Chelsea Marcantel

Chelsea Marcantel is an American playwright and director. She has written over thirty plays. and a Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her musical The Monster. Marcantel has two younger siblings. She was involved with the local community theatre as a child. She graduated from Louisiana State University in 2005 with a double major in English and Theatre; she earned a master's degree in English Education in 2006.

Career

Theatre Marcantel moved to Chicago after completing her master's degree. She worked in theatre in Chicago and won the Emerging Playwright Award from the Chicago Union League Civic and Arts Foundation. and Christopher Durang. She now lives in Los Angeles. The play premiered at Chicago's 20% Theatre Company in May 2012.

Even Longer and Farther Away premiered at the New Colony at the Den Theatre in Chicago in 2016. In it, Elliot gets snowed in at a small village on the Appalachian Trail. There he discovers part of his family's history among strangers who seem to know a lot about him and his family. Reviewer Chad Bay called it "one part standard-procedure coming-of-age story and one part mystical folklore."

Marcantel's play Everything is Wonderful premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in July 2017. In it, an Amish family who loses two children in a car accident invites the driver into their home. The play was inspired by Werner Herzog's documentary From One Second to the Next, which tells the real-life story of an Amish family affected by a similar accident. Writing about a 2019 production, reviewer Tina Collins calls the play "a thoughtful study of Amish life [that] slowly reveals the underlying complexity that characterizes the human condition as a whole." In reviewing a 2019 production of the play at Everyman Theatre, Baltimore Theatre Talk wrote: ""Chelsea Marcantel navigates the outwardly difficult subject with a beautiful balance of wit and raw emotion. Her writing is both entertaining and heartbreaking…. It's a crucial piece of theatre that shouldn't be missed." Everything is Wonderful is published and licensed by Concord Theatricals (formerly Samuel French, Inc).

Marcantel's play Airness debuted at the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The play tells the story of a woman who enters her first air guitar competition, and quickly realizes there is more to this seemingly silly art from than just playing pretend. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel acclaimed it as the best full-length play of the Humana festival, and other reviews were similarly glowing. Insider Louisville declared it, ""The most fun you will have at the theater this year … to call this play a "crowd pleaser" is a drastic understatement." Allie Fireel commented in an essay for HowlRound that, "Airness stays with the viewer after the last guitar chord has faded because of the way its complex layers ask the question 'what is real?' when it comes to families, groups, and societies." Airness won the American Theatre Critics Association's M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018; the award recognizes an emerging playwright, and carries as $1000 prize.

In 2018, Marcantel became a member of The Kilroys, a group of playwrights and producers working to enhance the recognition of female and trans playwrights. Marcantel said that she is particularly interested in improving visibility for trans and non-binary playwrights, as well as increasing diversity in theatre criticism.

The San Francisco Playhouse commissioned A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism, which premiered in February 2019. The play follows Blaze, a bored, disaffected teenager in rural Louisiana. Her YouTube videos depicting lesser-known female saints capture the attention of an FBI counter-terrorism agent, and her search for meaning "makes her vulnerable to some dangerous advice." In the play, reviewer Lily Janiak sees an indictment of America's "devoting so many resources to perceived terrorist threats of a particular ethnicity, nationality and gender while we ignore how poverty, downward mobility and social isolation sow the seeds of radicalization right in our heartland."

Also premiering in February 2019 was Marcantel's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play St. Joan, performed by the Delaware Theatre Company. The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Julia Klein appreciated Marcantel's "fine job of judiciously trimming Shaw's talky text," but found that the "dialogue tends to slow the piece down." Klein and WHYY reviewer Christine Facciolo both note that Marcantel's St. Joan strays further from historical reality than Shaw's original, and does represent a more feminist play than Shaw's. Facciolo notes that the play was timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States, but that St. Joan may be a better class hero than a feminist one, "an illiterate peasant girl [who] could rise to determine the fate of nations." Gail Obenreder in Broad Street Review called the adaptation: "Worthy of Shaw... Marcantel seems to fear no peril. Like Joan facing those seemingly insurmountable powers, she has thrown herself quite successfully up against Shaw. ... but GBS still has the best lines and the laughs." Marcantel's version of Saint Joan is published and licensed by Concord Theatricals.

