Paul William Kruse

Paul William Kruse

Paul William Kruse tells Queer love stories. As a playwright and media artist from Western Wisconsin, his work flows from his Catholic roots and ever-evolving experience of family. Paul often writes collaboratively, drawing from his years of experience as a videographer and documentarian. He is a cohort member of Audible’s third Emerging Playwrights Fund, and his audio play Once Removed was an official...
Paul William Kruse tells Queer love stories. As a playwright and media artist from Western Wisconsin, his work flows from his Catholic roots and ever-evolving experience of family. Paul often writes collaboratively, drawing from his years of experience as a videographer and documentarian. He is a cohort member of Audible’s third Emerging Playwrights Fund, and his audio play Once Removed was an official selection at the 2022 Tribeca Festival. Paul’s plays have been produced by Adjusted Realists in Brooklyn, NY; Quantum Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA; the Vortex Theater in Austin, TX; and in high schools around the country. Paul has developed work at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Yaddo, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and Middlebury College. Paul completed his MFA at UT Austin in 2020, where he was a fellow with the Michener Center for Writers. From 2012–2022, Paul was resident playwright with Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective, which he co-founded with Adil Mansoor and Nicole Shero.

Plays

  • Eelpout
    Sven Svensen and Ole Olsen have been best buds since kindergarten, and they put up with Lars Larsen because his daddy has a pretty nice ice house. When Ole up and decides to marry Lena Lingen, Sven feels like he’s losing his best friend. In a drunken morning of manly mishap, Sven and Ole question their thirty-year friendship as they wrestle with what a man is supposed to want. Maybe there’s more to living than what our daddies knew.
  • Chickens in the Yard
    Chickens in the Yard tells the story of a family through the eyes of their four chickens. Set in Pittsburgh, Chickens in the Yard explores what a gay identity means for one couple, as they journey from the families that raised them to the family they choose to create together. Amidst the struggle to define partnership and wrestle with individual family ties, Chickens in the Yard invites you to join them in taking one messy step forward.
  • Walldogs
    Walldogs is a new play about what it means to mark a wall with text and image. The play weaves together four stories that explore this complex relationship between walls, symbols, and people. A 1930’s wall sign painter, or “walldog,” buys advertising space on a rural woman’s home. Two teens tag an abandoned wall. A hipster street artist gets a lesson in economics. And, as in the biblical account, a drunken King...
    Walldogs is a new play about what it means to mark a wall with text and image. The play weaves together four stories that explore this complex relationship between walls, symbols, and people. A 1930’s wall sign painter, or “walldog,” buys advertising space on a rural woman’s home. Two teens tag an abandoned wall. A hipster street artist gets a lesson in economics. And, as in the biblical account, a drunken King Belshazzar seeks the meaning of the writing on the wall from Daniel. What does it mean to write on a wall? What can it tell us about ownership, gender, expression, and value? Saturated with sharp humor and coded references, Walldogs probes a simple action that humans have performed since we learned to draw.
  • Kiss
    The world ends in ten minutes. Anna has just escaped the madness of the city. Henry clings to the only life he has known. Kiss in a new ten-minute play that asks what it's like to face the end of everything with a complete stranger?
  • Once Removed
    featuring the voices of Barbara Kruse, Karina Kruse, Lydia Kruse, Seven Sexton, Diana Hershey, Jane Fisk, Jerome Mayne, John Mayne, Jeff Mayne, and Dolores Fairbanks.

    Initially for live performance, Once Removed was produced as an audio play by Hatch Arts Collective in 2021, under the direction of Adil Mansoor with sound design, editing, and original music by Aaron Landgraf. This documentary...
    featuring the voices of Barbara Kruse, Karina Kruse, Lydia Kruse, Seven Sexton, Diana Hershey, Jane Fisk, Jerome Mayne, John Mayne, Jeff Mayne, and Dolores Fairbanks.

    Initially for live performance, Once Removed was produced as an audio play by Hatch Arts Collective in 2021, under the direction of Adil Mansoor with sound design, editing, and original music by Aaron Landgraf. This documentary performance follows my growing up and coming out, against the story of my mom’s cousin, who we lost to AIDS in 1993. Once Removed is an official selection for Tribeca Festival’s 2022 Audio Storytelling Program.

    Learn more at https://www.paulwkruse.com/once-removed