Michaela Goldhaber

Michaela Goldhaber

Michaela (Mickey) Goldhaber is a feminist playwright, director, and dramaturg based in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose works include The Lady Scribblers, The Rehab Follies, and What Does it Matter? A Morality adapted from the short story by E. M. Forster.
In New York, she co-founded and served as Artistic Director for Flying Fig Theatre, a company whose mission was to tell women’s stories on stage by...
Michaela (Mickey) Goldhaber is a feminist playwright, director, and dramaturg based in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose works include The Lady Scribblers, The Rehab Follies, and What Does it Matter? A Morality adapted from the short story by E. M. Forster.
In New York, she co-founded and served as Artistic Director for Flying Fig Theatre, a company whose mission was to tell women’s stories on stage by commissioning new works and rediscovering plays from the past. For Flying Fig, she directed The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret by Susanna Centlivre, Shiloh Rules by Doris Baizley, and The Gut Girls by Sarah Daniels, and developed and produced two world premieres by Ellen K. Anderson, Shirtwaist and New Amsterdames. Her mission continues to be telling women’s stories on stage, and as associate editor for Women Arts’ blog she works as an advocate for gender parity in theatre.
Her plays have had staged readings at Playwrights Foundation, Central Works Writers Workshop, Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, Butterfield 8 Theatre Company, The Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, and Symmetry Theatre.
In San Francisco, she has directed for Boxcar Theatre, the Olympians Festival, the Playwrights’ Center, and the Center for Sex and Culture. She is the director of Wry Crips, a theatre company for women with disabilities in Berkeley, where she is guiding the process of creating a new ensemble play, a sci-fi comedy.
She has worked as a dramaturg and assistant director with the Geffen Playhouse, ACT, Central Works, Aurora Theatre Company, Milwaukee Rep, California Shakespeare Festival, San Jose Rep, and Berkeley Rep.
Mickey is a stroke survivor, and wrote about her Post Stroke return to directing for Theatre Bay Area Magazine. http://www.theatrebayarea.org/news/news.asp?id=163632
A graduate of Tufts University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Mickey has an MFA in directing from UCLA.

Plays

  • The Rehab Follies by Michaela Goldhaber
    Cast: 
    8–10
    ·
    Genre: comedy, dark comedy + 2 more
    ·
    Keyword: disability, Recovery + 2 more
    Genre: comedy, dark comedy, movement/physical, musical
    Keyword: disability, Recovery, medical satire, contemporary New York City
    The Rehab Follies is a semi-autobiographical absurdist comedy with fanciful musical numbers about a young woman recovering from a stroke in a geriatric facility in Manhattan. It is written for a diverse company of actors and musicians with and without disabilities.
  • The Lady Scribblers by Michaela Goldhaber
    Recommendations: 4
    ·
    Cast: 
    9–10
    ·
    Genre: comedy, docudrama/historic + 3 more
    ·
    Keyword: women, 17th Century
    Genre: comedy, docudrama/historic, period, political, verse
    Keyword: women, 17th Century
    London 1689. A fight breaks out at the funeral of Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living as a playwright. Mary Pix, who writes comedies in her kitchen while waiting for her bread to rise, wants to get her plays on the stage, but Christopher Rich, who runs the only royally sanctioned theatre in London, sneers at her and refuses to allow any more plays by women. Three leading actors voice their support...
    London 1689. A fight breaks out at the funeral of Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living as a playwright. Mary Pix, who writes comedies in her kitchen while waiting for her bread to rise, wants to get her plays on the stage, but Christopher Rich, who runs the only royally sanctioned theatre in London, sneers at her and refuses to allow any more plays by women. Three leading actors voice their support for Mary, and attack Rich for poor management and underpaying them. Mary and her women playwright friends join forces with the actors to lead a rebellion against Rich’s monopoly by founding a new theatre. Scribblers is written in the style of a Restoration Comedy, flirts with rhyming couplets, and does a country dance with history. Over twenty years of researching and directing the work of women playwrights of the Restoration, I have borrowed their style to tell their story.

Recommended by Michaela Goldhaber

  • WITCH HUNT by Carol Lashof
    5 Sep. 2019
    “ I wish I could have seen Witch Hunt in high school when I was first learning about the Salem Witch Trials, but I am thrilled to encounter it now. Feminist reconsidering of history at its best, the play centers on Tituba, the enslaved indigenous American woman who was the first accused of witchcraft in 1692. Tender scenes of Tituba telling stories to her master’s children are contrasted with fierce persecution by her own community. Witch Hunt is theatrical, lyrical, and provides delicious roles for a diverse cast. ”