Lucas Hnath Selected Works

Lucas is a playwright. Steve is a magician. Lucas asked Steve to show him some magic tricks. Steve did. And this is what happened.

Everyone who ever died is still here, just in a different part of here. Linda can communicate with them. And if you believe, she can make you hear them, too — in the thin place, the fragile boundary between our world and the other one. With acuity and relentless curiosity, Lucas Hnath’s play transforms the theater into an intimate séance, crafting an unnerving testament to the power of the mind, which has a mind of its own.  

Dana was a psych ward chaplain. Jim was a patient, an ex-convict who told her he was searching for redemption. Dana H. recounts the harrowing true story of the five months Dana was held captive—trapped in a series of Florida motels, disoriented, terrified, and with her life in Jim's hands. Told in Dana's own words and reconstructed for the stage by her son, playwright Lucas Hnath, this innovative work of theatre shatters the boundaries of the form and of our understanding of good and evil.

In the final scene of Ibsen's 1879 ground-breaking masterwork, Nora Helmer makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event—when Nora slams the door on everything in her life—instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, many years have passed since Nora’s exit. Now, there’s a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind?

Imagine that in an alternate universe, very much like our own, is another world where a woman named Hillary is trying to become president of a country called the United States of America. In a hotel room in New Hampshire in 2008, Hillary is poised to lose her last Primary Election. When her husband Bill arrives in the middle of the night to offer support, he turns the campaign upside down. Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton is a fast-paced, no-holds-barred glimpse into a political storm of another world, a 2008 Primary Election fantasy that explores the extraordinary sacrifices one is willing to make in order to gain ultimate power.

Ray’s swum his way to the eve of the Olympic trials. If he makes the team, he’ll get a deal with Speedo. If he gets a deal with Speedo, he’ll never need a real job. So when someone’s stash of performance-enhancing drugs is found in the locker room fridge, threatening the entire team’s Olympic fate, Ray has to crush the rumors or risk losing everything. A sharp and stylish play about swimming, survival of the fittest, and the American dream of a level playing field—or of leveling the field yourself.  

It's December 2010. Infirm Maxine thinks her daughter is paying Nurse Tina to gently nudge her into the grave before the new year. Maxine thinks Tina's doing this so her daughter doesn't have to pay hefty estate taxes, taxes that take effect on January 1. Nurse Tina adamantly denies Maxine's accusations, but when Maxine offers Tina a portion of her sizable estate on the condition that she lives until the 1st, Tina changes her tune. But of course, the plan doesn't go according to plan.

To understand light and optics better, young Isaac Newton inserted a long needle "between my eye and the bone, as near to the backside of my eye as I could." Why take such a risk? Lucas Hnath reimagines the contentious, plague-ravaged world Newton inhabited in Isaac's Eye, exploring the dreams and longings that drove the rural farm boy to become one of the greatest thinkers in modern science.

Twenty years ago, Pastor Paul's church was nothing more than a modest storefront. Now he presides over a congregation of thousands, with classrooms for Sunday School, a coffee shop in the lobby, and a baptismal font as big as a swimming pool. Today should be a day of celebration. But Paul is about to preach a sermon that will shake the foundations of his church's belief. A big-little play about faith in America—and the trouble with changing your mind.

Lucas Hnath’s darkly clever A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Life of Walt Disney centers on the reading, in a generic corporate conference room, of a stylized screenplay written by the great man himself, in the ultimate act of self-mythologizing. It’s being read by the people it’s about—Walt himself, his brother/henchman Roy, and Walt’s resentful daughter and her ex-jock husband. It's about Walt’s last days on earth. It's about a city he's going to build that's going to change the world. And it's about his brother. It's about everyone who loves him, and how sad they're going to be when he's gone. Can Walt control the future from the grave? Why does his daughter hate him so much? Were thousands of lemmings harmed in the making of a famous Disney nature film? Stay tuned . . .