Playwriting Alumna Samantha Chanse '12 Recipient of The Lark's Playwright Fellowship

Alumna Samantha Chanse '12 has been awarded The Lark 2019-2020 Venturous Playwright Fellowship. Chanse will be awarded $50,000 over two years, as well as a Production Subsidy Grant of up to $50,000 to support a production of the play at a theater of her choosing. The fellowship supports the advancement of ambitious, risk-taking, and innovative plays by providing concurrent residencies for playwrights, and advocating for production of their plays by partner theaters. 

Throughout the two-year fellowship, Chanse will be in residence at The Lark where she will have access to an individually-tailored lineup of new play development and advocacy resources, including readings, workshops, writers' groups, retreats, career guidance, and community engagement activities, designed to nurture her writing and advance her work. Chanse will continue to develop Trigger, which tells the story of Lee who recognizes Allie, a childhood friend, in a video of a racist rant that goes viral. Lee's sister, Grace, urges her to reach out. As Lee becomes uncomfortably reacquainted with Allie, a deteriorating domestic situation and sudden crisis tears her world apart. In a time of heightened fear and anger, how can Lee connect with others, and contend with her own rage? A play about this country and this moment, the fury around and within us, and what happens next. According to Lloyd Suh, Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark, “Sam Chanse's Trigger is at once a philosophical treatise on the history of anger, and a primal scream of theatrical imagination.”

Sam Chanse is the author of Trigger, The Opportunities of Extinction, Fruiting Bodies, The Other Instinct, What You Are Now, Lydia’s Funeral Video, about that whole dying thing, and Asian American Jesus. Her work has been developed with the Lark, Ma-Yi Theater, Cherry Lane, Leviathan Lab, Ars Nova, Broken Nose, and Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Project. Upcoming productions include Fruiting Bodies, directed by Shelley Butler, at Ma-Yi Theater (April/May 2019). She is a resident playwright of New Dramatists, and a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Commissions include Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, Ma-Yi/the Flea, Second Generation, Leviathan, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is an alumna of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Civilians R&D Group, and the Lark’s New York Stage & Film Vassar Retreat.