AMERICAN THEATRE | The Subtext: Benjamin Benne’s Sound and Vision

Each month on The Subtext, Brian speaks with a playwright about life, writing, and whatever itches we are scratching.

This month he speaks to playwright Benjamin Benne (a guest on Offscript in 2022) about how he defines success, which part of the play-making process he most cherishes (and which he dreads), his family’s alternating encouragement of and indifference to his work, and the Julio Cortázar story, Axolotl, that “broke his brain” and sparked his imagination. Benne’s breakthrough production was Alma at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2022, which led to stagings of the play at American Blues Theater, ArtsWest, Curious Theatre Company, Central Square Theater, The Spot, and Chance Theatre. His other plays include In His Hands at D.C.’s Mosaic Theater Company, Manning at Portland Stage, and What/Washed Ashore/Astray at Pilsbury House Theatre. He’s had plays developed by the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, the Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Realm, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Old Globe, Two River Theater, New Harmony Project, and SPACE on Ryder Farm, among many others. His work explores intimate, realistic relationships mixed with surreal, fantastic, and numinous elements that spur expansive, existential questions about grief and loss, death and the afterlife, faith and the divine.

Benne is a Playwrights’ Center ’23-26 Core Writer and an alum of Primary Stage’s Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group. He holds an MFA in playwriting from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where his teachers included Anne Erbe, Amy Herzog, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Sarah Ruhl.