Sarah Gancher
SARAH GANCHER is a playwright who loves epic stories, big ideas, and deep comedy. Her most frequent subject is how history is reflected in individual lives—how places, communities, and debates evolve over time. Her plays have been produced or developed at London’s National Theatre, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, The Public, New York Theater Workshop, The Atlantic, Steppenwolf, New York Stage and Film, Ars Nova, WP Theatre, The Flea, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Rep, Hartford Stage, RoundHouse, Mosaic (DC), P73, NYC Summerstage, and Telluride Theatre, among others. She has been a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, a member of P73’s writer’s group Interstate 73, a Writing Fellow with The Playwrights’ Realm, and a member of the Ars Nova Play Group. She is a newly minted member of New Dramatists.
Sarah is the winner of the New York Stage and Film Founder’s Award, the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the AR Gurney Prize, the Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission, a Toulmin Foundation Commission, and residencies from the Hermitage, Jewish Plays Project, Tofte Lakes, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, which presented Hungarian language staged readings of three plays from her 7th cycle (Seder, Klauzál Square, and Five Mothers.)
Sarah frequently collaborates with devising ensembles. She has written two musicals with rock band The Bengsons: The Lucky Ones, a commission for Ars Nova, and Hundred Days, which had its New York premiere at the 2017 Under the Radar festival at the Public and went on to rave reviews at New York Theatre Workshop. Both The Lucky Ones and Hundred Days garnered a number of 2018 Lortel, Drama League, and Drama Desk nominations and wins. Sarah was the collaborating playwright on Mission Drift, a musical about capitalism and the myth of the frontier written with director Rachel Chavkin, composer Heather Christian, and The TEAM. Mission Drift toured to Coimbra, Lisbon, Salzburg, the Edinburgh Fringe, PS 122’s COIL Festival, Perth, Hong Kong, and London’s National Theatre, and along the way it won the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, a Scotsman Fringe First, a Herald Angel, and a Drama League nomination for Distinguished Production of a Musical.
She has written for Blue Man Group and worked behind the scenes at The Colbert Report, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, The Big Apple Circus, and Norway’s Stellapolaris, among others. She currently teaches playwriting at NYU Tisch’s Department of Dramatic Writing and The New School’s MFA Playwriting program. As a jazz violinist, Sarah has played in groups from New Orleans to Budapest. A proud Oakland native, she currently lives in Queens. MFA: NYU.