Pauline David-Sax

Pauline David-Sax (she/her) is a playwright, children’s book author and educator living in Brooklyn, NY who focuses on (re)constructing missing or neglected perspectives in order to tell more complex stories. Her play How We Survived was awarded the 2020 Jane Chambers Prize and was selected for the 2020 Players Club of Swarthmore New Play Festival; it was also named a finalist for the 2019 HRC Showcase Theatre national playwriting contest. Her play Exposure was a finalist for the 2018 Todd McNerney Playwriting Award. Pauline’s work has been read/performed at Occupy the Stage (Women’s Theatre Festival), Nora Salon South & The Nora Salon (Nora’s Playhouse), The Bechdel Group, Tuesdays@9 (Naked Angels), and the Detention Series (ESPA/Primary Stages). Pauline is a member of the Dramatists Guild, SCBWI and Honor Roll!, an advocacy group of women+ playwrights over 40. You can read more about Pauline and her work at https://newplayexchange.org/users/15126/pauline-david-sax.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
https://newplayexchange.org/users/15126/pauline-david-sax

MORE ABOUT ME
I love theater because it is so alive with stories. There are the stories of the characters, brought to life on stage; and there are the stories of those in the audience, listening and watching. These narratives don’t always line up neatly, and in my favorite plays (such as Sweat, Top Dog/underdog, Three Tall Women, Eclipsed and Doubt) each character vies for the primacy of her story while each audience member must decide for herself how to reconcile the multiple truths she sees and hears. I seek to examine that multiplicity of stories and perspectives in the plays I write. As I sit down to tell you about myself, I think also about stories. Here, too, there are multiple narratives. There’s my twenty years in education, which taught me the importance of collaboration; I suspect this is why I am drawn to playwriting as opposed to other, more solitary writing genres. There are my two marriages and two children, which taught me the freedom of letting go of other people’s expectations; if it were not for my divorce and miscarriages, would I have been brave enough to switch careers in my 40s? And there is my life as a writer where I spent decades secretly scribbling in notebooks while outwardly pursuing a “safe,” “respectable” career before embracing the fact that my heart belongs to writing.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
So much! Currently incubating ideas for a play about the many faces of Alma Mahler and a musical based on a picture book I wrote (about a women's motorcycle group) that's currently under contract. Looking for further development opportunities for my plays Cotton's Tale (about the true story of the female rabbits from Peter Rabbit) and Goldfish Have No Memory (about a scientist who creates a robot replica of his deceased twin sister). And always on the lookout for opportunities to collaborate with others.

KEYWORDS
untold stories, women's stories, historical, biography