These Girls Have Demons: Condensed Workshop | 2026
Join EMMA writers Meghan Brown and TAPS alumna Sarah Taylor Ellis (’13) for a condensed workshop sharing of their new musical, These Girls Have Demons, with a post-performance chat between the audience and creative team
Book and Lyrics by Meghan Brown
Music by Sarah Taylor Ellis
About the show: After a lifetime of playing nice in a failed attempt to get ahead in a patriarchal society, four wildly different teenage girls are possessed by demons (literally, demons) that unleash all the rage, sexuality, insecurity, and sheer feeling they have been taught to repress as well-behaved little girls. Although The Horned Man – the physical embodiment of the patriarchy – tries to charm the girls into embracing the existing systems, these girls are no longer so “nice”; they begin to overturn patriarchal structures as an anarchic Demon Queen chorus. But at what point can power corrupt? Is flipping the hierarchy a solution, or just a new systematic force of oppression?
Infused with a contemporary rock sound and killer girl group harmonies, These Girls Have Demons is a Little Shop of Horrors for the post-#MeToo generation and a galvanizing siren song for demon girls everywhere.
About Meghan Brown: Meghan Brown writes about dangerous women. Her work has been produced or developed at institutions including Lincoln Center, Portland Center Stage, Victory Gardens, Pittsburgh CLO, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Villa. She has written over a dozen full-length plays and musicals, including The Tasters (Kilroy’s List, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee), What Happened While Hero Was Dead, The Pliant Girls (Ovation Award winner for Playwriting of an Original Play”), Cowboy Elektra (music by Z. Lupetin), EMMA: No One But Herself (music by Sarah Taylor Ellis), and These Girls Have Demons (music by Sarah Taylor Ellis). She wrote the libretto for The Discord Altar (OperaWorks), a musically-improvised, community-based opera focused on the Los Angeles housing crisis, and lyrics for Untuned Ears Hear Nothing But Discord (music by Ben Toth), a one-woman song cycle produced at Lincoln Center with Tony Award-winner Lindsay Mendez as Emma Goldman. She was a founding member of Los Angeles theater collective The Temblors, and spent five years as the resident playwright of Fugitive Kind Theater. Meghan’s latest plays include astronaut murder mystery A Seam (developed in the Geffen Playhouse Writers Room 2020/21), and conspiracy thriller Bigfoot (EST/Sloan commission 2023). Meghan is also a screenwriter and script doctor, and was most recently a co-writer of the Buzzfeed/Lionsgate movie F Marry Kill (2025). www.meghanbrown.net
About Sarah Taylor Ellis: “Frozen meets Kurt Weill” (nachtkritik). Whether collaborating on a devised musical for an inclusive theater in Berlin, an anthem for the Women’s March on NYC, or songs for a Shakespeare play at the National Theatre, composer, music director, and lecturer Sarah Taylor Ellis aims to embrace the inherent hybridity and multiplicity of music theater as an art form. Sarah and Niklas Wagner’s indie folk musical Die Mitte der Welt, which celebrated a critically-acclaimed premiere at Landestheater Linz in January 2026, has been hailed as a model for future chamber musicals in the German-speaking world (musicalzentrale). Sarah is also the composer and musician for Auf allen Vieren (All Fours), the world premiere theatrical adaptation of Miranda July’s novel, which played a sold-out run at Sophiensæle in February 2026 and will soon embark on a European tour. Sarah is a regular collaborator with Berlin-based Musiktheatergruppe glanz&krawall, and their hit bureaucracy musical with the inclusive Theater Thikwa — Die Tüten aus der Verwaltung — was invited to the 2025 Festival Politik im Freien Theater. Sarah and Meghan Brown’s feminist rock musical These Girls Have Demons has been developed with Pittsburgh CLO and is preparing for a premiere in Germany in the ’26/27 season. Sarah holds a Ph.D. in Theater & Performance Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in Theater Studies/Music and English from Duke University. She is a dual citizen in Germany and the USA. www.staylorellis.com