Kristen Palmer

How does the me-too era make us reevaluate how we feel about the people we love? When Jenna’s charismatic former teacher visits, Jenna grapples with the influence he has had on her and her husband’s divergent careers in theater. Generational expectations clash with sexism and economic realities around one dinner table in the suburbs.

A re-imagining of the Persephone myth into the era of climate collapse.

After Warren proposes to Josie, she decides she must make one last attempt to find her long-lost father before she walks down the aisle. What she finds instead is a dangerous, seductive world of secrets and magic from which she may not want to escape. Once Upon a Bride There Was a Forest is a lyrical, haunting, and surprisingly funny fairy tale about children and parents, forgetting and remembering, and the power of a good story to capture us or set us free.

"Playwright Kristen Palmer crafts a contemporary fairytale that feels timeless. She gives us a classic hero’s journey and a variation on princess tales while subtly subverting and exploring classic tropes of the genre. Evil queens, magic spells, true love quests: Palmer touches on all these without patting herself on the back or spelling things out for the audience. She gives Once Upon A Bride... a dream-like feeling that weaves its own lyrical spell." Amanda LaPergola, Theatre is Easy

The over-achieving daughter, Stevie, returns home and falls through the ice. Her PhD has stalled as she witnesses its subject, the Cryosphere, disappear due to our warming climate. Coming home to the suburbs of Washington DC seeking a respite, she finds instead her mother and younger sister frozen in their own isolation. Overwhelmed by her sense of impotence to change anything globally Stevie's attempts to impact her world locally seem equally unmanageable - until actions are taken - a kiss, a swim, a gun-shot - a connection.

D’lady returns home after years of wandering and expects everyone to greet her with open arms, instead her arrival is met with closed doors and accusations and she must figure out where she fits in the new landscape.

"Hometown is a metaphor for the relationships that have made us who we are. Palmer's exploration of her characters' reasons for clinging to one another is like a treasure map, giving up one clue at a time and concealing the reward till near the end. This map is well worth following, for it illuminates the mysteries of ordinary life and our hopes for happiness." Kat Chamberlain, ITN Review

A paranoid and increasingly hysterical domestic drama exploring what ‘safety’ means in a society that has chosen commerce and hierarchy over community care by teasing out the death wish moving below the surface of the patriarchy. Single set.

Penny's a life guard, just graduated high school and is figuring what's next. Beatty's dropped out and hanging around the pool. Josh's swimming laps over his summer vacation from teaching high school English.

A hyper-real dip into a moment of reckoning.

A re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream weaving a conservative Christian community, a commune of Radical Queer Faeries, trailer park boys, and art school drop outs into a theatrical event for today.

The play follows the original, nearly scene for scene and launches straight into the action. Language-driven and embracing the setting of the Appalachian, Midsouthern states, we follow the lovers, here Sandra and Mia on their escape to the promise of Richmond and a more liberal community. Their christian community’s rejection of their partnership leads them to the woods where they collide with Duke and Hicks. Duke is roiling over his ex Melli’s choice to raise their son in a Radical Queer Faerie commune and with his buddy Hicks (and a knowledge of psychedelics) he’s planning a humiliation and revenge.

Amidst this, the Rude Mechanicals, here a performance art ensemble, are putting together a show for the Mayor’s wedding. The open call for acts assuring their first public audience - and an opportunity to launch their vision.

Music, dance, spectacle and the magic of the original seeps into a new play for contemporary audiences (and artists).

In the year 2000, in New York City, Suze and Charlie answer phones at the TimeLife Books office. They fill orders for CD sets, Groovy Sounds of the 70s, Moody by Moonlight and other compilations. They process requests for books of general knowledge, including Folklore in America, The Sciences, History. They are being phased out, these easy to read summaries of the world’s information, and a new digital age is on the horizon.

All the rules have changed and yet, the cute white guy always ends up winning.

A comedy about privilege in a world before smart phones.

