John J. Caswell, Jr. is a queer, Mexican-American playwright and the artistic director of Progressive Theatre Workshop. He has developed and shown work at HERE, Dixon Place, Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, Primary Stages, Theater for the New City, and Page 73. His play God Hates This Show: Shirley Phelps-Roper in Concert - Live from Hell, was named a "Best of 2013" by Time Out New York, calling it "batshit crazy." His play CREAM! was named a 2017 O’Neill Finalist and a 2016 Princess Grace Award finalist. John was the 2017 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow in NYC and is the recipient of grants from the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, as well as The Arizona Commission on the Arts. His work is cited frequently as an example of queer-themed theatre, most recently referenced in articles appearing in Theatre Topics, The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, and the European Journal of Comparative American Studies. Included as a consummate demonstration of auto-ethnographic theatre, his play SHOTS: A Love Story was published as part of Johnny Saldaña's book Ethnotheatre: Research From Page to Stage published by Left Coast Press.
At MacDowell, he completed a draft of a new play called Wet Brain, the third in a series of plays set in his home state of Arizona. Wet Brain explores the author's personal relationship with familial alcoholism and its end-stage symptoms and aftermaths.
