Photo: Peter Bellamy
Biography
Dan O'Brien is a playwright, poet, memoirist, essayist, and librettist. His play Newtown, winner of the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award, premiered at Geva Theatre in 2024, directed by Elizabeth Williamson. The Body of an American, O’Brien’s play about the Battle of Mogadishu and the haunting of war reporter Paul Watson, was co-produced Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre by Primary Stages and Hartford Stage (New York Times Critics’ Pick), directed by Jo Bonney, after a world premiere at Portland Center Stage, directed by Bill Rauch. The play was produced in London at the Gate Theatre, directed by James Dacre, and at many theaters around the U.S. and the UK, including the Wilma Theater and Theater J. The Body of an American received the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the PEN Center USA Award, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Drama Award in London. More recently, his play The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage premiered at Boston Court Pasadena and received the PEN America Award for Drama. His libretto for Jonathan Berger’s Visitations: Theotokia & The War Reporter, two chamber operas commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation, premiered at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University and at the Prototype Festival in NYC, directed by Rinde Eckert.
Previous plays by O’Brien have premiered Off-Broadway and at regional theaters including Second Stage Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Page 73 Productions, Ensemble Studio Theatre, SoHo Playhouse, and Geva Theatre. He has served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting at The University of the South (Sewanee). He has frequently served on the playwriting faculty at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work has been developed at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, The New Harmony Project, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. Previous awards include the American Theatre Critics Association’s M. Elizabeth Osborn Award for Best New Play by an Emerging Playwright.
O’Brien has received new play commissions from theaters such as Center Theatre Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Foundation, Geva Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Lucille Lortel Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle), The Playwrights’ Center’s National Residency & Commission, Portland Center Stage, the Public Theater, Trinity Repertory Company, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. O’Brien is also a poet and a prose writer. He has published five collections of poetry in the U.S. and the UK and has received the UK’s prestigious Fenton Aldeburgh Poetry Prize for his debut poetry collection, War Reporter. His prose has appeared in such publications as American Scholar, Esquire, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
In 2021, he published a collection of essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas, and in 2023 he published Survivor’s Notebook (poems), From Scarsdale: A Childhood (memoir), and True Story: A Trilogy (plays). O’Brien lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.
