Atlas Arts Lab presents Nothing You Desire

Jacques is a drag queen. Touchstone thinks she should stop taking things so seriously. Oliver doesn’t “get” pronouns. And Rosalind is pretending to be the divine hero Ganymede as a performance art piece for her MFA thesis. But maybe she doesn’t want to stop. And maybe she’s not so sure it’s pretending.

Join Mekala Sridhar and C. J. Linton for excerpts, conversation, and artmaking around Nothing You Desire—their modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It about gender, queer art, and being afraid to want things.

C.J. Linton (he/him) is a DC-based writer, dramaturg, and game designer. Most recently, he served as the Dramaturgy and Literary Management Apprentice with the Professional Training Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Previously he has worked for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Center Theatre Group, Studio Theatre, and Olney Theatre Center in dramaturgical and communications capacities. At Johns Hopkins, he served as the Executive Producer of Witness Theater for two seasons developing and producing new student work, and received an Arts Innovation Grant to produce a new play at the 2018 Charm City Fringe Festival.

Dramaturgy credits include Rise and Set at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and Walk Two Moons at Olney Theatre Center. Playwriting credits include Not Served Neat and Lift and Drag at Johns Hopkins University. Outside of theater, C.J. is one half of the independent tabletop game design company Sly Robot Games. Game design credits include Tomorrow on Revelation III (co-creator), Those of Us Who Know Better, Bring Down the House, and The Prince of Nothing Good. Select game editing credits include TRIAL by Dominique Dickey and The Devil’s Dandy Dogs by Monte Cook Games. C.J. currently works as the Communications Associate at the Center for Community Progress, which works to equitably transform vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties into community assets and change unjust housing policy. He holds a BA in English and Sociology from Johns Hopkins University, where he researched economics in 1980s American cyberpunk and independent bookstores in the Amazon age. C.J.’s work explores themes of transness, transformation, autonomy, and making difficult choices in impossible circumstances.

Mekala Sridhar (she/her) is a DC-based director, writer, and producer currently working as the BOLD Associate Producer at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. She has previously worked in artistic and producorial capacities at Baltimore Center Stage, Blindspot Collective, Cleveland Play House, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, and Studio Theatre. Past writing credits include Women Like A River at BorderLight Festival, when the bubble bursts at La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival and A Different Nostalgia at Dixon Place. Her directing credits include A Wake at Singh’s (workshop) at Prologue Theatre, Salome and 1708 at Sarah Lawrence College and (re)Move West at Accademia Dell’Arte. Select assistant directing credits include Pass Over, Good Bones (reading), and Aspen Ideas (workshop) at Studio Theatre, What You Are at The Old Globe, and Light Years Away at La Jolla Playhouse. Mekala’s artmaking is grounded in creating radically inclusive, collaborative work, and helping transform the institutions she is a part of to be more equitable, community-oriented spaces is central to her practice. She holds a BA in Theatre, Literature, and Psychology from Sarah Lawrence College and received additional training from Moscow Art Theatre School and Accademia Dell’Arte.