Meron Langsner

Meron Langsner

MERON LANGSNER was one of three writers in the country selected for the pilot year of the National New Play Network Emerging Playwright Residencies, fulfilling his residency at the New Repertory Theater in Boston, Massachusetts.

His plays have been performed around the country and overseas and developed at venues that include the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, New Rep, Playwrights Commons...
MERON LANGSNER was one of three writers in the country selected for the pilot year of the National New Play Network Emerging Playwright Residencies, fulfilling his residency at the New Repertory Theater in Boston, Massachusetts.

His plays have been performed around the country and overseas and developed at venues that include the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, New Rep, Playwrights Commons (Freedom Arts Retreat & Playwrights Playground), the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, the Comparative Drama Conference, and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska (where he had the honor of returning as a featured artist).

Publishers of Meron's plays include Bloomsbury, Smith & Kraus, Applause Theatre Books, the Northwest Playwrights Alliance, YouthPLAYS, Next Stage Press, McSweeney's, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Routledge. He is also published as a scholar, humorist, journalist, and poet. Bylines include American Theatre, HowlRound, Backstage, The Theatre Times, The Sondheim Review, and The Fight Master: Journal of the Society of American Fight Directors.

Meron's plays have won awards and grants from the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and numerous other arts & theater organizations.

He was nominated for an IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Best New Play for Vagabond Theatre Group's production of Burning Up the Dictionary.

Meron is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Society of American Fight Directors. He is an alumnus of Project Y's Playwrights' Group, Athena Writes 2017, Stony Brook University's Audio Podcast Fellows, as well as the award-winning Whistler in the Dark Theatre.

He received his MFA in Playwriting from Brandeis University, and holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and a PhD in Drama from Tufts University. He also holds Executive Certificates in both Finance and Business Law from Cornell and a Certificate in Software Development from Columbia Engineering.

A first-generation American, he has lived on three continents, and four out of five boroughs of his native New York City, which he once again calls home.

Plays

  • Burning Up the Dictionary
    A story of Language, Love, Lust, and Loss. From the Vagabond Theatre Group blog: "Burning up the Dictionary, as described by Meron, feels like When Harry Met Sally but possessed by the demonic spirit of Neil LaBute. It journeys into the tenaciously crumbling relationship of two people who love and need each other but can’t find any room for trust. The play explores the personal language of every...
    A story of Language, Love, Lust, and Loss. From the Vagabond Theatre Group blog: "Burning up the Dictionary, as described by Meron, feels like When Harry Met Sally but possessed by the demonic spirit of Neil LaBute. It journeys into the tenaciously crumbling relationship of two people who love and need each other but can’t find any room for trust. The play explores the personal language of every relationship and how a common language that once kept people extremely close can also wound and drive them further apart."

    Nominated for an IRNE Award for Best New Play (Independent Reviewers of New England)

    A portion of this play (with commentary) was published in The Fight Master: Journal of the Society of American Fight Directors.
  • The Devil's Own Game
    The damned soul of Doctor Faustus, whose punishment is to inspire discoveries only to see them perverted, finds himself in the lab of a young physicist. Through the machinations of Faustus and Mephistophilis, she will either redeem the world or damn it to a new level of suffering. A contemporary remix/update of a classical archetype, influenced by the work of Neil Gamian and Foucalt.

    This play...
    The damned soul of Doctor Faustus, whose punishment is to inspire discoveries only to see them perverted, finds himself in the lab of a young physicist. Through the machinations of Faustus and Mephistophilis, she will either redeem the world or damn it to a new level of suffering. A contemporary remix/update of a classical archetype, influenced by the work of Neil Gamian and Foucalt.

    This play has been developed at the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, New Repertory Theatre through NNPN, and Whistler in the Dark Theatre Playwright Incubator Project, among other venues.
  • Over Here
    Set in New York City in the Summer of 2002, the growing friendship between an Israeli immigrant and a Palestinian-American is put into crisis by both local prejudices and events overseas.
  • Herd Immunity
    Two young mothers come to realize that their worldviews are not compatible with their friendship.
  • Report/Resist/Reclaim
    In a dystopian near-future, a married couple faces the fact that one of them is being ordered away to a labor camp. This play served as the source material for the pilot episode of the audio drama podcast Slippery Slope.
  • Masquerade
    An exploration of what happens when the mask becomes the face. - A movement piece with masks.
  • Bystander 9/11
    A documentary drama drawn from the experiences of New Yorkers during the September 11th attacks and their immediate aftermath. The story begins in the subways underneath the towers and continues in a changed world.
  • Jimmy Jim Jim & The M.F.M.
    Jimmy visits his friend in the county jail, and fills in the gaps in his memory as to how he got there.
  • The Godot Variations
    A series of mini-parodies of Samuel Beckett's existentialist classic. Among the quartet of variations are a restaurant (Waiters for Godot), a service call (Call Waiting for Godot), the outside of a stadium (Tailgating for Godot) and…whining (Whining for Godot), each an affectionate send-up of a play that has captured a strong place in the popular imagination.
  • After The Hill
    Having found themselves once more at the bottom of a steep and seemingly endless hill, Jack and Jill begin to ask themselves how they got there, and what their alternatives might be. The stakes rise when Mother Goose arrives and attempts to reassert the status quo. Their next choices will decide their fate forever.

  • An Open Book
    Who is the diary really written for? A travel journal reveals the secrets of the woman who searches for it.
  • THE ONE MINUTE, NON-MUSICAL, LA BOHÈME FOR ONE OR MORE ACTORS
    LA BOHEME, in a minute, without music.
  • Legacies
    Conflicting loyalties between family and tradition in three generations of American instructors of a Japanese martial art.
  • A Rain of Seagulls
    A parody of Chekhov's The Seagull in approximately 30 minutes.
  • Lying Makes Me Feel Like a God
    A short peek into the mind of a pathological liar (monologue)
  • Promises (Co-Authored with Julia Specht)
    A couple splits up and promises never to see each other again. Or do they?
  • NIBON (co-authored with Laura Pittenger)
    A neighborhood dojo, a deadly parrot, and a young person facing their fears

  • Deconstructing the Scream (co-authored with Laura Pittenger)
    A look inside the goings on in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream