More alike than either is willing to admit.
What happens when the woman asking for help and the woman deciding whether she deserves it have more in common than either is willing to admit?
The Welfare Queen is a two-person play set inside a worn Department of Family and Children Services office in the contemporary South. Through humor, confrontation, and spoken word, the play follows Idea Jasmine, a whimsical young woman applying for food stamps while pursuing her dream of opening a hair studio, and Masque Hollow, a blunt, rule-hugging caseworker nearing retirement. As their meetings unfold, both women are forced to the stories they've been told about poverty, motherhood, and success. When Idea publicly exposes Ms. Hollow's remarks, the backlash threatens to close the very office serving families like her own, forcing both women to reckon with the consequences of their choices.
MEET THE ARTISTS
Brazil Remani (she/her) is an Atlanta-based playwright whose work centers the richness, resilience, and contradictions of modern life in the Deep South. Her plays explore where personal decisions collide with larger systems—including family, government, and community. Her work has been developed through Workshop Theater’s Fall 2025 Writing Intensive, and her ten-minute play Eddie’s Special was featured in the Essential Theatre Festival. She is a 2025 Barbara Molette Scholar with Working Title Playwrights, a runner-up for the Del Shores Foundation Playwriting Competition, and holds a law degree that informs her storytelling. She is currently serving as Playwright/Producer for The Welfare Queen through Synchronicity Theatre’s Stripped Bare program.
ABOUT STRIPPED BARE
STRIPPED BARE INCUBATOR PROJECT created from a desire to use our theatre space to make a home for new theatrical works, and a place for emerging artists to flex their wings, Stripped Bare is an incubator to test-drive new ideas. Stripped Bare is about theatre at its core. A Stripped Bare project is not about sets, lights, props, and costumes. It is about actors, words, passion, movement, and ideas.
