Liza Birkenmeier

Liza Birkenmeier

Playwright from St. Louis, Missouri. 2019-2020 Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Ars Nova.

Plays

  • grief hotel
    News of a missing acquaintance brings old friends (and ex-lovers) back together. Relationships re-form around natural and unnatural disasters, and everyone ends up at Aunt Bobbi's house, even though her parties are cursed. A comedy about the commodification of healing.
  • f*ck7thgrade
    a rock concert musical about singer/songwriter Jill Sobule's terrible middle school lesbian experience and rise to pop stardom.
  • honestly sincere
    2002: a teenager accesses a supernatural Nokia. The erotics of humiliation might be the only thing more powerful than a cell phone. (Available at Theater in Quarantine's YouTube.) A New York Times Critics Pick.
  • Dr. Ride's American Beach House
    It’s 1983, the evening before Dr. Sally Ride’s historic space flight. Hundreds of miles from the launch, a group of women with passionate opinions and no opportunities sit on a sweltering St. Louis rooftop watching life pass them by. Their uncharted desires bump up against American norms of sex and power in this intimate snapshot of queer anti-heroines.
  • littleghost
    Ghost mediums, a nineties community musical production, a lecture. With a structure borrowed from our discovery of the number pi, littleghost is about approximation of everything: memory, discrete identity, and communal experience. Genderqueer math. A comedy.
  • The Way Out West
    Nineteen-year-old physicists and engineers party in the desert as they build the world's first atomic bomb. (Los Alamos, 1945.)
  • rocket park
    a queer cold war thriller--quietly told through a nuclear chain reaction
  • radio island
    Ellen is a crisis negotiator. When she takes her work back to her childhood home, conflicts with her injured mother bend and blur with an international hostage situation. In this stark-strange space, what begins as manageable grows to superhuman scope; who controls whom in this house, in this town, in this ocean, on this earth?
  • the hollower
    Otto's lover is in far-off and mysterious places. She has a teenage exchange student as a houseguest and a Pigman as a visitor. A horror-comedy about how crowded isolation can be.
  • Infirmary Shakes
    A professor on his way from shanghai to San Diego on a Junk Ship in 1939, a jazz musician at the Kentucky Narcotics farm in 1970, a nineteen-year-old heiress and her much-older lover in 2008 Harlem. A sinking-ship, triple-generation haunt-comedy about addiction and identity. Nominated for the Kilroys List of works by women. First Alternate for the Jerome Fellowship. Finalist for the JAW Festival.
  • Tragedy in Spades: A 1994 Crime Documentary
    A mystery-thriller without delineation between dialogue and stage direction--built for collaborative storytelling.