Gabrielle Sinclair joins the 2026 Bare Essentials Play Reading Series with her new play, The Resolute. Read on to learn a little more about Gabrielle and the play you’ll be seeing in August!
Gabrielle Sinclair is a playwright, college instructor, arts researcher, and mom. She earned her MFA in Playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School before finding her way to Georgia to complete her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies. She’s developed plays as an Ingram New Works Fellow at Nashville Rep, with the Wyoming Theatre Festival, through the Actors Studio Playwrights-Directors Workshop, and as part of the North Georgia New Play Festival and the Atlanta Fringe. She is inspired by performance’s power to investigate the stories we inherit, (un)make the myths that hold us together, and imagine new ones. As a scholar-artist (publishing under Gabrielle Sinclair Compton), she researches feminist playwriting practices, posthumanist place-making, and performances of care.
ET: Hi Gabrielle! Where did the inspiration for The Resolute come from?
GS: A while back, I was commissioned by Infinite Variety Productions to write a play that would feature an all-female cast and imagine women’s history on stage for a workshop at The Wyoming Theatre Festival. I was inspired by images of the real student baseball team in the early years of Vassar College, called The Resolute. The more I researched, I found so many colliding almost apocalyptic beginnings in one strange place and time. Teenage girls leaving home to begin college four months after a bloody war that lasted as long as they can remember. The famed astronomer Maria Mitchell beginning her first year of teaching. The origins of a baseball team, set apart from the world, made by young women without anyone watching. It felt very modern and connected to this moment.
ET: I love that. Could you explain how you found your way to playwriting?
GS: I found my way into playwriting through long-form improvisation, which I studied and performed in Chicago and Los Angeles. I found that I wanted to write plays that could somehow in each performance give actors and audiences the experience of something happening for the first time.
ET: How do feminist playwriting practices inform your body of work?
GS: My work specifically traces a legacy of playwrights, beginning in the late nineteenth century, who, from positions outside the dominant narrative of theatre-making, have subversively introduced radical ways of thinking about personhood, our entanglements with the more-than-human, and theatre itself. As a performance researcher, I also work with fellow improvisations at UGA on the Malady Mysteries project, where we use applied improvisation and the dramaturgical structure of the immersive detective murder mystery to investigate navigating the medical system with an invisible or undiagnosed illness or disability.
ET: The Bare Essential Play Reading Series allows our playwrights to engage in conversation with audiences, furthering the development of their play. How do staged readings influence your writing process?
GS: I love staged readings. I love that they let me be a dramaturg for a bit, to listen to the play from the outside with an audience and with the actors and director. I love that audiences bring their engagement, insights, and presence to the process. I’ve found that readings are important to approach with curiosity and a sense of gratitude. There’s always something to learn. I’m excited to listen for gaps, listen for moments that need more breathing room or heightening or want to be in a different place. I hope to listen for the arc of the story as a whole and see where that can be strengthened.
ET: Are there any plays that have guided your work on The Resolute?
GS: In thinking about The Resolute, I’m really inspired by Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. Both bring together large casts of women, experiment with form and narrative structure, and both bother me and haunt me in the best way. I love plays with characters who are unapologetically themselves, and plays that refuse to be easily solved.
ET: Wonderful. Can you give us a brief introduction to the story you will be sharing with us?
CB: The Resolute imagines the mythic beginnings of one of America’s first women’s colleges in the aftermath of four years of bloody Civil War, when a generation of teenagers comes of age at the end of one world and the beginning of another. As pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell begins her first year of teaching, her remarkable students, far from home, secretly take to the baseball field and create a world of their own.
ET: Thank you very much for sharing! Congratulations on your acceptance to the Bare Essentials Play Reading Series, we are so excited to experience The Resolute!
Gabrielle’s play, The Resolute, will be read at the Essential Theatre Play Festival on Tuesday, August 11th, at 7:30pm. Tickets: EssentialTheatre.Tix.com
2026 Meet the Playwright interviews conducted by 2026 Literary Management Intern Olivia Smith.
