Theresa Rebeck: Precepts of Playwriting

What is central to my work is comedy. For me, there is a desperation in comedy that’s very theatrical. And that you can ultimately get a play to a place where everybody wants to just kill themselves or they can tell a joke. So, to me, that’s often where they often land. These are your choices: you can kill yourself or die or tell a joke. ~Theresa Rebeck

Theresa Rebeck is a prolific and widely produced playwright, whose work can be seen and read throughout the United States and abroad. Last season, her fifth Broadway play premiered on Broadway, making Rebeck the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time.

“Theresa Rebeck is a fierce defender of the right to bear witness, an organizer, a galvanizer always willing to take big risks for the good of the theater. She is a powerhouse and a star of the first magnitude, and everybody knows it.” — Marsha Norman

Other Broadway works include Dead Accounts; Seminar and Mauritius. Other notable NY and regional plays include: Seared (MCC), Downstairs (Primary Stages), The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Loose Knit, The Family of Mann and Spike Heels (Second Stage), Bad Dates, The Butterfly Collection and Our House (Playwrights Horizons), The Understudy (Roundabout), View of the Dome (NYTW), What We’re Up Against (Women’s Project), Omnium Gatherum (Pulitzer Prize finalist). As a director, her work has been seen at The Alley Theatre (Houston), the REP Company (Delaware); Dorset Theatre Festival, the Orchard Project and the Folger Theatre. Major film and television projects include Trouble, starring Anjelica Huston, Bill Pullman and David Morse (writer and director), “NYPD Blue,” the NBC series “Smash” (creator), and the upcoming female spy thriller 355 (for Jessica Chastain’s production company). As a novelist, Rebeck’s books include Three Girls and Their Brother and I’m Glad About You. Rebeck is the recipient of the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, a Lilly Award and more.

Rebeck and Goodman Light Up the Oral Histories: an illuminating conversation ~

Posted on June 30, 2024 by LPTWAdminOn June 3, 2024, Goodman interviewed Rebeck on the stage of Lincoln Center’s Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Oral History series.