Stacey Isom Campbell

Stacey Isom Campbell is an Alaska-raised, Southern-rooted playwright. Her plays include: 1999 (WAM Theatre, Professional World Premiere, 2025 O’Neill Center NPC Finalist, Modern Works Festival Selection, Florida Rep’s PlayLab Selection, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference Semifinalist, Valdez Theatre Conference Play Lab Selection); THE LOOPHOLE (2019 Barter Theatre LORT-production and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Nomination, Great Plains Theatre Conference Selection, O’Neill Center NPC Semifinalist); THE CONTROLLER (2024 Henley Rose Playwright Competition Finalist, Seven Devils Playwriting Conference Finalist); BUFFALO CREEK (Rose Henley Playwriting Competition Finalist, The New Harmony Project Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semifinalist; WHEN MOUNTAINS MOVE (Commission and...

Stacey Isom Campbell is an Alaska-raised, Southern-rooted playwright. Her plays include: 1999 (WAM Theatre, Professional World Premiere, 2025 O’Neill Center NPC Finalist, Modern Works Festival Selection, Florida Rep’s PlayLab Selection, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference Semifinalist, Valdez Theatre Conference Play Lab Selection); THE LOOPHOLE (2019 Barter Theatre LORT-production and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Nomination, Great Plains Theatre Conference Selection, O’Neill Center NPC Semifinalist); THE CONTROLLER (2024 Henley Rose Playwright Competition Finalist, Seven Devils Playwriting Conference Finalist); BUFFALO CREEK (Rose Henley Playwriting Competition Finalist, The New Harmony Project Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semifinalist; WHEN MOUNTAINS MOVE (Commission and Production, Lee University); MEMORY OF ICE (Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semifinalist, Seven Devil’s Theatre Conference Semifinalist, O’Neill Center NPC Semifinalist); ON THE 8’s (Dan I Rodden Jr Award Winner, Rose Henley Playwriting Competition Finalist, Great Plains Theatre Conference Selection); SMOKIN’ DEVILS (Barter Theatre’s Appalachian Festival of Plays & Playwrights Selection, Plays for the 21st Century 2nd Place, Red Clay Theatre Production). Her short plays include: CICADAS (ATHE’s New Play Development Workshop Selection) and LAUNDRY AT THE COIN & SPIN (The Collective: NY equity-showcase approved production and publication). Her work has also been seen at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, L.A. First Stage, EstroGenius Xtended, and others.

Stacey is a Fellow of Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Trillium Arts.

Scripts

The Longest Walk

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

The Longest Walk follows Mags and Fee, two female Marines dealing with severe PTSD ten years after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through a non-linear structure that moves fluidly between past and present, the play reveals the intense bond between these two women warriors and the trauma that both connects and divides them. We see them in combat zones sharing dark humor and MREs, on nighttime raids with Special...

The Longest Walk follows Mags and Fee, two female Marines dealing with severe PTSD ten years after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through a non-linear structure that moves fluidly between past and present, the play reveals the intense bond between these two women warriors and the trauma that both connects and divides them. We see them in combat zones sharing dark humor and MREs, on nighttime raids with Special Forces, surviving mortar attacks, and navigating the particular challenges faced by women in the military. Their friendship becomes a lifeline and a battleground as they grapple with survivor's guilt, the loss of fellow Marines to suicide, and the impossibility of integrating back into a world that can't understand what they've witnessed and done. The play dramatizes the interior war they face, making invisible suffering formally visible through theatrical disorientation. Ultimately, The Longest Walk is about the human cost of war—the invisible wounds that don't heal just because you come home.

1999

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

In 2019, celebrated film professor and Oscar-winning producer Emma Middleton faces professional ruin when a student's viral TikTok exposes her for assigning films by an accused rapist—but the student, Naomi, has a deeper agenda. Through alternating timelines, the play reveals how Emma and Reese's ambitious partnership was destroyed in a single night, and how Emma's choice to accept hush money and build her...

In 2019, celebrated film professor and Oscar-winning producer Emma Middleton faces professional ruin when a student's viral TikTok exposes her for assigning films by an accused rapist—but the student, Naomi, has a deeper agenda. Through alternating timelines, the play reveals how Emma and Reese's ambitious partnership was destroyed in a single night, and how Emma's choice to accept hush money and build her career on that silence has haunted both women ever since. A searing exploration of complicity, survival, and the stories we tell ourselves to live with our choices, 1999 asks whether we can separate art from the monsters who made it—and whether those who stayed silent are monsters too.

Cicadas

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

Jessie tries to help her sister Eva make homemade yogurt. She only succeeds in burning the yogurt and offending Eva. In the end, Jessie must face the hypocrisy of her choice not to get help for her addiction in the face of Eva’s chronic illness for which there isn’t any help.

Jessie tries to help her sister Eva make homemade yogurt. She only succeeds in burning the yogurt and offending Eva. In the end, Jessie must face the hypocrisy of her choice not to get help for her addiction in the face of Eva’s chronic illness for which there isn’t any help.

The Controller (or a play about a marriage)

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

When a misogynist accuses Bri of cheating at a video game, she goes to extreme measures to clear her name. In doing so, she may lose her marriage. In the end, Bri must choose whether or not to exact revenge on her accuser. The Controller is an inquiry into how we reconstruct identity—and how narrative, whether digital, theatrical, or relational, can be a site of both rupture and repair. It asks—how do you...

When a misogynist accuses Bri of cheating at a video game, she goes to extreme measures to clear her name. In doing so, she may lose her marriage. In the end, Bri must choose whether or not to exact revenge on her accuser. The Controller is an inquiry into how we reconstruct identity—and how narrative, whether digital, theatrical, or relational, can be a site of both rupture and repair. It asks—how do you maintain your sense of self when the core things that defined you are taken through chronic illness and public shame?

