KEVIN RAY | WORKS
About
Read about Kevin Ray and KRW.
Kevin Ray is a Brooklyn-based theater artist creating visually inventive, design-forward work through KEVIN RAY | WORKS. His productions include UNEARTHLY VISITANTS (2021), based on ghost stories by Edith Wharton; THE MACHINE STOPS (2023), based on E.M. Forster’s science fiction story; and WE (2024), based on the banned dystopian novel by Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin. His original piece, NOISE/QUIET: A Cycle of Plays in Nine Movements, is currently in development. He is also adapting Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 high fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST for the stage.
His work has been supported by grants from NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Puffin Foundation, and FAIR in the Arts. Front Row Center described his productions as “a Space Mountain roller coaster ride, an intellectual white-water rafting expedition, a production that will have you talking about it for hours and days to come.”
Kevin holds an MFA in Theater Directing from Brooklyn College and writes about independent theater on his Substack, MODERN DRAMA.
READ ESSAYS ON SUBSTACK
Modern Drama offers a behind‑the‑scenes look at how new independent theater is made — from the first spark of an idea to the moment it meets an audience.
Learning to Ask "What's Next?" Like a Child
Refections on staging Yevgeny Zamyatin's WE and his 1923 essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters”
Read on Substack
Discovering Gratitude Through Grant Writing
On perseverance, perspective, and the unexpected gift that came right before Thanksgiving.
Read on Substack
I Started With Ghosts; They've Haunted Every Project Since
How adapting Edith Wharton’s gothic tales shaped the way I make theater—with production photos and a short video
Read on Substack
Staging a High Fantasy Masterpiece Time Forgot
How an overlooked novel from 1926, Nietzschean philosophy, and a grant award launched my most ambitious adventure yet
Read on Substack
NOISE/QUIET: A Cycle of Short Plays
From rejection to resurrection: how two plays became a cycle of sound and silence
Read on Substack
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
But I'm one step closer than I was yesterday.
Read on Substack Independent theater needs champions.
Your tax-deductible donation to KEVIN RAY | WORKS makes fearless new work possible.
Artistic Statement
My work emerges from the intersection of experimental theater, puppetry traditions, and literary adaptation. Working as a director and playwright, I develop projects through extended collaborative processes with designers and performers, allowing form to emerge from exploration rather than predetermined concepts.
I am drawn to banned, suppressed, or forgotten voices—writers whose work explores how authoritarian and technological systems erode imaginative life and cultural memory. I’m influenced by the Czechoslovak scenography of Josef Svoboda and Bread and Puppet Theater’s scale and materiality, as well as writers who interrogate systems of control—Wharton, Forster, Zamyatin, Kafka, and Pinter.
Adapting literature from the past provides aesthetic distance—audiences watch characters navigate dilemmas in times and places far from their own, giving them permission to witness drama rather than defend against it. This distance creates space for genuine inquiry.
NOISE/QUIET marks a shift toward original playwriting within ensemble processes—authoring text rather than adapting it. Moving forward, I aim to create theater where writing, directing, and design blur into collaborative composition: work that insists on sustained attention in a culture of distraction, and offers the theater as a space for shared presence and listening.
Lud-in-the-Mist
Read about the upcoming production of
Hope Mirrlee’s high fantasy novel