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The Stagecraft podcast is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of interviews with playwrights (and musical book writers) of shows opening on Broadway and off-Broadway.
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Guest: Sarah Gancher
Sarah Gancher is a playwright who loves epic stories, big ideas, and deep comedy. Her most frequent subject is how history is reflected in individual lives—how places, communities, and debates evolve over time. Her plays have been produced or developed at London’s National Theatre, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, The Public, New York Theater Workshop, The Atlantic, Steppenwolf, New York Stage and Film, Ars Nova, Women’s Project, The Flea, LaMama, P73, PS122, NYC SummerStage, Seattle Rep, Hartford Stage, RoundHouse, Mosaic (DC), the Great Plains Theater Conference, and Telluride Theatre, among others. She has been a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, a member of P73’s writer’s group Interstate 73, a Writing Fellow with The Playwrights’ Realm, and a member of the Ars Nova Play Group.
Sarah is the winner of the New York Stage and Film Founder’s Award, the AR Gurney Prize, the Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission, and residencies from the Hermitage, Jewish Plays Project, Tofte Lakes, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, which presented Hungarian language staged readings of three plays from her 7th cycle (Seder, Klauzál Square, and Five Mothers.)
She frequently collaborates with devising ensembles such as Colorado’s Telluride Theatre, Hand2Mouth from Portland, Oregon, NYC’s The TEAM, and Blue Man Group. She was the collaborating playwright on Mission Drift, a musical about capitalism and the myth of the frontier written with director Rachel Chavkin, composer Heather Christian, and The TEAM (Coimbra, Lisbon, Salzburg, Edinburgh Fringe, PS 122 COIL Festival, Perth, Hong Kong, and London’s National Theatre; winner of Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, Scotsman Fringe First, Herald Angel, Guardian Best of 2011, nom, Drama League for Distinguished Production of a Musical.) She also has an ongoing collaboration with rock band The Bengsons, writing two musicals with them: The Lucky Ones, a commission for Ars Nova, and Hundred Days, which had its New York premiere at the 2017 Under the Radar festival at the Public.
She has worked behind the scenes at The Colbert Report, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, The Big Apple Circus, and Norway’s Stellapolaris, among others. As a jazz violinist, Sarah has played in groups from New Orleans to Budapest. A proud Oakland native, she currently lives in Queens. MFA: NYU.
New York Theatre Workshop: Hundred Days
Host: Jan Simpson | [email protected] | Facebook | Twitter
Broadway & Me
JAN SIMPSON is the Director of the Arts and Culture Journalism program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, and also writes for TDF Stages, American Theater and has her own blog at Broadway & Me.
