Sam Chanse is the author of plays including What you are now (Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Civilians, Sloan/EST Commission), Trigger (Lark Venturous Fellowship), Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play) (The Magic Theatre, NPC Semi-finalist), Disturbance Specialist (NAATCO and The Public Theater’s Out of Time), and Lydia’s Funeral Video (Kaya Press). Under commission with La Jolla Playhouse, she is currently developing a new musical, The Family Album (2024 Idea Awards / Vivace Musical Theatre Award), with composers MILCK and AG, and director Jess McLeod.
Her work has been developed and/or produced with La Jolla Playhouse, the Lark, Ars Nova, the Civilians, Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Project, NAATCO, The Public Theatre, Magic Theatre, Boston Court, New York Stage & Film, Engarde Arts, Ma-Yi Theater, Cherry Lane, Leviathan Lab, Broken Nose, 24 Hour Plays, and the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List).
She is a resident playwright of New Dramatists, a recent MacDowell fellow and Lark Venturous Fellow, and a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab.
A past fellow at Cherry Lane, Sundance Theatre Institute, and Playwrights Realm , she has also received residencies and commissions from NAATCO, The Workshop Theatre, Djerassi, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Merrimack Repertory Theater, University of Rochester’s International Theatre Program, Ma-Yi Theater, the Flea, and the SF Arts Commission. She is an alum of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Civilians R&D Group, the Lark’s New York Stage & Film Vassar Retreat, and New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NYSAF NEXUS project.
As an educator, she has taught writing and playwriting at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Rochester, and elsewhere. A native New Yorker, she was based in San Francisco for several years, when she served as artistic director of Kearny Street Workshop and co-director of Locus Arts, and developed work as a writer and performer at Bindlestiff, AATC, Playground, standup spots, and other artistic homes. She wrote on three seasons of ABC’s The Good Doctor (seasons 4-6), and is a member of Dramatists Guild and WGAW. MFA: Columbia University and NYU/Tisch GMTWP.
Also:
New Dramatists: https://newdramatists.org/sam-chanse
NPX: https://newplayexchange.org/users/2894/sam-chanse
Artist Statement
My work explores crisis and catastrophe, wrestles with intersections of race, gender, and science & technology, and centers characters occupying some kind of marginal space. This centering has always been my natural impulse, part of my own perspective moving through the world, but I also hope to tell stories that broaden and deepen our sense of what it is to be human, and human in this particular, totally insane, totally appalling, and jawdroppingly beautiful, world. I’m also curious about our evolving humanity – how who we are on a contemporary today level intersects with who we are on a primal level, and who we are becoming.
As a multiracial and Asian American woman who regularly stumbled on checkboxes growing up (and as an adult, ongoing), I’ve also always been preoccupied with themes of belonging, identity, and authenticity – searching for belonging, yearning to define and articulate a sense of identity, regularly suspicious of any claims on authenticity (including and especially my own). My work is inherently political (which I believe is true of all work, whether acknowledged or not). I try to write the kind of theater I love and desperately need – theater that rouses and deepens our compassion, makes us laugh, connects us to one another – theater that wakes us up.