A Case for a Pedagogy of Optimism

CAMPUS COMMUNITY ONLY | Megan Tabaque is a writer, director, and actor who grew up in the dirtbag strip malls of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Her work has been developed, commissioned, and produced by the Alliance Theater, Inner City Arts, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Tofte Lake Center, the Workshop Theater, Paper Chairs, Vanderbilt, and Theatrical Outfit among others. She is a James A. Michener Fellow, Kundiman Fiction Fellow, Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, Seattle Public Theater Emerald Prize finalist, a 2021 Four Seasons Residency nominee, an Emory Playwriting Fellow, and the current 4 Seasons Resident Playwright in cooperation with the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, Tofte Lake, UCSB and Ignition Arts.  She’s also written for the immersive weirdos at Meow Wolf, assisted award winning TV writer Sheila Callaghan, and taught creative writing at Bennington College, Emory University, UT Austin, and UC Riverside. 

Megan writes to create new mythologies, using pop cultural tropes as accessible entry points for absurd, hot button, human issues. Megan’s play Britney Approximately (an adaptation of Medea remixed with the Britney Spears conservatorship) played to sold-out audiences in Atlanta as part of Theater Emory’s 2023 season. Only Reason (co-written with Kimberly Belflower) was named Best New Play by Austin’s Critic Circle and follows six obsessed teen girl fans when their favorite boy band crashes their tour bus. 

Among her other plays are Cycle Play (a two woman thriller that takes place in a Soul Cycle), Marry Me, Bruno Mars (a caper about a QAnon believer on a rescue mission gone wrong in Atlanta’s Asian American community), Decapitations (a haunting Halloween thriller about a Hapa family in South Florida being hunted by a Filipino folkloric monster), Antigone’s Last Birthday (an adaptation of Sophocles’ text set in a fictional border town in crisis) and Batman Returns Returns (an indie-holiday-musical adaptation of Tim Burton’s 90s cult-classic) which she created with installation artist Terror Pigeon at Austin’s Museum of Human Achievement (MOHA). 

Upcoming projects include a commission from Inner City Arts Work of Arts program in Los Angeles to be present in the Spring of 2025, a TYA commission from the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, and a developmental reading of her newest play, The Rink at the End of the World, about synchronized skating team facing a global nuclear apocalypse, with UCSB’s Launchpad Program. 

Megan has an MFA in Playwriting and Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX. She currently resides in Los Angeles where she is an Assistant Professor of Acting, Playwriting, and Screenwriting at University of California at Riverside.