Lucy Thurber

Lucy Thurber is an American playwright based in New York City.

Career

As of 2011, Thurber was the author of ten plays: Where We’re Born, Ashville, Killers & Other Family, Stay, Bottom of the World, Monstrosity, Scarcity, The Locus, The Insurgents, and Dillingham City.

Thurber was the recipient of the 2000/2001 Manhattan Theatre Club playwriting fellowship. Her play, Bottom of the World, opened the 2010–2011 season at The Atlantic Theater Company, and was produced by WET in the winter of 2005 and was previously workshopped at The Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Center. Bottom of the World was part of The Tribeca Theater festival and received a workshop at The Public Theater. She attended New River Dramatists in North Carolina. Her play, Where We’re Born, was produced at Rattlestick Theater in the fall of 2003. Killers and Other Family was produced at Rattlestick Theater in 2009, and well as 2001. Also in 2001, she was commissioned by The Keene Theater Company to write a short piece called The Kool-Aid Smile, which was presented in “Keene America.”

Thurber was a guest artist at The Perseverance Theatre twice, where she helped to adapt both Moby-Dick and Desire Under the Elms. Her ten-minute play, Dinner, is published in a collection called Not So Sweet, sixteen plays from Soho Rep’s Ten-Minute Play Festival. She is a member of MCC Playwrights’ Coalition, Primary Stages’ writing group, and 13P. She completed a new play commissioned by Playwrights Horizons. She received a Lilly Award in 2010.

In fall of 2007, Thurber's play Scarcity was produced by Atlantic Theatre Company in its Linda Gross Theater. The play starred Kristen Johnston, Jesse Eisenberg and Michael T. Weiss.

The Insurgents involves the lead character, Sally, "brooding[,] ... carrying a rifle around ... [and being] visited by four very different revolutionary spirits from the past": John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It premiered in 2011 at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown WV. It was commissioned by CATF with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.^[1]

References

• The bio from MCC Theater at The Lucille Lortel Theatre's Playwrights' Coalition webpage, apparently dated about 2007, is either the source for much of the pre-Scarcity play history above; or the above is the source for it. There is much identical wording. Retrieved 2013-11-06.