Andrea Stolowitz

When a small New England liberal arts college erupts in student protests over its required Western Civilization class, identity politics, free speech, and what it means to change the status quo are called into question. This play draws its inspiration from real-life events.
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The great-grandfather of Oregon Book Award-winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz kept a journal for his descendants after escaping to New York City in 1939 as a German Jew. Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books?

In this complex, contemporary drama about the search for home, fragmented heritage and Jewish diaspora, two performers scintillate between characters and locations at the border of reality and memory and the intersection of national history and private lives.

In this raucous free-wheeling comedy inspired by the Marivaux farce by the same name, three-time Oregon Book Award winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz creates a hilarious new play about love and winemaking in the Pinot Noir laden land of the Willamette Valley. Successful Strategies is set on a vineyard just before the grape harvest and follows three couples falling in and out of love, into the arms of others, and then eventually back to the the one they truly love. The play asks pointed questions about the nature of love, its staying power over time and why it hurts so much all while creating a delightful parallel to the specificity of the world of wine making. An extremely funny comedy, Successful Strategies delights the heart and mind.

Marine Captain Elaine Edwards has just returned from her latest tour in Afghanistan but this time things are different; home doesn’t feel right and nothing makes sense. After a blow up fight with her husband propels her to skip town, she undertakes an Odyssean journey through the American landscape battling her monsters, trying to find her way home.

Somewhere between Oregon and Antarctica lie several points on a continuum: Susan, a writer at an artists residency at the South Pole; Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the British Antarctic expedition of 1912; and Hilary, Susan’s 21-year-old daughter. When an insomniac EMT named Alex becomes the hapless link among them, time collapses, geographies blend and destinies emerge.

Rose, an elderly German-Jewish New Yorker, is a screamer. Approaching the big 8-0, she has managed to scare away an array of caretakers with her overwhelming antics. That is until her busy psychoanalyst daughter hires Winsome, an African American woman, who proves to be Rose’s match. When Lydia realizes how close the two have become, she suspects Winsome of being a clever grifter, but are her suspicions based on truth, or merely produced by jealousy? Alternately funny, moving and disturbing, this play raises questions of trust, race, and family obligation.