Her play Tiny Houses had a joint premiere with productions at the Cleveland Play House and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in April 2019. The same cast and creative team performed at both locations. Cath and Bodhi are joined by Bodhi's college roommate Ollie and his high school girlfriend Jevne in a building project that stretches long past the expected three- to four-month timeline, and eventually professional contractor Jeremiah hired to rescue the floundering project. The play explores themes of life complexities in the midst of trying to simplify life, and of what makes a home. Cleveland Plain-Dealer Andrea Simakis reviewer called the play a "perfect, timely comedy."

In addition to her theatre career, Marcantel co-hosted the podcast "Hugging and Learning" with writer Andrew Grigg. The podcast co-hosts watch and discuss "very special episodes" of television shows from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The podcast began in July 2018. The final episode, #101, was released on December 4, 2020.

In the fall of 2020, when in-person theaters across the world were closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Marcantel created, wrote, and directed an online theatrical experience called Citizen Detective, as part of the Geffen Playhouse's "Geffen Stayhouse" virtual theatre initiative. The show, performed entirely on Zoom, simulates a true crime seminar in which audience members are instructed on the finer points of armchair sleuthing by fictional crime novelist Mickie McKittrick – before realizing that Mickie is actually using them to crowdsource a solution to the 100-year-old unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor. The show opened in November 2020. Citizen Detective garnered a New York Times Critic's Pick, with reviewer Alexis Soloski observing "Marcantel clearly enjoys the online form, neatly juxtaposing the workaday tools of contemporary online culture — polls, slides, breakout rooms, screen sharing, chat, the mute button — with a lurid case nearly a century cold." Maureen Lee Lenker noted in Entertainment Weekly: "All in all, Citizen Detective is a diverting evening, a combination of game night with a theatrical endeavor, that offers some clues as how to execute entertaining interactive virtual theater." The show was extended due to popular demand, closing in February 2021 after 100 performances.

In March 2021, it was announced that Marcantel (along with collaborators Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler) had won a 2021 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Stoltenberg of DC Metro Theater Arts favorably compared the play to Airness, writing in his review, "What I knew about Chelsea Marcantel going in was that she's a genius at creating worlds on stage that seem fantastical and fictitious but that are situated in a world that actually exists. That's what she did with Airness, which she set in the world of competitive air-guitar, a kind of axe karaoke where contestants shred the air fiercely to a blasting soundtrack. (Who knew that was a thing?) Marcantel took me to that world, peopled it with characters I could care about, and got my disbelief not just suspended but dissolved." The Upstairs Department marked Signature Theatre's 60th world premiere production.

Film and television In 2022, Marcantel was brought on as part of the Walt Disney Animation Story Trust. In this capacity, she collaborated in the development of such films as STRANGE WORLD and WISH, in addition to various other series and features that were in development during 2022 and 2023. As of 2024, Marcantel has projects in various stages of development at both live action and animation studios around Hollywood.

Plays columns-list|colwidth=25em| Airness, 2017 Beatrice and Beau [short], 2009 Blood Song: The Story of the Hatfields and the McCoys Citizen Detective, 2020 Climax [short], 2022 Consumables [short], 2012 Dealing [short], 2010 Devour, 2012 Everything is Permitted [short], 2013 Everything is Wonderful, 2017 Four Faces [short], 2009 Galatea on God G.I.F.T. Global [short], 2011 Heroics! Adventure! [short] (co-written with Andy Grigg), 2013 Grounded [adaptation], 2015 Vanishing Act, 2019 Voodoo Chalk Circle, [adaptation] 2011 A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism, 2019 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award, 2018