From the Closet: N/A

Mario Correa’s N/A is the first play of Kitchen Theatre Company’s 2026/27 Season. The play consists of imagined conversations between well-known American political figures.

We’ll give you a few hints: "N" is an old guard powerhouse with decades of leadership under her Armani belt. "A" is a young, working class rising star, a once-in-a-generation talent elected to take on the DC machine. What follows is a battle for the soul of the Democratic party, and for democracy itself, in a series of discussions that start in January of 2019, and end sometime in the future.

We sat down with KTC Producing Artistic Director Emily Jackson, to find out what drew her to this play and how her thinking about it as evolved as current events have continued to reshape the context of this entertaining and relevant piece of theater.

FtC: What initially drew you to this play?

E: This is a play about women. Women who are in power–which means a lot of different things in this play. They have political power, but also, they’re women who have a lot of agency over their work and their lives, who have a lot of ambition. 

Because of that ambition, they’re probably more similar than they realize when they first meet. They also share a deep desire for community engagement, community change. 

They're characters who are fully human, and you see the best and the worst of both of them, which is really dynamic. That really drew me to the play. 

The play is also very funny, especially at the beginning. 

The characters of “N” and “A,” even though they're real person-adjacent, they are not meant to be representations of the actual people (Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). In early conversations with Kari-Lynn Vaeni, the director, we've been talking about how these characters, these women, are so much more than representations of historical figures. 

I’m also always looking to kick off the season with something really fun and buzzy, something that'll draw the crowds back in after our wonderful Ithaca summer, where people are spending time outside and enjoying all the beauty that we have here.

There's always a sense of like, “let's kick things off in a way that'll be really engaging, really bold,” and I think this play does that very well, and maybe even more than we realized when we first programmed it.

FtC: How has your thinking about the play, or has your thinking about the play changed or evolved, given recent events, like the DSA candidates sweeping the the recent New York City elections?

E: Ithaca–at least my impression of it–is a pretty progressive and liberal place. I think I wondered, like, “is this a story that we need?” You know, one of the core themes of the play is a battle between the establishment Democrat and the more progressive newcomer Democrat, and I wondered, “is that conflict?”

I think I had a sense that it was certainly still valid, but like, is it something Ithaca particularly cares to grapple with? 

In light of recent events, the sweeps by the Democratic Socialists and also a progressive candidate dropping out of a high-profile race, frankly, in a lot of ways, our systems seem to be kind of imploding.

But, thinking of Ithaca as a fairly blue place, I think the conversation about establishment versus progressive is going to be so relevant to the primaries through the fall and and leading up to the midterms.

So now I worry, will it maybe be too on the nose? Will people think, “oh, of course she programmed this now,” and that's why I'm thinking about the depth of it, in the sense of, “who are these women and what do they expect at the beginning, and how does it shift over the course of the play?” 

Because N/A takes place over a number of years, which is also really important to the story. Time passes in a significant way during the play, and that allows people to change, allows these women to change, and maybe there's something in that. Like: where are we now? Are we willing to not give up on our morals or values, but to be changed by the needs of our community, government, surrounding political forces, world? That makes this really important to grapple with. 

N/A runs at Kitchen Theatre Company from Sep 9-27. Book your tickets here.