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America’s most produced living playwright, Lauren Gunderson’s work often focuses on the lives of real and imagined heroines and explores themes of innovation, morality, and discovery. $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
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Celebrating the birth & legacy of
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“I write plays that give women voice and put their struggles, passions, power and wit center stage. . . Our stories are valuable, necessary, desired, and here to stay.” — Lauren Gunderson
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America’s most produced living playwright, Lauren Gunderson's work often focuses on the lives of real and imagined heroines, particularly women in the sciences, and explores themes of innovation, morality, and discovery.
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She was born February 5, 1982 in Decatur, Georgia to parents with careers in both the arts and sciences—influences that would later inform her work as a playwright. She developed an interest in theater at a young age and performed in a number of Atlanta-area productions while still a student. Her first play, Parts They Call Deep, was produced by Atlanta’s Essential Theatre when she was just seventeen years old. As an undergraduate at Emory University, she majored in English and took part in multiple student productions. She credits the staging of her play Leap (2004) by Theater Emory, the school’s resident professional theater company, as a formative experience. The play, which explores the discoveries and legacy of Isaac Newton, reflects her interest in both the sciences and the stage, providing early evidence of the themes that would define much of her professional work.
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“The meat of any play is its dramatic journey: complex and engaging characters in states of complication, taking risks and making urgent choices that lead to triumphs or tragedies. The ending is more than the last thing that we see before the curtain falls. It's the final meaning, the consummation, the last held breath before the unscripted world courses back in.” — Lauren Gunderson
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Gunderson earned an M.F.A. at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was also a Reynolds Fellow in social entrepreneurship. A prolific writer, she enjoyed almost immediate success. South Coast Repertory commissioned two of her earliest works, Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight (2009) and Silent Sky (2011), both of which are based on the lives of women in the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also commissioned I and You (2013), which won the prestigious 2014 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. I and You was lauded by the American Theatre Critics Association for its wisdom and its humor, and the play earned nationwide praise for its tender explorations of morality, friendship, and youth, as well as its artfully surprising ending. Others plays include Exit, Pursued by a Bear (2011) and the Kennedy Center-commissioned The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog! (2011), which was later adapted as a picture book. Ada and The Engine (2015) centers on Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, a Victorian math whiz who worked on the first computer algorithm.
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Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley (2016) is an original sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, co-written with Margot Melcon. Her feminist political commentary, The Taming (2013) is an irreverent response to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and one of four productions that compose her Shakespeare cycle. The play appeared in more than forty cities on Inauguration Day 2017, raising generous sums for progressive causes. The following year, she launched a campaign against gun violence, organizing free, public readings of her one-woman show Natural Shocks in theaters across the country. |
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The Book of Will (2018), an imagining of the creation of Shakespeare’s First Folio by the surviving members of his theater company, was commissioned by Denver Center Theatre Company. The play received the 2018 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. She was commissioned a second time by The Kennedy Center to write Earthrise (2019) a children's musical, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing. Peter Pan and Wendy, her adaptation of the J.M. Barrie classic, premiered later that same year at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Her most recent work is The Catastrophist (2020), based on the life and work of virologist Nathan Wolfe (Gunderson’s husband), a pandemic expert. Lauren Gunderson occupies a unique place in the world of theater: a woman in a field still dominated by men; an artist enamored by science; and a playwright without a day job.
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“If you take a child to the theater, not only will they practice empathy, they might also laugh uproariously, or come home singing about science, or want to know more about history, or tell you what happened at school today, or spend all dinner discussing music, or learn how to handle conflict, or start becoming future patrons of the arts.”— Lauren Gunderson
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Parts of this biography were excerpted from GeorgiaEncyclopedia.org
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We will celebrate the birth of Lauren Gunderson with a performance from one of her plays by Actors Co-op company member, Greg Martin!
This performance will be delivered to you for safe viewing at home, via email. |
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we are so grateful to our community!
Your generosity helps us
keep the lights on while our stages are dark.
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