Julia Cho
c/o John Buzzetti
The Gersh Agency
41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor
New York, NY 10010-2210
(212) 634-8126
(212) 391-8459 fax
Email:
jbuzzetti@gershny.com
Julia Cho wrote her first play in eighth grade about a motley group of people stranded in a bomb shelter during nuclear fallout. No one at the time foresaw Julia would go on to be a playwright, least of all herself. Hailing from the suburbs of Southern California and Arizona, Julia’s theater education consisted mainly of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and bad Shakespeare. Luckily, a class trip to New York and a chance encounter with John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation changed all that. Fascinated with the forces and choices that determine who we are, Julia often writes about good people who mean well but do not-so-good things. She strives to write with brevity, honesty, humor and a dash of poetry. Julia has received a New York Foundation for The Arts grant, residencies at Seattle Rep/Hedgebrook’s Women Playwrights Festival and The MacDowell Colony, and was a finalist for a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her play BFE won the 2004 Weissberger Award. She has received commissions from Ma-Yi Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, South Coast Repertory and the Mark Taper Forum. Julia is a graduate of Amherst College and has degrees from UC Berkeley, NYU and The Juilliard School.
99 HISTORIES
Two-act Drama / 100 minutes
2M, 4W (1 teen)
Flexible Set
This fluid, emotionally driven drama follows the story of a young woman
who must decide what to do with the baby that has unexpectedly taken
root inside her. Wrestling with shadows from her past, Eunice recalls
the musical prodigy she once was. But she soon finds that every good
memory carries with it a dark side as well. 99 Histories is a
beautifully haunting and moving play about memory, legacy, and the
unbreakable bond between mother and child.
Staged readings, The Sundance
Institute Theatre Lab (2001), New York Theatre Workshop (2002), South
Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival (2002). Workshop
productions: The Cherry Lane Alternative (2002), The Mark Taper Forum
(2004). Premiere, Theatre Mu (2004). Finalist for the 2002 Susan Smith
Blackburn Prize.
5M, 2W
Drama / 100 minutes (no intermission)
Flexible Set
Told in reminisces and from a multitude of perspectives, this
devastating drama recounts the aftermath of a young child’s
disappearance. The story centers on Greg, the boy’s father, who
abandoned the family right before he disappeared. The play unfolds on
the day he returns, only to find that the family he left behind no
longer exists.
As each member of Greg’s family tries to tell him what happened the
summer his son disappeared, the only thing that’s clear is that the
ten-year-old boy who vanished is far from the only thing they lost.
Staged readings: New York Theatre
Workshop (2002), The Mark Taper Forum (2002). Workshop production, The
Juilliard School (2003). Premiere, New York Theatre Workshop
(2003-2004).
BFE
Comedy/ 100 Minutes (no intermission)
4M, 5W
Flexible Set
BFE is the place between childhood and adulthood, the mall and the
trailer home, the rock and the hard place. In other words, it’s bum fuck
Egypt and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. But it’s also a place
where anything can happen—and does. From plastic surgery to serial
killers to Mormons, it’s just another day in the life of
fourteen-year-old Panny. She has just started her first year of high
school, and as any teen could tell you, it’s “a very dangerous time.”
World Premiere co-production, The
Long Wharf Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons (2005). Staged readings:
New York Theatre Workshop (2002), Seattle Repertory Theatre (2003), The
Mark Taper Forum (2003), The Goodman Theatre (2004), Portland Center
Stage (2004), The Cape Cod Theatre Festival (2004).