Jennifer Maisel

Canvas. Pencil. Paint. How can one piece of art tear at the hearts of generations?
Provenance is a suspenseful uplifting play about the life of a sensual, unusual portrait from its beginnings in early 1900s German society, through its theft by the Nazis and its subsequent travels around the world. The play is La Ronde-esque, with actors playing multiple roles.

A riff on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic domestic horror story about a woman driven crazy by the rest cure for post-partum depression, YELLOW WALLPAPER 2.0 2020 is about a female adjunct professor trying to thrive in COVID quarantine despite her toddler and demanding husband outside her bedroom and the personal demons she faces within.

Written as a Travis Bogard Artist in Residence at Tao House. Great Plains Theatre Conference 2022. Lucille Lortel Alcove commission and streaming reading.

WINNER OF THE 2021 OVATION AWARD FOR BEST PLAYWRITING

The lives that inhabit an apartment from 1949 to 2016. A young refugee woman finally free to start anew in the United States tries to vanquish the past that haunts her, alongside her father, husband, friends, daughter and granddaughter.

--
Set during eight nights of Chanukah over eight decades, Eight Nights is about Holocaust survivor Rebecca Blum, who arrives in America at 19 to forge a new life. The play calls out the trauma experienced not only by concentration camp survivors, but by African American descendants of slavery, interned Japanese Americans, and current refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

The play needs 7 actors, who play 14 roles. One actress plays Rebecca from age 19 into her 40s, then plays Rebecca’s daughter and granddaughter. Another actress plays Rebecca from her 40s into her 80s, as well as her mother, Rebecca’s mother, Anna. Several of the other actors play more than one character.

You may want to listen to this podcast that talks about the play: https://m.soundcloud.com/user-685353444/episode-49-hanukkah-light

"Ms. Maisel has written a thought-provoking play that touches on reproductive yearnings, sexual desire, cultural imperialism and more." - New York Times.

“A clever, taut and emotional play that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure, There or Here is a rare treat.”
-Fairy Powered Productions

“Jennifer Maisel’s play, There or Here, is a multi-layered narrative shot through with humour, some of it scathing, including a lot of witty one-liners. It contains tremendous sadness and want. An intelligent, well-written and cleverly structured play, it time slips back and forth with multiple characters expertly played by a talented cast.”
-View From the Cheap Seat

A hotel room in a third world country. The middle of the night. A jetlagged American couple, Robyn and Ajay (she of Eastern European Jewish descent, he was born here but he’s fully Americanized and has no memory of this country), are wide awake. Tomorrow they will meet the woman who will have her frozen egg and his sperm implanted inside her to have their baby. Tonight they won’t have sex even though they want to. The play moves between the past and the present, and between America and this third world country, connected by the tenuous threads of time zones and technology. Robyn and Ajay find themselves confiding in the anonymous beings on the other end of their phone lines rather than in each other; computer technicians, fast food order takers and phone sex operators whose work has been outsourced to another country become the refuge they can’t be for each other right now.

Character Breakdown: 2M, 3F.

Set/Technical: simple bare bones set, smooth transitions

Running Time: 110 minutes plus intermission

Finalist - PEN West Literary Award

PlayPenn Conference. Finalist, Sundance Theatre Lab Finalist, O'Neill Theatre Conference Finalist, STAGE International Competition Finalist, Abingdon Theatre Christopher Brian Wolk Award Finalist

A mother and her teenage daughter. The Jet Propulsion Lab Scientist and the underachiever. Sara lives on Mars time, spearheading the Mars Rover Expedition, visiting a planet she cannot touch, while her daughter, Lis, on earth time, falls under the spell of the cyber-cypher Edgar2330. Sometimes it takes being worlds apart for an exploring woman and a longing-to-be-explored girl to find each other in our increasingly disconnected universe.

Emily, a professor, and Clark, a tech wizard, had that perfect soccer parent life until their 10 year old died in an inexplicable random accident. Three years later, their son gone, their marriage shattered, Emily wants Clark to release her, so she can move on, so he can move on. But Clark has another plan. He thinks he can use technology to contact Jake – where-ever it is death has taken him. A meditation on love, connection and disconnection in this increasingly distant time, @thespeedofJake contemplates the universal desire to cheat death against the backdrop of our rapidly evolving technological world. The first draft was Kilroy nominated in 2014. The second draft received an Honorable Mention from The Kilroys in 2015.

