Elenna Stauffer

I have always been fascinated by the gray spaces where I can comprehend the incrementalism that allows bigger horrors to occur, and I want to write characters and stories that move people to take personal and collective action to make society more just and allow our planet to endure. My plays include Hysterical! (Thrown Stone Theatre Company, NY Int'l Fringe Festival, UC Davis Ground & Field Festival, Second Act New Works, published Broadway Play Publishing), The Auntie Network (Studio Theatre Tierra del Sol Staged Reading Series, Bechdel Group Finalist, SWTP Finalist, published Broadway Play Publishing), Woman’s Work (Pittsburgh New Works Reading Series, Warner International Playwrights Festival Semi-Finalist), and Reclamation (in development). I’m playwright 862 in Adam Szymkowicz' 1000+ playwright interviews series (http://aszym.blogspot.com/2016/07/i-interview-playwrights-part-862-elenna.html). As an actress I’ve recorded hundreds of radio and tv commercials, promos, and audiobooks, and my voice is in the Library of Congress for my Audible.com recording of Jennifer Crusie's Getting Rid of Bradley. Yale (BA) and Columbia (MFA). 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
TW: @elennaselenna
​IG: @elspiration

MORE ABOUT ME
I keep "doing theater" because theatre is the medium through which I feel most connected to humanity. I love the ensemble work of rehearsal and I love the subversive feeling that connecting across the boundary of actor-audience in performance engenders. Writing my worries into existence allows me to ruminate collectively and to share the joy and beauty of being human with other human beings.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I’m currently working on a play, Reclamation, an eco-drama about the impacts of climate change, sharing THE TEMPEST's island setting, but taking place after the departure of the European colonizers. A play about what happens next, Reclamation is a reconceived masque where the audience comes to understand the play through shifting lenses: first as a Shakespeare-inspired period piece in iambic pentameter, then as a play about the present, and finally as a theatrical performance in which they are participating. And there are Elizabethan style songs.
 
KEYWORDS
Climate Justice, Feminist, Drama, Play-with-music​