My name is Zoe Senese-Grossberg and I am a New York based playwright, director, dramaturg, and teaching artist. I came to playwriting when I was sixteen years old, having been training as a performer up until then at LaGuardia High School. I had always been attracted to the telling of stories, loving to create dialogues and narratives, but had not ever attempted to formally pursue it in any manner. Performing began to become a hobby as I decided to take playwriting more seriously and have never gone back. My first work, Etz Hayim, was a short play blending monologue, Hebrew prayer, and a simple young love story set in the Warsaw Ghetto. Since then, I have been writing avidly and have produced ten full length dramas and countless short plays.
As a playwright, I am attracted to intimate relationships but grand stories. Most of my plays are multi-hour epics revolving around historic subject matter ranging in time periods from Regency England to the near future. Themes in my plays are often around Jewish identity and diaspora, queerness, coming of age, and human sexuality. I am fascinated by what turns people on and pulls them apart. Tonally, my plays are poetic, deeply empathetic, and highly naturalist in their dialogue. Many of my plays deal with the holocaust and its effects. Deep seated anxieties around fascism and the world ending are also at the center of my plays. I express these present day worries through historic subject matter as I have always found it easier to talk about the past than the present. It allows me more perspective and empathy than I can often find when writing about modern day subject matter.
Historical plays have also given me ample opportunities to play with genre and style. I adore mimicking the literary forms of the era I am writing in and manipulating those narrative tropes to tell modern stories. Through these explorations in style, I have realized my true voice lends more towards metatheatricality and experimental storytelling. As a writer, I have been very comfortable with naturalist dialogue and clear divisions between audience and actors. However, as a director I have always been attracted to stories playing more with perspective, narrative, and direct address. This shift towards metatheater is something I am looking to foster and dig deeper into as a writer.
Another integral part of my writing and my background is the usage of music for storytelling. From opera, Celtic and Yiddish folk, Jewish nigunim, jazz, or pop music, music is a tool I am always using in constructing my narratives. Having trained as a classical musician, I see much of the world through the lens of musical storytelling. While some of my plays could be more classified as plays with music, the way music influences our relationships and emotions is central to all of my work. I am fascinated by moments that music can score and manipulate and how it can influence the people around us. Key moments in all of my work come when a character hears or performs a piece of music. Music, too, has become a tool I have begun to use in my new explorations of metatheatricality, constructing pieces where songs serve as distancing devices or connections with the audience. No matter what form it comes in, our relationship to music is at the heart of my writing.
My influences as a writer include playwrights like Sarah Ruhl, Caridad Svich, Suzan Lori-Parks, Jen Silverman, Adrienne Kennedy, Terence McNally, Martin Sherman, and Tony Kushner. I find my writing borrowing a lot from their techniques and styles as theirs was the writing that first taught me to write and inspired me towards playwriting. These influences taught me my foundation for playwriting but I am now excited to explore my own unique, lyrical, whimsical, and at times weird artistic voice.