Brendan Pelsue

Brendan Pelsue

Brendan Pelsue is a playwright, librettist, and translator whose work has been produced in New York and regionally. His play Wellesley Girl premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Hagoromo, a dance-opera for which he wrote the libretto, appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Pocantico Center, and was first-round ballot nominee for a Grammy Award. Recent projects include a new...
Brendan Pelsue is a playwright, librettist, and translator whose work has been produced in New York and regionally. His play Wellesley Girl premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Hagoromo, a dance-opera for which he wrote the libretto, appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Pocantico Center, and was first-round ballot nominee for a Grammy Award. Recent projects include a new translation and adaptation of Molière’s Don Juan at Westport Country Playhouse, and Read to Me at Portland Stage, which won the 2019 Clauder Prize. He is currently working on One Thousand Years of Sacred Music and Two Americans, a chamber opera, for Theater Emory, as well as a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities for The Alliance. Commissions include South Coast Repertory, American Opera Projects, Westport Country Playhouse, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He was a 2017 artist-in-residence at Château de la Napoule, France, where he produced the podcast We Are Not These People. Originally from Newburyport, MA, he received his MFA from the Yale School of Drama and his BA from Brown University, where he received the Weston Prize in playwriting. He teaches at Rutgers University.

Plays

  • Wellesley Girl
    It’s 2465. American politics haven’t changed much. Except that “America” is now only a handful of New England towns in a walled-in citadel. When an unidentified army encamps at the border, Congress struggles to move beyond personal agendas and petty bickering over procedure to decide the nation’s fate. With canny humor and wicked intelligence, Wellesley Girl exposes an unsettling truth: sometimes, all you can...
    It’s 2465. American politics haven’t changed much. Except that “America” is now only a handful of New England towns in a walled-in citadel. When an unidentified army encamps at the border, Congress struggles to move beyond personal agendas and petty bickering over procedure to decide the nation’s fate. With canny humor and wicked intelligence, Wellesley Girl exposes an unsettling truth: sometimes, all you can do is flip a coin and hope that history proves you right.
  • Read to Me
    A childhood with a terminal illness connects to the world in quiet, unusual ways––including a series of letters sent to strangers––all while attempting honesty with the person he needs most: his father.
  • Don Juan
    An adaptation and translation of Molière's "Don Juan."
  • Alumni Relations
    When a beloved teacher is accused of sexual impropriety, a former student must reconsider their relationship––and ask big questions about love, education, and power in the process.