Prolific playwright takes center stage
Lauren Gunderson’s holiday show, a Jane Austen homage, plays at City Lights
Gentle readers, let me introduce you to Lauren Gunderson. The New Yorker may have recently hailed her as the most popular playwright in America you have never heard of.
But if you live in the Bay Area, you have probably been a big fan ever since her brainy “Bauer” played at San Francisco Playhouse, or the shining “Silent Sky” was produced at TheatreWorks or the poetic “I and You” was performed at Marin Theatre Company.
Certainly, you may well already have tickets in hand for Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” billed as a sequel to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which holds court at San Jose’s City Lights Theater Company for the holidays, running today through Dec. 17. Around here, Gunderson has long been a go-to playwright with a penchant for plays about strong and witty women who don’t let convention hold them back, no matter what time period they live in.
A talent for melding historical depth with brave theatricality, a rigorous work ethic and a sunny disposition are all part of what makes Gunderson shine. In person, she has a way of winning you over instantly. On the page, she’s unstoppable, with more than 20 plays produced at the age of 35. Indeed, according to American Theatre
Magazine, she’s the most produced playwright in the country for the 201718 season, if you don’t count Shakespeare and Dickens.
“I’ve always been a bit of a busy body, I like to have a lot of plates spinning,” says Gunderson, who is currently juggling multiple play and TV projects, not to mention two children under the age of 3.
A warm and witty woman who talks as fast as she thinks, Gunderson seems to take her insane productivity in stride. She’s become accustomed to speeding through the doubt and uncertainty that can plague young writers. Over the years, she says she has learned how to trust her voice. She writes
at high speed.
“When I was younger, I would doubt my own instincts,” she notes. “Now I trust them. I’m like, ‘Girl, you’ve got five hours to rewrite this play,’ and I just do it.”
Collaborators of hers are usually fans for life.
“Lauren is one of the most perceptive, warm, humorous and insightful playwrights I have ever read,” says Robert Kelley, artistic director of TheatreWorks. “She sees the potential in humankind without ever shying away from our weaknesses. And she writes with an irresistible joy.”
“Lauren is a Bay Area jewel. … She is smart and funny and writes these lovely, charming yet
thought-provoking plays,” says Lisa Mallette, head of San Jose’s City Lights. “We are lucky to have her here, telling her stories in her unique way.”
Gunderson grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and she first found her voice as a playwright in high school, when she became obsessed with Samuel Beckett and began writing “bizarre and existential” plays of her own. She has always used stories to explore the complexities of life.
“Storytelling is primal and important,” she says. “Theater can help us open our hearts and minds. That’s one of the things that art gives us. How do we know that we are going to die and still live? We can
explore the nature of grief within the theatrical narrative, we can share it with others and find some comfort in the ritual of it, the catharsis.”
She is known for her endings, which always acknowledge the darkness of the world of the play but can also feel buoyed by a note of hope. As she once wrote in a column for the Wall Street Journal, she sees the finale as the time for transcendence, “the final meaning, the consummation, the last held breath before the unscripted world courses back in.”
She initially intended to pursue physics but she majored in English at Emory University and, intoxicated by the dramatic nature
of scientific discovery, ended up writing a canon of plays hailing the heroism of women in science, such as “Emilie,” “Silent Sky” and “Ada and the Engine.” One of the animating impulses in her work is the desire to bust open tired female tropes.
“Women are more than who they marry, they are more than how cute they are,” as Gunderson puts it.
For her latest feat, she has been commissioned by Marin Theatre Company, where she’s a resident playwright, to pull off a feminist fantasia on American themes, a play that examines 500 years of American history through a woman’s eyes.
It should come as no surprise that she is applying this same lens of social critique to the Austen homage in “Miss Bennet,” a holiday play with a fresh bite in the age of Harvey Weinstein. By the way, Gunderson and Melcon are already working on a sequel that delves into the downstairs world of Pemberley, where the servants dwell.
“It is funny and sweet and we hope it is witty,” she says of “Miss Bennet,” “but there is meat to it as well. We cranked up the soft feminism of Austen for our own purposes so that it has a backbone, too. It’s a Christmas play but it’s also about being heard and standing up for the things that need changing.”