Mallery Avidon

Mallery Avidon is a playwright, screenwriter, teacher, and dramaturg whose work blends sharp wit, surrealism, and intimate cultural commentary. Known for pushing The boundaries between fact and fiction, her plays often explore themes of belief, identity, community, and disconnection in contemporary America.

Avidon’s work has been produced at leading venues across the country. Her play O Guru Guru Guru, or Why I Don’t Want to Go to Yoga Class with You premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Mary-Kate Olsen Is In Love, which debuted at The Flea Theater, was praised for its satirical take on millennial culture and female agency. Other productions have appeared at venues including Target Margin Theater, HERE Arts Center, and the Bushwick Starr...

Mallery Avidon is a playwright, screenwriter, teacher, and dramaturg whose work blends sharp wit, surrealism, and intimate cultural commentary. Known for pushing The boundaries between fact and fiction, her plays often explore themes of belief, identity, community, and disconnection in contemporary America.

Avidon’s work has been produced at leading venues across the country. Her play O Guru Guru Guru, or Why I Don’t Want to Go to Yoga Class with You premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Mary-Kate Olsen Is In Love, which debuted at The Flea Theater, was praised for its satirical take on millennial culture and female agency. Other productions have appeared at venues including Target Margin Theater, HERE Arts Center, and the Bushwick Starr in New York, and Pavement Group in Chicago.

Her television work includes serving as a staff writer for Season 2 of HBO’s High Maintenance, and she developed shows with Paul Giamatti and Sue Naegle’s production companies. Her screenwriting voice mirrors her theatrical sensibility: smart, strange, emotionally honest, and often darkly funny.

Avidon is also a committed educator and dramaturg. She taught playwriting at Cornish College of the Arts and in public high schools through ACT Theatre’s Young Playwrights Program. She has also taught and developed new work in prisons, colleges, and independent workshops. A former co-curator of the Bushwick Starr reading series and a frequent collaborator with Target Margin Theater, Avidon has worked closely with a wide range of artists and institutions committed to formal experimentation.

A graduate of Brown University’s MFA Playwriting program, she previously earned her BFA in Original Works from Cornish College of the Arts. Her current projects include teaching art and writing workshops to unhoused folks at the Shelter where she works in Santa Cruz, and a new play called A YEAR OF DAYS, a play of poems written one day at a time.

Scripts

A Very Incomplete History of the Blue Planet

by Mallery Avidon

Synopsis

Two Aliens Travel Back in Time and witness positive love scenes between LGBTQIA youth that take place in a forest turned Wal-Mart Parking lot throughout recent American History from the 1950s into the Near Future. Teens, Aliens, Love. What More Could You Want

Two Aliens Travel Back in Time and witness positive love scenes between LGBTQIA youth that take place in a forest turned Wal-Mart Parking lot throughout recent American History from the 1950s into the Near Future. Teens, Aliens, Love. What More Could You Want

queerSpawn

by Mallery Avidon

Synopsis

queerSpawn tells the story of The Kid, a fourteen-year-old starting high school in a small town. Everyone knows he has two moms, and that's just the beginning of his trouble. While dodging bullies, The Kid invents a group of imaginary friends with whom to share his troubles, including sex/relationship advice columnist Dan Savage and Dr. McSteamy from TV's Grey’s Anatomy. But as his reality becomes more and more...

queerSpawn tells the story of The Kid, a fourteen-year-old starting high school in a small town. Everyone knows he has two moms, and that's just the beginning of his trouble. While dodging bullies, The Kid invents a group of imaginary friends with whom to share his troubles, including sex/relationship advice columnist Dan Savage and Dr. McSteamy from TV's Grey’s Anatomy. But as his reality becomes more and more hazardous, their "help" becomes less and less helpful. Staring down four more friendless years, what is a Kid to do?

"[C]ompassionate and bleakly funny…an all-too-apt expression of the interior world of a high school freshman looking at four years of the loneliness and despair that have become his everyday companions. How can you really believe that things will get better when they never seem to change?" —NY Times.

“queerSpawn is difficult to watch, but that's part of the point…[The play is] a sort of philosophical dialogue between The Kid and the social forces that have shaped his personal hell. Playwright Mallery Avidon's original research was supported by Colage, the only national organization for people raised in LGBTQ families, where she had the opportunity to interview teens and young adult children about their experiences at home and in the world. It's a timely, unique, and fascinating piece." —BroadwayWorld.com.

This Play is Published for a preview, acting editions & licensing information: http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=5029

O Guru Guru Guru, or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you

by Mallery Avidon

Synopsis

Lila grew up in an ashram, but she does not want to go to yoga class with you. Not because she doesn’t like stretching or has no discipline or worries she might be bad at it. Not because she doesn’t like you. The reason Lila doesn’t want to go to yoga class is not easy to explain—but let her try. A disarming look at the precarious process of becoming yourself.

This play is published in the Humana Festival 2013...

Lila grew up in an ashram, but she does not want to go to yoga class with you. Not because she doesn’t like stretching or has no discipline or worries she might be bad at it. Not because she doesn’t like you. The reason Lila doesn’t want to go to yoga class is not easy to explain—but let her try. A disarming look at the precarious process of becoming yourself.

This play is published in the Humana Festival 2013 Anthology: https://www.playscripts.com/play/2631

Mary-Kate Olsen is in Love

by Mallery Avidon

Synopsis

Grace is 27, married to her high-school sweetheart, makes good money, and should be way happier than she is. But her husband lost his job and now all he does is play Xbox and smoke pot and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen might be her best friends but maybe they only like her because she's their new target demographic. Or maybe…they're actually going to save her. A funny play about sad people.

"The script levels some...

Grace is 27, married to her high-school sweetheart, makes good money, and should be way happier than she is. But her husband lost his job and now all he does is play Xbox and smoke pot and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen might be her best friends but maybe they only like her because she's their new target demographic. Or maybe…they're actually going to save her. A funny play about sad people.

"The script levels some delightfully devastating shots at pop culture and its reductive treatment of women. But playwright Mallery Avidon is after something meatier than just SNL-style ridicule. She's chronicling her generation's struggle for self-definition…Avidon's style is fresh, contemporary, and…touchingly sentient." —Show Business Weekly.

"In Mallery Avidon's angst-ridden dream-comedy MARY-KATE OLSEN IS IN LOVE, a woman's lot is a sorry thing. She can't find happiness as long as she looks outward for validation, but look inside, and she may simply be a hash of pop-culture references peppered with a sense of yearning…It's a problem honestly come by: ‘How do we know what to want?'" —Time Out NY.

"MARY-KATE OLSEN IS IN LOVE raises the terrifying possibility that the onslaught of marketing campaigns and a blind faith in the inevitability of upward mobility have created unrealistic expectations for a generation of Americans, hopes that are bound to crash and burn in a conflagration of disappointment." —TheaterMania.com.

For More Information, Acting Editions & Licensing: http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=5027

For A Preview of the Script: http://www.dramatists.com/previews/5027.pdf

everyone they knew was famous

by Mallery Avidon

Synopsis

A funny sad family play about cousins and grandparents and smoking pot and secrets and skateboarding and growing up.

A funny sad family play about cousins and grandparents and smoking pot and secrets and skateboarding and growing up.