ELLEN
McLAUGHLIN
McLaughlin has worked extensively in regional, international and New York theater, both as an actor and as a playwright.
Acting work includes originating the part of the Angel in Angels in America, playing the role in workshops and regional productions through its original Broadway run. Other favorite work includes the Homebody in Bart Sher’s production of Homebody/Kabul (Intiman, Seattle, WA), Pirate Jenny in A Threepenny Opera (Trinity Rep. Elliot Norton Award), Claire in Albee’s A Delicate Balance (Arena Stage, Yale Repertory Theater), Margie in Good People (George St. Theater, Seattle Rep.), and Nancy in Seascape (ACT, SF, CA.) Films include Jon Jost’s The Bed You Sleep In. TV includes several appearances on “Law and Order.”
Her plays and operas, which include Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Trojan Women, Infinity’s House, Helen, Oedipus, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Pericles, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Oresteia, have been produced Off-Broadway, regionally and internationally by The Public Theater, National Actors’ Theater, Classic Stage Co., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Theatre (DC), Prototype, and The Almeida Theater (London).
She is the recipient of the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund as well as other honors, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and grants from the NEA.
She has taught in several programs, including Yale School of Drama, Princeton, and Bread Loaf School of English. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995.
NEW PLAYS BY
ELLEN McLAUGHLIN
KISSING THE FLOOR
A radical retelling of the Antigone myth. Set in Depression Era America, the play investigates the relationships among a set of siblings, all survivors of their family’s agonized, infamous legacy. Annie and her disturbed and disturbing brother, Paul, are knotted together by fate and a tortured love as their sister Izzy and their brother Eddie look on with concern and all too much understanding. Can one extricate oneself from a terrible past? What do we owe those who share our blood, however tainted?
MERCURY’S FOOTPATH
Based on a tiny fragment of a lost play by Euripides, Mercury’s Footpath is a new play inspired by the strange myth of Protesilaus, the first Greek soldier to die in the Trojan War, whose wife Laodamia’s grief was so extreme that even the gods took notice. Mercury, the god who is our guide to the Underworld, agrees to her outrageous request—that her beloved husband might return to her temporarily—a bargain with consequences Laodamia can’t predict. Mercury’s Footpath is a play about the subtle moments fate turns upon, the idiosyncrasies of grief, and the yearning for life that can only be felt by those who have lost it.
