Marisa Wegrzyn

Marisa Wegrzyn (born 1981) is an American playwright based in Chicago, Illinois. She won the 2009 Wasserstein Prize for her play Hickorydickory.

Wegrzyn grew up in Wilmette, Illinois. Born to an anesthesiologist and former flight attendant, she began writing plays at 18. While at Washington University in St. Louis, Wegrzyn won the university's A.E. Hotchner playwriting award after finishing second the preceding year. She came as runner-up as a freshman for Polar Bears on U.S. 41, and was chosen to take part in the WordBRIDGE program. Hosted by Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, is a two-week program with theatre professionals. The next year, her Killing Women, about female hitmen, won the award and was produced by the University’s A.E. Hotchner Play Development Lab. After graduation in 2003, she was put in touch with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's director of new play development.

Wegrzyn's black comedy The Butcher of Baraboo debuted by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2006 and ran again at the Second Stage Theater in New York City a year later. The play went on to receive its West Coast premiere in San Diego, CA, in 2009 where it was then hailed by critics as a success. "With its acid blasts of humor and its carnival-fun-house vision of family values, Marisa Wegrzyn's “The Butcher of Baraboo” has a way of leaving people in stitches."-San Diego Union-Tribune

Wegrzyn's one-act Psalms of a Questionable Nature played at Los Angeles' Lucid By Proxy in 2005 to a positive reception. In June 2009, Ten Cent Night opened in Burbank, California and was called a "delightful but messy romp".

She is currently completing two plays commissioned by Steppenwolf and Yale Repertory Theatre.

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