Questioning the Unanswerable: The Darkly Comic, Complex World of Playwright Gina Gionfriddo
“I like to live in that space of not really knowing the answers. People have different motives simultaneously and exactly what the right thing to do isn’t 100% clear.”
Award winning playwright Gina Gionfriddo joins Susan to discuss two of her plays; Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn, and how they relate to the world at large in a conversation that explores how we react to difficult and challenging subjects, what we do in situations of moral greyness and responsibility, and moving forward to push back against assumptions of what the “ideal life” is like.
Meet This Episode's Guest
Gina Gionfriddo
Gina Gionfriddo is a playwright and television writer. She is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Her most recent play, Can You Forgive Her?, premiered Off Broadway at New York’s Vineyard Theatre in 2017.
Her play, Rapture, Blister, Burn, was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and premiered at their Off-Broadway home in June of 2012. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and has subsequently been performed all over the United States and abroad in London (Hampstead Theatre), Sweden, and Australia.
Her play, Becky Shaw, was a also finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The play enjoyed a long Off-Broadway run at New York’s Second Stage Theatre where it received an Outer Critics Circle Award as well as Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominations for Best Play. The play was commissioned by and first produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of The Humana Festival. It has subsequently been produced at regional theatres across the country and abroad in London (Almeida Theatre), Argentina, Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, Sweden, The Netherlands, Korea, Israel, and Malta.
Gina’s dark comedy, After Ashley, also originated in Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival. It had its New York premiere at The Vineyard Theatre and was named one of 2005’s ten best theatre shows by Entertainment Weekly. The play starred Kieran Culkin and Anna Paquin, and received two Obie Awards, one for Gionfriddo’s writing. The play has received regional productions across the country and abroad in Poland.
In addition to an Obie Award, Gina has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and an American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Citation.
Gina has worked as a writer/producer for The Alienist on TNT and for the dramas, FBI: Most Wanted, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Law & Order True Crime: Menendez. She was a writer for Cold Case (CBS), House of Cards (Netflix), and Borgia (Canal Plus).
