Gravity: A New(tonian) Musical

Created by Joel Chapman, Weston Gaylord, Matt Herrero, Jessia Hoffman, and Ken Savage

Modern-day physicist Sophie travels back in time to 1666, meeting young Isaac Newton but upsetting the applecart of history in the process. An original comedy with a fresh, contemporary score, Gravity is a delightful tale of innovation, feminism, and the art of science.

Gravity was featured as the Next Generation musical at 2016 TheatreWorks New Works Festival, honored as a finalist for the O’Neill Music Theatre Conference in 2017, and produced at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco in 2019.

SHEILA: an original play

Jessia aims to tell contemporary narratives, using storytelling in the service of community building. After years of witnessing problematic gender dynamics in her peers, Jessia embarked on an interview-based playwriting project around hookup culture and sexual assault. Amidst a plethora of student experiences, she heard one dominant thread: an obsession with bodies. Body-consciousness pulsed beneath Stanford’s campus, spurring sexual experiences that students – especially women – confessed left them unsatisfied and empty.

After three years of wrestling with the project’s form, what emerged was an intimate, narrative-based play revolving around the triumphs and limitations of the human body, represented in an ensemble of six eclectic female-identified characters. Sheila reaffirmed Jessia’s belief in the transformative effects of storytelling and reinvigorated her drive to use performance as a platform upon which to voice unspoken realities, a creative forum for self-expression and communal dialogue.