250th Anniversary · July 25, 2026 · One Performance Only
Winner · Excellence in Playwriting · New York International Fringe Festival
Starring OBIE Award Winner James Urbaniak as George Washington
Kirk Wood Bromley's award-winning play tears the founding open and refuses to put it back together neatly. Written in muscular iambic pentameter — verse that hits like a bar fight and lands like a reckoning — it follows kings, spies, traitors, soldiers, and the chaotic chorus of people who invented America whether they meant to or not.
It is funny and devastating in the same breath. It moves at speed. It does not permit the comfortable idea that the Revolution ended, that the experiment succeeded, or that any of it is resolved.
One night. One room. The founding argument — power, betrayal, democracy, and the terrifying, still-unfinished invention called America — put back on stage where it belongs.
I — George Washington
"The struggle we just won has just begun."
II — Johnny Freeman
"Freedom ain't free, man."
III — Benedict Arnold
"America hates me, so I love her."
At a moment when the American experiment feels unstable, contested, and unfinished, this play brings the country's founding argument back into the room as something immediate, dangerous, funny, and alive.
It does not treat history as a museum piece. It treats the Revolution as a living conflict about power, ambition, democracy, betrayal, and who gets included in the story of freedom.
This is a dynamic staged reading — not a static one. Think less actors behind music stands and more athletes in a room, language as music, history as theatre. The audience sits close. Close enough to hear every breath of the text. Close enough to feel it.
The Form
A Reading Is Not A Reading.
A dynamic staged reading is a full performance with scripts in hand. The script is not a crutch — it's visible, intentional, part of the form. Think of it like jazz: the chart is on the stand, but the playing is real. Actors are completely alive in the text. The audience is close. No set. No costume. All language.
Kirk Wood
Bromley
Playwright
"The beloved bard of downtown theater." — The New Yorker
Kirk Wood Bromley is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American theatre and the founder of Inverse Theater Company in downtown New York. For more than three decades he has written plays that fuse Shakespearean language, political satire, myth, comedy, and philosophy. Critics have compared his work to Shakespeare and Stoppard. Among actors, his plays are famous for one thing: they are exhilarating to perform.
American Theatre Magazine: his writing "speaks directly to its audience's concerns and in its dialect."
James
Urbaniak
George Washington · Guest Artist
OBIE Award winner James Urbaniak is one of the great performers of the downtown New York stage. He originated the role of Thom Pain in Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing) — an international hit earning him a Drama Desk nomination. Television audiences know him from Sex and the City and Difficult People. Cult audiences know him as the voice of Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture in The Venture Bros.
On July 25, he is George Washington. In Raleigh. At SEVEN.
Joshua
Spafford
Director
American Filipino actor and director. Founding member of Inverse Theater Company. Has directed Bromley plays and originated Bromley roles for more than twenty-five years. Studied Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Talking Broadway called his Benedict Arnold "worthy of a Greek or Shakespearean tragic figure." He received the British Council Grant for Directing. He won the Gawad Buhay Best Actor 2018 — The Tonys of the Philippines — for his role in Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, and currently plays Richard III in Christopher Sanderson's digital film adaptation.
SEVEN
The Venue
For one night, SEVEN becomes the room where the American Revolution is argued, betrayed, and won.
The Form
A dynamic staged reading is not a reading. It is a performance that happens to hold the script.
01
The Venue
SEVEN, Raleigh. Intimate. The audience sits close enough to hear every breath of the text.
02
The Language
Muscular iambic pentameter. Verse that sounds like a bar fight and a philosophy lecture simultaneously. Dense, funny, devastating.
03
The Company
OBIE winner James Urbaniak alongside Triangle area actors. Language-forward, physically committed, open to all ages and backgrounds.
04
The Moment
250th anniversary of the Revolution. The founding argument — still unresolved, still alive — back in the room for one night.
Casting Now · Raleigh Triangle
Performance
July 25, 2026
SEVEN · Raleigh, NC
$200 Honorarium
Open to actors of all ages, genders, and persuasions. Cast primarily from the Raleigh Triangle alongside guest artist James Urbaniak. Actors play multiple characters across five phases. This is a dynamic staged reading — scripts in hand, full acting, close audience of around 100. Bromley's writing rewards actors who act with poetry, passion, humor and truth. To inquire: amrev2026@gmail.com
LEAD · CAST
George Washington
The founding paradox made flesh
This role is cast. The man who holds the country together by deciding not to become a king. Four major verse soliloquies, each a different philosophical register. Sets the level for the entire company.
Washington — alone, after his appointment
Well, I have won. Now I am a General. No, I am the General. The General of what? A plan, never-tried; an army, never led… I love this country far beyond myself, And any consternation of the cause Concerns my failings only.
LEAD · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · READS APPROX 20–30 · ACTS 1–4
Peggy Arnold
The Woman at War
The play's most dangerously underestimated role. Her actions directly cause the play's central catastrophe. A Loyalist by conviction, an aristocrat by temperament, and a woman in a world that offers her no legitimate power — she becomes a virtuoso of the illegitimate kind. Genuinely and painfully in love with André; she knows that love is her greatest liability.
Peggy — alone, Act 2
I know this: I am a woman at war. My cause? Survival. My strategy? Deceit. My arms? My arms. To win, all I must do Is wed a Brit, be a Brit, birth a Brit. I am a woman at war, and lose I shan't.
