Each month on The Subtext, Brian speaks with a playwright about life, writing, and whatever itches we are scratching.

On this month’s episode, Brian speaks with playwright and essayist Mashuq Mushtaq Deen. They discuss his approach to staying ahead of the audience, the choice to remove the character of Deen from his autobiographical play (Draw the Circle), and his experience revisiting prose writing. Deen earned an MFA in theatre with a playwriting concentration from the now-separate Actors Studio Drama School/New School for Drama.

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is a CORE writer at the Playwrights’ Center, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Draw the Circle, which was produced at PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, and Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre (published by Dramatists Play Service). His other full-length plays include: The Vessel, which was commissioned by the NYU graduate acting program); Flood, which had its world premiere at Kansas City Rep in 2023, and its Chicago premiere at Shattered Globe in 2024; The Betterment Society, which is published in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays; The Shaking Earth, which has won two 2nd place international playwriting awards (International Woodward Prize, and the India’s International Sulthan Padamsee Prize), and has been nominated for both a Weissberger Award and a Venturous Fund award; and The Telegram, a live-staged radio play which was commissioned and produced by Keen Company.

This episode can also be found here.

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