The arts are under assault, the gender gap has widened into a gulf, and even casual card games turn cutthroat nowadays. It’s all enough to make you want to throw your hands up and scream “WTF” — as in Whiskey Theatre Factory. This Central Florida collective concentrating on new play development — which scored at Orlando’s Fringe Festival with original scripts like The Vast of Darkness and The Saints of West Orange County — is back this weekend and next at Oviedo’s Imagine Performing Arts Center with Slaymaker, a dark rom-com by WTF’s co-founding writer/director, Bethany Dickens Assaf.
A native of rural Indiana, Dickens Assaf moved to Orlando at age 12 and first became involved in theater during high school, but she began writing even earlier, starting her first “Oregon Trail”-inspired novel at age 6. She first merged the two in her 20s while working as a barista, when actors she worked alongside requested her help with audition monologues. “I enjoyed doing it. I wasn’t very good at it to start with — playwriting is its own kind of beast — but I just loved the collaborative aspect of it,” she says.
Around the same time, Bethany saw Duncan McMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, which she says “dramatically expanded” her perspective on theater, after mostly having been exposed to high school productions of Oklahoma and Hello, Dolly. “The audience engagement, the immersion: It was a whole experience that just rocked my world, and I was an active participant in it. And so my path was set — from that point I was like, I never want to do anything else again.”
Whiskey Theatre Factory was started during the pandemic by a group of local writers, actors and directors who “weren’t getting the opportunities that we wanted in order to grow, so [we] created those opportunities for ourselves,” recalls Dickens Assaf, who estimates that WTF has presented about 40 full productions and staged readings since 2020. “In the last five years, we’ve really found that promoting developing in a real, intentional, best practices, dramaturgical way, and celebrating local playwrights: That’s where we live, that’s our mission. It’s been really wonderful because Central Florida just draws so much talent.”
Much of Dickens Assaf’s own writing focuses on the intersection of fandom and gender, and although she’s been a fantasy genre fan since she first watched The Lord of the Rings, she acknowledges that some pockets of so-called “geek culture” remain male-centric. “It doesn’t mean that anyone I encounter is a bad person,” she says. “I haven’t had any horrible experiences or anything, but you navigate those spaces in a different way when you’re a woman.”
Those differences helped inspired Slaymaker, which Dickens Assaf says is “about marriage. It’s about identity, but it’s primarily about Magic: The Gathering,” a strategy card game using collectible cards. The show stars Komal Patel as Meghan, a burgeoning MTG champion, and Reese Twilla as Jay, her resentful soon-to-be-ex, who challenges her to a best-of-three duel over her continued use of his their bad-ass last name. “For ages I have wanted to write a Magic: The Gathering play,” says Bethany. “The cards are so beautiful, and yet the culture can be really sometimes dismissive, sometimes a little unwelcome for female players. So I knew there was something there with gender that I wanted to write about.”
The first draft of Slaymaker’s script was written in only a few power punk-fueled days, but the version Orlando audiences will be seeing benefited from development and staged readings at Columbus, Ohio’s MadLab Theatre (where Dickens Assaf previously worked as literary manager) and Gainesville’s Hippodrome Theatre.
“When you’re in your own head and you’re writing something down on paper, it’s not good enough with playwriting. You have to hear it, see it, [with] amazing actors reading it,” Bethany says, explaining how observing rehearsals helped take her play “to the next level.”
“As a playwright, I’m sitting in the back of the room listening to everything, taking it all in … I would work overnight, and I would type up a new draft and actually get to put that in the script. So the look on the actors’ [faces] when they realize that they’ve influenced the script in this way is beautiful.”
Even more essential (according to Dickens Assaf) is the support of United Arts, which provided her an individual artists grant for Slaymaker’s development, and which she describes as a “lifeline” for large organizations and nomadic theater companies like WTF alike.
“United Arts makes this funding available for projects that are not going to generate a huge patron response. They’re not going to generate thousands and thousands of dollars in ticket sales because it’s new work, it’s local playwrights you’ve never heard of before,” says Bethany. “We need grant-funders. We desperately need them to come alongside us and see the value in this work [and] I just commend [United Arts] for everything they’re doing. They’re fabulous to work with, and what they do for our community is just is wonderful and absolutely critical, especially in times like this, where we’re scared to apply for certain government funding agencies.”
Slaymaker may someday mark the start of a new era for WTF, which recently welcomed Max Pinsky as their new artistic director, and will be leaning into bilingual and multilingual offerings over the next couple of years. “We’d love to receive national focus for best practices, for dramaturgy and new works,” says Dickens Assaf about their upcoming Spanish outreach efforts. “But I also think that’s an area where we could particularly be excellent, and also welcome audiences and engage them who maybe don’t always feel like theater is for them.”
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This article appears in Best of Orlando (R) 2025.