Barbara Blatner

(Updated 1/17/2024) BARBARA BLATNER’s verse play No Star Shines Sharper, published by Baker’s Plays, was aired repeatedly on Christmas eve on NPR stations and acquired by New York’s Museum of TV and Radio. The award-winning Years of Sky was produced by Scripts Up! at 59E59 Theatres and read at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Jane, Queen’s Foole was part of Centenary Stage’s 2023 Women Playwrights Series. Hamlet Leaves England appeared on the Pittsburgh New Works Mainstage. Two Sisters was read in the 2022 Inge Play Festival’s New Play Lab. Secret Places was produced by New Circle Theatre Company. Spell, a riff-in-verse on Shakespeare’s Tempest, was featured in Toronto’s Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival and as an audio play by Open Door Playhouse. Light was read at the 2020 ATHE Conference. Barbara is a poet who writes plays. New York Quarterly Books published her poetry collections, The Still Position (2010) and Living with You (2012). Poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared in Beloved on this Earth, Heliotrope, House Organ, Poetry Northwest, The New York Quarterly, Lift, Apalachee Quarterly, 13th Moon, and others. Barbara’s plays are hysterical, difficult, tragic, funny, probing, plunging. Her plays show an intensity of engagement with contemporary issues, with stories that focus on the micro-politics of relationships and expand to cultural and historical dimensions. She heightens language to conjure characters and conflict. Ms. Blatner has been a Fellow at many competitive residencies, including the Tyrone Guthrie Center, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Colony, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Arts, Jentel Foundation and La MaMa Umbria International Playwright Retreat.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.BarbaraBlatner.com

MORE ABOUT ME
If I could bring one change to theatre, it would be to cultivate a close-up, low-tech kind of theatre in small, intimate spaces. We are isolated in our contemporary lives for many reasons. Rampant technology seems to pull us further apart. Can we return to a theatre of humans using human imagination? As humans, we want to know and love other humans. When I ride the New York subway I love looking at my fellow passengers. Just looking. Witnessing. Noticing moments of being. I want theatre to be more like this. I want perhaps theatre to happen as dramatic moments happen on the subway - spontaneous, real, intense. I want to watch more closely the small but momentous moves that make up our interactions and our daily life. I want less technology onstage and more magic. I want a beautiful piece of cloth to transform into a river; I don't want to see a river in a video onstage. I want text to be poetically charged, not quite realistic, as in ancient ritual. I don't want theatre to be regressive, but pluck from its past all the clean and clear and vibrating qualities of humans enacting stories in front of other humans revealing their deepest, most intimate selves.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A full-length play about a thirteen-year-old girl who brings home a wild black rat snake as a pet and provokes her emotionally distant, recently divorced mother.

KEYWORDS
Nature, animals, climate, verse, musical language, poetry, rhythm, political, universal, Jewish, history, history and the individual life, pagan, pianist-composer