Kathleen Cahill

Kathleen Cahill

Kathleen Cahill’s awards include the Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award, two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting Awards, a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts New American Works Grant, three Edgerton Foundation Awards and a Drama League Award. Her play Charm was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; her play The Persian Quarter was nominated...
Kathleen Cahill’s awards include the Jane Chambers Playwrighting Award, two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Playwrighting Awards, a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts New American Works Grant, three Edgerton Foundation Awards and a Drama League Award. Her play Charm was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; her play The Persian Quarter was nominated for a Steinberg Award.(Both published by Dramatic Publishing.) Her produced musicals include for The Navigator, Friendship of the Sea, Dakota Sky; an opera, Clara, two opera/cabarets, A Tale of Two Cities: Paris and Berlin in the Twenties, and Fatal Song (Utah Opera, The In Series, Washington D.C. ) and the lyrics for David Zabriskie’s Requiem. Her plays include the comedy, Course 86B in the Catalogue (Salt Lake Acting Company) The Still Time (Georgia Rep/ Porchlight Theatre, Chicago) the comedy, Women Who Love Science Too Much (Porchlight Theatre and NPR Radio) Joy Forever (Cleveland Public, Firehouse Theatre, Massachusetts) Charm ( National New Play Network Festival, Salt Lake Acting Company premiere, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Dallas; Orlando Shakespeare; Taffety Punk, Washington D.C.) among others, and The Persian Quarter ( Salt Lake Acting Company, Merrimack Rep.) The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies premiered in at Fusion Theatre, Albuquerque as part of “The Seven.”. A new musical, PERDIDA, The Winter’s Tale in Mexico, premieres at Catholic University in November, 2014. She wrote the screenplay for the independent feature, Downtown Express. For the past decade she has written Alan Cumming’s and Laura Linney’s’ introductions for Masterpiece/Mystery on PBS. She is Playwright-in-Residence at the Salt Lake Acting Company.

Plays

  • HARBUR GATE by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    6
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    Genre: adventure, drama + 1 more
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    Keyword: NNPN Commission
    Genre: adventure, drama, political
    Keyword: NNPN Commission
    Five soldiers -- two men and three women -- are traveling on the same convoy in northern Iraq at the height of the war. A hidden event before their journey even began, tests their warriors' code-- and their humanity-- in ways they could never have imagined.
  • Course 86B In The Catalogue by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    4
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    Genre: adventure, comedy
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    Keyword: science, History + 2 more
    Genre: adventure, comedy
    Keyword: science, History, comedy, strong roles for women
    SYNOPSIS: COURSE 86B IN THE CATALOGUE is a comedic riff on evolution and time. It is set in a remote corner of an arid western state, and tells the story of Stevie Stuart, a paleontologist who is teaching a course on the history of life on earth, at an obscure community college in the desert. Her lectures are constantly being interrupted by: her soon-to-be ex husband Bill, a womanizing financier who lost...
    SYNOPSIS: COURSE 86B IN THE CATALOGUE is a comedic riff on evolution and time. It is set in a remote corner of an arid western state, and tells the story of Stevie Stuart, a paleontologist who is teaching a course on the history of life on earth, at an obscure community college in the desert. Her lectures are constantly being interrupted by: her soon-to-be ex husband Bill, a womanizing financier who lost his job in the financial meltdown, and is now living in a remodeled chicken coop, hoping to win her back so they can start a family – “evolution is just romance by another name” he says.; her best student, Dell, who is a genius at anatomical drawing, but seems to be from a previous century; and Dell’s boy friend, Sterling, an ambitious young man who lives in a tree and isn’t fully Homosapien. In this part of the country, everyone lives in the present, but the present isn’t the same for everyone. Stevie Stuart, who is ever-ready when it comes to fieldwork, makes one astonishing discovery after another as she hikes out of town, “off the dirt road.” She finds a 500-million year old fossil called opabinia, which represents a vanished, unique life form, and when she discovers the ancient, petrified bones and teeth of ardipithecus, an early hominid, she starts to believe that life itself began here in this obscure deserted corner of the planet. Maybe it did. But first, Stevie’s existence as a scientist and a woman are put to the ultimate test when she loses first her evidence, and then her life…. perhaps not to be re-discovered for another 6, 000 years.
  • CHARM by Kathleen Cahill
    Recommendations: 3
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    Cast: 
    7
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    Genre: biography, comedy + 2 more
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    Keyword: Charm, Margaret Fuller + 1 more
    Genre: biography, comedy, drama, romantic comedy
    Keyword: Charm, Margaret Fuller, strong roles for women
    It is set in the 1840’s, about people who actually existed: a remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller, and her relationships with many of the great literary figures of her time—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne—men whose works we know well. But the past is an invention, and therefore the characters glide between worlds: they live in and out of history, in and out of the past. The...
    It is set in the 1840’s, about people who actually existed: a remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller, and her relationships with many of the great literary figures of her time—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne—men whose works we know well. But the past is an invention, and therefore the characters glide between worlds: they live in and out of history, in and out of the past. The play is about writers, people who made worlds out of words. The language of the play is rich. It is also full of anachronisms. Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time, and so she sometimes uses the language of our time, and dreams our dreams. On another level, CHARM is about several famous men, and one forgotten woman. It is a play about who history remembers and who it forgets, and why. It is a surreal comedy of manners, a play about what men and women want from each other, the difficulties of communication, and how we are inhibited or freed by the manners and conventions of our time. It’s also about American Transcendentalism, the belief in the freedom of the human spirit to transcend the confines of history and time. I believe great writing can free the soul. The writings of the Transcendentalists continue to inspire me, and I believe we need them more than ever now, as our towers of greed crumble around us.