Amy Wheeler

A theatre artist, writer, speaker, educator and nonprofit leader, Amy Wheeler has built a career on bringing people together, across generations, to collaborate on inspiring productions, innovative programs, and spirited events imbued with a social justice message. Her newest venture is Play Club, a national book club featuring playwrights and new plays, and exploring plays as a live and literary artform. https://www.theplayclub.org/

Her plays have been produced and developed by: Greenwich Street Theatre and the Guggenheim Museum (NY), Bay Area Playwrights Festival (CA); Portland Center Stage's JAW West Festival and Stark Raving Theatre (Portland); Theatre22, Capitol Hill Arts Center and FringeACT Festival (Seattle); 7 Stages (Atlanta)

Current projects: The Last Babushkas, a musical play...

A theatre artist, writer, speaker, educator and nonprofit leader, Amy Wheeler has built a career on bringing people together, across generations, to collaborate on inspiring productions, innovative programs, and spirited events imbued with a social justice message. Her newest venture is Play Club, a national book club featuring playwrights and new plays, and exploring plays as a live and literary artform. https://www.theplayclub.org/

Her plays have been produced and developed by: Greenwich Street Theatre and the Guggenheim Museum (NY), Bay Area Playwrights Festival (CA); Portland Center Stage's JAW West Festival and Stark Raving Theatre (Portland); Theatre22, Capitol Hill Arts Center and FringeACT Festival (Seattle); 7 Stages (Atlanta)

Current projects: The Last Babushkas, a musical play inspired by the documentary film The Babushkas of Chernobyl, in collaboration with first generation Ukrainian-American composer Natalie Nowytski; Everywomxn's Island, a devised theatre project engaging her community on Whidbey Island, WA in inclusive storytelling, centering womxn, BIPoC and non-binary stories.

Wheeler led the nonprofit Hedgebrook for 13 years, evolving it from a Whidbey Island-based residency program into a global community of influential womxn writers authoring change in the arts, culture, politics and social justice. As a producer of the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival, she incubated work by hundreds of female-identified and non-binary playwrights. Celebrating the culmination of her tenure in 2020, Seattle Arts & Lectures recognized Wheeler with the Prowda Literary Champion Award for “demonstrating true commitment to the Pacific Northwest’s community of readers and writers.”

Wheeler holds an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

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Scripts

Two Birds & A Stone

by Amy Wheeler

Cast Size
8
Genre
adaptation,
drama,
fable/folktale,
movement/physical,
political

Set in an unnamed war-torn country, Two Birds & a Stone weaves together the stories of four people: an orphan Boy hiding in an abandoned barn and animating the Sun, Moon and King Carp to keep him company, a pregnant refugee Woman escaping her interrogator, an Interrogator seeking redemption, a Girl in the future who watches a flock of birds fly over and tries to imagine flying to the mother she never knew. A...

Set in an unnamed war-torn country, Two Birds & a Stone weaves together the stories of four people: an orphan Boy hiding in an abandoned barn and animating the Sun, Moon and King Carp to keep him company, a pregnant refugee Woman escaping her interrogator, an Interrogator seeking redemption, a Girl in the future who watches a flock of birds fly over and tries to imagine flying to the mother she never knew. A haunting lullaby threads through the piece, connecting the characters across space and time. The story is told through a non-linear circular structure, tracing the geography of dreams and fractured memory, spaces we find ourselves in when reality is shattered by trauma. An invented language is spoken by the Interrogator and Soldiers.

Place: The play takes place in winter in a mythic village devastated by war, in country with a long history of violence. The recent conflict was a civil war that involved ethnic cleansing. In the present moment, a tenuous ceasefire has brought an uneasy peace. Several locales are active onstage, sometimes simultaneously: a city terrace, an abandoned barn, an interrogation room, a frozen pond, and a village café.

Time is fluid, flowing forward and circling back. There are synchronized moments when time bends and we experience two spaces at once. There are moments when past and future collide: a flock of birds lifting off, a birth and a synchronous dream.

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