Jennifer Maisel is an award winning playwright, television and film writer whose plays have been hailed as “inventive and sophisticated” and “human and eternal” with a “formidable flair for the mysterious”.
Jennifer's GOODY FUCKING TWO SHOES was a Heideman Award finalist and was produced in the 29th Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
THE LAST SEDER received a National Foundation for Jewish Culture New Plays for Production grant, sponsored by the Winnick Family Foundation and was workshopped at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey before receiving the highly regarded Fund for New American Plays Award from the Kennedy Center, as well as their most prestigious honor - the Charlotte Woolard Award for Promising New Voice in American Theatre. The play has been produced at The Organic Theatre, Chicago; Theatre J, DC; Ensemble Studio Theatre -LA Project; Teatro da Juventude, Brazil, Park Square Theatre, St Paul, St. Louis Repertory. The screenplay adaptation of THE LAST SEDER won Showtime's Tony Cox Award.
Jennifer's THERE OR HERE, was a finalist for the Sundance Theatre Lab, the O'Neill Theatre Conference, the STAGE International Script Competition, Abingdon Theatre's Christopher Brian Wolk Award and the PEN West Literary Award and was workshopped at PlayPenn in Philadelphia prior to its critically acclaimed premiere at the Hypothetical Theatre in New York. Jennifer's other work has won South Coast Repertory's California Playwrights Competition, the Center Theatre International Playwrights Competition and the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays and includes the plays birds, MAD LOVE, MALLBABY, EDEN and …AND THE TWO ROMEOS.
Jennifer's shorter works, which have been produced for regional and off and off-off Broadway houses include GOODY FUCKING TWO SHOES, STORYTELLER, SEEN AND NOT SEEN, IMPENETRABLE and ANIMAL DREAMS. IMPENETRABLE and ANIMAL DREAMS were produced in L.A.’s Edge of the World Theatre Festival, directed by Wendy McClellan and Matt Almos (inventive and sophisticated…a provocative piece of expression – Backstage West). HOW I LEARNED TO SPELL and GOODY FUCKING TWO SHOES were finalists for the 2001 and 2004 Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Awards respectively; the former premiered off off Broadway with Women Seeking Theatre Company in 2003 while the latter was part of New Power Plays (newpowerplays.com), a marathon of new political plays presented at West Coast Ensemble in Los Angeles in 2004. Her monologues have been published in several editions of Monologues for Women by Women as well as the literary journal So To Speak. University of Texas Press published THE LAST SEDER in their 9 Contemporary Jewish Plays and GOODY FUCKING TWO SHOES was published in Plays from the 29th Humana Festival.
Jennifer is a member of playwrights groups Playwrights Ink, Dog Ear (dogearplays.org), and Circle Rising; the latter was formed out of Paula Vogel’s boot-camp at ASK Theatre Projects in Los Angeles. She participated in the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop and studied with playwrights Maria Irene Fornes, Murray Mednick and Leon Martel. She has had the privilege to work with such wonderful directors as Joseph Megel, Kent Nicholson, Wendy McClellan, Charlie Stratton, Dan Oliverio, Matt Almos, Jim Glossman, Jackson Gay, Amy Feinberg and Veronica Brady.
Her most recent full-length, OUT OF ORBIT, was workshopped at the 2010 Sundance Theatre Lab at Mass MoCA and recently received an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation rewrite commission.
Jennifer's new play, MATCH - a journey into the underbelly of bartering for your organs…and perhaps for your soul - was workshopped at the Inkwell in Washington D.C. and University of the Arts in Philadelpha.
Contact:
For information regarding her plays, including production rights, please contact the playwright at maiselj at dogear.org or her agent, Susan Schulman, at Schulman at aol.com