Victoria Z. Daly

VICTORIA Z. DALY's plays include Doppelgänger, Sam, Demeter and Polly, Shell Collection, Invisible, Far North, On the Cross Bronx, Circling the Globe, Raw, Final Rest, High Water Line, and What To Do About It (#AfterTheBans.) They have been developed/produced at the Actors Studio, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, ATHE Conference, Short+Sweet Festivals (Hollywood; Dubai; upcoming: Sydney, ) SuperSoundScotland Radio, Alliance for Jewish Theatre, Berrie Center, Spokane’s KPBX-FM (NPR,) and Edinburgh Festival, among other venues.

Vicki is a Faculty Member in the Plays in Progress program at the Dramatists Guild Institute. She is also the Founder and Director of The 9th Floor, a collaborative of writers and actors in New York City, now in its thirteenth season.

Recent awards for Vicki’s work include The Neem Award for Improper Dramaturgy, Russia, for High Water Line; Best Play and Judges’ Choice, Short+Sweet Dubai, for On the Cross Bronx; Winner, Impossible Fest, Chicago for High Water Line; Winner, the Warner International Playwrights Festival, Connecticut, for Final Rest (all in 2020); Winner, the New Short Play Festival, New York City, for Final Rest (2019); and Winner, the Warner International Playwrights Festival, Connecticut, for Raw (2018.)

Next Stage Press will publish Raw and Other Short Plays, a collection of her work, in December 2020.

Vicki has taught playwriting for Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwrights, Inc., Fly Arts Center, Litchfield Performing Arts, Playmaking and her own The Write Stuff! programs. As a television producer, script consultant, and executive, she has worked for entertainment/media organizations including Lifetime Cable Television, Warner Brothers, and the American Broadcasting Companies. Her journalism has appeared in national magazines including Glamour, Health, and Portfolio. Education: MFA in Dramatic Writing, NYU/Tisch School of the Arts; Certificat d'Etudes in Theater, L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris; A.B. and M.B.A., Harvard.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://victoriazdaly.com
FB: Victoria Z. Daly
TW: @vzdaly
IG: @vzdaly

MORE ABOUT ME
*What play or production changed your life?

In Paris, at age 16, I first attended a performance by the white-faced mime Marcel Marceau. A wonky, isolated high school junior with almost no friends, I'd attended many Broadway shows growing up but was in no way a theater geek. I came from a family that collected art but didn’t create it.
 
Sitting in that audience, I found myself awestruck and thrilled at the simplicity of what Marceau did onstage, at how he created entire worlds with his body. And as I watched, a thought came to me: “I want to return to Paris and study with him.”

It took me another 5 1/2 years. I moved to Paris to study physical theater, not with Marceau but with Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq’s idea of mime flew against Marceau’s. It was something much larger: a conception of the infinite possibility and beauty of theater itself. Lecoq urged us to create our own, new forms onstage. In Paris, for the first time, I thought of myself as a theater creator. The drive, directness, physicality, and playfulness -- the unlimited nature of what theater can be -- that I learned at Lecoq’s still color what I write now.

None of it would have happened if I hadn’t sat in Marceau's audience so many years ago and thought, “I want to go there and do that."

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A full-length play, Shell Collection, about three sisters who have two days to divide up their late mother's possessions, sell her Florida condo and spread her ashes over the Gulf of Mexico. The process doesn't go well -- especially because the dead mother keeps showing up to tell one of the sisters that she does NOT want to be buried at the beach. It's a play about the persistence of family roles long into adulthood; grief; and whether it really pays to hold on to the family silver.

KEYWORDS
Magical Realism, Comedy, Dramedy, Absurdity,  Physical Theater, Climate, Political, Impossible Plays, Satire, Theatricality, Women, Family Dysfunction, Abuse