Madeleines

Bess Welden - is a theater maker living and creating in her adopted home state of Maine. She spent 2022 as a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow for her work at the intersection of art-making and social change. She served as the 2024 Playwright-In-Residence for the Maine Playwrights Festival and recently created a commission for the Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated project, an interdisciplinary visual art, music, and theater exhibition honoring girls and young women who died in the Holocaust. She is the Founder/Core Artist of Death Wings Project (www.deathwingsproject.org).

Bess’ play Madeleines won the 2022 National Jewish Playwriting Contest and was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Madeleines has been developed in New York City with Jewish Plays Project, in Palo Alto with TheaterWorks Silicon Valley, in Indiana with the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington, in West Hartford, CT with Playhouse on Park, and with Portland Stage as part of the Little Festival of the Unexpected. Madeleines will make its world premiere at Portland Stage in 2025.

Her play with songs, Death Wings, won the 2020 Maine State prize of the Clauder Competition for New England Playwrights and was produced in Maine by Dramatic Repertory Company, The Theater Project, and Meetinghouse Arts with major support from the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission. Death Wings was a 2020 semi-finalist for the prestigious O’Neill New Play Conference and was workshopped with Fresh Ink Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts.

Her play Refuge Malja, winner of the Tel Aviv Jewish Plays Contest and a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Playwriting Contest, premiered on Portland Stage’s mainstage. Refuge Malja and Madeleines were both nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Monologues from Death Wings and Madeleines are featured in The 2021 and 2024 Best Stage Monologues for Women published by Smith & Kraus.

Her short plays Celebrity Exit and All I Ever Wanted Was to Play were produced by Colby College’s Department of Performance, Theater, Dance. Mergirl Saves the Waves, Bess’ feminist, environmentalist adaptation of The Little Mermaid, was developed with support from the Maine Arts Commission and staged by A Company of Girls at the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine. Her solo comedies The Passion of the Hausfrau and Big Mouth Thunder Thighs premiered in Portland Stage’s Studio Theater, and her collaborative theater performance project with live music and illustration, Legbala is a River, premiered at Mayo Street Arts. She participated as an invited writer at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat (HBMG Foundation) and with Company One Theatre’s PlayLab Unit in Boston. You can hear her 15-minute audio rom-coms “What I Miss Most,” “Under My Skin,” “Island Time” on the Meet Cute Podcast (www.meetcute.com).