Jami Brandli

*Winner of 2023 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award
*Winner of 2023 Stanley Drama Award

The Magician’s Sister follows the story of two sisters: the aspiring Magician driven by being the best, and the play’s narrator, who somewhat reluctantly serves as her “Wise Assistant.” When the Magician purposely disappears herself and leaves behind mysterious clues to solve, the Wise Assistant becomes obsessed with finding her. As the sisters’ story dramatically unfolds over the span of thirty years—interweaving the present and the past—we witness the sisters struggle to fulfill their collective goals and conflicting individual desires, while they strive to perfectly execute Houdini’s famous “Metamorphosis” illusion. But at what cost? The Magician’s Sister explores the complexities of sisterhood, the ripple effect of family trauma, and the complicated pursuit and price of “being special,” while also incorporating the stories of real, historical female magicians and plenty of on-stage magic.

*The Magician's Sister was written as part of The Center Theatre Group's Los Angeles Writer's Workshop 21/22 and received a public presentation at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, September 2022.

A family dramedy about evolving heroes, memory keepers, monsters and early onset Alzheimer's.

Development:
-The Caregiver's Guide recently received a workshop and reading as as part of the Kayenta New Play Lab in St. George, sponsored in part by the NEA; August 2024

-2020 Under Construction playwright; play initially written under the auspices of The Road Theatre
-Under Construction Reading Festival with The Road Theatre (Virtual), January to February 2021
-Under Construction Reading Festival with The Road Theatre (in person!), Sept 2021

The Odyssey reimagined as a rhapsodic dramedy.
O, a childless female neurobiologist in her 40s, is blindsided by her husband who wants a divorce, but he refuses to leave the house. With that, her life is upended and she’s thrown into an epic couch-hopping odyssey. As O hops from one couch to the next, we’ll not only learn about the science behind love and heartbreak, O discovers unconventional and magical ways to reassemble the blown-up pieces of her life while she struggles to find her way back toward a “new home.”

Development:
Selected for The Road Theatre's Tenth Annual Summer Playwrights Festival, 2019, Los Angeles
The Playwrights Union First Peak Reading Series, June 2018

The near future. Former biographer Pauline Grey has shut herself and her daughter Ava away in a remote cabin in Angeles National Forest for nearly a year. Pauline will not let Ava go until she has the answers she is desperately seeking. But when a solar flare storm hits, cutting the women off from communication with the outside world, and a downed pilot appears at the cabin asking for help, Pauline's reality is challenged in more ways than one.

Development and Accolades:
Selected for Kitchen Dog Theater's 2022 New Works Festival, Dallas.
Selected for The Road Theatre's 12 Annual Summer Playwrights Festival, 2021, Los Angeles.
Finalist for 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

The Romeo and Juliet Senior Citizens Project—A Comedy
Lucas, a recent Yale MFA graduate, is hired to direct an abridged production of Romeo and Juliet for a local senior citizens retirement facility. Hilarious complications arise among the elder actors during rehearsals as an unexpected romance re-blossoms between Rich and Rose, the two star-crossed lovers/residents at the facility. As this comedy about second chances unfolds, we’ll watch both Lucas and his cast of headstrong seniors wrestle with Shakespeare and real-life drama. But will they be able to come together as a team and actually pull off opening night? The odds are against them, but the play must go on…no matter what.

Visiting Hours; Part Four of Re-envisioned Greek Myth Cycle
A reclaiming of the Persephone myth, now set in a psychiatric hospital, Visiting Hours follows the arduous journey of Stephie Green, a middle-aged music teacher who must break free from her complicated past in order to be reunited with her family.

Reading at The Road Theatre Company as part of their 2020 Summer Playwrights Festival #11

Nominated for best Playwriting for an Original Play; Los Angeles Ovation Awards.
In 2018, BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) received a joint-world premiere with Moxie Theatre (San Diego) and Promethean Theatre (Chicago), ending with Moving Arts’ production at Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles (LA Times Critic’s Choice and Ovation Recommended).
Winner of The Great Plains Theatre Conference's Holland New Voices Award. Named on The Kilroys' THE LIST of the 46 most recommended plays written by female playwrights. Finalist for O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and The Source Festival. Selected readings at The Antaeus Company in Los Angeles, HERE Arts Center in NYC, The Hearth Collective hosted by Portland Center Stage, and a Workshop Presentation with Moving Arts in Los Angeles.

It's 1960 in North Orange, NJ. Clytemnestra and Medea are now housewives with a pill addiction, and Antigone is the teenage girl next door who is in love with a black boy. On the surface, they're seemingly blissful to follow the "rules” of Emily Post, the American author famous for writing on etiquette. But that's just the surface. Then Cassandra, a black working girl, moves into their neighborhood and all routines are interrupted. Cassandra is determined to finally break the curse of Apollo, the gorgeous and egotistical god who gave her this “gift” of prophecy but made it so no one would ever believe her. He makes it clear his curse is practically indestructible: all she has to do is convince someone to believe her. Can Cassandra convince these women they now have choices in this modern era? That they don't have to live a doomed existence? Can all four women escape their ongoing fate?

Through the Eye of a Needle received is world premiere with The Road Theatre in Los Angeles, 2018.

