Michael Laurence

MICHAEL LAURENCE 
is a an award-winning playwright and actor.
He wrote and performed the solo play Krapp,39 which ran six months off-Broadway and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. (Subsequent productions in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.) 
His play Hamlet in Bed premiered at Rattlestick, NYC (Also: Pleasance Theater, Edinburgh.)(Published by DPS.)
He is the author of the full length plays Cincinnatus, The Escape Artist, Virgil’s Cauldron, and the monologues The Shakespearean on the Porch and The Twilight Shopper.
He also wrote and directed the indie feature film Escape Artists.
Select Acting credits include
Broadway: Talk Radio, Desire Under the Elms.
Also: Coal Country (The Public), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate (Signature), Opus (Primary Stages), The Morini Strand (Primary...

MICHAEL LAURENCE 
is a an award-winning playwright and actor.
He wrote and performed the solo play Krapp,39 which ran six months off-Broadway and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. (Subsequent productions in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.) 
His play Hamlet in Bed premiered at Rattlestick, NYC (Also: Pleasance Theater, Edinburgh.)(Published by DPS.)
He is the author of the full length plays Cincinnatus, The Escape Artist, Virgil’s Cauldron, and the monologues The Shakespearean on the Porch and The Twilight Shopper.
He also wrote and directed the indie feature film Escape Artists.
Select Acting credits include
Broadway: Talk Radio, Desire Under the Elms.
Also: Coal Country (The Public), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate (Signature), Opus (Primary Stages), The Morini Strand (Primary Stages), Samuel D. Hunter’s The Few and Dael Orlandersmith’s Horsedreams (Rattlestick), Hands In Wartime (LaMama), Tooth of Crime (Signature), Splendid’s (Theatre National de Paris/ La Colline.)

TV: major recurring roles on Shades of Blue (NBC opposite Jennifer Lopez), Damages (FX), and the cult Adult Swim show The Heart She Holler.
Leading guest star parts on Blacklist (NBC), Prodigal Son (FOX), Evil (CBS), Good Wife (NBC), L&O:SVU (NBC), Hit & Run (NetFlix), Elementary (CBS), Person of Interest (CBS), and Dexter:New Blood. (Showtime).
Film: Can You Ever Forgive Me, Man On A Wire, The Last Thing Mary Saw, One For the Money, many indies.
Graduate of NYU/ Tisch Schoolof the Arts/ Experimental Theater Wing.
Literary agent: Bret Adams Agency.
Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, he lives in NYC.

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Scripts

Hamlet in Bed

by Michael Laurence

Cast Size
2—3
Genre
comedy,
drama

HAMLET IN BED Synopsis:
Michael is a neurotic actor and adoptee obsessed with two things- finding his real mother, and playing the famous Gloomy Dane.
His twin fixations collide when he tracks down Anna, a reclusive former actress-turned- barfly; gripped by the notion that she might be his actual birth-mother, he first stalks her from a distance, then lures her into a noirish production of Hamlet playing the...

HAMLET IN BED Synopsis:
Michael is a neurotic actor and adoptee obsessed with two things- finding his real mother, and playing the famous Gloomy Dane.
His twin fixations collide when he tracks down Anna, a reclusive former actress-turned- barfly; gripped by the notion that she might be his actual birth-mother, he first stalks her from a distance, then lures her into a noirish production of Hamlet playing the role of the queen, his mother.
Hamlet In Bed is a twisty and darkly comic story about mothers and sons.
About what it means to live a life in the theatre, both a generation ago, and now.
And about families- the ones we’re born into, and the ones we find along the way.

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Cincinnatus

by Michael Laurence

Cast Size
7
Genre
comedy,
drama

CINCINNATUS
by Michael Laurence

SYNOPSIS
A coming-of-age story, a family dramedy, and an homage to the joy and daring of performance. Comedy/Drama 4 W, 3 M

When PARKER, a young and outré performance artist living in NYC, returns to her childhood home in Cincinnati in the wake of her adoptive mother’s death, she is literally at the end of her rope; you see, she and PAN, her alcoholic performance-partner (and...

CINCINNATUS
by Michael Laurence

SYNOPSIS
A coming-of-age story, a family dramedy, and an homage to the joy and daring of performance. Comedy/Drama 4 W, 3 M

When PARKER, a young and outré performance artist living in NYC, returns to her childhood home in Cincinnati in the wake of her adoptive mother’s death, she is literally at the end of her rope; you see, she and PAN, her alcoholic performance-partner (and erstwhile boyfriend), are several months into an “endurance performance” in which they are bound together by a ten-foot rope, and can neither detach nor have any direct physical contact for one year.
Over a fraught weekend, PARKER must thread her way through a minefield of old family secrets and conflicts with her toxic step-father and his loopy new amour, her flinty gun-toting “aunt,” her haunted obsessive ex, and the ghost of her dead artist mother. (Not to mention PAN, who is losing his marbles on the end of that rope.)
CINCINNATUS is a darkly comedic Red State/Blue State collision, and a twisty interrogation of families of origin vs families of choice, art and money, performance and identity, and, as one character puts it, the “Poetics and Politics of Personal Space.”

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