The play opens in the parking lot of a disintegrating motel on the outskirt of the district. A group of agents put a plan in motion to locate Milla, a daughter of a dissident, reported to be dead. In one of the rooms she is being secretly kept by Clyde, one of the agents now charged with finding her. She is often addled from drug use, but is kindling the will to ask the questions no one is asking - why, who's orders, and where else could they go? The play pits coarse dialogue, familiar archetypes, and slapstick violence against heightened language and moments of serenity to ask serious questions about violence, individual agency and belief.

For Cara and Andrew it is the end of summer, the end of college, and the beginning of everything else but first they must say goodbye.

"It's the oldest story in the world—boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl—but it feels new again every time it happens to you. And as an audience member at Kristen Palmer's play Departures, you feel like it's happening to you all over again, because director Kyle Ancowitz's visceral production puts the audience in such intimate contact with the stage that you're (literally) trapped in the bedroom with a couple as they work out their relationship. The production makes physical the play's emotional subtext, its structural metaphors, in rich and powerful ways." - Loren Noveck, nytheater.com

"These two may speak less poetically than those star-crossed lovers, but there's something more immediate in their contemporarily beautiful words. By staying simple and true, with a fine cast and focused direction, Departures is a quiet marvel on its own; not meant to be compared with Shakespeare, but of fine caliber all the same." Aaron Riccio, Theater Talk's New Theater Corps

In the Spring of 1968 on a rural college campus in the mid-west, Gracie dreams of Bobby Kennedy and he dreams back at her. A play that looks at a moment that shook america through the eyes of one young woman and wonders how her choices ripple out to the present day.

Meg's yoga studio is barely getting by, though she's committed to the local neighborhood and to the community she's gathered at her studio. Her partner, Frida wants to add Spin and maybe some of that car-pulling or whatever they do at the garage down the road. Meg creates a position for Amira, a young Syrian refugee, at the studio.

The convergence of worlds; the attempt to create a safe space; the dream of community and fulfilling lives and the limits of good intentions.

A man receives a terminal diagnosis. The Doctor sends him to Spence. Spence is a specialist, not in the direct treatment of the disease, but in the oblique caring for the person. The man feels that he knows when the disease began, when the cells turned against him and he starts a journey west to try to correct his mistake.

Along the way he chokes on a sandwich.

He is saved by Bickie and Jess, teenagers running from a very bad thing. They decide to travel together.

A play about who saves who and how.

About the unrelenting movement of lives and the death that ends it.

About going west by any means necessary.

Mai’s mom died and everyone is home drinking about it. Mai left her life behind to be with her family, but parts of her life won't let her go. A play about what we lose and what we keep in order to go on.

To be performed in a small space, ideally a basement, a backroom. Someplace safe. THE STRAY DOG takes its inspiration from the St. Petersburg cabaret of the same name where Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandlestam, Mayakovsky and others read their poetry in the early 1900s. This play takes place in the present, amidst the ceremonies of a group devoted to the adoration of these poets on a night when their priestess is teetering on the brink. A theatrical event balanced between the real and the imagined about what makes the heart sing - and what makes that stop.

Set in rural Iowa, Sacrifice is a play about the broken heart of the mid-west. About a young girl named Emmie who is looking at the state of things and figuring out what must be done. About a corporate mentor with other motives. About how to get a mother back. About what needs to be sacrificed.

Beth and Daniel used to be in love, young artists ready to take on the world. And then, he became successful and she got married and had a son.

Now he's calling her at night and she's sneaking to the city for a visit, creating a dream of an affair - intoxicating and hang-over inducing.

What love remains when there is nowhere left to go?

Maureen gets her new furniture delivered, but Ed can't get it down the well.

On a train through America, talking across the aisle.

Therapeutic Breakdown in a zoom room at the beginning of the Corona Pandemic.

at a nurse's station in a large hospital the workday unspools.

A short play about waiting in cars for your friends to get their shit together.