Through the Eye of a Needle (formerly known as A Merry Little Christmas)
Workshop with Launch Pad at UC Santa Barbara, July 2017;
Finalist for ID Theater, Seven Devils Conference, 2017;
Finalist for LOCAL Theater's LOCAL Lab, 2017;
Semi-finalist for O'Neill Playwrights Conference, 2017;
Semi-finalist for Bay Area Playwrights Festival, 2017;
Selected for The Road Theatre's Seventh Annual Summer Playwrights Festival, 2016, Los Angeles

Through the Eye of a Needle is a working middle-class family dramedy about the Keen family dealing with the death of their daughter, Dana, a navy corpsman who recently died in the Iraq War. Larry copes with a tumbler of scotch or five, Barbara stubbornly sets an extra plate setting, while their straight-edge teenage daughter, Samantha, secretly uses Twitter to create a protest on the George Washington Bridge. Much to Larry’s annoyance, the self-righteous Pastor Bill Towers and his fragile wife, Shirley, invite themselves over for Christmas Eve dinner, and then Nasser, an Iraqi refugee, arrives at their door unannounced. They quickly learn he was Dana’s trusted military interpreter and that Dana has given Nasser as a “Christmas gift.” As they fight over to keep Nasser or not, tempers fly and secrets are revealed. Will the Keens be pulled further apart or will they find grace and redemption in this unexpected gift?

World premiere with The Inkwell Theater Company in Los Angeles, December 2018.

Workshop production with The Inkwell Theater Company in Los Angeles, December 2016. Finalist for The Source Festival. Semi-finalist for The Bay Area Playwrights Foundation. Selected readings Moving Arts MADlab Reading Series, Playwrights Union First Peak Reading Series.

The Brontë sisters, modern day, Christmas Eve. Due to the death of their brother, Charlotte has dropped out of society and joined a commune on Gondol Island. So Emily and Anne build a canoe to rescue her. In this off-center dramedy about family, social media, fame, the holidays and the perfect cupcake, individual secrets and desires are revealed which could tear the sisters apart.

Technicolor Life premiered as part of the 2015 Women’s Voices Theater Festival and received its Australian premiere in 2017.
Winner of The Aurora Theater Company's Global Age Project (GAP) Prize, John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award, and Ashland New Plays Festival. Finalist for 2016 PEN Literary Award for Drama, Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship and O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Readings at New York Theatre Workshop and The Lark. Fellow at WordBRIDGE.

Maxine, a book smart teenager, is caught between her older sister, a wounded soldier who just returned from the war in Iraq, and her ailing grandmother with a flair for American Musicals. With the help of her new imaginary friends—Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—Maxine secretly creates a dating profile for her sister and successfully sets her up with another wounded vet. Life takes a darker turn when her grandmother announces she'll be ending her life and wants her family to support her final wish by throwing her a good-bye party. With that, Maxine has to grow up fast.

Workshop presentation with MOXIE; Feb 2018, San Diego. Finalist for the 2017 Source Festival. Visiting Playwright at Loyola Marymount University with a workshop presentation; 2016 Fall, Los Angeles. Visiting Playwright for UC Santa Barbara’s LAUNCH PAD: New Plays in Process. Semi-Finalist O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

Part epic and part grotesque comedy, ¡SOLDADERA! is set in the Mexican Revolution during The Day of Dead Feast. A teenage girl with face blindness finds the camp where her mother fled to become a revolutionary soldadera (female solider). She is taken in by the other soldaderas and unintentionally catches the eye of the lascivious, god-fearing colonel. Upon learning her mother died bravely in battle, the girl decides to become a soldadera. This sets off the unveiling of secrets that threatens to tear the camp apart.

NOTE: The current uploaded draft is a work in progress.

This is a work-in-progress

Part Two of Reclaimed Greek Myth Cycle
A modern-day reclaiming of the Medusa myth set on a college campus. The Golden Boy can run, but he can't hide.

-*Atwater Village Theater, Los Angeles World Premiere, March-April 2013
*Received 2013 Los Angeles ARC Grant for this production
-HotCity Theater, St. Louis Premiere, May 2010
-2011 Nomination for Kevin Kline Award for “Outstanding New Play”

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS A BITCH. It’s the morning after a big party celebrating the publication of Josh’s first novel. His top student, childhood best friend, and literary agent unwittingly meet in his apartment and find themselves trapped by the fierce winter storm raging outside which threatens to cause a State of Emergency for the Boston area. Anxiously awaiting Josh’s return, the three begin sifting through the cigarette butts and plastic cups to clean up last night’s mess, until the discovery of a mysterious gun triggers unexpected revelations about the man they each deeply love.

A married couple have their last date at their special spot in the woods.

NOTE: "Epic Love" can be performed outdoors or indoors.

Version #1: A young married couple struggles to adjust to their new pandemic living situation while their therapist wrestles with her own problems.

Version #2: A long-time married couple struggles to adjust to their new pandemic living situation while their therapist wrestles with her own problems.

NOTE: This piece can be done on Zoom or live/on-stage.

A young woman does her first Zoom audition while she wrestles with her inner darkness.

NOTE: This piece can be done on Zoom or live/on-stage

Late for brunch with his in-laws, Robert tries to get his son, Bobby Jr., down from a tree. As Bobby Jr. continues to refuse to come down, Robert discovers things about his son and himself.

B and C try to take a simple drive to a coffee shop. But there's a problem. B has a phobia of cars, and C has a phobia of small spaces. As the two phobics struggle to put the key in the ignition and close the door, they end up bearing their hearts and falling for each other.

NOTE: "Flooding" can be performed outdoors or indoors.

In the middle of the night, Lilith, a difficult widow, is visited by Moon Man, who has traveled from the moon to keep her company. Although Lilith tells Moon Man to leave, she is torn between wanting him to actually go and wanting him to stay. So she calls her son, Frankie, pretending that the house is on fire. When Frankie arrives, he cannot see Moon Man and finally reaches the end of his patience with his mother's lying.

Elliot and Maggie, a married couple diseased with a deep sadness, are desperate to get back into bed. But here’s an undeniable bump under the covers and they are forced to face a recent tragedy.