winter miller

winter miller

Winter Miller is a founding member of the Obie-winning 13 Playwrights and was awarded a 2016 New York Foundation of the Arts grant. She is best known for her drama In Darfur which premiered at The Public Theater, followed by a standing room only performance at their 1800-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a first for a play by a woman. In Darfur won the “Two-Headed Challenge” commission from the Guthrie...
Winter Miller is a founding member of the Obie-winning 13 Playwrights and was awarded a 2016 New York Foundation of the Arts grant. She is best known for her drama In Darfur which premiered at The Public Theater, followed by a standing room only performance at their 1800-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a first for a play by a woman. In Darfur won the “Two-Headed Challenge” commission from the Guthrie and the Playwrights Center and has been produced nationally. She traveled with her then boss, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to the Sudan border to research on the ground.

Other plays include: Spare Rib (Hon. Mention Relentless Award 2016 and Kilroy’s The List 2016, multiple benefit readings in NYC); No One is Forgotten (2017 National New Play Network conference 2017, Hon. Mention Kilroy’s List 2015, developed at Salt Lake Acting Company, Powerhouse, Magic Theatre, The Lark); Look at Us (Cherry Lane Mentor Project); The Penetration Play (13P, dir Josh Hecht); Seed (NYTW Mondays@3); The Arrival (NYTW Mondays@3); and the musical Amandine (Joe’s Pub with composer Lance Horne). A collection of short and very short plays including Colored, commissioned by The New Black Fest for Facing Our Truth: 10 minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege (National Black Theater, Center Theatre Group, The Public, Woolly Mammoth, The Goodman, Hansberry Project); plays about gun control for No Passport (community theaters and colleges); She created and produced Rape Aid at The New Ohio, a variety show about not raping which included the short This is How We Do It (dir. Gaye Taylor Upchurch).

Ms. Miller’s plays have been produced by The Public, 13P, Cherry Lane, New Black Fest, Joe’s Pub, CenterStage, TimeLine, Theater J, Keen, WAM, Geva, Horizon, The Landing and performed in London and Uganda. Samuel French, Playscripts, No Passport, Smith & Kraus’ Best Stage Scenes, Best Monologues, publish her plays. Ms. Miller’s monologue, Mother to Son, is in Eve Ensler’s anthology A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer and in Best Women’s Monologues of The Millennium.

Fellowships and residencies include: Sundance, Civilians R&D, Playwrights Center Core Writer, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Lark, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, Space on Ryder Farm, and the Cherry Lane Mentor Project. She is an affiliated artist with New Georges. Commissions include: Joe’s Pub, New Black Fest, CenterStage America, No Passport, Keen Company and Theatre Askew. MFA Playwriting, Columbia University, BA Smith College.

Ms. Miller has taught playwriting at The New School MFA, Primary Stages: ESPA, SUNY Purchase BFA, and led workshops for PlayPenn, Princeton, The Cherry Lane, The Playwrights Center, Girl Be Heard, The Atlantic Theatre, Sundance, NYTW’s “Mind the Gap,” Stella Adler, Theatre Askew, Keen, Arts Connection and with youth in refugee camps in Northern Uganda and Palestine. Ms. Miller is a Certified Core Energetics Facilitator from the Institute of Radical Aliveness. She leads frequent workshops in NYC, The Warrior Writing Intensive.

Voices of Uganda invited Ms. Miller to northern Uganda to write short plays for a group of youth in a refugee camp whose lives were devastated by the Lord’s Resistance Army and AIDS. The work is chronicled in the 2013 documentary After Kony: Staging Hope. Her monologue Lifelines, has been performed by legends Ruby Dee, Liv Ullman and Alison Janney.

Ms. Miller has 70+ bylines in the Metro, Arts, and Style sections of The New York Times. She has written articles for New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Variety. She was profiled in The New Yorker, Bomb, New York Magazine, NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show and Minnesota Public Radio. At Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Winter created Team Frontal, a mentorship program for marginalized TV comedy writers. Bells and whistles at www.wintermiller.com.

Plays

  • No One Is Forgotten
    Lali and Beng are held captive.
    No one knows where they’ve been taken or if they’re alive.
    Or, maybe their story has been broadcast to the world?
    A story about intimacy, surrender, and the will to live for someone else.

  • Spare Rib
    Just imagine if Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes and Judy Chicago had a love child and it was this play? Spare Rib follows two generations of abortion providers: Harriet, a member of the underground collective Jane in the early 1970’s and Florynce, her daughter who is a contemporary abortion provider. The action rockets between three distinctive eras, early 1970’s, 30 years later and the present. Members of...
    Just imagine if Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes and Judy Chicago had a love child and it was this play? Spare Rib follows two generations of abortion providers: Harriet, a member of the underground collective Jane in the early 1970’s and Florynce, her daughter who is a contemporary abortion provider. The action rockets between three distinctive eras, early 1970’s, 30 years later and the present. Members of the cast play multiple roles as they time-bend and genre-bend. Naturalism collides with surrealism; the goddesses Kali, Oya and Mama Quilla are hunting in the Nantahala forest alongside three women barely written into history, the Empress Theodora, Shen-Tsan, (the uncredited) mother of Chinese medicine, and Madame Restelle, an abortionist in mid-1800s New England. What abortion play would be complete without a band of obstinate fetuses with strong ideas about life and death?

