Playwriting

Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Continuous Learning:

Students are encouraged through classes, workshops and practical hands-on learning to develop their writer’s voice and point of view. We encourage curiosity in experimentation and expanding one’s artistry, and not strictly adhering to one style or genre of work, continually challenging writers to try new methods and approaches to their work. 

Activism and Social Justice: 

All art is discourse with society, and as such, playwrights must reckon with their own power in reflecting a more inclusive and ultimately authentic world narrative and challenging inequities and the status quo and reimagining a world that better addresses societal ills and celebrates what all communities have to offer.  With each class assignment and project, Fordham Theatre invites students to confidently claim their place as agents of change.

Collaboration and Process:  

Through courses, such as Collaboration I and II, Playwriting Classes and experiential learning opportunities in productions and workshops, students refine and hone their collaboration skills to work with directors, designers, stage managers, actors, dramaturgs, and production staff. Constructive communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and feedback are all constantly put into practice.  

Risk and Artistic Freedom: 

Students are encouraged to take risks in form, style, and content. Writers are challenged through classwork to expand their horizons away from the norm and status quo, and embrace that they are the authors of pushing the form forward into the future. Playwrights are introduced to non-traditional and non-Western practices and plays to expand their own skill set in the kind of work they might create.

Technical Skills: 

Students develop administrative and leadership skills as they organize and assume producing responsibilities for staged readings and productions. They build the artistic and research skills needed to lead their own play development process, hone the rigor needed to ask questions, interpret notes and observations to revise and rework their plays.    

THEA 2080: Collaboration I

THEA 2090: Collaboration II

THEA 3011: Text Analysis

THEA 3700: Playwriting (taken 5 times)

THEA 3012: New Play Dramaturgy

Two of the three following courses:

THEA 3004: Global Theater History - Foundational Impulses

THEA 3005: Global Theater History - Evolutions of the Present

THEA 3920: History of Theater Design (preference given to D&P concentration)

Playwriting Elective

Theatre Elective

Recommended Electives:

Acting and Movement, Dramaturgy, Introduction to Directing, Producing Social Justice, Stage Combat, Ancient Theatre, Theatre Journalism

Diane Exavier
Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker, and educator who creates performances, public programs, and games that invite audiences to participate in a theater that rejects passive reception. Dispatching from the Caribbean Diaspora, Diane explores what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land.

Oscillating between performance and poetry, her work has been presented at BRIC Arts, Haiti Cultural Exchange, Sibiu's International Theater Festival, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and more. Her writing appears in The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, amongst other publications. Her play Good Blood received a 2017 Kilroys List Honorable Mention. That same year her chapbook, Teaches of Peaches, was published by TAR Chapbook Series. She is the author of The Math of Saint Felix (The 3rd Thing, 2021), as well as a Jerome Foundation finalist.

As an educator, Diane’s pedagogy focuses on creating spaces of care and self-expression with young people. Some organizations she has worked with include ArtsConnection, Community MusicWorks, New Urban Arts, Providence Public Library, RISD Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Diane studied Theater & Dance at Amherst College and holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University. She lives and works in Brooklyn. www.dianeexavier.live

