Chelsea Marcantel


Chelsea Marcantel is an American playwright and director. She has written over thirty plays. She won the American Theatre Critics Association's M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018 for her play Airness.

Early life

Marcantel is originally from Jennings, Louisiana, the daughter of Greg and Jean Marcantel. She was involved with the local community theatre as a child. She graduated from Louisiana State University in 2005 with a double major in English and Theatre; she earned a master's degree in English Education in 2006.

Career

Marcantel moved to Chicago after completing her master's degree. She worked in theatre in Chicago and won the Emerging Playwright Award from the Chicago Union League Civic and Arts Foundation. From Chicago, she moved to Virginia where she taught English and playwriting at Emory and Henry College, and taught English and theater at Virginia Intermont College. She was a Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Fellow at the Juilliard School, where she studied under playwright Marsha Norman. She now lives in Los Angeles. She is married to sound designer and composer Miles Polaski.
On July 4, 2010, Marcantel's series The Symmetry Cycle premiered at the Viaduct Theatre in Chicago. The cycle comprises three plays, Numbfeel, Dumbspeak and Blindsight, running a total of about five hours. It follows the same characters through the three plays, several scientists pursuing their careers and love lives, using insights biology, chemistry, and neurology to explore their motivations.
Marcantel's play Devour features Anais, a wealthy young woman charged with the deaths of three of her ex-boyfriends. Anais is a stereotypical "spoiled rich girl," but the play digs past her surface to discover her vulnerability, " the audience to care about this socialite-trash." The play premiered at Chicago's 20% Theatre Company in May 2012.
Her play Everything is Wonderful premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in July 2017. In it, an Amish family who loses two children in a car accident invites the driver into their home. The play was inspired by Werner Herzog's documentary From One Second to the Next, which tells the real-life story of an Amish family affected by a similar accident. Writing about a 2019 production, reviewer Tina Collins calls the play "a thoughtful study of Amish life slowly reveals the underlying complexity that characterizes the human condition as a whole."
Even Longer and Farther Away premiered at the New Colony at the Den Theatre in Chicago in 2016. In it, Elliot gets snowed in at a small village on the Appalachian Trail. There he discovers part of his family's history among strangers who seem to know a lot about him and his family. Reviewer Chad Bay called it "one part standard-procedure coming-of-age story and one part mystical folklore."
Marcantel's play Airness debuted at the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The play tells the story of a woman who enters her first air guitar competition, and was inspired in part by a former boyfriend of Marcantel's. The play The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel acclaimed it as the best full-length play of the Humana festival. It won the American Theatre Critics Association's M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018; he award recognizes an emerging playwright, and carries as $1000 prize.
The San Francisco Playhouse commissioned A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism, which premiered in February 2019. The play follows Blaze, a bored, disaffected teenager in rural Louisiana. Her YouTube videos depicting lesser-known female saints capture the attention of an FBI counter-terrorism agent, and her search for meaning "makes her vulnerable to some dangerous advice." In the play, reviewer Lily Janiak sees an indictment of America's "devoting so many resources to perceived terrorist threats of a particular ethnicity, nationality and gender while we ignore how poverty, downward mobility and social isolation sow the seeds of radicalization right in our heartland."
Also premiering in February 2019 was Marcantel's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play St. Joan, performed by the Delaware Theatre Company. Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Julia Klein appreciated Marcantel's "fine job of judiciously trimming Shaw’s talky text," but found that the "dialogue tends to slow the piece down." Klein and WHYY reviewer Christine Facciolo both note that Marcantel's St. Joan strays further from historical reality than Shaw's original, and does represent a more feminist play than Shaw's. Facciolo notes that the play was timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States, but that St. Joan may be a better class hero than a feminist one, "an illiterate peasant girl could rise to determine the fate of nations."
Her play Tiny Houses will have a joint premiere with a production at the Cleveland Play House and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in April 2019. The same cast and creative team with perform at both locations. The play revolves around a couple, Bodhi and Cath who have left their jobs in New York City to pursue Bodhi's dream of building a tiny house in Oregon. The plan is for Cath to finance the project and for Bodhi to build the house; but it is soon clear that Bodhi is a Thoreau-quoting dreamer who overestimates his ability to build the house. He describes his blueprints as ""It’s 10 percent how-to and 90 percent why-not?" Cath and Bodhi are joined by Bodhi's college roommate Ollie and his high school girlfriend Jevne in a building project that stretches long past the expected three- to four-month timeline, and eventually professional contractor Jeremiah hired to rescue the floundering project. The play explores themes of life complexities in the midst of trying to simplify life, and of what makes a home. Cleveland Plain-Dealer Andrea Simakis reviewer called the play a "perfect, timely comedy." Cincinnati's City Beat magazine said "the confines of a tiny house pressurize the play’s entertainment quotient, even if these characters are more caricatures."
In addition to her theater career, Marcantel co-hosts the podcast "Hugging and Learning" with Andrew Grigg. The podcast co-hosts watch and discuss "very special episodes" of television shows from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The podcast began in July 2018.
In 2018, Marcantel became a member of The Kilroys, a group of playwrights and producers working to enhance the recognition of female and trans playwrights. Marcantel said that she is particularly interested in improving visibility for trans and non-binary playwrights, as well as increasing diversity in theatre criticism.

Plays

Awards