bailey james

playwright in residence

2023-2025

Bailey James

BIO

Bailey James is a Tulsa playwright who got her start with Heller Theatre and is delighted to be the company’s newest Playwright In Residence. She has produced several plays locally, including Reflections (co-written with Obum Ukabum), Exploits with Blackjack Rewrite Company, and One Year In Silence and Resilience with Theatre Tulsa. Her plays Future Projections and A Fine Cow Indeed were produced through Second Sunday Serials, and she won the audience choice award for Heller’s 25-Hour Play Festival in 2022. She has also written short stories, food blog posts, video game reviews, and more, and currently works as a marketing writer for a software company. She studied Creative Writing, English, and History at Oberlin College.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I write plays to understand other people. All the skills I apply to my craft - a talent for language and character development, a background in historical research, and a love of collaborating with performers, directors, and technicians to bring a work to the stage are in service of helping us all better make sense of the world we live in and the rich, complicated perspectives of the people around us.

My personal plays are focused on the intimate, confusing, inexplicable bonds we make when we dare to know each other. My work tends toward small casts, with roles that give actors plenty of opportunities to explore nuances of character and the uncertain development of relationships. I love to explore language and how we use it in our lives - the things we attempt to express so ineloquently, the ways we avoid saying what we really mean, how we weaponize jargon to solidify our authority, and what our bodies communicate that our words can never hope to match. In Future Projections, I used a relationship between two people who were in constant negotiation about how to label their connection to explore how we seek to use definitions to understand what we mean to each other. In Exploits, I let the physical distance between two characters serve as a roadblock that forced them to use their words to bridge the thousands of miles and different life experiences that separated them. In Bleeding Edge, I used the setting of a dystopian office environment to explore how power and corporate lingo are inextricably connected and used to keep more vulnerable people in control. Each of my solo projects has explored themes I care about like dating, the workplace, art, and technology with characters that speak to our messy humanity.

One of my greatest passions as a playwright has been to collaborate - to use my abilities to share the stories of other people and other times. In my work on Reflections with Obum Ukabam, I applied my skills in deep historical research and in building rich, conflicted characters to help tell the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the Tulsa community during a time when they were seeking to understand our city’s past and how we can grow from our worst actions. In both of my short pieces for Theatre Tulsa’s Tell Me A Story project, I aimed to use the tools of theatre to adapt true events from the lives of Tulsans Karin Roest and Shadia Dahlal into dramatic works that conveyed the emotional truth of these women’s pasts in a way that would engage and illuminate audiences. These types of collaborative projects will always be a priority for me because they help to elevate voices and narratives that deserve greater visibility in our community, and because they are a way for me to better understand new perspectives myself - which makes me a more empathetic person and a more informed artist.

I am honored to have been able to share my own ideas onstage, as well as trusted with perspectives and experiences that are vastly different from my own. Whether I am working alone or alongside other artists to share a story that requires the skills of a playwright, I apply every bit of my ability to bring people together for an intimate contract that is painfully temporary, happening right in front of you, hopefully touching something deeply human that cannot be experienced any other way.