Jackie Sibblies Drury
Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her critically acclaimed play FAIRVIEW premiered in 2018 at Soho Rep. Other plays include WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT A PRESENTATION ABOUT THE HERERO OF NAMIBIA, FORMERLY KNOWN AS SOUTH WEST AFRICA, FROM THE GERMAN SUDWESTAFRIKA, BETWEEN THE YEARS 1884-1915, REALLY, and SOCIAL CREATURES. Drury's plays have been presented by New York City Players and Abrons Arts Center, Soho Rep, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Company One, and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at The Bellagio Center, Sundance, The Ground Floor, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, A.C.T., The Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, NYTW, PRELUDE, The Bushwick Starr, and The MacDowell Colony. Drury is a NYTW Usual Suspect, a United States Artists Gracie Fellow, has received a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, and is a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman is a playwright and screenwriter from Portland, OR/Multnomah Territory currently living in New York City/Lenapehoking. Their plays have been seen at the Public Theater, WP Theater, National Asian American Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater, Yale School of Drama and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. Their work has been developed by the Lark Play Development Center, the Playwrights Realm, Page73 and New York Theater Workshop among others. MJ received a 2022 grant from the The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre Fund. They have also received a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, an ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, the Global Age Project Prize, and the Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre. MJ has held residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony, and SPACE on Ryder Farm and is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists. MJ has been a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers’ Group, WP Theater Lab, a core playwright at InterAct Theatre and a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theater. An alum of Wesleyan University and Yale School of Drama, MJ has taught playwriting at Yale College, Fordham University, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase College and University of the Arts. MJ is currently an Assistant Professor of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. MJ curated the 2016 and 2017 seasons of Trans Theater Fest at The Brick and, along with Kit Yan and Cece Suazo, founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists. MJ has also written for Netflix and is currently developing a project with Anonymous Content. Find out about upcoming shows by joining MJ’s mailing list at: https://tinyletter.com/mjkaufmanster. https://mjkaufman.com/

Charly Evon Simpson
Charly Evon Simpson (she/her/hers) is a playwright, TV writer, and teacher based in Brooklyn. Her plays include Behind the Sheet, sandblasted, Jump, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Vineyard Theatre, WP Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark, P73, NNPN, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, and others. She is a recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award. She is a resident of New Dramatists and a core writer at The Playwrights’ Center. She’s a former member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group, and Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood. In TV, she has worked on Showtime's American Rust and she currently has an overall deal at HBO where she has worked on several shows including the second season of Industry. Charly has a BA from Brown University, a master’s in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford, New College, and her MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College. www.charlyevonsimpson.com 

Michael Walkup
Michael Walkup is the Artistic Director of Page 73, a Tony- and Obie Award-winning theater company producing playwrights’ first professional premieres in New York City and developing the work of early-career playwrights who have yet to receive such productions. Page 73’s co-production of A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson won 2022 Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical as well as the 2020 Pulitzer Prize; it is currently running on Broadway. Other recent world premieres include Man Cave by John J. Caswell, Jr.; STEW by Zora Howard (2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist); and Catch as Catch Can by Mia Chung. Michael has been at Page 73 since 2011, working with over 100 playwrights through production, an annual Fellowship, and leading the Interstate 73 early-career writers group. He also teaches a First Draft Playwriting course at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School for the Performing Arts. Michael previously worked in new play development and dramaturgy at Yale Repertory Theatre; he received his MFA in Dramaturgy from Yale School of Drama and BA in Theater Studies from Penn State University.

Anne Washburn
Anne Washburn is one of the most exciting new voices in the American theatre. Her plays are feasts of imagination, with vivid characters, storylines that veer off in surprising directions, a wry sense of comedy, and a playful love of language. Her plays include MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY, THE COMMUNIST DRACULA PAGEANT, HAVE LOVED STRANGERS (included in an edition of New York Theater Review, edited by Brook Stowe), APPARITION (published in New Downtown Now; University of Minnesota Press, edited by Young Jean Lee and Mac Wellman), THE LADIES, and THE INTERNATIONALIST (the Gate Theatre in London, published by Playscripts, Inc.), as well as a translation of Euripides' Orestes.  Her plays have been produced by 13P, Cherry Lane Theatre, The Civilians, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, Naked Angels, and the Vineyard Theatre in New York.  She had workshops with Kretakor, New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, Soho Rep, and the Williamstown Theater Festival.   Ms. Washburn is an Associated Artist with Obie award winning groups 13P, The Civilians, and New Georges, and is a member of New Dramatists.  She received her MFA from NYU.

Recent graduates of the program have been accepted into the MFA Playwriting Programs at Brown University, Yale School of Drama, CalArts, New York University, Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and the University of East Anglia in England. One graduate was accepted for an artistic residency at London's Royal Court Theatre.