Big Red
By Enid Graham
Monday, June 1, 2026
Iris Cantor Theatre
38 West Houston Street
New York, NY 10012
Cast
Judith Gillmore — Enid Graham
Pastor Ward —Teagle F. Bougere
Hank Mitchell — Stephen D’Ambrose
Lacy Drew — Emma Pfitzer Price
Jimmy Laster — Zachary W. Desmond
Anita Gonzales — Vivia Font
Barrett Johnson — Michael Gaston
Angie Spake — Lizbeth Mckay
Landis Gordon — Kelly AuCoin
Stage Directions — Lili Ostojic Gibson
Creative
Writer — Enid Graham
Director — Lee Sunday Evans
Stage Manager — Michal V. Mendelson
Producer — Mêlisa Annis
Casting Director — Stephanie Klapper
Casting Assistant — Joe Piserchio
Kelly AuCoin: Broadway: Julius Caesar, 24 Hour Plays Broadway. Off-Broadway: MTC, Signature (Drama Desk, Outstanding Ensemble: Wayside Motor Inn), Playwrights Horizons, 2ST, Primary Stages, Cherry Lane, LAByrinth, Mint, New Georges. Regional: La Jolla, Yale Rep, NYS&F, Syracuse Stage, Folger, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Television: Billions (‘Dollar’ Bill), The Americans (Pastor Tim), The Greatest, Clipped, Elsbeth, The Girl From Plainville, WeCrashed, Super Pumped, The Bold Type, House of Cards, TURN, Blacklist, Madam Secretary, Person of Interest, Good Wife, The Following, Unforgettable, multiple Laws & Order of various suffixes. Film: Samo Lives, The Holdovers, The Good House, The Post, Wizard of Lies, False Positive, All That I Am (SXSW, Outstanding Ensemble), Julie & Julia, The Kingdom.
Teagle F. Bougere: Broadway: Oedipus, The Crucible, A Raisin In The Sun, The Tempest. London’s West End: Debate, Baldwin vs Buckley (James Baldwin). Television: Queen America (series regular), Law & Order S.V.U. (recurring). Film: Night at the Museum, The Pelican Brief. Upcoming: The Winter’s Tale (Camillo). The Winter’s Tale marks Bougere’s fourteenth show with the Public Theater.
Stephen D’Ambrose has worked at theaters across the country, with performances at Guthrie Theater, the Folger Theater, the Broadway tour of August: Osage County, and Guthrie Theater’s tour of Great Expectations. Film and television credits include Honeydew and Make Your Soul Grow (Kurt Vonnegut).
Zachary W. Desmond: New York theater: Ivanov, The Brothers Karamazov (New American Ensemble), Hooded, or, Being Black for Dummies (59E59 Theaters), There Are No Diving Pools in Hell (BK Center for Theater Research). Fall 2026: Degenerates (Playwrights Horizons). Since 2022, Desmond has developed work with dozens of directors, choreographers, and theater makers as a member of the acting pool at Mercury Store in Gowanus. He was the Playwriting Fellow (2023–25) at Playhouse Creatures Theater Company, which commissioned his O’Neill NPC semi-finalist play, TENT CITY. Desmond received an MFA from the Juilliard School. @zacharywdesmond
Vivia Font is an actor, director, maker, and educator. As an actress, she has worked in English and Spanish at many New York and regional theaters, in the Dick Wolf multiverse, and in some great indies, shorts, and commercials. She teaches acting and other things at Princeton University. Upcoming theater: The Smoker by Lisa D’Amour. www.viviafont.com
Michael Gaston: Broadway: Lucky Guy, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Public Theater: Coal Country, Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Henry V, Cripple of Inishmaan. Film: First Reformed, W, Inception, Hackers, Far from Heaven, The Crucible, The Wedding Banquet. Television: The Leftovers, Five Days at Memorial, The Man in the High Castle, The Good Lord Bird.
Enid Graham’s productions/workshops include: Smoke (Cadence), How to Save Ourselves, (Farm Theatre), Tenderness and Gratitude Number Four (Westport Country Playhouse), A Long Time Ago in a Dark Yard at Night (Hudson Stage), Golden (Falconworks), What Martha Did (UCSB), Ruth (NPC 2018), Pathological Venus (finalist NPC 2020), and Saint Vegas (Chance). Graham is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School.
Lizbeth Mckay has been a working actress on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and all over the country. She has received Theater World, Drama Desk, Outer Circle Critics, and Elliot Norton awards. Mckay raised her family in Washington Heights and recently became a grandmother to Leila and Charley. She is currently playing Jon Hamm’s mom on Your Friends and Neighbors. She is happy to be with Enid and Lee once again. Mckay attended the Yale School of Drama.
Lili Ostojic Gibson is thrilled to be a part of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Lab! She made her television debut last year on season five of Only Murders in the Building. Gibson is a graduate of the Juilliard School’s Drama Division, where she received the Liz Smith Voice and Speech Prize.
