In partnership with Shea Theatricals, Colt Coeur is thrilled to announce playwright Kallan Dana as the second recipient of our annual Beacon Commission. Selected from nearly 100 applicants, Kallan’s untitled project centers on a Vietnam War-era draft evasion counseling service and poses philosophical inquiries about activism, peace, and violence.

Kallan Dana (Beacon Commission) is a playwright originally from Portland, Oregon. Productions include Lobster (The Tank, Best Theater of 2025 in The New Yorker and Vulture/New York Magazine) and RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR (The Hearth/A.R.T. NY and Artists Repertory Theater). She has developed or presented work with the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center/National Playwrights Conference, Yaddo, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Working Theater, The Hearth, The Tank, Artists Repertory Theatre, The Cell, Portland Theater Festival, Bramble Theatre Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, Prelude/The Segal Center, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and a recipient of the 2025 National Theatre Conference Paul Green Award. She makes theater with her company Needy Lover. MFA: Northwestern University.

From Kallan, about the project:

Influenced by the work of student organizers in the 60s and 70s, my play will center on a Vietnam War-era draft counseling group at a women’s college. I plan to use this recent historical setting to investigate our current moment’s pressing philosophical and moral questions about activism, pacifism, and violence.

I am inspired by the theatrical techniques of works like Brecht’s Mother Courage, which locates 1939 Germany inside the 17th century Thirty Years War, or Fornes’s The Danube, which tackles the 80s threat of global nuclear disaster through a 1938 Budapest setting. Borrowing from these formally radical works, my play will use the interrelated but fractured youth movements in the United States 1968 to grapple with parallel youth movements today. How does a community create a mutually agreed upon ethics? What are the virtues as well as the consequential limitations of nonviolence? Through both archival research and workshops with current college students, my project will ask questions about young people who are trying to create a better world for future generations. It will also be funny.

-Kallan Dana