David Adjmi

2010
plays

David Adjmi’s plays include Stunning (premiered at Lincoln Center Theater), The Evildoers (developed at the Sundance Institute and Royal Court Theater and premiered at Yale Rep), Marie Antoinette, Strange Attractors, Elective Affinities (which premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company) and Caligula. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and The Juilliard School. His plays have earned a Bush Artist’s fellowship, and Jerome, McKnight, Cherry Lane Theatre, and Kesselring fellowships as well as a Helen Merrill Award, a Marian Seldes-Garson Kanin Award, a Lecomte du Nouy Award, and a Steinberg Playwright Award. He is at work on a book for HarperCollins which he calls “a hybrid piece, but perhaps best described as a memoir.” He lives in Brooklyn.

The Whiting selection committee saw in David Adjmi “a truly theatrical imagination. His plays come charging to life in front of a live audience. He does things with embodied language that few young playwrights even think to try. Wildly inventive feats of juxtaposition and wit drive these pieces as they scoff at the foolish consistencies of a too-too tidy dramaturgy.”