Plays
Hannah writes plays about overlooked people in overlooked places. She delights in language, wrestles with truths of life & death, champions the oddness of people, and builds theatrical worlds—just adjacent to ours.
Plays
Hannah writes plays about overlooked people in overlooked places. She delights in language, wrestles with truths of life & death, champions the oddness of people, and builds theatrical worlds—just adjacent to ours.
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NIGHTJAR
Nomination – Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2020
Selection - Barter Theatre’s Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights, 2020
Semifinalist - Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference, 2018
Staged Reading - Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2017
This is Eastern Kentucky, coal country. The miner in his coal vein can’t stand up straight; a young man in his black vein is charged up in might. In 1950 a mining family is kicking off coal dust; business is good, and Della is the first of her family to leave for college. In 2017 the coal dust’s scrubbed clean, but Della’s still here, housing a family she didn’t expect. NIGHTJAR is a test of grace under pressure, from the interior and the exterior.
FULL LENGTH: 3W, 3M
Marblehead
Finalist - The Woodward/Newman Drama Award, Bloomington Playwrights Project 2020-21
Semifinalist - Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference, 2020
Marb has a glass eye, and Marb believes she can’t do much. Her mother’s a vegetable, her Uncle Yoyo a “gourmet” fry cook, and her Aunt Sharon doesn’t know when to quit. A half-sighted living in a half-baked drive-by diner, Marblehead’s nearing the end of hope. But on her eighteenth birthday when she asks for sight, the sight she receives is nothing asked for. “Marblehead” will have to battle death itself to see further than the dark.
FULL LENGTH: 3W, 3M
Native
Finalist - The Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, Marin Theatre Company, 2017
Semifinalist - Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference, 2016
It is the end of summer at the Native American Institute's Camp for Kids, and the counselors are restless. Driver the mixed, Liz the fractional, Levi the self-proclaimed, and Alana the outsider work under the care of Mary, an elder. But it's camp after all—pee in a bush, make a pinch-pot—it's all fun and games until someone is outed as a faker. NATIVE is a coming of age story in an age of personal culture claiming.
FULL LENGTH : 3W, 2M
SHE GOEs BEFORE ME
Centerstage in 1553, a dethroned Lady Jane Grey stands condemned to die. It’ll be a seven-month waiting game in the Tower for the sixteen year old ex-sovereign. But she'll sooner practice her beheading than recant her God to live. In present-day nyc, five women study the book of Romans in a fearless yet bizarre Bible study, as one of their own must learn to die. A play about believing women who go before us, running faith’s living-and-dying path through the seeming impossible.
FULL LENGTH : 6W
life in the clean slate
In the age of the Clean Slate, you and I are the future’s swept dust. It’s 2525, and a future people live in the splendid simplicity of knowing only what they’ve elected to know. Trees, birds, wars, mechanical engineering — easy, get the downloads. But Mars, Trinket, Apple, and Toad choose to know “SHE.” Well now, that one won’t be so easy. To grasp an Abstraction like She is a dusty, difficult thing. They’ll have to experience, receive, and allow She to irritate their very existence… What the four discover might just stick to their bones.
FULL LENGTH : 5 Characters, any gender
on 49th & nowhere
Somewhere in Hell’s kitchen, tacky jingles ring, a tabby cat sings, and a modern day Herod dreams of despicable things. From the view of his mildew-ridden sidewalk table of discount books, Valter tells a Christmas story he (almost) certainly hates. Welcome to the Christmas Crib, a year-round xmas store. Miguel and Joy hire a “Johnny Bingo” off Craig’s list. And Tabitha the local Jesus lady commissions a neighborhood celebration. But all cheer shall die (and die quickly) if the bookseller on 49th & Nowhere has anything to do with it.
FULL LENGTH : 2W, 3M
THE TOUR DE FORCE
Invited Reading - Primary Stages ESPA, Fall 2019
In the near future, a once quaint New England town evacuates in the wake of an apocalyptic storm, but six people choose to stay: a deli caretaker, a carousel popcorn lady, a doomsday prepper, a fading physicist with a tin choral top, a mother who’s fighting to keep what’s left, and a daughter seeking chaos itself. It’s a timeless place at the end of time where allegory and reality are the present, but what force is feeling and what force is fact?
FULL LENGTH : 3W, 3M