Leo has a wife and needs a kidney. Ben needs a kidney and is desperate for human connection. Maddy believes giving her kidney away will redeem her. Leyla longs to live her life and thinks that means she may have to leave Leo behind. Moss deals in flesh, seeking the highest bidder.

As we go deeper into the play we come to wonder about Maddy and her motivations as she becomes more and more entrenched in Leo, Leyla and Ben’s psyches. Who is this woman who has the power to change their lives?

Is there any such thing as a gift with no strings attached?

What if it meant every thing you owned, but you get to keep your life?

A journey into the underbelly of bartering for your organs…and perhaps for your soul.

A bride's cold feet, a mother seeking her daughter's saviour and a downtown New York City nightclub that disappears. Three women face the battles of our time -es of our time - AIDS, alienation, commitment, loyalty and rootlessness - armed only with the power of love and friendship. EDEN is the story of Maura's search for the man she is certain saved her from death in the Holocaust in hope he can save her daughter, Cecelia, who is HIV-positive. It is the story of Cecelia, who escapes to a club called Eden, waiting to die until she can somehow learn to live. It is the story of Cecelia's two closest friends who, on the verge of love, can't love without her. Their stories are woven together by Harvey - executor of divine coincidence - who must somehow bring these women and their loves together in the few hours before the wedding takes place.

THE LAST SEDER is the heartbreaking, fiercely funny story about MICHELLE PRICE, who is going to the last Seder in her family home before the house is sold and her charismatic father is put in a facility for Alzheimer’s. Well she would be going if she could bring herself to get on the train and face her mother, sisters and all the relatives and reminders that her life is going by too fast and definitely not according to plan. And then Michelle sees a guy in a suit also waiting for a train - a guy who looks like the guy she should be bringing home with her, if she actually had someone to bring home with her. A guy who looks right. Maybe he likes matzah? Bringing this stranger home for Seder triggers a weekend full of unexpected connections and confrontations for the entire Price family - and a magical moment with her father where Michelle and her sisters get the answers they’ve been longing for.

The play addresses universal themes of love and loss by using the steps of a Seder to illustrate and comment on the differing perspectives on the dynamics of this modern Jewish family.

Winner of the Kennedy Center's Fund for New American Plays Award as well as the Kennedy Center's Charlotte Woolard Award for plays of extraordinary promise

Full-length without intermission

New York Times review: Ms. Maisel has sketched a touching portrait of an aging family facing enormous change...her play is steeped in universal themes audiences of any affiliation can appreciate.

Thirteen year old Jace's family fell apart when her brother died last year, and now she desperately tries to escape her father by persuading a reclusive thirty-one year old Christmas tree salesman to help her kidnap her hissing mother from the insane asylum.

The drama club. The new girl. The lead in the school play. High school politics get dirty.

(there is a PG version available upon request)

Two women hover on the brink, juggling the insanity of solo parenting in the pandemic. How far will they go for their friendship?

A woman longing to find herself in the middle of her dreams. A man struggling to reconcile his past transgressions with his current self. Will Lisa and Josh ever conquer the distance between them? What every day choices add up to their life together? Can Siri’s voice lead them down a path to redemption?

The play works as alternating monologues over time -- think Spalding Gray meets Love Letters.

Also very flexible with staging as we move back into theatres.

Like every other mom with two teenagers who loathe/love her and a husband who is absent while present, Liza aspires to be aspired to, so she invites Elaine, family architect - fixer of broken suburban souls, dispensing the wisdom of the ages from the flat screen, promising familial bliss to the disenchanted - into her home.
Can around-the-clock scrutiny by hidden cameras and intense domestic dissection change the way Liza’s family’s lives are going to go? What does it mean to be Better?

Bec, Morgan, Lola, and Cam are parent friends – you know, the friends you make because your children hang out together. Tonight’s challenge – a long overdue dinner where they can’t talk about the kids that turns into a sequence of interactions they never could have predicted at all. How can one moment cause a whole world of possibilities to unfold? Who knew life in the empty nest could be so… empty.