“I’m just obsessed with the idea of belonging,” playwright Shay Overstone tells me. “It’s the second most important part of being human.”
She pauses for a moment. “Beyond school, organized religion, immediate family … I’ve wondered where we can find that space for connection. Or where we can make it.”
Her earliest inkling of an answer stems back to summers at her grandparents’ beach shack on the coast of Western Australia. “Even to this day, we’re not allowed to have Wi–Fi or TV there,” she says. As that boredom gave way to creative expression, they’d perform plays instead.
Shay naturally took the lead on the writing effort, casting and directing her family in roles of her own invention. The home on the coast became her first stage, where she discovered the collaborative thrill of carrying a story through to production. Those early living–room performances, though makeshift, became the foundation of her venture into professional playwriting in adulthood.
In her teenage years, Shay’s desire to create steered her into a variety of disciplines, leaving her with a unique and versatile artistic background. She’s done everything. “I did ceramics. I did video. I’ve been into film photography since I was a teenager,” she explains. She still loved writing, but it had taken a backseat to her other experiments. Only recently has she reconnected with her love for writing plays. “It was only natural,” she says, “that I’d find my way back to it eventually.” To Shay, theater connects every one of her diverse interests, allowing her to utilize all of her broad creative expertise in a single space. But beyond the joy of independent creation, theater also has a community element—that sense of belonging she’d been searching for.
That same emphasis on human connection shapes her writing process. Her scripts draw directly from lived encounters and observations, capturing the texture of everyday life in ways audiences immediately recognize. Having traveled and moved around often, Shay describes herself as someone “really good about writing about nothing. At being observant, and letting that tell the story. In some ways, the stories kind of write themselves.” The result is theater rooted in shared experience, where actors and audiences connect not through spectacle but through the humor and relatability of ordinary moments brought to the stage.
Shay has lived in the United States for 11 years now, where she’s based in Philadelphia. She’s now written and produced three plays—A Day in the Life, Next Stop, and now, Plum—that each unfold in a single, everyday setting. That choice is as much about practicality as it is relatability. Her work leans into the shared moments that happen in these spaces, transforming the mundane into something connective. “Instead of riding the train being this shitty thing, I wanted to write about something that bonds all of us,” she said. The humor comes from those odd encounters we’ve all had in public, those interactions and connections we’ve made in passing.
“I just think the working class is so cool, and we do so much with so little. I want to find the spaces where we are and uplift them … without it being too preachy.”
Striking this balance is key to her work. She lets the lives and experiences of the working class form the quiet undercurrent of her narratives, while also placing comedy and entertainment at the center of the stage. “There’s already so much seriousness in the world,” she explains. She hopes her work can be an escape, even for just a little bit.
With a formal education in psychology (she graduated from Temple University in 2022), Shay grounds her artistic practice in an understanding of the brain’s inherent desires. For her, humor is a bridge, a way to turn strangers into friends. She is well aware of laughter’s power to break down barriers and promote social bonding in groups, even among strangers. “Laughing … it’s the quickest way to find people,” she explains.
This energy threads through her productions, acting like a pulse that beats on and off the stage. Her work gives a voice to people who have never acted before, and she takes pride in watching their confidence blossom over months of preparation. She sees confidence give way to trust, and trust give way to a kind of found family by the time the curtain falls. In her plays, Shay hopes for three elements to converge: “people meeting, people shining, and my writing coming together to make an impact on them. It makes me super proud.” Her pride swells at the end of every production, when gratitude mixes with the bittersweet knowledge that the community she’s built must soon disperse. “It’s so rewarding. It’s beyond rewarding.”
She laughs as she recalls her first production. “I had to beg all my friends to be in it,” she remembers. “But now, there’s a bunch of strangers I’ve never met. And at the end of the play, people are like, ‘When are we gonna do it again?’”
Photo courtesy of Matt Lovannone, Sets by Nicolo Gentile
Shay Overstone’s theater is a living, breathing art form, an interdisciplinary merger of Philadelphia creatives and friends–of–friends eager to “be at the bottom together.” In this space, skill level and experience matter less than a willingness to connect. Onstage and off, she makes the work into a collective effort, uniting with collaborators like her housemate, sculptor and set builder Nicolo Gentile, and her longtime friend Abby Codrea, co–owner of Sweet Peel Vintage, who costumes her characters. Together, they expand her multidisciplinary vision, turning each production into a community–driven project where art is as much about fostering belonging as it is about putting on a performance.
Shay’s most recent play, Plum, ran from Sept. 4 through 7 at the 2025 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, with sold–out shows and an encore performance on Sept. 18. But this success isn’t measured in ticket sales alone. The intangible sense of belonging and community that forms on and off the stage is something that Shay and her collaborators carry with them beyond the performance. Her theater functions as a kind of third space: an in–between, an escape into connection. In every production, the art lies in the relationships forged across ages and backgrounds, right here in Philadelphia.
And for those curious to experience this community firsthand, Shay announces her open calls and upcoming productions on her Instagram: @shaydaylayway.
