Claire Willett

Claire Willett

Portland native Claire Willett is a playwright, novelist, former Catholic youth minister, and nonprofit grantwriter. She is a past recipient of the Oregon Literary Fellowship for Drama, has received creative project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, was a founding artist of Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Work (for which she wrote five plays and...
Portland native Claire Willett is a playwright, novelist, former Catholic youth minister, and nonprofit grantwriter. She is a past recipient of the Oregon Literary Fellowship for Drama, has received creative project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, was a founding artist of Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Work (for which she wrote five plays and two librettos), and spent six years as a company member of the award-winning Portland-based writers' collective Playwrights West.

Her most recent project is HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING?, a play about the intersection of Catholicism and queerness, which will receive its first workshop in October 2022 at University of Portland, as the theatre department's first-ever commissioned original play.

Her play DEAR GALILEO was produced in Portland in 2015 by Playwrights West and CoHo Productions, where it was a Drammy Award finalist for Best Original Script, and has been developed at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture and the the Lark Play Development Center (New York, NY), Pasadena Playhouse (Pasadena, CA), Enroot Theatre Company (Seattle, WA) and Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland, OR).

Her other plays include THE BROKEN HEART SPREAD, a commission which was produced as a film by The Theatre Company (Portland, OR) in summer 2021, starring DeLanna Studi and directed by Brandon Woolley; WRITER'S BLOCK and RED SKY AT MORNING, produced by Southwest Stageworks at Wilson High School in partnership with Playwrights West; THE DEMONS DOWN UNDER THE SEA, a queer retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” produced in 2014 by Shaking-the-Tree in partnership with Playwrights West as part of a collection of world premiere Poe adaptations; the Scottish folk musical CARTER HALL (with Nashville songwriter Sarah Hart); and the chamber opera THE WITCH OF THE IRON WOOD (with composer Evan Lewis), among others.

Her first novel, THE REWIND FILES, a time travel adventure about Watergate, was released in September 2015 by Retrofit (now Axiomatic Publishing) in Los Angeles. Its sequel, ALL THINGS FALL, is scheduled to be released in September of 2022, followed by the third and final installment in the trilogy, ZERO HOUR, in early 2023.

She has a B.A. in Theatre from Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA), is a graduate of the Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program at Manhattan Theatre Club (New York, NY), and resides in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, where she has worked for over 15 years as a nonprofit grantwriter and fundraising consultant.

In her free time, she yells about politics, feminism and science fiction on the internet, where her pop culture criticism has appeared in Vice Magazine and on StarTrek.com and on podcasts such as Thank You, Five! (a musical theatre podcast), Fuckbois of Literature (a podcast about terrible people from great books), Fathoms Deep (a "Black Sails" podcast), and The Afictionados (a "Lost" podcast). She is most famous on Twitter for a 100-tweet thread about how Joey and Rachel should have ended up together on "Friends", which briefly blew up the internet in 2017 and greatly displeased Jennifer Aniston.

Plays

  • The Broken Heart Spread
    An intimate and heartfelt peek into a day in the life of a modern witch, Delphine, who is reading tarot for the guidance of her clients in their shaky human moments. Each scene of the play is based on a different tarot card for a different woman experiencing a crisis of the heart.

    An abridged version of this play was produced as a film by The Theatre Company in Portland, OR which streamed from...
    An intimate and heartfelt peek into a day in the life of a modern witch, Delphine, who is reading tarot for the guidance of her clients in their shaky human moments. Each scene of the play is based on a different tarot card for a different woman experiencing a crisis of the heart.

    An abridged version of this play was produced as a film by The Theatre Company in Portland, OR which streamed from July 23 - August 22, 2021, starring DeLanna Studi and directed by Brandon Woolley. Production information and trailer can be found here - https://www.thetheatreco.org/the-broken-heart-spread. It has not yet received a theatrical world premiere.
  • Dear Galileo
    Three women in three different times wrestle with their identity, the conflict between science and religion, and what it means to be their fathers’ daughters. In Renaissance Italy, Celeste Galilei lives under house arrest with her elderly father Galileo, the disgraced astronomer who was imprisoned for defying the Pope but yearns to secretly publish one last book. In a small town in Texas, creationist author and...
    Three women in three different times wrestle with their identity, the conflict between science and religion, and what it means to be their fathers’ daughters. In Renaissance Italy, Celeste Galilei lives under house arrest with her elderly father Galileo, the disgraced astronomer who was imprisoned for defying the Pope but yearns to secretly publish one last book. In a small town in Texas, creationist author and TV pundit Robert Snow is at a loss when his ten-year-old daughter Haley’s newfound passion for science begins to pull her away from the Biblical teachings of her upbringing. And in Swift Trail Junction, Arizona, home of the Vatican Observatory’s U.S. outpost, pregnant New York sculptor Cassie Willows arrives to find that her estranged father, world-renowned astrophysicist Jasper Willows, has gone missing. As the three stories move towards their point of convergence, the destinies of each become inextricably bound with the others, linked through time by love, family, grief, faith, the search for identity, and the wonder of the stars.

    “'Mathematics is the language in which God has created the universe,' the production’s program quotes Galileo, and that’s the territory Willett claims as her own: the convergences and clashes of science and religion as each tries to understand the shape and reason (if there is one) of the infinite.” --Oregon Arts Watch

    "A complex, century-jumping narrative [that] wears a love of learning on its sleeve . . . scrupulously shaped.” --The Oregonian

    “DEAR GALILEO is a promising new work, smart and sensitive.” --Portland Mercury

    "It’s a potent, important idea, and Willett’s smart concept and attractive characters display real potential . . . a scientifically, dramatically, and emotionally intelligent play.” --Willamette Week

  • Red Sky at Morning
    Old friendships, new crushes, and way too much pizza meet swashbuckling adventure, zombie pirates, and bonus rolls on the Wisdom Dice, as Marcus and his friends play the maritime battle role-playing game Red Sky at Morning. But when the world of the game abruptly collides with real life, each member of the group finds themselves confronting the ways we’re shaped – for bad or good – by the online communities we live in.
  • Office 62-B
    Welcome to the Department of Historical Corrections, where the enigmatic Miss M handles the cases of women whose life's accomplishments were minimized, dismissed or erased by men after their death. It's a demanding job, and today's client, Thea Philopator - more commonly known as Cleopatra - is the toughest case Miss M has has seen since her own . . .
  • The Demons Down Under the Sea
    An adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee." In a desolate mariner's graveyard in 1900's Cornwall, the melancholy Rose Barnwell has spent ten years sitting by the side of her dead lover's grave, watching the sea. But when bubbly, lively Nan Gray crosses her path, Rose begins to find herself beginning to slowly come back to life again . . . awakening the wrath of Annabel's jealous ghost.