Karen Hartman
c/o Bruce Ostler
Bret Adams Agency, Ltd.
448 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
(212) 765-5630
(212) 265-2212 fax
Agent Email:
BOstler.BAL@verizon.net
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
Karen Hartman’s work includes Going Gone (world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, 2004); Motherbone, an opera composed by Grahm Reynolds (Loewe Award for New Music Theater, Salvage Vanguard Theater); Gum (produced by Women’s Project & Productions, Center Stage, Magic Theater, P73 Productions); Girl Under Grain (Best Drama in New York Fringe, Drama League, P73 Productions); Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl (from Lewis Carroll, music by Gina Leishman – AT&T Onstage Award, Dallas Theater Center); Leah’s Train (workshop at Long Wharf Theatre); and Blessings and Curses (San Diego’s Tommy Award for Dance and Patte Award for Theater, with Malashock Dance). Her plays have been produced by more than 40 companies and have received developmental support from A.S.K. Theater Projects, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, California Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and South Coast Repertory. She is the recipient of the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award and a former Hodder Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and writer-in-residence at the Royal National Theatre (London).
karen hartman
GOING GONE
Two-act Comedy/Drama, 100 Minutes
2M, 2W, 1 teenage boy
One Set (Flexible)
An exploration of desire and baseball in a Jewish home in Cincinnati,
1930s.
World Premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, January 2004.
Commissioned by South Coast Repertory. Workshops at McCarter Theatre,
O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and South Coast Repertory (2001).
GIRL UNDER GRAIN
Romantic Drama with Songs, 80 Minutes
1M, 3W
Flexible Set
A Dust Bowl love story based on the Book of Ruth.When Sugar and her new
daughters-in-law get ditched by their men in the night, she tells the
girls to go back home. Orpah hitches away but Ruth clings to Sugar,
sparking a journey of desperation and desire. The soundscape of Girl Under
Grain ranges from the taut, brutal language of Ruth and Sugar’s love to an
outpouring of song from Orpah, the girl who walks her own road, and Boone,
the farmer who can make anything grow.
Winner, Best Drama, 2000 NY Fringe Festival. Produced by the Drama
League, extended by P73 Productions. Commission from the National
Foundation for Jewish Culture. Workshops and readings with the Drama
League’s New Directors/New Works, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, A.S.K.
Theater Projects, Center Stage, New York Theatre Workshop, and the
Streisand Festival of New Plays at the La Jolla Playhouse.
ALICE: TALES OF A CURIOUS GIRL
Music Composed by Gina Leishman
Adventure with Music, 90 Minutes
3M, 1W, one girl to play 13
Unit Set
Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Alice races through the brain of a
curious girl. On a hot Spring day, Alice leaps from a stifling
photographer’s studio into Wonderland, a world where cakes talk, cats
smoke, and little girls change size. In autumn, she tries to repeat the
adventure by stepping through the looking glass. Alice’s second journey is
more inversion than fantasy, a place of fleeting memories and outgrown
childhood dreams.
“Hartman’s plays reveal a probing mind with an ear for light,
intriguingly freighted dialogue, and a confident sense of dramatic
structure…In her Alice, curiosity is its own reward. And ours.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“By the time it reaches its tender, mysterious, and riveting
conclusion, [this] strange new Alice has burrowed not only under the
earth, but under the skin.” –Dallas Morning News
Commissioned and Produced by Dallas Theater Center, (1999). Produced by
Thick Description, San Francisco (1999).
LEAH’S TRAIN
Two-act Comic-Drama, 100 Minutes
2M, 2W (boy of 11, girl of 12)
Two Sets
Three generations of love and anger are ignited when an ambitious young
doctor encounters her grandmother as a child on a train.
Workshop at Long Wharf Theatre, 2000. Finalist, L. Arnold Weissberger
Award, 2000.
TROY WOMEN
Free Verse Tragedy, 70 Minutes
3M, 9W (doubling)
One Set
A modern poetic adaptation of Euripides’ THE TROJAN WOMEN. The story of
the fallen royalty of Troy is offset and illuminated by the chorus: five
distinct women whose voices become increasingly unified as the tragedy
mounts. Cassandra’s prophecies link her to the present with speech that is
frenzied, vulgar, and wild.
“There were sharp wonders in the text. Hartman has found a new flow in
the words of the distraught prisoners of this terrible war.” – New Haven
Advocate
Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater (1997); Trap Door Theater
Company, Chicago (1997).
ALICE’S
WILD RIDE: THE TRUE STORY OF A PIONEER ON WHEELS
Play for Children, 45 Minutes
1M, 2W (ages 6-10)
Minimal Set
A romp through America circa 1910, as seen through the eyes of Alice
Huyler Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the country.
Commissioned and produced by the La Jolla Playhouse, 2000.
GUM
Juicyfruit Tragedy, 70 Minutes
2M, 3W
One Set
A violent fairy tale.
Within the walls of their father’s garden, two wealthy sisters discover
new appetites. GUM explores the need to tame nature in a fictional
fundamentalist country, where gum is contraband and every desire has a
price. Can be presented alone or with THE MOTHER OF MODERN CENSORSHIP.
“A brief, intense, beguiling, sensual, witty, impassioned, deeply
moving and brightly burnished gem.”
–San Francisco Examiner
“Hartman has written a stirring feminist drama without ever mentioning
feminist theory…Throughout, she displays a masterful control of English,
shifting from teasing, intimate sister talk to flights of poetic reverie
to unsettling descriptions of sex and violence.” – Baltimore Messenger
Women’s Project and Productions, New York (1999); Center Stage, world
premiere, Baltimore, (1999); Magic Theater, San Francisco (1999).
Published by Theatre Communications Group.
THE MOTHER OF MODERN CENSORSHIP
One-act Comedy, 35 Minutes
1M, 3W
One Set
An office power play.
In a fictional fundamentalist country, the Chief Music Censor and her
loyal assistant labor to screen out smut via boom boxes, headphones, and
intricate systems of moral measure. An ambitious New Girl tries to
overturn the Chief’s claims to virtue and snatch the top job. Can be
presented alone or as an opening piece for GUM.
Lincoln Center Director’s Lab/American Living Room Festival at HERE,
(1996); Yale Cabaret, New Haven (1996).