FILM & THEATER – Written and Directed by Prasad Paul Duffy
FILM / CURRENT PROJECT
Stay With Me Tonight
A romance thriller about a country singer from Texas and a law student from New York whose seemingly perfect relationship takes a dangerous turn when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant.
Short Films
Deprogrammed
Password: enraptured
Back From Iraq
THEATER / CURRENT PROJECT
Frida and Diego
An intimate retelling of the turbulent and passionate relationship between Mexico’s most famous artists: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Theater Productions
Prasad Paul Duffy is an NYU-trained playwright, director and theatre artist whose work uses the immediacy of live performance to examine identity, artistic freedom, political division and the courage required to live authentically. His theatre spans immersive drama, rock musical, biographical memory play and contemporary relationship drama, yet each work is rooted in the same belief: the stage can bring audiences into intimate contact with lives and perspectives very different from their own. Rather than offering simple heroes, villains or ideological conclusions, his plays place complex human beings inside conflicts that challenge what they believe about themselves and one another.
In 2017, Prasad wrote and directed Revolutionary, a futuristic rock musical originally produced in Hollywood, and then a second production in 2019 at Theater for the New City in New York. Set within a totalitarian society, the musical follows a generation of rebel youth fighting to reclaim their freedom and their power to determine the future. Through live music, political conflict and youthful resistance, Revolutionary explored the tension between conformity and rebellion, asking what ordinary people are willing to risk when obedience can no longer be mistaken for peace.
Prasad returned to Theater for the New City in 2022 to write and direct the world premiere of Strokes of Genius as part of the Dream Up Festival. The biographical memory play brings together three pioneering Abstract Expressionist painters—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler—before they achieved recognition and while they were still fighting to establish themselves in a male-dominated art world. Drawn from their own words, the play follows the women as they prepare for the groundbreaking 9th Street Show of 1951, when the center of modern art was shifting from Paris to New York. It celebrates their courage, creative perseverance and struggle to emerge from the shadows of the powerful men with whom their lives and careers were entwined.
With Pro-Love, Prasad turned from artistic history and political revolution to one of the most divisive moral conflicts in contemporary America. Set against the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the play follows a conservative Texas country singer and a liberal New York law student who fall deeply in love, only to find themselves on opposing sides of the abortion issue when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant. The play does not ask the audience to choose which character is right. Instead, it asks whether love can survive when two people cannot reconcile a profound ideological and moral difference. In performance, the work invited audiences to move beyond political positions and encounter the emotional truth of both characters, demonstrating Prasad’s conviction that theatre can create empathy across even the most difficult divisions.
Across these productions, Prasad’s theatrical work moves between the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary, the realistic and the dreamlike. Whether depicting young rebels confronting authoritarian power, women artists fighting for recognition or lovers divided by an irreconcilable moral conflict, his plays return to the same essential question: How does a person remain true to their self while trying to love another?
