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, with artists 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 Dramatist Guild and WGAW. MFA: Columbia University and NYU/Tisch GMTWP.
Artist Statement
I consider my plays to be deep dives into unfigureoutables, landing in unresolved, ambiguous places. My work explores intersections and collisions of race, gender, science & technology, and centers characters occupying some kind of marginal space – this has always been my natural impulse, part of my own perspective moving through the world, but in doing so I hope to contribute to efforts to illuminate and elevate marginalized voices – to tell stories that broaden and deepen our sense of what it is to be human, and human in this particular world. My work is inherently political (which is true of all work; still, sometimes needs to be said).
As a multiracial and Asian American woman who has regularly stumbled on checkboxes, I’ve always been preoccupied with authenticity – constantly hungering for it, and constantly suspicious of any claim on it. So my work also seeks to explore and complicate notions of Asian Americanness, hybridness, and Americanness. 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 with who we are becoming.
I try to write the kind of theater I love and desperately need – theater that challenges and transforms our perspective, that rouses and deepens our compassion, that connects us to one another, that wakes us up.