Cold War Choir Practice

Dear Santa, for Christmas this year I want a Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.

It’s twilight in Ronald Reagan’s America and the specter of nuclear war hangs over the country – but rent is still due on the 1st. In Cold War Choir Practice a young girl is embroiled in intrigue when her estranged uncle, a prominent Black conservative, brings his mysteriously ill wife home for the holidays. This darkly comedic play with music is a fugue of Reaganomics, espionage, roller disco, cults... and choir practice.

A New York Times Critic’s Pick during its 2025 Summerworks run co-produced by Clubbed Thumb and Page 73, Ro Reddick's breakthrough play is infused with choral music and spiked with espionage.

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2026, this edition was published to coincide with the New York run at MCC, co-produced by Page 73 and Clubbed Thumb.

Ro Reddick is a queer Black playwright and songwriter. She writes off-kilter comedies; the theme songs to your late capitalist nightmares.
Ro is the 2025-2026 recipient of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and an artist-in-residence at the Vineyard Theatre. Her play Cold War Choir Practice is a finalist for the 2026 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; It premiered in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2025 (NYT Critic’s Pick, dir. Knud Adams), co-produced by Page 73, and will be remounted at MCC Theater in a co-production with Clubbed Thumb and Page 73 in March 2026. Cold War Choir Practice was also produced in September 2025 at Trinity Repertory Company (dir. Aileen Wen McGroddy). Ro is an alum of the Page 73 Writers Group, the PWC Core Apprentice Program, and the DGF Playwriting Fellowship. Her plays have been developed at The Ground Floor (Berkeley Rep), Bushwick Starr Reading Series, People’s Light Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival (NYC Reading, dir. Jamario Stills), Clubbed Thumb, Page 73, and Trinity Rep. Ro has an MFA in Playwriting from Brown and an MBA from NYU, which she has no intention of using.