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. 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 Critic’s
Pick) after a world premiere at Portland Center Stage. The play was produced in
London at the Gate Theatre and at many theaters around the US and 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 Theatre
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 and 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 New York City. Previous
plays by O’Brien have premiered off-Broadway and at regional theatres including
Second Stage Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre
Festival, Page 73 Productions, Ensemble Studio Theater, 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 is also a poet and a prose writer.
He has published five collections of poetry in the US and 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.
