In this satirical retelling of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, five 12 year old girls find themselves unsupervised in their middle school classroom when a school-wide lockdown is announced. As they come together and form a plan, power dynamics and friendships complicate their path through the chaos. Woven with preteen politics, the complicated internal (and external) forces of girlhood, and a young obsession with a notorious dictator, these girls hold our hand through emergency and promise to deliver this story with the unwavering humor and honesty of their preteen perspective.

Queen Bee is set in 2012, the year the world was supposed to end. While the girls in the show are on the brink of puberty, the world around them is rapidly becoming more well-connected. The young women of Queen Bee have iPod touches, not iPhones. They're playing DoodleJump and Temple Run, sending anonymous messages on ask.fm, and posting "Like for a TBH" on their freshly made Instagram accounts. The girls are searching for the right way to fit in and stand out at the same time, to follow and to lead.

Some of our first musings on what this new production of Queen Bee will look like have involved our team circling back to the things we loved when we were 12. For some of us it was our extracurricular activities, ballet and musical theater. For others, it was obsessions with The Hunger Games, One Direction, or Newsies. We were fanatics, artists, politicians, and athletes.

Collages made by the cast at our first rehearsal showcasing what our 12 year old selves were thinking about

(From top left to bottom right: Ava Alexiades, Sabrina Harris, Ellen Relac, Siena Mehta, Rachel Stubington, and Violet Morris)

Queen Bee first premiered in June 2022 as Remy's capstone with UCLA's School of Theater. It starred a group of fellow students and was seen by as many people as would legally fit in the classroom where it was performed. Rehearsals for that original production were challenging and full of giggles. The cast filled notebooks with the thoughts of their characters and explored how a lot of the character's adolescent queries still resonated with them as college students.

Stills from original production of Queen Bee (From left to right: Yua Watanabe & Ali Janku, Yua Watanabe, Ellen Relac, & Ali Janku, Madelyn Rose Davis & Vanathi Ravikumar)

As we embark on this exhilarating journey of reviving Queen Bee for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, we're excited to widen the scope of the play. Many of the cast members are familiar with the show and have been friends with Remy since its first inception, but none of them were in that original production, bringing new perspectives to these five 12 year old powerhouses. Even though rehearsals have just begun, the show is already changing in exciting ways. Because Remy is directing the production as she reworks the text, she's molding it to this new cast's preteen opinions and infatuations. Check out our Team page for info on the cast of our Fringe Revival!

Queen Bee is ready for a new audience. The Hollywood Fringe Festival provides a wonderful opportunity to get eyes on the project who aren't familiar with us as artists, but will still resonate with these characters and their story. In order to fully realize this production, we have financial goals that must be met. Your donation to our Seed&Spark campaign will go towards our venue rental, costume, set, tech, and promotion. Your contribution here is not just financial; it's an investment in the enduring spirit of live theater in Los Angeles.

Eastwood Performing Arts Center 

1089 N Oxford Ave

Thursday June 6th @ 7pm (Preview)

Friday June 14th @ 9:30pm

Wednesday June 19th @ 7pm

Saturday June 22nd @ 10:30pm

Saturday June 29th @ 8:30pm

Queen Bee is a labor of love and it's a testament to our belief in the power of theater, as well as the transformative experience of laughter. The playwright Suzan Lori-Parks relates laughing to throwing up. It is in this purging of emotion that we find catharsis. Humor shepherds the audience through Queen Bee, using comedy and laughter as a conduit for our nuanced massages of our personal experiences of girlhood and the development of identity that goes along with it. I hope to carry that with me through every professional venture I undertake. To 12 year old me, theater was my entire life, it was my entire heart, it was my entire brain. I look back, as a 24 year old making a play greatly influenced by my experience as a 12 year old, and I feel honored to be able to make this piece of theater in devotion to the collective experience of girlhood as a theater-loving adult. This play means as much to 12 year old me as it does to 24 year old me, and I really hope (and believe) that this will translate into the hearts and brains and lives of our audience members as well.

-Remy Small

Writer and Director of Queen Bee

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