Melody Bates (she/ they) is a native Oregonian actor and writer based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She is a queer femme creatrix whose award-winning work includes the plays R & J & Z and AVALON, and the Enchanted Islands Project. As an actor and dancer, she has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, The Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, La Mama ETC, The New Ohio Theatre, ART Boston, Theatre des Amandiers (Paris), and Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana). TV and film appearances include Law & Order SVU, I Am Homicide, PBS Great Performances, and the indie feature Ask For Jane. She is a versatile and talented actor who works in stage and film in a wide array of genres. The New York Independent Theater Awards have recognized her with acting, writing, ensemble, and original music awards. She was featured in Necessary Exposure: The Female Playwright Project, and was a finalist for the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award.
She began acting as a child, appearing in local plays and in a feature film that was shot in Oregon’s wine country. She fell for Shakespeare early—within a year of seeing The Taming of the Shrew at the Oregon Shakespeare festival, she was directing herself and her brothers and cousins in a midsummer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged on the shores of Odell Lake in the Cascades, costumes pulled from their grandma's dress-up box, line prompts whispered from behind pine trees, the lake lapping at the edges of the play. That love of Shakespeare stayed with her, as she played Rosalind, Juliet, Titania, Olivia, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Andrew Aguecheek, Puck, and many more, some of them more than once. Her play R & J & Z, called "boisterous and splendid" by the New York Times, is a supernatural sequel to Shakespeare's original, beginning with Act V and continuing in verse as the famous lovers navigate a world in which death is not necessarily the end. Of the NYC premiere, New York Theatre Review wrote, “R & J & Z exceeds all expectations… Shakespeare is not spinning in his grave, but perhaps he will rise from it just to see this delightful, theatrical gorefest.” R & J & Z is available from Original Works Publishing, and continues to be produced across the country.
Her play AVALON, a radical and ambitious telling of the legends of Avalon and Camelot, was created in collaboration with Maine sculptor Peter Beerits. The 2019 world premiere, staged in Beerits' multi-acre woodland arts installation, was a sold out phenomenon. The play won an Innovation and Creativity Award from the state of Maine, and garnered rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. Broadway director Jay Scheib said of it: "From out the tangle of centuries, Melody Bates has forged not just a coherent and
compelling and radically feminist reading of the many Grail legends, but in her lyrical and triumphantly poetic text, she has also rendered Magic normal, obvious, irreproachable and elemental to any quest for truth. Dark, sexy, hair-raising, fast, light, and unflinching in her performance...I was gobsmacked."
Melody holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, and is always up to something.
She began acting as a child, appearing in local plays and in a feature film that was shot in Oregon’s wine country. She fell for Shakespeare early—within a year of seeing The Taming of the Shrew at the Oregon Shakespeare festival, she was directing herself and her brothers and cousins in a midsummer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged on the shores of Odell Lake in the Cascades, costumes pulled from their grandma's dress-up box, line prompts whispered from behind pine trees, the lake lapping at the edges of the play. That love of Shakespeare stayed with her, as she played Rosalind, Juliet, Titania, Olivia, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Andrew Aguecheek, Puck, and many more, some of them more than once. Her play R & J & Z, called "boisterous and splendid" by the New York Times, is a supernatural sequel to Shakespeare's original, beginning with Act V and continuing in verse as the famous lovers navigate a world in which death is not necessarily the end. Of the NYC premiere, New York Theatre Review wrote, “R & J & Z exceeds all expectations… Shakespeare is not spinning in his grave, but perhaps he will rise from it just to see this delightful, theatrical gorefest.” R & J & Z is available from Original Works Publishing, and continues to be produced across the country.
Her play AVALON, a radical and ambitious telling of the legends of Avalon and Camelot, was created in collaboration with Maine sculptor Peter Beerits. The 2019 world premiere, staged in Beerits' multi-acre woodland arts installation, was a sold out phenomenon. The play won an Innovation and Creativity Award from the state of Maine, and garnered rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. Broadway director Jay Scheib said of it: "From out the tangle of centuries, Melody Bates has forged not just a coherent and
compelling and radically feminist reading of the many Grail legends, but in her lyrical and triumphantly poetic text, she has also rendered Magic normal, obvious, irreproachable and elemental to any quest for truth. Dark, sexy, hair-raising, fast, light, and unflinching in her performance...I was gobsmacked."
Melody holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, and is always up to something.