TOP ROW (L to R): Kendyl Davis, Kevin Richard Best, Joyah Dominique BOTTOM ROW (L to R): Eric Easter, Feyisola Soetan, Isaiah Joseph

Cast Announced for Rishi Varma’s Eco-Gothic Drama Sulfur Bottom, Opening Off-Broadway in August

Playwright Rishi Varma has announced the cast for his upcoming Off-Broadway production, Sulfur Bottom, an eco-gothic drama set to premiere at The Jerry Orbach Theater in Manhattan this August. The play, which spans four decades in a single family’s life, explores the quiet devastation of environmental collapse and its emotional toll across generations.

Performances will be held at The Jerry Orbach Theater at The Theater Center, located at 210 West 50th Street. Previews begin on Wednesday, August 13, and Sunday, August 16. The official opening night is scheduled for Tuesday, August 20. Weekly performances will run on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 1:00 p.m.

Sulfur Bottom is described as bold, surreal, and emotionally raw—an intimate portrait of a family clinging to memory, identity, and love while living in a home poisoned by decades of environmental neglect. Set in a decaying house on the edge of industrial sprawl, the production brings to life the slow violence of pollution and the ways it seeps into personal relationships.

The cast features a slate of rising talent, including Kendyl Grace Davis, Kevin Richard Best, Joyah Dominique, Eric Easter, Feyisola Soetan, and Isaiah Joseph. Davis plays the central role of a daughter searching for a way out of the toxic landscape she was born into. Best portrays the well-meaning but faltering patriarch, while Dominique plays a forceful family member navigating her own fractured path. Easter, Soetan, and Joseph complete the ensemble, each contributing to the layered emotional terrain of the story.

Playwright Rishi Varma, a Northwestern University graduate based in New York, is known for work that blends comedy, surrealism, and social critique. His inspiration for Sulfur Bottom came from contemplating what it means to stay in a beloved place that is no longer safe. “The climate crisis doesn’t always arrive with a bang,” Varma said in a statement. “Sometimes it leaks, drips, accumulates. Sulfur Bottom is about what it means to live in that slow accumulation of poison, of memory, of silence… and how we find ways to keep living inside it.”

The production is directed by Megumi Nakamura, a Brooklyn-based theater artist with credits that include the regional premiere of The Twelfth Night Show and the New York premiere of Anne Frank in Mt. Vernon, OH at JACK. Nakamura has also served as the resident Associate Director for the Lyrics & Lyricists series from 2022 to 2025.

Cast members bring a range of stage and screen experience. Kendyl Grace Davis is a 2025 BFA Musical Theatre graduate of Western Connecticut State University, and a CT Critics Circle and BroadwayWorld nominee. Kevin Richard Best, a first-generation Guyanese American actor, has appeared in independent feature films and holds a B.A. from Hofstra University. Joyah Dominique (they/them, she/her), an actor, baker, and educator, has performed at Pipeline, Powerhouse/NYSAF, and in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Eric Easter, a recent BFA graduate from NYU Tisch, makes his Off-Broadway debut in Sulfur Bottom. His previous work includes The Winter’s Tale and Richard II at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Brooklyn-born Feyisola Soetan, an actor-writer, has performed with McCarter Theatre and Theatre East, and starred in the Christmas feature Mr. Santa: A Christmas Extravaganza. Rounding out the cast is Isaiah Joseph, a New York-based actor with Off-Broadway and television credits, including Zooman and the Sign and New York Homicide.

Varma, who also works as a screenwriter, actor, and SCUBA instructor in New York, writes stories that often drift into the absurd to expose emotional truths. His previous plays have been staged at Theaterlab and Urban Stages.

Sulfur Bottom invites audiences to engage with urgent questions around legacy, denial, and environmental survival—not through spectacle, but through the everyday intimacy of a family living in a poisoned world. Tickets and additional information are available at www.sulfurbottom.com.