Playwright Pick

Christopher Shinn

With numerous awards won over a course of 10 years, whose first play, Four  was produced at the Royal Court Theater at the tender age of 22, he is forced to be reckoned with.  The 34 year old play write from Connecticut ,  has a prolific writing style.  His play, Dying City, first produced in 2008, is about an Iraq War widow who is visited by her dead husband’s twin brother. It deals with war, betrayal, love, torture, child abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Ben Brantley of the New York Times described the play as an “unsettling study of domestic sadism and subterfuge” that “brought the war home.  


When on the Daily Show, John Stewart asked him what sparked his idea of the play, Shinn replied, "I try to structure my plays intuitively because, at the deepest level, any work of art represents the movements of the psyche in grappling with trauma. We do not plot out our sufferings in a logical manner in real life—we merely suffer.

The play was structured like a trauma, and the trauma was disguised in three characters. It looked at the profound questions about the links between sexuality, violence, deceit and the truth. I wanted the work to inflict a trauma on the audience—to be something they’d have to struggle with rather than passively experience."

His newest play, Picked, is about a young actor whose life undergoes radical change when he is chosen to star in a big-budget Hollywood action movie. Think of “Entourage,” but with an emphasis on psychology, not sex. Michael Wilson directs. (April 20, Vineyard Theater)