ashley minihan

Ashley Minihan's plays include Ophelia, The Sunrise Side, The Assistant, Remission, and Freedom. Her work has been produced and developed by the Actors Studio, Arizona Classical Theatre, Fault Line Theatre, the Lark, New Jersey Repertory Company, the New York International Fringe Festival, and Reign or Shine Productions, among others. Ashley was an Edward Albee Foundation Fellow in 2019. Her play The Assistant was featured in Table Works Press’s 2020 Recommended Plays list. She received an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University School of the Arts and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
FB: Ashley Minihan
TW: @Ashley_Minihan
IG: ashley_minihan

MORE ABOUT ME
I saw "Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches" produced by the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island in the spring of 1996. I had just finished my sophomore year of college and was treating myself to a seeing this play that all the smart and cool people from my playwriting classes were saying I should see. My family were regular theatergoers, but our tastes tended to run towards in the direction of musicals, Neil Simon, and A Christmas Carol. I was a child of the Reagan era, and sex, drugs, AIDS, and homosexuality all fell under the vague category of "just say no." Suffice it to say that I'd had a sheltered childhood, but I loved the theater, and being involved in my high school dramatic club had been tremendously therapeutic for me when I was dealing with a debilitating illness. From the moment the play began, I was spellbound by the honesty and courage of Kushner's writing and by the flawed, raw vibrancy of the characters. The intermingling of reality with magic, of the banal and the terrifying and the joyous, all felt the closest to the actual phenomenon of living that I had ever encountered in a theater or any other artistic space, for that matter. When the Angel crashed through Prior's ceiling at the end of Part One, something broke open inside me too, and I have been freer ever since. I will be forever grateful to Tony Kushner and his wonderful characters for showing me what human imagination is capable of. 

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Freedom- a play about a young secular Jewish college student who participates in the Missisippi Summer Project in 1964 and how her life changes after that summer

KEYWORDS
​Jewish, historical fiction, intersectionality, civil rights, Queer