Emma Pfitzer Price is a New York City based actor. Price made her off-Broadway debut in the World Premiere of Betty Smith’s play, Becomes a Woman. She received a Theatre World Award as well as an Outer Critics Circle nomination for her performance. Other professional theater credits include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Yale Rep). She can be seen as Dr. Hannah Clark on Doc. Other recent television credits include Poker Face, Will Trent, FBI: International, Evil, and American Rust. Upcoming work includes television series The Terror: Devil In Silver, as well as the short film Delusion. Price graduated from the Juilliard School with a BFA in Drama.
Mêlisa Annis is an award-winning Welsh playwright, director, and producer committed to the power of storytelling as a civic act. An adjunct faculty member at Tisch School of the Arts’s Department of Dramatic Writing, she works with emerging writers, helping shepherd new plays with rigor, care, and an activist belief in theater’s necessity. She has been honored to collaborate with the Brennan Center on this special project.
Lee Sunday Evans is a two-time Obie Award-winning director and choreographer and the artistic director of Waterwell. She most recently directed the acclaimed production of Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things and was just announced as the director of a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. She is currently developing a Television project for A24. Notable credits include Dance Nation by Clare Barron, the live production of The Courtroom, Detroit Red by Will Power, Sunday by Jack Thorne, In the Green by Grace McLean, Miller, Mississippi by Boo Killebrew, and Home by Geoff Sobelle.
Enid Graham’s productions/workshops include: Smoke (Cadence), How to Save Ourselves, (Farm Theatre), Tenderness and Gratitude Number Four (Westport Country Playhouse), A Long Time Ago in a Dark Yard at Night (Hudson Stage), Golden (Falconworks), What Martha Did (UCSB), Ruth (NPC 2018), Pathological Venus (finalist NPC 2020), and Saint Vegas (Chance). Graham is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School.
Stephanie Klapper’s award-winning work is frequently seen on Broadway, off-Broadway, regionally, on concert stages, in film and on television. Klapper and her team are known for their limitless imagination and creativity, as well as their work connecting creative, caring people to each other to make extraordinary things happen. www.klappercasting.com
Michal V. Mendelson’s New York credits include The Fabulous Invalid, Keen Company, Transport Group, Lucille Lortel, Primary Stages, Theater Breaking Through Barriers, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Pomegranate Arts, Rattlestick Theater, the Flea Theater, New Georges, New Dramatists, the Pearl Theatre, and Ensemble Studio Theatre. Regionally, she has worked at New London Barn Playhouse, the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College, the Kennedy Center, Studio Theatre, and Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. She is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association.
About the Democracy Theater Lab
The Brennan Center for Justice launched the Democracy Theater Lab in 2025 to inspire Americans to join the movement for a stronger and more inclusive democracy. Our goal is to reach citizens who are disconnected from our political system by communicating in new places and in new ways.
Working in partnership with the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, we invited proposals for scripts about the most pressing issues facing U.S. democracy: gerrymandering, voter suppression, abuse of presidential power, dysfunction in the criminal justice system, the influence of money in politics, threats to elections and election officials, and an unaccountable Supreme Court.
Three playwrights received commissions to develop full-length scripts. Each playwright worked with a Brennan Center expert to add color and ensure accuracy. Tsilala Brock’s Junebug is a joyous, sitcom-style musical about a woman in 1960s Detroit finding her place in the civil rights movement. In The Parking Lot of the Whole Foods Is Everything Wrong with the World, Rehana Lew Mirza imagined a conversation between an immigration detainee in Donald Trump’s America and people held during past periods of xenophobia, such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Enid Graham explored the challenges facing today’s election officials. Set in small-town Texas, Big Red is a story about the women and men who make democracy possible. Every couple of years, Americans gather with their neighbors to vote in school gymnasiums, cafeterias, senior centers, and public libraries. Even though so much of civic life has moved online, elections remain community events. And it is election officials, with their abiding devotion to communitarian ideals, who keep this tradition alive.
Election officials are under fire today. Fabricated allegations of misconduct swirl across social media, promoted by partisans and even some elected officials. It’s a wonder poll workers persist in an environment poisoned by falsehoods and acrimony. And yet, they do persist. Graham celebrates election officials’ faith in democracy, and in us, in Big Red.
About the Brennan Center for Justice
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to reform and revitalize — and when necessary defend — U.S. systems of democracy and justice. The Brennan Center is dedicated to protecting the rule of law and the values of constitutional democracy. We focus on voting rights, campaign finance reform, ending mass incarceration, and preserving liberties while also maintaining national security. Part think tank, part advocacy group, part cutting-edge communications hub, we start with rigorous research. We craft innovative policies. And we fight for them — in Congress and the states, in the courts, and in the court of public opinion.
About the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
The Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing cross-trains students in all areas of dramatic writing across the mediums of playwriting, screenwriting, and episodic TV writing. Both BFA and MFA programs are small, intimate communities with the unique advantage of being part of a major university in the world’s most vibrant city.
The Goldberg Department faculty are working professional writers who encourage students to hone their voices while giving them an analytical, practical, ethical, and diverse historical understanding of the craft of dramatic writing.