Elana Gartner

(Updated 3/19/24) Internationally produced and recognized playwright Elana Gartner has written Jagged Journey (2022 Finalist: Gulfshore Playhouse New Works Festival, Reading: Media Arts), Runtime Error (2021 Semi-Finalist: Eugene O’Neill; Virtual reading: Transformation Theatre), Before Lesbians (2020 Dayton FutureFest Finalist; 2nd Place Recipient of the 2018 Henley Rose Playwriting Competition for Women. Readings: Oberlin College, Yellow Rose Productions. Virtual readings: Dayton Futurefest; Good Luck Macbeth), Because of Beth (Productions: Howick Little Theatre; The Workshop Theater), Daughter (Reading: UpTheater Company; PlayLab Selection, Great Plains Theatre Conference), Pilar’s Brother (Reading: Repertorio Español), Cortex Kin (Reading: Dixon Place), Spinning (Production: Fabrefaction Theater Company), and Ernie Evan (Productions: Genesis Repertory Theater; Heights Players, 6x10 Festival). Elana participated in the Kennedy Center Playwriting Initiative. She has had monologues published from Because of Beth (Audition Monologues for Young Women #2: More Contemporary Auditions for Aspiring Actresses", by Gerald Ratliff, 2013) and Runtime Error in Smith & Kraus' Best Monologues for Men 2022. During the pandemic, Elana founded Four Walls Theater which produced socially responsible theatre virtually. She is the founding member of EMG Playwriting Workshop and Ghost Light Dramatists. She holds memberships with the Dramatists Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, Honor Roll!, Manhattan Oracles, and the International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP), where she was a board member for five years. She was the co-founding chair of the ICWP 50/50 Applause Awards, recognizing those theaters who were producing women in at least 50% of a given season. She was co-founder of the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Book Reading Club of Plays, reading, analyzing and attending plays. Elana received her MFA in Playwriting from Spalding University and her BA from Oberlin College.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://www.elanagartner.com
FB: @elanagartner, https://www.facebook.com/elanagartnerplaywright
IG: @elanamgartner
NPX: https://newplayexchange.org/users/817/elana-gartner

MORE ABOUT ME
​I have had two truly stunning moments that stick out to me from my career. The first was when I attended the Great Plains Theater Conference many years ago. It was such a deep immersion in the culture of playwriting. We ate together, made playwright jokes together, worked together, thought together, problem solved our plays together; it was the first time that I felt my tribe at the most visceral level. There are people from that experience that I am still in touch with, some that are even Honor Roll! members. But that was how I knew what I was shooting for when it came to a theater community that I wanted to be a part of. The second moment was in 2020. It was after George Floyd's murder. I was the Artistic Director of Four Walls Theater. My associate artistic director and I realized that we needed to have our next play be about Black Lives Matter. We read many plays and finally came up with one that was fantastic. : a very topical play on a white cop shooting a Black teen but there were many gray areas within the play. Our artists who came from around the country also brought their own experiences to the play, some of them directly from Minneapolis or Louisville where Breonna Taylor had been murdered. Sometimes we heard protests while we were rehearsing. The play was virtual and we had a talkback afterwards. It was the longest, most engaged talkback that we had had. The audience was so passionate, so eager to discuss the things that were pressing on them from the protests, from the murders, from the injustice. I was so grateful to see that theater still would have a place in the world, that it was still so desperately needed, to have such important conversations at critical times.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am working on two plays: one that is inspired by the play on the streets during my childhood and one about the aftermath of a tornado.

KEYWORDS
Women, lesbian, sexual abuse, #MeToo, disability, epilepsy, drama, alternate time structure, historical, magical realism, surrealism, family.