Playwright Enid Graham (Photo by Xanthe Elbrick)
Enid Graham is such a fixture as a New York City-based actress and playwright that I sometimes forget she has roots in Texas. The alumna of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at Juilliard isn’t exactly hiding her heritage: She has no fewer than three Texas-set plays, including her latest, the four-character Saint Vegas, getting a Feb. 16 reading in Ground UP Productions’ 2026 New Works Winter Reading Festival.
“I am originally from Galveston, which is wonderful and weird enough to be the perfect setting for this memory play,” Graham told me. “I seem to be creating a whole body of work that takes place in Texas.”
Her first play set in Texas, The Plans I Have for You, takes place in a dry West Texas town where a Sri Lankan doctor has run to escape her life. Once there, “she meets a messed up young girl and finds that she can’t escape no matter how far she goes.”
David Gow is the narrator in Enid Graham’s memory play “Saint Vegas.”
Graham just finished workshopping another Texas play — A Long Time Ago in a Dark Yard at Night — at Chance Theater in Anaheim, CA, where she’s playwright in residence for 2026. That play follows two friends as they grow from girls to women, living divergent lives “but retaining the bond that formed through those endless summers of childhood.”
Saint Vegas — the free 7 PM reading of which requires a reservation — is a “rueful comedy,” Graham said, explaining: “Ben, the narrator, recalls the summer when his single mom, Marsha, takes in a friend’s troubled teenaged daughter. Through the course of the play, Ben grows up and learns to see his mother as a person separate from himself. People always ask me if my Texas plays are about me, and of course they are. Everything I write is about me! But the things that happen in these plays didn’t happen to me or to people I know. I make it all up.”
Directed by Robert Sella, the cast features David Gow (who happens to be a Houston native) as Ben (the young narrator), Ground UP artistic director Kate Middleton as Marsha, Howard W. Overshown as Clark and Ella Stiller as Fresca. Josh Evans serves as Ground UP producer of the reading series. Jesse R. Tendler reads stage directions.
The 7 PM Feb. 16 reading of Saint Vegas is at A.R.T. NY, 520 Eighth Ave. (between 36th and 37th Streets), Third Floor, in Manhattan.
Ground UP Productions artistic director Kate Middleton.
Saint Vegas is the first play Graham wrote after completing her time at Juilliard as a playwriting fellow. “The curriculum at Juilliard mainly consists of the assignment to write six plays in two years — a crazy challenge!” she said. “So, I had done that and felt I had exhausted all my ideas. But I’m a writer and wanted to write something new — so coming up with the task of writing specifically for my son gave me the impetus to create again.”
She added, “I don’t write with an outline or a plan, but usually I have something, an image or character, something that excites me to start out. In the case of Saint Vegas, I decided to write a play for my son who is a young actor. At the time he was a student at LaGuardia High School and they were always looking for scenes that involved two teenagers to work on in acting class. So, I thought, ‘let me write a play with lots of juicy scenes for high-schoolers!’ That was enough to get me started.”
The reading at Ground UP will be the first time Graham hears the play read by actors: “I brought it into my writing group and heard it read by all the writers there, which was wonderful and extremely helpful, but I look forward to working with actors and then hearing it for the first time in front of an audience.”
Saint Vegas was a 2025 Semi-Finalist in the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
Ella Stiller plays Fresca in “Saint Vegas.”
Enid Graham is a writer and actress living in New York City where she is a 2022 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at Juilliard. Smoke was produced in the 2025 season at the Cadence Theater in Richmond, VA. How To Save Ourselves, a commission from the Farm Theater, received simultaneous productions from Sewanee College in Tennessee and Center College in Kentucky. Tenderness and Gratitude Number Four was seen as part of the Scripts in Hand series at the Westport Country Playhouse; received a reading at the Chance Theatre in Anaheim, CA, and was a finalist for the Blue Ink Playwriting Festival 2025. Her play A Long Time Ago in a Dark Yard at Night was performed in a 2022 reading series at the Hudson Stage Company, and her short play for Zoom, Do Not Go, My Love, was performed in an online reading series, also at Hudson Stage. Golden was presented in audio format for The Falconworks Theater Company. What Martha Did received a preview production in the Launch Pad series at UCSB. Her play Ruth was chosen for the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Center and the New TACTics New Play Festival in New York City. What Martha Did was a finalist for the National Playwrights Conference and a semi-finalist in the Blue Ink Playwriting Festival in Chicago. Other plays include: Pathological Venus (2020 finalist NPC), Something Unrecognizable and Varenka by Miriam Leeds. As an actress, her credits include numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway productions such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Honour (Tony Award nomination). Her TV/film credits include “The Sinner,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Margaret,” “Mare of Easttown,” “Rabbit Hole” and “A House of Dynamite.”
Howard W. Overshown appears in the first public reading of Enid Graham’s “Saint Vegas.”
Learn more about her work as an actress and writer at her website — or more about her plays on her page at New Play Exchange.
What’s up next for Graham? “I’m finishing up a current commission from the Brennan Center for Justice to write a play about the challenges our democracy is facing. I have a commission to write a screenplay for Cadence, the theater and film group that produced my play Smoke last year. And, as I mentioned before, I am the Playwright in Residence at the Chance Theatre and will be returning there in the spring for another workshop. And as an actor, I start rehearsals for Titus Andronicus next week at the Red Bull Theatre here in New York City.”
