c/o New Dramatists
424 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
(212) 757-6960
(212) 265-4738 fax
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, performer, and
former Carnival Queen from New Orleans who now resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Her plays have been inspired by road trips (1988 Olds Delta 88), family
(thick and Southern), movie stars (Marlon Brando) and architecture
(bridges, skyscrapers, multi-level parking garages).
If she is not writing plays that fit in a theater, Lisa is making
site-specific performances, often with her closest collaborator, Katie
Pearl. Together, they have built performances into crumbling vaudeville
houses, corporate atriums, groves of trees, and more. Lisa holds an
M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and also trained at
Eugenio Barba’s ISTA Conference and the Portland International
Performance Institute. She has received a Jerome Fellowship and two
McKnight Advancement Grants from the Playwrights’ Center, a Jerome
Performance Art Commission, and project funding from the Minnesota and
Louisiana State Arts Boards. In 2005-06, she will be in residence at
Infernal Bridgegroom Productions working on a new play, Hide Town,
thanks to an NEA/TCG Playwrights' Residency grant.
ANNA BELLA EEMA
A ghost story to be spoken and sung. 3W
A chamber piece for three women in three chairs. What’s a mother to do
when her little girl makes her own girl out of plain, wet earth?
“…it’s beauty and depth are a almost
beyond language other than its own…” —Wayne Allen Brenner, The Austin
Chronicle
Produced by New Georges, NYC (2003),
Blue Theater/Physical Plant, Austin, TX (2001), Ten Thousand Things,
Minneapolis. Winner, Best New Play, Austin Critics’ Table (2002).
16 SPELLS TO CHARM THE BEAST
16 Spells in 17 Scenes 2M, 2W
Lillian Davis, a metropolitan housewife of great regard, sets out to write
her last will and testament in her apartment on the 27th floor of a
respectable, rent-controlled building. As she inventories her possessions,
she feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. There is a
beast watching her every move, you see. He spies on her through a
telescope from the window of his crappy apartment halfway across town. Oh,
don’t be silly Lillian, there is no such thing as a beast. She goes to the
window. She admires her “view.” She sings a little song. The beast
approaches.
Clubbed Thumb workshop production,
NYC (2001); Salvage Vanguard Theater, Austin, TX (2003).
HOMEFREE
One-act Topographical Personality 1M, 3W
A Minnesota State Trooper and three vagabond Nuns from Wisconsin find
themselves stranded off the interstate in South Dakota. Identity is as
temporary as a wrinkle in a habit, and fierce fears lurk just behind the
badge.
THREE MUTANTS: PLAYS ABOUT
GIRLS
A Three-part Bestiary 1M, 4W (Doubling)
Three plays, DREAMS OF A WEST-TEXAS MARSUPIAL GIRL, MONIQUE THE MOSQUITO
TAKES FIRST RUNNER UP, and AUTOPSY examine beauty, bravery, and girl-ness
with horrific and hilarious intensity.
MARSUPIAL GIRL: Frontera at Hyde
Park Theater (TX); MONIQUE: Red Eye Collaboration (MN). Trilogy produced
by Defunct Theater, Portland, OR (2001), RQS Production, Ithaca, NY
(2002).
3M, 5W (Doubling)
Claire Gaudet is the proud inheritor of her grandfather’s integrity, as
well as his place in the New Orleans accounting firm of Coquedrie, Gaudet,
McGraw. Whether her legacy proves to be the road to holiness or the burden
that will break her remains to be seen. A play about tradition and
individuality, secrets and saintliness, facts, and truth.
1999 PlayLabs; 1999 A.S.K. Fall New
Plays Weekend.
FUTURE STRUCK
A Tragicomic Melodrama in Three Acts 2M, 2W, 1 Boy
Young Linus, an aspiring chemist, longs to discover a science of morality.
His experiments take an odd turn, however, when his forgotten
gangster-aunt shows up, rekindling a long-dormant genius in his mother. A
tale about the risk of invention, the danger of grapefruit, and the
unceasing quest for a greater good. Inspired by the childhood life of
Linus Pauling.
