Celebrating Jewish Plays
An Immersive Weekend of Staged Readings

Amanda Gronich is an Emmy-nominated documentary scriptwriter who has devoted her career to bringing true stories to the stage and screen.

Born and raised in New York City, Amanda received a BA in Drama from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Soon after, she joined Tectonic Theater Project as a charter member and became captivated by interview-based storytelling. Amanda was one of the group of artists who traveled to Laramie, Wyoming to co-create (based on 200+ interviews) The Laramie Project, later made into an HBO film. She directed the company's Toronto production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Most recently at Tectonic, Amanda co-authored Here There Are Blueberries (La Jolla Playhouse, Shakespeare Theatre Company DC, New York Theatre Workshop 2024).

In addition to her work in theater, Amanda pursued a prolific, decade-long career in documentary television. She joined the award-winning production team at National Geographic Television as a lead series writer. Prior to that, Amanda was the Supervising Senior Writer at Hoff Productions, where for many seasons she oversaw the company’s entire staff of writers and all scripting. In this role, Amanda created, wrote and story-consulted on top-rated series and specials for diverse national broadcast networks, including National Geographic, Animal Planet, WeTV, Travel Channel and TLC. Her work has also been seen internationally, with her programs receiving some of the highest ratings in their timeslots overseas.

Throughout, Amanda committed herself to inspiring new generations of playwrights to create groundbreaking documentary storytelling, bringing unheard voices to the stage. While teaching as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Educational Theatre at the City College of New York, Amanda developed a unique method for generating interview- and research-based dramas. She is at work founding a documentary theater development institute to expand these techniques. In addition, a book about her original play-devising methods will be released by Southern Illinois University Press.

Amanda currently works as a playwright and script consultant. She is developing a new documentary musical about a family coping with a rare genetic condition. She plans to continue working in the under-explored field of interview-based musicals.

Karen Hartman is a finalist for the 2023 international Susan Smith Blackburn prize. In 2022, her work launched VOLT at 59e59 Theaters, an unprecedented festival of three simultaneous off-Broadway premieres by a single author: New Golden Age (Primary Stages); The Lucky Star (The Directors Company); and Goldie, Max & Milk (MBL Productions). Also in 2022, Rattlesnake Kate, book by Hartman, score by Neyla Pekarek, won eight Henry Awards, including Best New Work, in its world premiere at Denver Theater Center. Some of Hartman’s many plays include: Good Faith: Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department (Yale Repertory Theater), Roz and Ray (McKnight Fellowship, Edgerton New Play Prize, Kilroy’s List), Project Dawn (NEA Art Works Grant, NNPN Rolling World Premiere, currently in development for television), Leah’s Train (National Asian American Theater Company, Weissberger Award Finalist), Girl Under Grain (Best Drama in NY Fringe) and Gum. Her plays are published by Theater Communications Group, Dramatists Play Service, Concord Theatricals and more.

Her prose has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. A recent Guggenheim Fellow and former Fulbright Scholar, Hodder Fellow, and New Dramatist, Hartman served as Senior Artist-in-Residence at University of Washington School of Drama for five years, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. She wrote the book for Alice Bliss (music: Jenny Giering, lyrics: Adam Gwon, based on Laura Harrington's novel), which won the 2019 Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award and will premiere at TheatreWorks in 2023.

Tony- and Emmy-nominated director and playwright, and recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President Obama, Moisés Kaufman has led Tectonic Theater Project since its founding in 1991. Broadway credits include Paradise Square (10 Tony Award nominations), the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams, the revival of The Heiress starring Jessica Chastain, 33 Variations starring Jane Fonda (Tony Award nomination for Best Play), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (Obie Award and Tony, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and Lucille Lortel Award nominations). West End: Gross Indecency, I Am My Own Wife, This Is How It Goes. Off-Broadway / Regional: Here There Are Blueberries (Tectonic Theater Project/La Jolla Playhouse), Seven Deadly Sins (Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, Tectonic Theater Project/Madison Wells Live), One Arm by Tennessee Williams (Tectonic Theater Project/The New Group); The Laramie Project (writer/director; Theater in the Square, Drama Desk nomination); The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (writer/director; Alice Tully Hall); Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (writer/director; Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and the Joe A. Callaway Award for Direction); Macbeth with Liev Schreiber (Delacorte Theater); Master Class with Rita Moreno (Berkeley Repertory Theatre). Opera: El Gato Con Botas (New Victory Theater). Film/TV: The Laramie Project (HBO; two Emmy nominations for writing and directing, Opening Night Selection at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, National Board of Review Award, the Humanitas Prize); The L Word. Kaufman is the Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project, a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, and an Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award winner.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was born in New York City and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include The Man Who had All the Luck (1944), All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), The American Clock (1980) And Playing for Time. Later plays include The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998), Resurrection Blues (2002), and Finishing the Picture (2004). Other works include Focus, a novel (1945), The Misfits, a screenplay (1960), and the texts for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. Memoirs include Salesman in Beijing (1984) and Timebends, an autobiography (1988). Short fiction includes the collection I Don’t Need You Anymore (1967), the novella Homely Girl, a Life (1995) and Presence: Stories (2007). He was awarded the Avery Hopwood Award for Playwriting at University of Michigan in 1936. He twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, received two Emmy awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, as well as a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also won an Obie award, a BBC Best Play Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, a Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Algur Meadows Award. He was named Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He was awarded the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and the 2003 Jerusalem Prize. He received honorary degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University and was awarded the Prix Moliere of the French theatre, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; the New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards; and earned her a grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. For The Sisters Rosensweig she received the 1993 Outer Critics Circle Award, a Tony Award nomination, and the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre. Other plays include Old Money and An American Daughter and Third (Lincoln Center); Uncommon Women and Others (Phoenix Theater); Isn’t it Romantic (Playwrights Horizons); a musical, Miami (with Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman); Waiting for Philip Glass, included in Love’s Fire (The Acting Company). Wasserstein’s screenplays include The Object of My Affection, produced as a major motion picture starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. For PBS Great Performances she wrote Kiss, Kiss Darling; Drive, She Said; and adaptations of John Cheever’s The Sorrows of Gin and her own Uncommon Women and Others. She adapted The Heidi Chronicles for TNT (1996 Emmy Award nomination for Best Television Movie) and An American Daughter for Lifetime Television. Her adaptation of The Nutcracker was performed at The American Ballet Theatre at The Met, and her adaptation of The Merry Widow premiered at San Francisco Opera. She was the librettist for the original opera Festival of Regrets: Central Park, which had runs at Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera. She wrote Pamela’s First Musical, a children’s book, which adapted with Cy Coleman into a musical which premiered in Spring 2006. Her other books include the essay collections Shiksa Goddess and Bachelor Girls. She contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Woman, and Harper’s Bazaar, among many other publications. She was the recipient of an NEA Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She served on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, on the Board of the British American Arts Association, School of American Ballet, WNET/Thirteen, and The Educational Foundation of America. She taught at Columbia University, New York University, Juilliard School, and Princeton University, and held an Honorary Doctorate from Mount Holyoke College. Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Yale School of Drama.

Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Slate, Salon, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere. She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston.