Lucy Thurber

Lucy Thurber is an American playwright based in New York City. She is the recipient of the first Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a Lilly Award and a 2014 OBIE Award for The Hill Town Plays.

She was born in rural western Massachusetts, a place that is important as a setting or reference for a number of her plays. She lived first in the town of Huntington, then in Northampton. She attended Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Hyde Academy in Bath, Maine, and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sarah Lawrence College.

Lucy Thurber is the author of: Where We’re Born, Ashville, Killers & Other Family, Stay, Bottom of the World, Monstrosity, Scarcity, The Locus, The Insurgents, Dillingham City and other plays.

Five of her plays, while standing alone as individual works, also form a cycle known as The Hill Town Plays. Each play in the cycle considers an important moment in the life of the main character, beginning with childhood in rural Western Massachusetts, and then progressing through college, coming to terms with her sexual identity, and onto adulthood. The five plays are: Where We’re Born, Ashville, Killers and Other Family, Scarcity, and Stay. In 2013 they were produced all together by David Van Asselt of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and ran simultaneously at several theatres in the West Village in New York City.

Thurber was the recipient of the 2000/2001 Manhattan Theatre Club playwriting fellowship. Her play, Bottom of the World, opened the 2010–2011 season at The Atlantic Theater Company, and was produced by WET in the winter of 2005 and was previously workshopped at The Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Center. Bottom of the World was part of The Tribeca Theater festival and received a workshop at The Public Theater. She attended New River Dramatists in North Carolina. Her play, Where We’re Born, was produced at Rattlestick Theater in the fall of 2003. Killers and Other Family was produced at Rattlestick Theater in 2009, and well as 2001. Also in 2001, she was commissioned by The Keene Theater Company to write a short piece called The Kool-Aid Smile, which was presented in “Keene America.”

Thurber was a guest artist at the Perseverance Theatre twice, where she helped to adapt both Moby-Dick and Desire Under the Elms. Her ten-minute play, Dinner, is published in a collection called Not So Sweet, sixteen plays from Soho Repertory Theatre’s Ten-Minute Play Festival. Her play Laura and Wendy was performed at the Blue Heron Arts Center. She completed a new play commissioned by Playwrights Horizons. She received a Lilly Award in 2010. She is a member of MCC Playwrights’ Coalition, Primary Stages’ writing group, and 13P.

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