Playwright Resident 2024–2025

Munroe is a writer, designer, and big idea generator from Essex Junction, Vermont (now based in Boston). His work centers his rural New England heritage, evolving queer identity, and passion for history to explore complex themes of gender expansion, queer family, grief, and intergenerationality. His plays have won the Rod Parker Playwriting Fellowship, the Betsy Carpenter Award for Playwriting, and been a finalist for Waterworks 2024. His nonfiction work has been selected as a runner-up for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid essay contest, featured on HowlRound, and published in Passengers Literary Journal.

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Project Statement

“During this residency, I want to continue to develop the lens through which my previous work explores historical queerness into a piece exploring queer inter-generationality across history. In my work, past and present, I’ve tackled historical mysteries like those of Christopher Marlowe, the enigmatic Shakespearean playwright, and Antinous, the doomed lover of Roman emperor Hadrian. I’m fascinated with the hushed whispers and half-truths that are told about their lives, and seek to find the lessons they can teach about modern queer experience. Through collaborations with other artists, I’ll build work that travels across spectrums of gender, geography, and time in order to deeply and holistically explore these themes across a much wider array of stories. In much of the theatrical canon, works that explore queer thought are intentionally specific to era, place, and identity. My dream is to weave these threads of specificity into a tapestry of larger truth: Where have we been? How did we get here? Where do we go now?

In this moment of multi-faceted threat against queer people in the United States and worldwide, too many 2SLGBTQIA+ communities resort to internal fracture over seeking unified mutual strength. Those who seek heteronormativity turn against the gender rebels, those who live in more oppressive conditions envy those allowed to express themselves more freely, and the internet gives a platform for scattered and ill-informed discourses to perpetuate and fester on all sides. Though I don’t believe in a “let’s all hold hands and call it a day” solution, I think that internal community exchange, as well as a connection to our shared history, is the path to more realized queer unification and our best defense against social forces that would see us destroyed.

My work seeks to dig into these complex problems through magical realism: universal literary touchstones like ghost stories, historical imagination, and things that go bump in the night. Myths, legends, and stories tap into the connections that we’re craving to the past, and help to bring historical queer embodiment and inter-generational exchange to the here and now. How do the queer stories we pass down impact who we become? What is more true: The history or the myth? I’m excited to work within the thriving queer community of Boston to grapple with these questions and build work that embraces and rewrites a common queer history while celebrating the differences that define us.”