    In an interview with the author in Talk of the Town, The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead describes Spare Rib a "quasi-comic abortion drama." www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/cold-read
  • In Darfur
    In Darfur is the provocative tale of three lives that intersect in the most challenging of circumstances: a camp for internally displaced persons. The story follows an aid worker’s mission to protect lives, a Darfuri woman’s quest for safety and a journalist’s pursuit to deliver a front page story to call world attention to a humanitarian crisis. In Darfur is a journey of courage and humanity in the face of...
    In Darfur is the provocative tale of three lives that intersect in the most challenging of circumstances: a camp for internally displaced persons. The story follows an aid worker’s mission to protect lives, a Darfuri woman’s quest for safety and a journalist’s pursuit to deliver a front page story to call world attention to a humanitarian crisis. In Darfur is a journey of courage and humanity in the face of peril.




    “It’s an excellent poignant play.” —Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Opinions Columnist


    “A riveting and haunting play.” —Samantha Power, Pulitzer winning author, A Problem From Hell


    “Winter's play is an urgent and passionate response to a crisis unfolding at this moment.”

    —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater


    “A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.”

    —Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer winning playwright, Ruined, Sweat

    In Darfur inaugurated the Public’s Lab series in April 2007 for a sold out three week run, and filled to capacity a staged reading at the 1800-seat Delacorte Theater on July 9th, 2007, the first event of its kind for a play by a woman.
  • The Penetration Play
    Triangles are never easy. Rain wants Ash. Maggie wants Ash to marry Rich. Ash wants to have her cake and eat it. This verbally taut comedy revives a little-known adage: If at first you don't succeed, seduce your best friend's mother.



    "The cracklingly funny dialogue summons up the feel of a raunchy gossip session that includes an uncomfortable, almost violent game...
    Triangles are never easy. Rain wants Ash. Maggie wants Ash to marry Rich. Ash wants to have her cake and eat it. This verbally taut comedy revives a little-known adage: If at first you don't succeed, seduce your best friend's mother.



    "The cracklingly funny dialogue summons up the feel of a raunchy gossip session that includes an uncomfortable, almost violent game of one-upmanship."

    Jason Zinoman, The New York Times
    "...a smart, elegantly simple three-character play for strong women actors that moves like lightning -- any theatre that wouldn't touch it is missing out."

    Loren Noveck, NYTheatre.com
    "This is a witty, bitterly mocking play. Playwright Winter Miller has written a tight, carefully structured script."

    Jenny Sandman, CurtainUp
    "The dialogue that Winter Miller sets down on the stage for her characters is very conversational, which makes her characters as believable and tangible as anyone I know off-stage."

    Timothy John Papp, OffOffOnline
  • Conspicuous
    Adoption brings a multitude of diverse people together, transcending race, culture, and traditional gender roles. In this fast-paced collection of humorous and thought-provoking interconnected stories, we meet a young woman raised by two dads, an African-American family considering adopting a Native-American girl, a Korean college student who has to cope with her adopted mom's mental illness, and many...
    Adoption brings a multitude of diverse people together, transcending race, culture, and traditional gender roles. In this fast-paced collection of humorous and thought-provoking interconnected stories, we meet a young woman raised by two dads, an African-American family considering adopting a Native-American girl, a Korean college student who has to cope with her adopted mom's mental illness, and many others. Skipping freely through the present, past, and future, Conspicuous examines adoption from multiple angles, revealing its complexities and joys. (This play was specially commissioned by Playscripts for high school actors.)
  • Amandine
    Inspired by a true story, a girl born in rural France in the 19th century dies a man in Paris.

    100 minutes
    Amandine is a singular love story, inspired by the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century intersex person who was raised a girl and died a man. Amandine is born intersex and raised as a girl in the most traditional and cloistered of settings, Catholic school. She is smart,...
    Inspired by a true story, a girl born in rural France in the 19th century dies a man in Paris.

    100 minutes
    Amandine is a singular love story, inspired by the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century intersex person who was raised a girl and died a man. Amandine is born intersex and raised as a girl in the most traditional and cloistered of settings, Catholic school. She is smart, ambitious and unlike the other girls. When Amandine finds love, her body betrays her with devastating consequences. Amandine's struggle is ours: to be accepted for who we are, as we are.
  • Look At Us
    Of course there are other fish in the sea. The ocean never said we're out of fish.

    Arthur and Allison absolutely must compromise about the baby they haven’t had. Paul is great at relationships other than his own. Carl, a union man, wants a girlfriend. Marcy is taking a big risk in front of a bunch of strangers. It only takes a night to change your life.
  • The Arrival

    After an accidental murder, Batty fled her radical group, leaving her infant behind. She created a new life and for 40 years she’s lived unknown on the street where her victim once lived. Now, as a wave of domestic terrorism has everyone on lockdown, an unusual boy arrives at her door, claiming he’s her grandson. A story about atonement and revenge.
  • Animalia Arthropoda

    It’s true that life after the apocalypse is unpredictable, but these three things are constant: It sometimes rains vegetables, comparing your lover to Hitler is an ender, and all it takes is one mustache to fall madly in love. Boy is China going to be pissed when they discover the real United States of Monsanto is a total disaster.
  • SNAP*
    *Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or, Food Stamps

    SET: Minimal, except recorded video and screen necessary

    TONE: Satire played straight

    A middle class family of four embark on an experiment with empathy. They limit themselves to $5.25 per day for a week (to cover all meals) and the results are alarming. Mother gets hooked on moths, Sonnyboy can't focus...
    *Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or, Food Stamps

    SET: Minimal, except recorded video and screen necessary

    TONE: Satire played straight

    A middle class family of four embark on an experiment with empathy. They limit themselves to $5.25 per day for a week (to cover all meals) and the results are alarming. Mother gets hooked on moths, Sonnyboy can't focus on basketball because all he can think of are boys and paninis, Daddy can't get a promotion and Babydoll's undefeated wrestling career is coming to a grinding halt.

    35-40 mins