Joy Cutler

Joy Cutler

Joy Cutler has worked as a writer and performer with the San Francisco collaborative ensemble, Elbows Akimbo, and with Berlin theater companies: The Berlin Play Actors, Out To Lunch Theater Group and The Flying Buttresses. Her stage plays, radio plays, and solo performances have been produced in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Alaska, Chicago, Berlin, Amsterdam and Jakarta. She was a playwright...
Joy Cutler has worked as a writer and performer with the San Francisco collaborative ensemble, Elbows Akimbo, and with Berlin theater companies: The Berlin Play Actors, Out To Lunch Theater Group and The Flying Buttresses. Her stage plays, radio plays, and solo performances have been produced in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Alaska, Chicago, Berlin, Amsterdam and Jakarta. She was a playwright participant the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska in 2013-2017. Her full-length play, Pardon My Invasion was produced at Plays and Players Theater in Philadelphia and The Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco. Her one-act play, The Big Crunch, won the "Audience Choice" award in Luna Theater's Future Fest. Joy is a mentor-guide for the 2014-2015 Emerging Artists Residency (EAR) in Philadelphia. Her script, Reaching Beatrice, was accepted in 2015 for development by The Inkwell in Washington, D.C. and participated in a collaboration with San Francisco composer, Beth Custer, at Wildacres artist-in-residence program in Little Switzerland, N.C. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MA in Interdisciplinary Art and Performance from San Francisco State University. She divides her time between Philadelphia and NYC.
Contact: info@joycutler.com

Plays

  • My Beshert, Or the Curse of the Stolen Potatoes by Joy Cutler
    Cast: 
    1
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    Genre: biography, comedy + 1 more
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    Keyword: family, Genetic disease + 3 more
    Genre: biography, comedy, drama
    Keyword: family, Genetic disease, sibling rivalry, magical thinking, comic drama
    A solo performance about a family's genetic history and how a 100 year old curse might have set a disease in motion throughout the family.
  • Cathy the Great by Joy Cutler
    Cast: 
    4–5
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    Genre: comedy, fantasy
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    Keyword: comedy, life after death + 3 more
    Genre: comedy, fantasy
    Keyword: comedy, life after death, feminism, Catherine the Great, reincarnation
    Catherine the Great sits in a café that exists somewhere between her former life as the Empress of Russia and her soul’s next lifetime as a girl born into 1950’s America. The problem is she doesn’t want to be born again and refuses to let go of her former glorious and infamous identity.
  • Reaching Beatrice by Joy Cutler
    Cast: 
    8–14
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    Genre: dark comedy, drama
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    Keyword: life and death, comic + 6 more
    Genre: dark comedy, drama
    Keyword: life and death, comic, magical realism, medical, spectacle, journey, Dante's Inferno, music
    Reaching Beatrice is a darkly comic drama that imagines Dante’s Inferno as a hospital elevator. Danny enters a hospital for the purpose of meeting Beatrice, a woman he contacted online, but discovers once he walks on the elevator it’s not so simple to get off it again. Danny has two guides on his journey - Virgil, the elevator operator, who escorts him through the hospital’s seemingly endless levels; and Gerald...
    Reaching Beatrice is a darkly comic drama that imagines Dante’s Inferno as a hospital elevator. Danny enters a hospital for the purpose of meeting Beatrice, a woman he contacted online, but discovers once he walks on the elevator it’s not so simple to get off it again. Danny has two guides on his journey - Virgil, the elevator operator, who escorts him through the hospital’s seemingly endless levels; and Gerald, Danny’s deceased father, who guides him through his anger and fear of illness and death. Only then is he prepared to reach Beatrice.
  • The Craving by Joy Cutler
    Recommendations: 3
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    Cast: 
    2
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    Genre: comedy
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    Keyword: amnesia, baseball + 3 more
    Genre: comedy
    Keyword: amnesia, baseball, out-of-body experience, baby, marriage
    Iris makes many strange and complicated demands on her husband, Denny. He knows pregnant women are prone to outlandish cravings and he's desperate to satisfy her impossible wishes, but the harder he tries the more frustrated she becomes. He anxiously looks forward to the birth of their first child, but Iris' pregnant belly is only another one of her tricks to restore her husband back to the man she...
    Iris makes many strange and complicated demands on her husband, Denny. He knows pregnant women are prone to outlandish cravings and he's desperate to satisfy her impossible wishes, but the harder he tries the more frustrated she becomes. He anxiously looks forward to the birth of their first child, but Iris' pregnant belly is only another one of her tricks to restore her husband back to the man she used to love before his bizarre accident that day on the baseball field.

  • Pardon My Invasion by Joy Cutler
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    6
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    Genre: comedy, dark comedy
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    Keyword: Iraq war, gender bending + 4 more
    Genre: comedy, dark comedy
    Keyword: Iraq war, gender bending, trauma, SEXUAL AWAKENING, pulp fiction, desire
    In this eccentric, unpredictable comedy Rita Lourdes, a single mother and writer of pulp fiction, is swigging her way through writer's block when her 13-year-old daughter Penny bursts in her office to alert her mother that "something really weird" is happening inside her. It soon becomes clear that an AWOL soldier, Private Malcolm Jack from Iraq, has taken refuge in Penny's body. He not...
    In this eccentric, unpredictable comedy Rita Lourdes, a single mother and writer of pulp fiction, is swigging her way through writer's block when her 13-year-old daughter Penny bursts in her office to alert her mother that "something really weird" is happening inside her. It soon becomes clear that an AWOL soldier, Private Malcolm Jack from Iraq, has taken refuge in Penny's body. He not only won't leave, but is holding Penny hostage and won't allow Rita to speak to her. Although Penny's hormonally-charged and changing body holds alien surprises for Jack, it ultimately fails to scare him away; the trauma of the war and what he did there freaks him out much more than living inside a pubescent girl. Rita tries every trick she can think of to get Private Jack to vacate her daughter, to no avail. Even the intervention of Private Jack's imaginary bullying sergeant and Rita's pulp character, the enticing bombshell Honey Babe, can't move the shell-shocked and well-trained soldier. It takes someone who has experienced the war firsthand to convince him to leave the girl in peace and return to Iraq to complete his mission.

  • Nightshift(ing) by Joy Cutler
    Cast: 
    7–13
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    Genre: comedy, dark comedy + 2 more
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    Keyword: spectacle, Surreal + 6 more
    Genre: comedy, dark comedy, drama, musical
    Keyword: spectacle, Surreal, ensemble, hospitals, loss, alternative musical theater, oddball, life and death
    Overworked and sleep-deprived intern Dr. Quinn stumbles through the everyday madness of a hospital emergency department when his deceased sister shows up demanding her release from his memories. Told in the form of a music-fueled comic hallucination, Nightshift(ing) is an investigation into loss and sibling relationships.