Dan LeFranc

Resident Playwright

2008 -- 2015

Dan LeFranc received the 2010 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, premiered by Page 73 Productions and Soho Rep. His most recent play, The Big Meal, received its world premiere at American Theater Company in Chicago, and will receive its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons this season. His other plays include Troublemaker or The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright, Origin Story, Bruise Easy, Night Surf, In The Labyrinth, The Fishbone Fables, Backyard, Kill The Keepers, and Catgut.

Dan’s work has been seen or developed across the country at The Public Theater, The Vineyard Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, MCC Theater, The Kennedy Center, Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, The Studio Theatre, American Theater Company, The House Theatre of Chicago, Trinity Repertory Company, ArsNova, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Magic Theatre, The Hangar, Circle X Theatre, and the Page 73 Productions Summer Residency at Yale, among others.

Awards include a Helen Merrill Award, the Whitfield Cook Award, the John C. Russell Fellowship, a Djerassi Resident Artists Program Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony/Alpert Foundation Residency; and commissions from Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and American Theater Company in Chicago. He is a proud member of New Dramatists, the MCC Playwrights’ Coalition, and a former member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab.

A graduate of the MFA playwriting program at Brown University, Dan served as visiting faculty in Literary Arts at Brown and head playwriting instructor of the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. He was recently a visiting lecturer at University of Rochester, Whitman College, and the Alaska State Theater Institute at Perseverance Theater. Sixty Miles to Silver Lake is published by Samuel French and his short play, Hippie Van Gumdrop, is published in The Backstage Book of New American Short Plays 2005, edited by Craig Lucas. He was born and raised in Southern California.

ND Activity

Composer-Librettist Studio
Composer-Librettist Studio
Our annual Composer-Librettist Studio focuses simultaneously on music-theatre development and the principles of collaboration, teaming five writers with five composers and five performers to develop brand-new works of musical theatre. At the end of the Studio, each playwright has worked with each composer and 25 new music-theatre pieces have been created by the group.
Creativity Fund
Creativity Fund
The Creativity Fund blends the flexibility of a one-day play reading with the intensive focus of a two-week workshop, providing ten to fifteen playwrights per year the opportunity to program three to five day workshops on an ad hoc basis. Creativity Fund workshops are structured according to each writer's needs at any stage of development and are funded through a lead grant from the Andew W. Mellon Foundation.
Nocturnal Commissions
Nocturnal Commissions
Nocturnal Commissions is a marathon evening of instant theatre, New Dramatists style. First, the opportunity to commission new plays by New Dramatists resident and alumni playwrights is auctioned to the highest bidder; second, the writer and their winning bidder meet for a lightning-fast commission; third, each writer has about 20 minutes to create a new short theatre piece, monologue, or song; fourth, the plays are rehearsed upstairs while the audience has dinner downstairs; and last, all the evening's commissioned pieces are presented by a first-rate company of actors and directors.
Whitfield Cook Award
Whitfield Cook Award
The Whitfield Cook Award goes to one New Dramatists playwright each year for an unproduced, unpublished play deemed worthiest by an outside panel of judges. The purpose of the award is to provide financial assistance to New Dramatists resident playwrights to encourage and reward their talents in the art of playwriting.
Writers' Executive Committee
Writers' Executive Committee
The Writers' Executive Committee is a voluntary grouping of resident playwrights who meet throughout the year to discuss and make decisions concerning the work of New Dramatists and to help guide the organization.