Erik Ehn's plays include The Saint Plays (an ongoing series comprising hundreds of short pieces), Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, Maria Kizito, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In 2012, his play-cycle Soulographie premiered at La MaMa in New York. He is an artistic associate at San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen, most recently writing Crazy Horse for them, which combined Noh forms with Native American music and dance. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York (BACA, Whitney Museum), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), and elsewhere; he has a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Undermain Theater in Dallas. He is co-founder of the Tenderloin Opera Company, San Francisco (with Lisa Bielawa), and a graduate of New Dramatists. Ehn is the chair of Theatre Arts at Brown University. He conducts annual trips to Rwanda/Uganda, bringing teams to study the history there, and explore the ways art is participating in recovery from violence. In addition, he produces the Arts in the One World conference yearly, which engages themes of art and social change.
“ . . . Mr. Ehn has something vitally important to say and a many-splendored voice with which to say it. ‘Ten thousand things turn into 10,000 other things,’ he writes. And horror turns into art.” —The New York Times [on Soulographie]
“One cannot overestimate the apocalyptic beauty of Ehn's language or the haunting stagecraft on display . . . Ehn's impulse to look at the moral issues of our time through the mysteries of faith is a noble one.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [on Maria Kizito, part of Soulographie]
"Soulographie is an audacious and devastating achievement, sustained by Erik Ehn's commitment to lyricism in the face of brutality. The strongest characters in his cycle resist pain and shame with their inviolate imaginations. In metaphor they achieve grace." —Marc Robinson, Yale University
Selected Works
