Plays
Ethan Lipton’s produced plays and musicals include The Outer Space (Lortel nom.), Tumacho, Red-Handed Otter, Luther, No Place to Go (Obie Award), Goodbye April Hello May, 100 Aspects of the Moon and Meat. His work has been seen in New York at the Public Theater (Joe’s Pub), The Playwrights Realm and Clubbed Thumb, and beyond at The Gate (London), Theatre de la Ville (Paris), The Pavilion (Dublin), A Red Orchid (Chicago), Arts Emerson (Boston), Grand Performances (LA), the Modlin Center (Richmond) and elsewhere. Ethan won the 2023 Kleban Prize for most promising Americans librettist and is a 2023 Creative Capital Grantee. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alpert Prize Fellow at MacDowell, a Clubbed Thumb associate, part of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group, a Space at Ryder Farm Fellow and the Playwrights Realm’s Page One Fellow. He has developed work at Williamstown, New York Stage and Film and the Orchard Project. He has received commissions from The Civilians, NYFA, Clubbed Thumb , Playwrights Horizons, True Love Productions, Barrington Stage Co., the Sloan Foundation (MTC) the Public, Media Arts Exploration, the New York Public Library and the Onassis Foundation.
For script inquiries or a full theater bio contact:
Bonnie Davis, Bret Adams, Ltd
448 W. 44th Street New York, NY 10036
212-765-5630, ext. 101
More about Ethan’s plays:
| The Outer Space is a bittersweet musical about a couple who buys an old spaceship, leaving the noise, pollution, and overpriced rents of Earth for the vast beauty and treacherous terrain of the final frontier. The Outer Space was a NY Times Critics Pick and was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award. |
Tumacho is a Western musical comedy about a town beset by violence.TUMACHO was a NY Times Critics Pick and a TimeOut NY “Four-Star” production when it premiered at the Wild Project in New York, directed by Leigh Silverman as part of the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks Festival.
No Place to Go is a musical monologue about the demise of an American workplace. Performed by Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra (Eben Levy, Ian Riggs and Vito Dieterle), with music by the band, NO PLACE TO GO was commissioned by Joe’s Pub and produced by the Public Theater in a production directed by Leigh Silverman in March 2012. The show won an Obie Award and was called “one of the galvanizing theater moments of 2012” by the NY Times, and later played four weeks at Two River Theater in Red Bank, NJ , where it earned a spot on the Star-Ledger’s Best of Theater and Opera list for 2012. The band has also performed one-offs of the show in Virginia, Vermont, Los Angeles, Connecticut and at the ATP music fest in Camber Sands, UK, and will continue to tour it through 2014.
Luther is a tragic comedy in which abandoned veterans of war are adopted in the fashion that we now adopt abandoned animals. LUTHER was a NY Times Critics Pick and a TimeOut NY “Five-Star” production when it premiered at HERE Center for the Arts in June 2012, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll as part of the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks Festival. First developed in the Public Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group. The play has also been produced by Steep Theatre in Chicago and Apollinaire Theater near Boston, and published in THEATER magazine form Duke University Press.
Red-Handed Otter is a melancholy comedy about security guards and a dead cat. RED-HANDED OTTER was mounted by the Playwright’s Realm at the Cherry Lane Theater in fall 2012. Directed by Mike Donohue, RHO earned Four Stars in TimeOut NY and was named one of the Best Plays of 2012 by the NY Post. It was later produced by A Red Orchid Theater in Chicago.
The Barber + the Farmer is a comic noir one-act about a couple ensnared by the mortgage crisis.THE BARBER AND THE FARMER has been performed at 3LD Art & Technology Center, at Motherlodge in Louisville, the U of Texas and Dixon Place in NYC.
Goodbye April, Hello May is a dystopic comedy set 100 years from today in an NYC where developers build hotels on Ellis Island, middle age is 78 and people subsist on hummus and bottled water. GOODBYE APRIL, HELLO MAY premiered at HERE in NYC, directed by Patrick McNulty.
100 Aspects of the Moon is a sad comedy inspired by the work of 19th-century woodblock-printmaker Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. The play explores the place where East and West meet over deep-seated resentment and lousy communication. 100 ASPECTS premiered at the Ohio Theatre in NYC as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, directed by Emma Griffin.
Meat is an extra-dark comedy based on the true story of a pair of dogs who broke into a Florida zoo and wiped out its gazelle population. MEAT has been produced in LA by Buffalo Nights (Steve Chabon dir), NYC by Crackerjack Prod (Ken Schmoll dir), Edinburgh by Upstart (Tom Mansfield dir) and Berne, Austria (David Hefti dir).
Hope on the Range is a philosophical comedy about a man who lives in his car, his unlikely friendship with an Argentine rabbi and birdcrap. HOPE ON THE RANGE premiered at the Complex in LA, produced by Buffalo Nights (Brian Kite dir).