PIVOTAL SUPPORTING · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · ACTS 1 AND 5
John Adams
The Man Who Stages the Revolution
The Revolution's impresario — absolute clarity of purpose, almost no personal charisma. Dense, Latinate, muscular language shot through with wit. Never quite the hero of his own story.
Adams to Washington, Act 1
I intend to stage the American Revolution, and if you will take the lead, I hope to have a hit.
MAJOR SUPPORTING · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · READS APPROX 24–38 · ACTS 1–4
Major John André
The Beautiful Enemy
Painter, poet, party thrower — and a ruthless intelligence officer engineering a man's treason over months. At the gallows, his composure is either courage or performance — most intriguingly, both. The play's most arresting death scene.
André to Arnold, Act 4
Come now! You seek not power? Who seeks not power? Consciousness itself is but a struggle For position, as when that struggle's left What's there but bondage, impotence, decay? Make history, or history will make you.
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · ALL FIVE ACTS
Alexander Hamilton
The Federalist in the Room
Young, sharp, impatient. Often right on the practical, wrong on the human. Frankly authoritarian in instinct, yet capable of the play's most compassionate speech — at André's gallows, he argues for mercy with everything he has. Then Washington shuts him down. That collision is his defining moment.
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · ACTS 2–5
Marquis de Lafayette
America's Most Devoted Stranger
The play's sun — warm, ridiculous, infectious, and right. The only character who is never cynical, never self-interested, and never wrong in his deepest reading. His Act 5 farewell is the play's most tender scene. He sees what Washington cannot: that chaos is genius.
Lafayette to Washington, Act 2
For freedom, though defeated, thus defeats, As he who conquers freedom soon converts Unto freedom, captured by his capture. You can never lose.
The Rebel Mess
Comic heart · Democratic conscience · Must function as a precision ensemble
MAJOR · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · PRESENT THROUGHOUT
Johnny Freeman
The Soul of America
The play's comic engine. Freeman is what America actually is beneath the rhetoric — alive, anarchic, funny, and capable of sudden unexpected nobility. His final speech is the play's most sober political indictment. The laugh dies in the throat.
Freeman — Act 5
Hold my Samuel Adams! Freedom ain't free, man. Well, ya gotta own some stolen land… and ya gotta have my pigmentation.
MAJOR · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER
Captain Gutbreath
The Army on One Leg
Bellowing authority, forged credentials, genuine courage. Loses an arm in Act 2 and keeps going. His language deteriorates through trauma and alcohol — from coherent command English to a private dialect the Rebel Mess follows anyway. Same body, progressively dissolving.
Gutbreath — Act 4
You cornswogglin shamwow shaman, dat's Junral Shoshishon, or I'm a casket o' swish n flips.
MAJOR · OPEN · ANY RACE · MUST CAST A WOMAN
Deborah Sampson
as Robert Shurtleff
The Soldier Who Was Never Supposed to Be There
A woman fighting the war under a male identity. Fights the entire production under false identity, performs the only competent medical procedure in the ensemble, and is excluded from the Revolution's promises by her sex. The Mess's most practical and competent member. The reveal in Act 5 is one of the play's genuine surprises.
MAJOR · OPEN · ANY RACE · ANY GENDER · ★ DRUMMING A SIGNIFICANT PLUS
Tom Dodge
The Drummer Who Knows Too Much
The play's most honestly cowardly and most intellectually equipped figure. Quotes Herodotus under fire. Translates Latin in a battlefield. Dies at Yorktown in Act 4. Ideally plays drums.
Tom and Freeman, Act 2
Free: What would the geeks do? Tom: You mean the Greeks? Free: Yeah, them too! Tom: They were warriors; I'm a worryer.
Significant Supporting
All open · Any race, gender, age
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ACTS 1 AND 5
Benjamin Franklin
Sardonic, weaponized with calm
Parliament scenes. Perfect stillness and quiet authority. Every word chosen, no energy wasted. Makes the Americans' case with the patience of someone who has already decided the argument is won.
Franklin to King George, Act 1
King: This smacks of independence, Mr. Franklin. Frank: A smack, my King, is kinder than a stab.
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ACTS 1 AND 5
King George III
Baroque derangement governed by its own logic
A pure theatrical gift. Menacing, pitiable, and hilariously alive. The madness must feel governed — not simply unhinged, but operating by a complete internal system that makes terrible sense. Sets the comic ceiling for the entire production.
King George to Franklin
Lightning, Mr. Franklin, is the rod of God, And their enfant terrible, equality! You want equality? Then, here it is: You are equal, Mr. Franklin, to my bum!
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ACTS 1–3
General Charles Lee
Perceptive and personally catastrophic
The council scenes' wild card. His invented dialect must sound spontaneous, not literary — possibly Cockney. Often correct and impossible to deploy. Comic and genuinely threatening simultaneously. Requires appetite for vulgarity, force, and volume.
Lee — Act 2
Why's I ever join you skanky Yankers? Can't brawl, can't brew, can't yap, can't dress, can't cook, Ya damn well fails to rears ya bozitch right, But tip to top ya can't appreciate The breeded exclusivity of grandeur Exhibited by so-such and me wieners, Puts this whole cracker continent to shunk!
SUPPORTING · OPEN · ACTS 1 AND 5
Lord Burke
The tragedy of reasonable opposition
The play's most consistently correct political figure, overruled at every turn. Must make being right feel quietly heroic — the specific exhaustion of stating the truth clearly and watching it be ignored in real time.
Burke and North, Parliament
North: They'll use these liberties to crack the crown. Burke: Deny these liberties, you'll crack the crown.