Hickorydickory: About the Playwright

Marisa Wegrzyn (born 1981) is an American playwright based in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois. Born to an anesthesiologist and former flight attendant, she began writing plays at 18. While at Washington University in St. Louis, Wegrzyn won the university's A.E. Hotchner playwriting award after finishing second the preceding year. She came as runner-up as a freshman for Polar Bears on U.S. 41, and was chosen to take part in the WordBRIDGE program. Hosted by Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, it is a two-week program with theatre professionals.

The next year, her play Killing Women, about female hitmen, won the award and was produced by the University’s A.E. Hotchner Play Development Lab. After graduation in 2003, she was put in touch with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's director of new play development.

Wegrzyn's black comedy The Butcher of Baraboo debuted by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2006 and ran again at the Second Stage Theater in New York City a year later. The play went on to receive its West Coast premiere in San Diego, CA, in 2009 where it was then hailed by critics as a success.

In 2009, Wergzyn won the third annual Wasserstein Prize for her play Hickorydickory, which had not yet been produced. The award, named in honor of Wendy Wasserstein, is given to a female playwright under 32 who has yet to receive national attention.

She has been commissioned by Steppenwolf (twice), Yale Repertory Theatre, and Theatre Seven. She is a founding member of Theatre Seven in Chicago and is currently writing for TV (Goliath, Amazon) while continuing her work in theater around the country.

The How & the Why: The Playwright

Sarah Treem is the Golden Globe Winning writer and producer of Showtime's The Affair. Her full-length plays include Empty Sky,Against the Wall, Mirror, Mirror, A Feminine Ending, Human Voices, When We Were Young and Unafraid, and Vienna's Amazing.A Feminine Endingreceived its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in Fall 2007, was subsequently produced at South Coast Repertory and Portland Center Stage in 2008. Human Voices was part of Manhattan Theater Club's Springboard's New Play Series and New York Stage & Film's Powerhouse Reading Season in 2007. Sarah has been in residence at The Sundance Institute and The Ojai Playwriting Conference. She has been commissioned by South Coast Repertory and Playwrights Horizons, and she is a current fellow at the Lark Playwrights' Workshop. On the television side, Sarah is a Writer/Producer on two acclaimed HBO series, In Treatmentand Mark Wahlberg's How To Make It In America. She also writes for House of Cardsfor Netflix. Sarah is currently adapting Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons for Bill Haber and Tina Brown at HBO. Born in Boston and raised in multiple states on the east coast, Sarah graduated from Yale University with a B.A. and the Yale School of Drama with an MFA. 

Watson: Meet the Playwright

Madeleine George grew up in Amherst, Massachussets and began writing plays as a high school student at Ameherst Regional High School. She participated in the Young Playwrights Festival at the Playwright’s Horizon and The Public Theatre as a teenager. Ms. George then attended Cornell University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1996. She then obtained an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. 

Since then, Ms. George’s plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Shotgun Players, and Perseverance Theater, among other venues. She has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and the Jane Chambers Award. A resident playwright at New Dramatists, George was also a founding member of the collective 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), which won an Obie Award. Her play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. She also won the Whiting Award for Drama in 2016 for the same play. 

For seven years, George was the director of the Bard College satellite campus at Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan. She is originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Airswimming: Meet the Playwright

Charlotte Jones is a British playwright who was born June 2, 1968. Her first play Airswimming debuted in 1997 at the Battersea Arts Centre in London. She won the Critics’ Circle Most Promising Playwright award in 1999 for In Flame and Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis. Her fourth stage play Humble Boy premiered at the National Theatre in 2001, and was awarded the Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award, the People’s Choice Best New Play Award and was nominated for an Olivier award. It transferred to the West End and ran for nine months before opening at the Manhattan Theatre club in New York and being nominated for a Drama desk award. Humble Boy also garnered Ms. Jones the 2001 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize established in 1978, is for English-language women playwrights. In 2004 her play The Dark premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Ms. Jones also wrote the book to the 2004-2006 West End musical, The Woman in White, in collaboration with David Zippel and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Ms. Jones also writes extensively for TV, radio and film.