Trish Harnetiaux

Trish Harnetiaux

Trish Harnetiaux is a playwright, filmmaker and podcast creator. Her new narrative podcast, The MS Phoenix Rising, about the relaunch of the cruise ship industry, is available on Playwrights Horizons Soundstage. Current projects include her new play, Bender and Brian, a subversive tale of Breakfast Club fanfiction (pandemic delayed, forthcoming JACK), and California (Clubbed Thumb commission). She’s developed...
Trish Harnetiaux is a playwright, filmmaker and podcast creator. Her new narrative podcast, The MS Phoenix Rising, about the relaunch of the cruise ship industry, is available on Playwrights Horizons Soundstage. Current projects include her new play, Bender and Brian, a subversive tale of Breakfast Club fanfiction (pandemic delayed, forthcoming JACK), and California (Clubbed Thumb commission). She’s developed and presented work at Playwright’s Horizons, Soho Rep, Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, JACK and more.


Harnetiaux has been creating short, dark comedies with Steel Drum in Space since 2012, their current short which she directed and co-wrote, You Wouldn't Understand, was presented at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. She was an Executive Producer on the off-beat comedy series Driver Ed that premiered at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She has been a resident at MacDowell, Millay, SPACE at Ryder Farm and Yaddo. Ars Nova Play Group, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, affiliate member of New Georges. MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College. Her novel, White Elephant, was published fall 2019 (Simon & Schuster) as well as the UK edition, The Secret Santa (Penguin Random House). She teaches in the Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program.

Plays

  • California
    A family road trip takes an unexpected turn when in the dark of night, on the plains of eastern Oregon, reality splits.
  • Bender and Brian
    Not many know the true story of Bender and Brian. Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall were not the first actors cast in John Hughes' iconic movie The Breakfast Club. Initially, two other actors played the roles, but were fired after an altercation that occurred while filming the scene when they go to take their jackets off at the same time. This pivotal day was, well, pivotal for our original Bender and...
    Not many know the true story of Bender and Brian. Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall were not the first actors cast in John Hughes' iconic movie The Breakfast Club. Initially, two other actors played the roles, but were fired after an altercation that occurred while filming the scene when they go to take their jackets off at the same time. This pivotal day was, well, pivotal for our original Bender and Brian, as they went on to live their lives together. This is their story.
  • Tin Cat Shoes
    Blessed with the can-do American spirit, a troop of dedicated shoe store workers embark on a madcap odyssey of personal (employer-mandated) expansion. But when "work is your life" and systems breakdown, all that remains is you, some nachos, and the truth.
  • How To Get Into Buildings
    HOW TO GET INTO BUILDINGS takes an exploded view of love, in which confusion blends with confidence, time keeps shifting, amateurs are experts, and brunch can be fatal.

    As a blueprint for her play, Harnetiaux used the structure of exploded view: an illustration or diagram used in manuals (for lawnmowers, bicycles, computers) that shows an object's parts apart from the whole, but in positions...
    HOW TO GET INTO BUILDINGS takes an exploded view of love, in which confusion blends with confidence, time keeps shifting, amateurs are experts, and brunch can be fatal.

    As a blueprint for her play, Harnetiaux used the structure of exploded view: an illustration or diagram used in manuals (for lawnmowers, bicycles, computers) that shows an object's parts apart from the whole, but in positions that indicate their relationship to it. Roger and Lucy meet in a convention hall, Daphne and Nick break down at a diner, their stories intertwine as the play swirls around you, rotating on its axis, to articulate the experience of love, with its alternating moments of intimacy and isolation.
  • Weren't You In My Science Class?
    Remember when you ran into Irene Cunningham? Yeah, from high school. So funny seeing her at the bank all these years later... and during a robbery (what are the odds!) A play about how big things can lurk beneath small talk and how totally awful friendship is when you forget to be friends. Because, let’s face it- the past isn’t always pretty.
  • If You Can Get To Buffalo
    Few know that way back in the day, 1993 to be exact, a text-based social network "mansion" called LambdaMOO was hijacked by a "Mr. Bungle," who singlehandedly detonated the new world utopia by misbehaving most grievously at a virtual party. Somewhat based on the real story of the first instance of virtual rape, the attempt to deal with the perpetrator and the awkward Charlie Rose episode...
    Few know that way back in the day, 1993 to be exact, a text-based social network "mansion" called LambdaMOO was hijacked by a "Mr. Bungle," who singlehandedly detonated the new world utopia by misbehaving most grievously at a virtual party. Somewhat based on the real story of the first instance of virtual rape, the attempt to deal with the perpetrator and the awkward Charlie Rose episode that followed, Mr. Bungle and the Incident at LambdaMOO explores our fascination with hiding behind a keyboard, the impulse to be bad, and the anonymity that made it all possible.
  • Welcome to the White Room
    The room is completely white. We discover Ms. White, Jennings, and Mr. Paine shortly after they have arrived. We follow their journey as they attempt to figure out exactly what they are meant to be doing. There are letters that only Ms. White can read. There is the arrival of The Last Deck of Cards in the World – and with, at all times, one-thing-leading-to-another – somewhere between throwing a party,...
    The room is completely white. We discover Ms. White, Jennings, and Mr. Paine shortly after they have arrived. We follow their journey as they attempt to figure out exactly what they are meant to be doing. There are letters that only Ms. White can read. There is the arrival of The Last Deck of Cards in the World – and with, at all times, one-thing-leading-to-another – somewhere between throwing a party, suppressing sexual tensions, and dancing a tango – this senseless world summons it’s puppeteer, who’s in for a big surprise.
  • Your Pretty Little World
    Your Pretty Little World
    is Adapted from Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

    ​Elizabeth Richmond is led, after a series of disquieting events, to a psychiatrist who discovers that her mind is divided among, and tortured by, four separate and strong-willed personalities. Hers is a story of survival, a young woman's journey into the different parts of her true self – the...
    Your Pretty Little World
    is Adapted from Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

    ​Elizabeth Richmond is led, after a series of disquieting events, to a psychiatrist who discovers that her mind is divided among, and tortured by, four separate and strong-willed personalities. Hers is a story of survival, a young woman's journey into the different parts of her true self – the innocent, the provocateur, the injured, the playful. It's a story of questions – How did her mother die? What is it that Aunt Morgen wants? In whose interest is Dr. Wright's treatment? Can Elizabeth control her personality shifts? What really happened in New York and who in the hell was Robin? This world is suspenseful and unnerving – a slanted, shifting reality, that places the audience in the center of the swirling kaleidoscope.
  • We Are Not Well
    The MS SeaFoam, a failing American cruise ship conglomerate, calls on an Avant-garde theatre director to adapt Ionesco's The Chairs to premiere on board as they launch a new route through The Bahamas.