Nina Alice Miller

Nina Alice Miller

Nina Alice Miller is a playwright, dramaturg and theatrical community-builder in Denver, Colorado. She is co-founder and co-producer of Denver’s Rough Draught Playwrights: An Open Mic Theatrical Playground; co-founder of the Dirtyfish Theater collective; and has dramaturged for Athena Project Festival, the University of Georgia, and the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture. Her full-length plays are The Living (...
Nina Alice Miller is a playwright, dramaturg and theatrical community-builder in Denver, Colorado. She is co-founder and co-producer of Denver’s Rough Draught Playwrights: An Open Mic Theatrical Playground; co-founder of the Dirtyfish Theater collective; and has dramaturged for Athena Project Festival, the University of Georgia, and the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture. Her full-length plays are The Living (Athena Project Festival, workshop production), Fisheaters (Vintage New Play Festival staged reading), and Agon of the West (And Toto Too staged reading); and her short plays include Nano Diving (Red Rocks Community College Western Showcase), Bullies and Friends (Mirror Image Arts, commission), Boomtown IDP (Dirtyfish Theater, full production), and Delaware, American Herring, Real Estate and Lit Crit (And Toto Too Theatre Company, full productions). In the course of a diverse career, Nina has produced numerous scholarly articles and a book (Making Love Modern, Oxford University Press, 1999), dozens of performing arts study guides for young audiences, and scores of incidental articles and grant proposals for nonprofit organizations. Nina is a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts and holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

Plays

  • Whole World
    What comes after the 1970s dream of Back-to-the-Land?  19-year-old Surgence has taken on the utopia her parents have long since abandoned, but the wider world – and the land itself – will have their say. 
  • Agon of the West
    Chronically itinerant Meredith is determined to give her heart to the West and make it her home, but will its larger-than-life inhabitants let her all the way in? In the land of Big Sky and Fierce Independence, Meredith will not be the only one working out her dreams against the treacherous fantasy of an American myth.
  • Nomads of Disaster/Listening to Chernobyl
    As they reluctantly depart the future nuclear zone, Svetlana and Alexey take a hopeful shot at tapping into some good old American know-how or luck or whatever it is that makes their adoptive home so seemingly impervious to disaster. They try the Book Bar. They meet Ashley.

  • Fisheaters
    Life is unravelling for Barry. Not that it was ever perfect – but it was damn close. Now, with his wife gone, a ghost wreaking havoc next door, and all the kids (living and dead) acting out, even the nightly bliss of gourmet dinners, cooked up in the liberal-bourgeois utopia of a fancy shared kitchen, can’t keep the dream (or was it a fantasy?) alive. Time to face some ugly truths. Or can internet dating...
    Life is unravelling for Barry. Not that it was ever perfect – but it was damn close. Now, with his wife gone, a ghost wreaking havoc next door, and all the kids (living and dead) acting out, even the nightly bliss of gourmet dinners, cooked up in the liberal-bourgeois utopia of a fancy shared kitchen, can’t keep the dream (or was it a fantasy?) alive. Time to face some ugly truths. Or can internet dating get a guy out of any of this?
  • Trash (or, Love)
    Three people discover each other over an office trash can. Love, nourishment, revulsion and the clash of worlds.
  • Delaware
    War may crack the world wide open, but how will you chart a path to the new and who will you trust to help you get there? Escaping slavery, family, and the army, three young Americans make wary common cause to seize new lives.
  • American Herring
    Three rivalrous emigres hustle and kvetch one morning in their adoptive country of capitalism and hot cheese. America might be the promised land, but the herring is nothing to write home about.