Buffalo Creek

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

It’s 1972 and Bailey Seeger’s 18th birthday, the age at which he is expected to start working in the coal mine with his father. Bailey overcomes his fears to begin work in the mine but quickly finds that safety regulations aren’t being followed. When the coal waste dam busts, 100 million gallons of water and coal sludge are dumped on Buffalo Creek, leaving thousands homeless and over a hundred dead. Three...

It’s 1972 and Bailey Seeger’s 18th birthday, the age at which he is expected to start working in the coal mine with his father. Bailey overcomes his fears to begin work in the mine but quickly finds that safety regulations aren’t being followed. When the coal waste dam busts, 100 million gallons of water and coal sludge are dumped on Buffalo Creek, leaving thousands homeless and over a hundred dead. Three generations of his family must come to terms with the coal company created disaster. Buffalo Creek is about the relationships between faith and family, the union and coal company, the past and present, and the region’s long-term oppression and today’s political landscape. It asks—who do you trust when everyone has betrayed you?

The Loophole

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

When Darlene and Charlene Caddell accidentally overcharge the Department of Defense $10,000 for shipping a two-dollar lug nut, they discover a loophole that will eventually net them over twenty million dollars. What begins as grief-stricken Darlene's attempt to fund charity after her son's death spirals into luxury cars, ocean-front property, and matching Mercedes—while her husband David obsesses over his dead...

When Darlene and Charlene Caddell accidentally overcharge the Department of Defense $10,000 for shipping a two-dollar lug nut, they discover a loophole that will eventually net them over twenty million dollars. What begins as grief-stricken Darlene's attempt to fund charity after her son's death spirals into luxury cars, ocean-front property, and matching Mercedes—while her husband David obsesses over his dead son's rock-climbing mentor instead of noticing his wife's transformation from Sunday school teacher to white-collar criminal. Seven years later, as the twins face the consequences of their choices, David must journey into the New Mexico desert to confront an impossible question: how did he miss the signs of his wife's unraveling, and what role did his own refusal to truly grieve play in her descent? This darkly comic drama explores how ordinary people rationalize extraordinary crimes, and how the small moments we ignore can grow into forces that destroy everything we love.

Laundry at the Coin & Spin

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

Laundry takes on new meaning when two women take refuge in a laundromat.

Laundry takes on new meaning when two women take refuge in a laundromat.

Memory of Ice

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

Nate and Zoe are glaciologists conducting research on the rate of ice flow in an outpost on Broadmore Glacier, Alaska. While the ice beneath them moves at unprecedented speed, their marriage is in crisis. Unexpectedly pregnant, Zoe wants to leave her post-graduate research, go home, and formulate a plan for how to be a glaciologist and a mother. Roger, a freelance PR consultant, arrives to get footage of the...

Nate and Zoe are glaciologists conducting research on the rate of ice flow in an outpost on Broadmore Glacier, Alaska. While the ice beneath them moves at unprecedented speed, their marriage is in crisis. Unexpectedly pregnant, Zoe wants to leave her post-graduate research, go home, and formulate a plan for how to be a glaciologist and a mother. Roger, a freelance PR consultant, arrives to get footage of the project. Meanwhile, the trio is being watched by Trapper Max, an old woman with a secret and a penchant for showing up at inopportune times. After Nate falls and breaks his leg, Max “rescues” him… or does she? Memory of Ice asks—can loss be quantified and can hope be maintained in the face of increasingly frightening conditions?

On the 8's

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

In present day Virginia, Tammy’s routine as a housewife, mother, and Weather Station watcher, are interrupted when her only daughter leaves for college and begins expressing herself in ways that land her in jail. Tammy, and her husband Ed, used to be members in the punk rock movement in New York, before they traded it in for a normal life in suburban Virginia. When Tammy finds out that her former lover, punk...

In present day Virginia, Tammy’s routine as a housewife, mother, and Weather Station watcher, are interrupted when her only daughter leaves for college and begins expressing herself in ways that land her in jail. Tammy, and her husband Ed, used to be members in the punk rock movement in New York, before they traded it in for a normal life in suburban Virginia. When Tammy finds out that her former lover, punk rock legend Bobby Foster, dies of a drug-overdose, she struggles to hold onto her normal routine.

Donna Storm, a weather personality, offers Tammy a diversion in the Weather Station, but when it’s not enough anymore to merely watch the weather, Tammy begins creating the storms in her living room. In the end, Tammy must decide to continue living her life vicariously through other people’s experiences or to go outside and face life on her own.

When Mountains Move

by Stacey Isom Campbell

Synopsis

When Mountains Move is the epic tale of Lillie Mae Bostic, told through a Chorus of Coal Miners and a bluegrass band. Due to the unusual circumstances of her birth, her father believes God has given her a Word for her people. The story, set on Black Mountain, Kentucky, follows the decade-long labor struggle of the coal miners for the basic human rights denied them in the 1930s. In the midst of the struggle...

When Mountains Move is the epic tale of Lillie Mae Bostic, told through a Chorus of Coal Miners and a bluegrass band. Due to the unusual circumstances of her birth, her father believes God has given her a Word for her people. The story, set on Black Mountain, Kentucky, follows the decade-long labor struggle of the coal miners for the basic human rights denied them in the 1930s. In the midst of the struggle, Lillie Mae searches for her Word while growing up in the Closplint Church of God, surrounded by women who join the fight for freedom. While the play is fictional, it is inspired by historical accounts of Bloody Harlan in the 1930s, the preacher-miners who secretly helped get UMWA support, and the oral histories of the people who remember the struggle. The play explores how the power of words and a little bit of faith can move mountains.