-Resident at The Mitten Lab in 2019 and resident playwright at Queer Theatre Kalamazoo in the 2019-2020 season. Palson graduated with an MFA in playwriting from Western Michigan University in 2020 and is a PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. As a scholar, Palson studies LGBTQ+ theater in the late 20th century, theater as an expression of historiographical and archival research, and how documentary theater allows LGBTQ+ practitioners and audiences to collectively experience their history and build activist communities.
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2nd Place
Sophie Goldstein is a Jewish/Chicana writer from Los Angeles, CA whose short plays have been accepted into competitions and festivals nationwide. All The Things She Never Said was most recently given a public staged reading at the LA Chapters festival at the Morgan-Wixson theater in Santa Monica that was directed by Cybelle Kaehler. She is currently developing a full-length version of the script with the Company of Angels playwriting group that will receive a public reading in the fall. Her script ILY, Marshall High School was shortlisted for The Road Theatre's 2024 SPF 15 festival and her script Rosa will receive a public reading by the Playwright's Arena in July 2025. Her short stories have both placed and received honorable mentions in contests sponsored by Reedsy, WOW! Women Writing, and Fractured Lit. She was a 2022 Ya Tu Sabes writer finalist for the competition sponsored by Nosotros, an organization created by Ricardo Montalban to uplift emerging Latine Talent. She is a member of the Los Angeles Female Playwriting Initiative (LAFPI) where she currently volunteers as a moderator for their virtual Sunday writing sessions.
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3rd Place
Kendall Grenolds is a playwright and actor based in Chicago, IL. She is a recent graduate of the University of Hartford, and a recipient of the Phyllis B. Abrahms Awards in Drama and Poetry, as well as the Melvin Goldstein Interdisciplinary Essay Award. Her poetry appears in We Do Not Need Permission to Rise, the latest anthology from Beyond the Veil Press. You can find her on New Play Exchange, Instagram, and Substack @kendallgrenolds. kendallgrenolds.com.
Why a Playwriting Contest?
It’s not just abortion that is stigmatized in our culture, but the entire lived experiences of people who seek to fulfill their promise as autonomous human beings, realize their own dreams, raise their families in safety and peace, pursue their ambitions, and maintain control over their physical and reproductive lives.
The subject of reproductive justice is one too often simplified by our current dialogues. And too often the voices and perspectives of the people most affected by restrictions, legislative prohibitions, and cultural prejudices are excluded from our artistic institutions.
A is For seeks to change that. We believe that theatre is a powerful platform through which to share stories, debunk myths, and create lasting change. We believe that theatre can transform. We want to challenge the abstract, politicized, and stigmatized ways people think about abortion and reproductive justice. We want to amplify voices that can reframe the conversation. We want to support and promote artists who can dispel myths and misconceptions. We want to hear the stories you want to tell.
In that spirit, the stories we hope to bring to the fore will be diverse in perspective as well as imagination. These plays may be personal and realistic, or they may be allegorical. They may be fantastic, sprung from dreams, or they may be grounded in naturalism. From the surrealist, to the literal. From magical realism, to documentarian. Whatever form or shape they may take, we hope to receive a wide range of works from all over the country, reflecting the great variety of experiences that reproductive justice demands we all recognize.
In highlighting these stories, we’re broadening the emotional vocabulary of the American audience, and opening up our theaters to a fuller and more honest exploration of the human experience.
