The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Performance Grant to Jerry Lieblich, for their project, without mirrors. 

An experimental-language solo play exploring hopelessness, isolation and a perhaps misguided search for a fundamentally “true” self.  Written and directed by Jerry Lieblich, without mirrors will be performed by six-time OBIE winner David Greenspan at The Brick in Williamsburg, November 5th-23rd, 2025.\

In dim light and stillness, a lone person speaks, trapped. How does one go on from a place of hopelessness?  When it feels like the world is collapsing?

The speaker (Greenspan) is in a place without light, without sensation, without point of reference or context: they’re uncertain if they’re standing or falling, walking or holding still.  Their language is rife with disjunction and non-sequiturs. How does a sense of continuity form amidst disjuncture? Continuity of a sentence? A play? A self?

When I leave “home”; when major relationships end; when I abandon a predetermined gender; when my body changes into something I don't recognize; when any or all of the ways I know myself are gone: who am I?

Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands between theater, poetry, and music.  Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Their plays include The Barbarians (La Mama), Mahinerator (The Tank), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Clubbed Thumb – Critic’s Pick: NY Times, TimeOut NY), Tongue Depressor (The Public Theatre / Brooklyn College), Nostalgia is a Mild Form of Grief (developed with Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater, Page 73), Ghost Stories (Cloud City - Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), Your Hair Looked Great (Abrons Arts Center), A Discourse on the Method… (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera).  Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days.  Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series.

Jerry has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, NACL, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and UCROSS, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Yiddishkayt. They have received a EST/Sloan Commission, the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award (twice), and a Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.  They are an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Page 73's I-73 Writer's Group, and Pipeline Theater’s Playlab group. BA: Yale, Philosophy; MFA: Brooklyn College (Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, chief instigators). 

without mirrors will be performed by six-time OBIE winner David Greenspan at The Brick in Williamsburg, November 5th-23rd, 2025.

Please visit Jerry’s Website and Instagram for more information.