L M Feldman

L M Feldman

L M Feldman is a queer, feminist playwright (and circus artist) who loves theatrically adventurous, physically ambitious, intimate, inquisitive, deeply honest plays – usually about outsiders, often about searchers, always about the human connection. 

Her plays include THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL (New Georges Audrey Residency, O’Neill Finalist); ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE (Magic Theatre Virgin Play...
L M Feldman is a queer, feminist playwright (and circus artist) who loves theatrically adventurous, physically ambitious, intimate, inquisitive, deeply honest plays – usually about outsiders, often about searchers, always about the human connection. 

Her plays include THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL (New Georges Audrey Residency, O’Neill Finalist); ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE (Magic Theatre Virgin Play Festival, Sewanee Writers' Conference, PlayPenn Conference, O’Neill Finalist, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Drama League workshop); AMANUENSIS (Georgetown University, Northwoods Ramah Theatre commission); THE EGG-LAYERS (Jane Chambers Honorable Mention, O’Neill Finalist, New Georges/Barnard College co-commission, American Academy of Dramatic Arts); A PEOPLE (Orbiter 3, Jewish Plays Project); GRACE, OR THE ART OF CLIMBING (Denver Center Theatre Company, Art House Productions, Nice People Theatre Company, ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award Nomination, Barrymore Nomination, Kilroys List); several ensemble-devised works, including GUMSHOE (New Paradise Labs + Free Library of Philadelphia + Rosenbach Library), AND IF YOU LOSE YOUR WAY, OR A FOOD ODYSSEY (The Invisible Dog, New York Innovative Theatre Award Nomination), LADY M (Philadelphia Live Arts Festival), and THE APOCRYPHAL PROJECT (Yale Cabaret), among others; and a baker's dozen of short plays.

She has been nominated for the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Wendy Wasserstein Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, L is also a New Georges Affiliated Artist, a devised-work collaborator, a teacher of playwriting (Bryn Mawr College, Circadium, PlayPenn), and a freelance dramaturg.
 
In 2010, L fell in love with theater & circus as a hybrid art form through the feminist, Brooklyn-based ensemble LAVA; soon she began creating theatrical circus duets with Megan Gendell, and her passions led her to the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) for full-time professional training. She freelances as a creator/performer of contemporary circus – specializing in duo trapeze with Megan Gendell, solo static trapeze, handbalancing, and partner acrobatics. She has performed in festivals and cabarets from Chicago to San Francisco, Philadelphia to New York City, Riga to Tokyo, and beyond, and she is a co-creator/performer of the full-length ensemble circus-theater show TINDER & ASH (SummerStage NYC, TOHU residency, Orchard Project). She teaches writing & dramaturgy at Circadium, coaches circus at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts, and travels around the country dramaturging works of contemporary circus & physical theater.

L has lived in seven cities and is now based in Philly – where she is a proud Orbiter 3 playwright. She is always writing three new plays.

www.laurenfeldman.com // www.orbiter3.org

Plays

  • Thrive, Or What You Will by L M Feldman
    Recommendations: 7
    ·
    Cast: 
    5–7
    ·
    Genre: adventure, biography + 5 more
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    Keyword: feminist, science + 7 more
    Genre: adventure, biography, docudrama/historic, drama, movement/physical, period, political
    Keyword: feminist, science, History, ensemble, queer, LGBTQ, Transgender, gender nonconforming, intersectionality
    Okay so this is a story about the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Her name was Jeanne Baret, and she did it disguised as a man.

    A lot happened on that epic journey. And before that journey. And after. But nearly everything we know about her life comes from the journals of the men who knew her.

    So this play imagines multiple versions of who Jeanne was, or may have been....
    Okay so this is a story about the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Her name was Jeanne Baret, and she did it disguised as a man.

    A lot happened on that epic journey. And before that journey. And after. But nearly everything we know about her life comes from the journals of the men who knew her.

    So this play imagines multiple versions of who Jeanne was, or may have been. Everyone in the ensemble at some point plays Jeanne, and sometimes multiple people play her simultaneously.

    An epic tale of historical fiction about our country's present moment, THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL interrogates the nature of discovery, of legacy, of categorizing the world, of science and sacrifice, of species and survival, of status and privilege, of gender and identity, and of the subjective nature of both history and self.

    Meanwhile, we watch Jeanne and Commerson on their adventure -- from meeting to parting -- across lands & seas & 6,000 plants - in an epic quest that is part love story, part Peer Gynt journey, part Latin taxonomy, part feminist wrestling with historiography, and part theatrical celebration of herbs, dolphins, eclipses, and awe. //

