The sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, a big-hearted evocation of queer intimacy set in a bathhouse at the end of the world

In this love letter to queer bathhouse culture, the Presenter, a Mexican-American public-speaking student, is thrust into the landscapes of queer intimacy, colonialism, and erotic community when their class presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing starts to unravel. What had been a single presentation soon becomes a chorus, joining student presenters with the ghosts of bathhouses past, present, and future, along with the cleaning staff, A Conquistador!, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control, to explore queer desire and the gleeful delights of messiness. Here in the bathhouse at the end of the world, Jesús I. Valles conjures the ever-present yearning for skin to touch skin, a place of connection that shimmers in the steam of the bathhouse and refuses to ever fully fade.

Bathhouse.pptx is the sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and first winner chosen by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris.