Scourge (thesis production)

by Harley Elias '24 MFA
directed by Brian Mertes

Thursday, May 2: 8:00 PM
Friday, May 3: 1:00 PM
Saturday, May 4: 8:00 PM
Sunday, May 5: 1:00 PM

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Leeds Theatre
83 Waterman Street
Providence RI 02912

Plague strikes in a city under siege! Certain people are being blamed; other people are blaming
themselves. Is it a chance for revolution, or a chance to put on a great show? A dark comedy for bubonic times.



Harley Elias is an Indian-Iraqi-Jewish playwright and performer from New York City, who often writes plays about the strangeness of history, the dismantling of power systems, and revolutions. He has been the recipient of residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, with Resonance Ensemble, a Fulbright Grant, the Wild Epiphanies New Play Award, two Samuel French OOB Awards, a Young Playwrights Award, the Hester-Franklin Prize, and his Play #3 is published by Samuel French. Recent plays include The Handless King (Wild Epiphanies), Thug Play (Resonance Ensemble), The Pardon (Brown University), and 47 Years of Marriage (Samuel French OOB). With the composer Francisco Finck he wrote the libretto for the opera 11:35, set to premiere in Mexico City in 2023. The documentary he co-wrote and directed, Reconquest of the Useless, was shown at the Havana, Zurich, Woodstock, and Virginia Film Festivals. As an actor, his credits include Les Miserables (Broadway and National Tour), A Thousand Clowns (Broadway), A Christmas Carol (Broadway), Ragtime (National Tour). He has worked at the Goodspeed Opera House, EST, Workhouse, Second Stage, HB Studio, Soho Rep, and performed solo at the Kennedy Center. He holds a BA and MA in History and Art History from Stanford and is currently pursuing his MFA in Playwriting at Brown. He is currently under commission from Miami New Drama and Theater J. 

Brian Mertes has directed many world premieres, including David Greenspan’s The Myopia for the Foundry Theater at the Atlantic and Jose Rivera’s Massacre at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in NYC and De Profundis with Jim Findlay at Playmakers Rep. He has developed new work at Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Class Company, Naked Angels, Manhattan Theater Club, The Public, PS 122, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Playwrights Center Minneapolis, New Dramatists, Ars Nova, PlayPenn, and BACA. Mertes has directed numerous projects at Juilliard where he created a multimedia theater work based on Sam Shepard’s Paris, Texas with alt-country rocker, Jim White. Brian has directed for ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, garnering three Emmy and three DGA nominations, and an Emmy for directing. He is Co-Artistic Director of the Chekhov Project in Rockland County, NY, beginning in 2003- working on all of Anton Chekhov’s plays, Seagull, resulting in a feature film I am a Seagull, 2017, Three Sisters in current development, Cherry Orchard also in development, Uncle Vanya and many of the short plays. Head of the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Directing Program, and an Associate Director at Trinity Rep, where he directed Steel Magnolias, Clybourne Park, Crime and Punishment, A Lie of the Mind, The Glass Menagerie, Appropriate, and Marisol. He has taught directing for both Columbia and NYU film programs and has been a guest director at North Carolina School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase, NYU Grad, UT Austin, and Yale.