    The nutshell: Jeanne Baret is an 18th century gifted botanist named who grew up laboring in the fields of rural France. While working in the fields, a 20-year-old Jeanne meets a 32-year-old botanist with a chronic leg abscess; his name is Phillibert Commerson. He's been university-trained by Linnaeus himself. She's been field-trained by herb women. They're a botanical power couple. They fall in love. He's already married. Things happen. Babies happen. Moving happens. Illness happens. The dawn of binomial nomenclature happens. And an opportunity to join a French ship on an expedition around the world happens: the voyage is in need of a botanist and an assistant, but both must be men.
  • Another Kind of Silence by L M Feldman
    Recommendations: 3
    ·
    Cast: 
    8
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    Genre: adaptation, comedy + 3 more
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    Keyword: LGBTQ, bilingual + 6 more
    Genre: adaptation, comedy, drama, movement/physical, translation
    Keyword: LGBTQ, bilingual, ASL, Deaf, Greek mythology, Eurydice, intersectionality, Lesbian
    A fully bilingual play (English & American Sign Language), ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE tells the story of Evan, a writer who -- after a decade of marriage to her composer husband -- finds herself falling in love with an artist named Chap, who is already partnered herself. Set in modern Greece (that bedrock of myth), the play follows the two couples and their four souls as they confront the hard questions in...
    A fully bilingual play (English & American Sign Language), ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE tells the story of Evan, a writer who -- after a decade of marriage to her composer husband -- finds herself falling in love with an artist named Chap, who is already partnered herself. Set in modern Greece (that bedrock of myth), the play follows the two couples and their four souls as they confront the hard questions in long-term partnership, the challenges of communication, the transformative nature of desire, and the mysteries of a changing self.
  • A People [a mosaic play] by L M Feldman
    Recommendations: 3
    ·
    Cast: 
    6–10
    ·
    Genre: comedy, drama + 4 more
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    Keyword: feminist, queer + 8 more
    Genre: comedy, drama, experimental, faith-based, immersive, movement/physical
    Keyword: feminist, queer, Jewish, ensemble, LGBTQ, identity, Diaspora, intersectionality, multi-generational, intergenerational
    A PEOPLE is a mosaic of eras and lands; generations and deserts; hats and books; clarinets and bread; people lost and people searching; angry young women; sad old men; angels; history; memory; and imagination. A buoyant, kaleidoscopic journey across time & culture, A PEOPLE is as intimate as it is epic -- 8 actors playing 80 roles -- in a spectacle of ambitious scope, exploring and exploding the history...
    A PEOPLE is a mosaic of eras and lands; generations and deserts; hats and books; clarinets and bread; people lost and people searching; angry young women; sad old men; angels; history; memory; and imagination. A buoyant, kaleidoscopic journey across time & culture, A PEOPLE is as intimate as it is epic -- 8 actors playing 80 roles -- in a spectacle of ambitious scope, exploring and exploding the history & present of the Jewish diaspora. The play transports its audience to a timeless festival atmosphere in which 2,000 years can pass in one hour, spinning a luminous and tenuous tale of fellowship and longing, all while wrestling with the question: What is my relationship to those who came before me? And are we - or is anyone - still a people?
  • Amanuensis, or The Miltons by L M Feldman
    Cast: 
    4–7
    ·
    Genre: adaptation, biography + 6 more
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    Keyword: three sisters, Fathers and Daughters + 5 more
    Genre: adaptation, biography, comedy, docudrama/historic, drama, movement/physical, period, political
    Keyword: three sisters, Fathers and Daughters, authorship, classical literature and art, genius, feminist, King Lear
    AMANUENSIS, OR THE MILTONS is a tale, a grapple, a loosely-historically-inspired feminist fantasia. Told through the eyes of three sisters over the course of the seven years that their father spent writing Paradise Lost, AMANUENSIS imagines the poet Milton's relationship to his kept-pretty-illiterate daughters. Poetic and playful, fantastic and unflinching, this kinetic new play interrogates the...
    AMANUENSIS, OR THE MILTONS is a tale, a grapple, a loosely-historically-inspired feminist fantasia. Told through the eyes of three sisters over the course of the seven years that their father spent writing Paradise Lost, AMANUENSIS imagines the poet Milton's relationship to his kept-pretty-illiterate daughters. Poetic and playful, fantastic and unflinching, this kinetic new play interrogates the relationship between privilege, authorship, and history as it tells the story of three children growing up in the shadow of genius, of society, and of its cultural and historical legacies.
  • The Egg-Layers by L M Feldman
    Recommendations: 2
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    Cast: 
    8
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    Genre: adaptation, adventure + 8 more
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    Keyword: Leda, Swan + 8 more
    Genre: adaptation, adventure, comedy, dark comedy, drama, experimental, fable/folktale, fantasy, movement/physical, political
    Keyword: Leda, Swan, Zeus, mythology, rape, Helen, Persephone, puppets, feminist, Greek chorus
    In this fever-dream play of origin stories, the ancient canon, and the myth of Leda & the Swan, a searching, unruly ensemble of women, girls, men, and boys all journey, lay eggs, question, turn into eggs, suffer, hatch from eggs, and rebel -- to the awe and dismay of their Playwright - who is struggling to make sense of them, the world, and her own story, all of it spinning wildly out of control.
  • Grace, or the Art of Climbing by L M Feldman
    Recommendations: 2
    ·
    Cast: 
    7
    ·
    Genre: adventure, comedy + 2 more
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    Keyword: athletic, fathers + 8 more
    Genre: adventure, comedy, drama, movement/physical
    Keyword: athletic, fathers, daughters, stroke, grief, Colorado, Miami, Boston, feminist, Depression
    Faced with a painful chapter in her life and fighting the inertia of depression, Emm decides to enter the world of competitive rock-climbing. Her quest through the rugged and humorous terrain of physical training and personal relationships charts the journey of a young woman suspended between muscularity and vulnerability, falling and climbing, parents and children, and the ardor and grace of being human.