ADRIAN COSTA
writer-director | actor
Photos by Isabella Teran.
BIO
Photos by Isabella Teran.
Born in Washington Heights and growing up in the Bronx,
ADRIAN COSTA (He/Him/His) is a writer-director & actor of stage and film. With a commitment to new work exploring contemporary themes, Adrian evokes his rigorous academic and creative discipline to embrace the politics of love in American life. His most recent, notable achievement is “STRIVING”, A staged epic following Student as they are led by the father of black political thought, WEB DuBois, to join the notorious group he coined as the Talented Tenth. Adrian’s work has been hosted in venues like New York Live Arts, Mabou Mines, The Tank, LATEA Theater, and the Fisher Center. With support from the Obie-Award-winning Sol Project, Adrian is currently developing his next full-length play: “SPANISH BOMBS! or abuela’s memories of the war & other stories”.
He is a member of the Dominican Artists Collective, a company-in-residence with New York Theatre Workshop, and a member of the Inaugural Cohort of the Latinx Playwrights Circle, inducted as one of the future Latin voices of the American Theatre.
Adrian has recently developed a feature screenplay, “S”,
and currently in pre-production for his short film, “MY ARTISTS’ EYES ARE BURNING”.
Latest News & Upcoming Events
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"SPANISH BOMBS!...", premieres at Solfest 2023
Adrian’s play premieres pages at Solfest 2023, A Latiné Theatre Festival produced alongside PRTT and PlayPenn to celebrate emerging Latin voices.
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LPC Announces Inaugural Fellows
Working alongside legendary theatre artists, The Latinx Playwrights Circle named Adrian as one of the seminal voices shaping the Latinx voice in American Theater.
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HYTC Joins The Tank's PrideFest
Just months after a successful residency at Target Margin Theater, Hold Yr Terror Close was programmed into The Tank’s most celebrated, highly selective PrideFest 2023.
Theatre & PERFormance
When She Made Me
Written and Performed by Adrian Costa
Inspired by conversations on conception, family, and the history of love, When She Made Me phases through the ancestral lineage to explore the intimate impact of motherhood. Set in a moment of loss and departure, When She Made Me attempts to reconcile with the inevitable pain codified into the family as a way to understand and advocate for generous and absolute love.
THE FUTURE IS PRESENT (TFP) is a high-impact, liberatory media project that engages a core group of Black and Indigenous youth activists and art makers working in tandem with Bard students and adult movement leaders, artists, and researchers.
Inside a 7-week art and political action laboratory, the youth leaders will craft a set of core demands and messages for our collective future, which will then be amplified through a series of high-distribution public actions and artistic interventions that centers the voices and vision of black and indigenous young people, and builds concentric circles of solidarity around their demands on our collective future.
Image by Sunder Ganglani.
Created in collaboration with
youth artist/activists and Bard students
led by the creative team of
Charlotte Brathwaite, Justin Hicks
Janani Balasubramanian, Sunder Ganglani
with producer Alyssa Simmons
and documentarian June Cross
A co-production of Fisher Center at Bard and Casting the Vote.
Co-commissioned by Live Arts Bard and New York Live Arts
WE’RE JUST SOLDIERS
Written and Directed by Adrian Costa
WE’RE JUST SOLDIERS is a one-act play that follows four white gamers caught during a rare moment of respite as they struggle for survival through the dense forest of a virtual Vietnam-esque video game battlefield. This moment quickly descends into chaos as the soldiers maneuver questions of identity, agency, and the charge of whiteness in a world surrounded by violence.
Read through my Director’s Note here.
“You effeminate boys of the Theater,
What do you know about war?”
-Ernest Hemingway to Orson Welles
w HERE d o w e g o
Written and Performed by Adrian Costa and Dani Wilder
Born out of and responding to the trauma of community, w HERE d o w e g o maneuvers the musical, the dramatic, and the psychic to diagnose and confront the nature of insecurity and the ease of evil that ultimately destroys our collective selves.
In a world where white people are black,
and queer people are villains, only one question remains:
Where do we go?
Read through my Director’s Note here.
Image by Dani Wilder. Photos by Chris Kayden.
Some songs included in the show:
“Straight”
“Pretty White Tranny”
“Where do we go?”
“I Will Never Forgive You”
“Fuck it”
Please find recorded demos of some of these songs at the link here.
The
Bathroom
Play
Written and Performed by Adrian Costa
Part voyeuristic snuff film and part fat liberatory manifesto,
The Bathroom Play is a one-act solo performance based on the semi-autobiographical journey of our formerly fat protagonist to record his recently abandoned corporeal and spiritual practices of care after his drastic weight loss.
The semi-transparent images of these past intimate aesthetic rituals give way to bitter exhalations of resentment at a thin-focused society latticed against the guilt of shedding these formative barriers. Grotesque, and yet still disarmingly vulnerable, “The Bathroom Play” hosts both sermon and funeral, holds court, and delivers judgment, challenging us to embrace the radical nature of self-affirming bodily practice and care.
STRIVING
Written by Adrian Costa
STRIVING is a full-length stage play about black ascension, black intellectualism, black success, notoriety, infamy, and eventual destruction.
It follows our protagonist Student as they set out on a journey led by W.E.B DuBois, the father of contemporary black political thought, to join the ranks of notable black figures folded into the coveted group that DuBois historically coined as the ‘Talented Tenth’. This hero’s journey quickly dissolves into a tale confronting the consequences of education, legacy, and the crippling anxiety of attaining black exceptionalism in a world that expects nothing less.
Image courtesy of New York Public Library.
Photo Courtesy of The Clash.
SPANISH BOMBS,
OR ABUELA’S MEMORIES OF THE WAR & Other Stories
Written by Adrian Costa
Contact Me
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