DRESS ME BLUE/WINDOW ME SKY
A Performance Installation Lisa + 3W
Is it possible to crawl inside someone else’s loss and see it from her
perspective? A tour through a performative landscape composed of curious
sisters, red umbrellas, imaginary skylights, and other optical illusions.
“D’Amour’s lyrical language, her
solicitous manner, and Katie Pearl’s simple yet effective theatricality
took us inside another person’s loss, made it visible, in one of the most
deeply effecting works of this Fest.” –The Austin Chronicle
Frontera @ Hyde Park Theater (TX);
Argyle Zebra Gallery (MN). (Photos, text excerpts, and video excerpt
available at New Dramatists.)
SLABBER
A Performance Installation Lisa + 1W
A Slabber is the name of the machines in old soap factories that cut big
blocks of soap into slabs. It is also the name of a trans-medium
performance installation, which conjures the story/world of a young girl
exiled from her hometown after being deemed “unclean.” A three-dimensional
fable composed of saints, monsters, soap, and dirt.
Intermedia Arts (MN); The Red Eye
Collaboration (MN); FronteraFest, Austin, TX (2000); Dramarama, New
Orleans (2000); and Women in Professional Theater Conference (2000). “Best
Touring Production,” Austin Critic’s Circle (2001). Ton Tep Theatrical
Events of 2000, Austin Chronicle. (Photos, text excerpts, and video
excerpt available at New Dramatists.)
INTO THE O
An Exfoliation for the Theater Lisa
A solo oratorio (with full-body kinetic hieroglyphs) celebrating the
extra-ordinary adventures of an ordinary home appliance hero.
“D’Amour hones in on the notion of
“O” and makes of it a rabbit hole, through which she slips into a
wonderland as eye-opening and jocose as Alice’s.” – The Austin Chronicle
Frontera @ Hyde Park Theater (TX),
Raindog Playwright’s Project (OR), Annex Theater (WA), and The
Playwrights’ Center (MN).
3W, 3M
Jane Whithers is searching for the origin of evil, the root of denial, and
the basic human weakness that causes us to fear death. Her quest takes her
to the beaches of Florida, the sewers of Texas, the center of the Adriatic
Sea, and beyond, as she pursues her childhood friend, Prospero Albright
(who might be the key to everything). A twenty-first century riff on Edgar
Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.
Red Eye Collaboration, Minneapolis
(2001), Clubbed Thumb, NYC (2002).
DREAM OF A WEST TEXAS
MARSUPIAL GIRL
Children’s Musical 2 M, 3 W
A dreamy adventure through the desert sands of West Texas with Marsupial
Girl, not quite a girl and not quite a kangaroo. A Children’s musical with
music by Sxip Shirey.
CAPTAIN BOB SETS SAIL
A Sudsy Comedy for Kids.
Is he Captain Bob, commander of the Soapy Seas? Or plain ole Bobby, trying
to stay in the tub for as long as possible to avoid his first day of
school?
Stages Theater, Hopkins, MN (2000).
2 W, 1Pianist
A multidisciplinary re-telling of the lives of Flora and Piroska Gellert,
two sisters who emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary to perform their
“international dances” on the vaudeville circuit. The piece traces their
lives from vibrant vaudeville stars to reclusive New Orleans outsider
artists, who spent their days and nights sewing and painting their house
in wild, polka dot patterns.
“….a fascinating, Pirandellian
cabaret turn…”-- David Cuthbert, New Orleans Times-Picayune
HERE, NYC 2003; ArtSpot Productions,
New Orleans, 2002. 2003 OBIE AWARD.
THE CATARACT
Full Length 2 M, 2 W
Set in Minneapolis in 1883, this sparse, poetic drama explores one week in
the lives of Cyrus and Lottie Finch. They take in a vagabond couple from
the South, who have come upriver looking for work and safety.
PlayLabs, Minneapolis, MN, 2003.
3W
This ten-minute play, written for Iron Belly Muses’ 7 Deadly Sins Project,
is a lecture-gone-awry on the topic of Sloth.
Iron Belly Muses, Austin, TX (2002).