When the death of their patriarch draws family members home, they must reckon with grief and the haunting realities that death often brings to the surface. Demons is a magical meditation on getting older, the reality of losing your parents, inherited trauma, and that ever-elusive quest to live up to one's family's expectations.

Keelay Gipson is an activist, professor and award-winning playwright whose plays include imagine sisyphus happy (Finalist; Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, P73 Summer Residency at Yale University); #NEWSLAVES (Finalist; Princess Grace Award, Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils Playwright Conference); CRH, or the placenta play (Semi-Finalist; The O'Neill, Bay Area Playwrights Conference, AADA Main Stage Live!); Nigger/Faggot (Downtown Urban Theater Festival); The Lost, Or How to Just B, What I Tell You in the Dark (Finalist; Premiere Stages); and Mary/Stuart, a dramatic queering of Friedrich Schiller's classic play (BAM Next Wave Festival, partnership with Wendy's Subway and Lambda Literary). His work has been seen/developed at Victory Gardens, the Wild Project, Poetic Theater Productions, HERE Arts Center, The Theater at Alvin Ailey, Tom Noonan's Paradise Factory, Pace University, Planet Connections Theater Festivity, The University of Houston, The National Black Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights' Theater, The Fire This Time Festival, Classical Theater of Harlem, and New York Theatre Workshop. He is the recipient of New York Stage and Film's Founders' Award, the Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, as well as writing fellowships with Lambda Literary, The Amoralists, Page 73, Dramatist Guild Foundation and Playwrights' Realm.  He has held residencies with the MacDowell Colony, New York Stage and Film, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of New York, and the Administration of Children's Services of the City of New York. 

Every February for the past four, JAG Productions has invited African American theater artists to spend a week in White River Junction, Vermont, to further the development of a new play or solo performance. Over the course of the residency, five projects receive intensive workshopping, constructive feedback and a staged reading for the public at Briggs Opera House and the Hop's Warner Bentley Theater. Readings are followed by talk-backs with the playwright.

Learn more about the plays

This event is produced by JAG Productions and hosted by the Hop.