Work
Musical
Caleb Needs a Kidney
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Heard You Were Leaving
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Wednesday Nights
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playwright & librettist
Work
My collaborator, Caleb Martin-Rosenthal (lead pianist for Boys Go To Jupiter), and I have been working on the show since 2023, and we've staged two 29-hour developmental readings, directed by Miles Sternfeld. We're in the process of developing the show further with a showcase performance.
Caleb needs a kidney, and time is running out... Desperate and disillusioned with the world, 29-year-old Caleb returns to his college town in search of help, only to find his ex-girlfriend, Chloe, who brutally cheated on him seven years prior. Chloe, now a therapist, is racked with guilt and desperate to be a "good person" once again. She sees an opportunity: give Caleb her kidney and finally clear her conscience. Unfortunately for Chloe, their other college friends have the same idea — donating a kidney would solve each of their image problems — and a ruthless competition to be The Donor begins. Caleb Needs A Kidney is a five-character musical dark comedy about navigating adult friendships, forgiveness after betrayal, and what it takes to be fundamentally "good."
Run time: approximately 2 hours.
Photos by Grace Copeland
It's the early 2010s. A multigenerational family stuck at home in the suburbs is on the verge of killing each other. Instead, they enact an elaborate catfishing scheme, using a fictional boyfriend, "Timmy," to con their oldest daughter, Alexa, out of $20k, which they use to renovate their home.
Timmy explores the loneliness, repressed sexuality, and anger that comes from being isolated and misunderstood by your family, and how that can lead people to do cruel things.
Contains sexual language.
Christina is a 25-year-old underemployed Upper East Sider with bad knees, convinced she's incapable of doing anything hard. Continuing her self-destructive streak, she decides to hook up with her neighbor, a man she's not even into, but who is obsessed with her.
Her neighbor isn't in love with Christina, though. He's a medium-successful serial killer. But Christina's really annoying, and killing small women who live alone is starting to feel insultingly easy, so he pivots and decides to fix her messed-up knee instead.
Contains sexual language and light body horror.
Aspiring chef and dog-mom Lane whips through genres, time periods, and her memories to piece together her failed relationship with her ex-girlfriend. She relives heartbreak, gets lost in her memories and dreams, and tries to do the most difficult thing of all — sitting with her own feelings and accepting reality.
College freshman Abby thinks she's going out to eat with a friend from class and her sister. This is exciting for Abby, who is desperate for a community. It quickly becomes clear that she may only be there as a potential Mary Kay recruit. How much is belonging really worth?
Amelia and her Dad are driving through a snowstorm, visiting liberal arts colleges across the East Coast. Amelia hates all of them. Her dad just wants to find a way to make her happy. A short play about inherited mental illness that sometimes brings them together and sometimes pushes them apart, and the generational pressure to succeed.
Formed in 2020 at Tufts University, Wednesday Nights develops new plays together, generally outdoors. (We meet on Tuesdays.) Our plays are sweet, funny, surreal, and most importantly, relatively short. We're interested in love and sex, gender, anger, death, humiliation, and being funny.
Actors: Paige Walker, Tim Sanford, Sara Kimble, Katrina Coffman, Jason Martin. Playwright/Director: Megan Rivkin.
Lola is a bar owner who worked very hard for her almost-perfect life, and now a mysterious woman (her soulmate?) is trying to tear it all apart.
Paige's 25th birthday is coming up, and she feels like everyone in her life has a problem with her. She goes to a psychic for help, and learns how to manipulate others into loving her. A funny, fast-paced coming out story.
Photo: Erin X. Smithers / FRINGEPVD, presented by Wilbury Theatre Group
"The Island" — a lovable jerk — wants to prove that we all still talk. They hold a shady ticket salesman and an extravagant theatre-going woman hostage to demonstrate. A surreal play set in scenic Midtown, Manhattan.
Photo: Laura Sylvers
In 2022, we staged an immersive walk-through performance in a New York apartment, featuring actors and visual art designed to be disorienting and strange. The central question: when we enter someone else's home, why do we blindly accept the rules they set for us?
A play set at a vague outdoor audition: one director, one assistant director/plant, and two auditioners who seem weirdly in sync for strangers. About past lives, loss, storytelling, and putting yourself out there.
Bio
Megan Rivkin
Megan Rivkin is a playwright and librettist who splits her time between New York and Northern Michigan. She is currently writing the book for new musicals: Caleb Needs A Kidney (with composer/lyricist Caleb Martin-Rosenthal), an adaptation of The Odyssey (with composer/lyricist Jacob Ben-Shmuel), and a new musical with Evan Rees and Ed Horan (more info coming soon).
Past projects include Neighbor Play (Stage Time), Bar Play (222 Speakeasy, Providence Fringe), Do You Party? (Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival), and Timmy (Columbia). An avid collaborator, Megan also produces outdoor, immersive, and audio projects through Wednesday Nights Company, where she serves as lead producer.
Megan is the Writer-In-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, where she teaches Dramatic Writing. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University (2024) and is a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (Bookwriting).