The works of SIU Carbondale playwrights and third-year MFA students M. Kamara (left) and Mikayla Delos-Santos will be featured at the 14th annual Big Muddy New Play Festival, April 23-26. (Photo by Yenitza Melgoza)
April 17, 2026
SIU’s 2026 Big Muddy New Play Festival is April 23-26
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Theater lovers will have myriad opportunities next week to embrace the works of Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s talented student playwrights at the 14th annual Big Muddy New Play Festival.
This year’s festival — set for Thursday-Sunday, April 23-26 — features full thesis productions by two third-year graduate students in the School of Theater and Dance’s Master of Fine Art in Theater playwriting program. The festival also features free, staged readings, along with a free workshop and talkbacks with Martine Kei Green-Rogers, dean of DePaul University’s The Theatre School.
Full productions in two locations
The full production performances are at 7:30 p.m. April 23-25 and 2 p.m. April 26.
“Bear Trap Garden,” written by Mikayla Delos-Santos and directed by MFA theater student Holly Lynn, will be performed in SIU’s Furr Auditorium. The play is about a matriarchal society in the distant future where girls “are brought up to flourish and boys to watch. Women are powerful and men are gentle,” Delos-Santos said. The play centers on Emme, a bright and eager 16-year-old who volunteers in a boys’ school, and a boy named Elliot, who was raised outside the matriarchal system by his now-deceased mother and his father, who is now missing. In Emme’s search for answers, identity and equality, she “discovers dark truths about both the world that surrounds her and the world that came before her.”
“The Great Love of Siabanda Sesay,” by M Kamara with Racquel McKenzie directing, is in SIU’s Christian H. Moe Laboratory Theater, at the Communications Building, Room 1045.
Kamara said the production is “about love – Black , queer love. Over the course of the first 10 years of the AIDS epidemic, Siabanda Sesay and Guillermo Aguilar — who have been best friends since the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) — take their first steps into adulthood, stumbling in and out of each other’s lives while they learn to balance what haunts them from familial love (or lack thereof), what they hope to cultivate in romantic love, and each other.”
‘From the page to the stage’
Delos-Santos and Kamara said they are looking forward to seeing their works on stage.
“I'm excited to see the words come to life,” said Kamara, who was raised in the northern Virginia area about an hour outside of Washington, D.C. and earned a bachelor’s degree in English and film studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. “It's been an interesting experience handing the play over to a director, actors, and designers and seeing their artistry added on top of my artistry to make the whole theatrical experience. I'm really proud of the ways the actors are growing and learning more about the characters and themselves.”
Kamara hopes audiences “walk away thinking about the ways they love – not just those closest to them, but how they love their neighbors, people they pass by on the street, in the grocery store. I don't believe that love is a finite resource — the more love we can give, the better a world we can create.”
Delos-Santos, who is from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and lives in St. Louis, is “thrilled” to see her play performed. She earned her bachelor’s degree in acting for the stage and screen from Azusa Pacific University.
“It’s every playwright’s dream to see their words on the page be brought to life on stage,” she said. “I love seeing these incredibly talented actors play the characters I created and tell their story.”
Delos-Santos hopes audiences leave her production with “minds full of questions.”
“I hope they don’t quite know how to feel about what they’ve just seen,” she said. “I hope they continue to wonder and contemplate and have conversations.”
Jacob Juntunen, professor, dramatic theory, criticism and playwriting in the School of Theater and Dance, said plays “are meant to be seen and heard and experienced in three dimensions in real time.”
“The staged readings are great and people should definitely come, but really the only way for us to understand playwritings’ full process is to actually see a production,” he said. “That is why this is such an important capstone experience – to see it complete from the page to the stage; working with directors, actors and designers and understanding that collaboration and the results.”
Attracted to SIU’s playwriting program
Kamara and Delos-Santos each spoke of the collaborative and supportive environment in SIU’s program, which focuses on “collaboration over competition,” Kamara said.
“I’m an artist-writer that cares about the collaborative aspects of making work, especially theater, which is an already highly collaborative medium that can often be made competitive,” Kamara said.
Delos-Santos was drawn to SIU by the “great professors, great classes and most importantly, the great table read environment for workshopping plays.”
Ticket information
The staged readings and workshops are free. Tickets for each of the two thesis productions are $15 for adults, $10 for senior citizens (age 55 and older) and $5 for students. Tickets are available online. Tickets are also available in the School of Theater and Dance office during business hours or at the door prior to the performance.
Workshop, talkbacks set
Juntunen said Green-Rogers will give a free, public workshop, “Making Work in the World: How Artists Move From the Room into Practice,” at noon, Friday, April 24, in the Communications Building, Room 2005. Green-Rogers will lead a post-show discussion after Kamara’s April 23 show and after Delos-Santos’ show on April 24.
Staged readings are April 24, 25
The staged readings by theater students in the MFA playwriting program are also in Moe Theater with a discussion following each reading. Admission is free, and there is no RSVP required.
The schedule, with play title and student playwright, is:
Friday, April 24
- 3 p.m. — “5:08” by Cynthia Garcia.
Saturday, April 25
- Noon — “Retreat” by Zo Schmidt.
- 3 p.m. — “Kent Narrows” by Alice Dougherty