LUCY THURBER is the author of twelve plays: Where We're Born, Ashville, Scarcity, Killers and Other Family, Stay, Bottom of The World, Monstrosity, Dillingham City, The Locus, The Insurgents, Perry Street and The Unfinished. The Atlantic Theater Company has produced Bottom of The World and Scarcity. They also developed Bottom of the World at Perry-Mansfield. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater has produced three of her plays, Where We're Born, Killers and Other Family and Stay, and produced a critically acclaimed revival of Killlers and Other Family in 2009, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin. Lucy has twice collaborated with the director Lear deBessonet, on Quixote, a site-specific performance with the Psalters made for and with The Broad Street Community in Philadelphia, and also on her play Monstrosity for 13P. Scarcity was published in issue of American Theatre, and acting editions of her work are published by Dramatists Play Service. Lucy is a member of Labyrinth Theater Company. She is an alumni of New Dramatists and 13P. She is a recipient of the Manhattan Theatre Club Playwriting Fellowship, The Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting and a LILLY Award. Lucy has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, The Contemporary American Theater Festival and Houses On The Moon. She currently teaches playwriting at NYU.
The Hill Town Plays is a cycle of five plays: Scarcity, Ashville, Where We're Born, Killers and Other Family, and Stay. Each play investigates a pivotal stage of the main character's life, spanning from a childhood in rural Western Massachusetts, through college and coming to terms with her sexual identity, and onto adulthood as a successful author. The cycle is an examination of the culture of poverty in America; how we are always a part of where we come from, and yet our future is determined by who we choose to be. We all come with these stories we've created; urban or rural, we have narratives we construct as a means of survival. Often they keep us from allowing others to know us, to touch the parts of ourselves we kept secret in order to remain whole. The Hill Town Plays examine how, in order to overcome the past, we have to accept the fact that it takes courage to live in the present.
