Anne Washburn

2015 Winner in
Drama

Anne Washburn's plays include Little Bunny Foo Foo, The Twilight Zone, 10 out of 12, Mr. Burns, The Internationalist, A Devil At Noon, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, I Have Loved Strangers, The Ladies, The Small and transadaptations of Euripides' Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has been produced by 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, The Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Folger, The Gate, The Guthrie, Playwrights Horizons, Red Eye, Soho Rep, Studio Theater, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Washburn's awards include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a Whiting Award in Drama, a Guggenheim, a PEN/Laura Pels award, a NYFA Fellowship, a Time Warner Fellowship, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist, as well as residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. She is an associated artist with The Civilians, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Chochiqq, and is an alumna of New Dramatists and 13P.

Photo Credit:
Beowulf Sheehan
Reviews & Praise

“Downright Brilliant. When was the last time you met a new play that was so smart it made your head spin? Get ready to reel, New York. Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play has arrived to leave you dizzy with the scope and dazzle of its ideas. With grand assurance and artistry, Ms. Washburn makes us appreciate anew the profound value of storytelling in and of itself, and makes a case for theater as the most glorious and durable storyteller of all. I look forward to remembering it for a long, long time.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Anne Washburn’s hypnotic, sly and fiendishly insinuating Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play . . . does the improbable: It makes the end of civilization seem like the perfect time to create glowing objects of wonder and beauty.” —David Cote, Time Out New York

“Anne Washburn has written a cryptic crossword puzzle of a play, but it is a clever little thing that starts out as if it might be a quirky romantic comedy and sheds its skins as it turns into an unsettling, almost Kafka-esque examination of the nature of self and the impossibility of escaping who we are and where we come from . . . Washburn's gobbledygook language is a brilliant device possessing all the imaginative linguistic gymnastics of Caryl Churchill's plays.” —Lyn Gardner, The Guardian [on The Internationalist]

“The dreamy tone tinges believable actions with the surreal. Similarly, Washburn’s English can float from conversational to poetic in a phrase . . . the final moment evokes a distance between people that may never close, since most don’t even realize it’s there. It’s a heavy sigh of an image, and it suits this sad, beautiful play.” —Variety [on The Internationalist]

Selected Works

Little Bunny Foo Foo
Premiered in
2018
Iphigenia in Aulis
Premiered in
2015
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From the Selection Committee

There are few American playwrights working today with a more thrilling theatrical intelligence and vision than Anne Washburn. Her plays think about the world so deeply they enter into the mythic. They are profoundly engaging: dread-inducing, delightful, hilarious, gripping, terrifying, perception altering. Anne draws her audiences in with her exceptional ear for the fine-grained minutia of quotidian human interaction and then guides them into worlds both compellingly familiar and disorientingly strange, where fissures in the social order offer tiny glimpses of the primal chaos that might lie behind it.  Like all the best, most deeply ambitious writers, Anne makes culture that plumbs and enacts the essential human need for culture.

Outside Links
Mr. Burns Preview (YouTube)