Jason Grote

Jason Grote (born 1971) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He wrote a series of plays in the 2000s that were known for addressing contemporary themes in the context of classic literature with multilayered stories jumping back and forth between fantastic and realistic scenes. In the 2010s, Grote became a television writer with credits on Smash, Mad Men, Rogue and Knightfall, as well as the video game series BioShock.

Early life and education Grote was born in Lakewood Township, New Jersey and raised in a working-class family. He studied theater at Montclair State University, where he took a playwriting class, then moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1997. After a few years of acting, writing and directing in New York—including having a play performed at the New York International Fringe Festival—Grote enrolled in the master of fine arts program at New York University, graduating in 2003.

Playwriting career Grote's early plays included The New Jersey Book of the Dead; He received a commission from the theater collective Radiohole to write the text for their performance Tarzana.

1001 Grote's first major success was 1001, a play inspired by the One Thousand and One Nights. 1001 premiered at the Denver Center Theater in 2007 The play won an Ovation Award from The Denver Post. Grote adapted 1001 into a musical, with music by Marisa Michelson, which debuted off-Broadway in 2018. The New York Times said the show was "at its best when it flat-out mocks American ignorance and the stubbornness of ethnic clichés" but critiqued Grote's book for getting "bogged down as it tries to layer a time-shifting plot". Tablet praised Grote's skill with dialogue but called the characters "frustratingly trope-laden."

Maria/Stuart In 2008, Maria/Stuart premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., with Sarah Marshall in a starring role. The play is a dramedy adapted from Friedrich Schiller's play Mary Stuart, drawn from the relationship of Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. The play focuses on female rivalry in a contemporary U.S. suburban environment and includes supernatural elements. According to The Washington Post, This Storm Is What We Call Progress and Maria/Stuart established Grote's reputation for "scripts that explode the boundaries between the ordinary and the chimerical, the political and the aesthetic, the intimate and the dizzyingly cosmic."

Civilization (all you can eat) From 2008 to 2011, Grote developed a surreal satire of contemporary life called Civilization (all you can eat), which features a plotline involving a pig named Big Hog plotting an escape from an abattoir layered into a story about a struggling waitress, her daughter who seeks financial success through online pornography. The play also addresses commercialism and interracial marriage. According to Grote, it "documents the very beginning of the romance with Obama, the backlash against Obama, and the dawn of social media." Civilization was mounted at Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks festival in 2011, then given a world premiere at Woolly Mammoth, with Sarah Marshall in the role of Big Hog, in 2012.

Habit Toward the end of his time in New York, Grote wrote a devised theatre work called Children of Kings for David M. Levine's performance installation Habit, which premiered in 2012. Grote described the script as "a parody of the realism that dominated American stages at the time."

Basetrack Live In 2014 Grote adapted an online citizen journalism project called One-Eight Basetrack with Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger for En Garde Arts. The multimedia theatrical piece, called Basetrack Live, is drawn entirely from text about the impact of war on veterans and their families. It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival and was a New York Times critics' pick, with Charles Isherwood saying, "this production brings the gritty, brutal truths alive in ways that nothing I've read or seen has succeeded in doing."

Television career In 2010, the post-financial crisis recession affecting live theater and a layoff from a teaching job at Rutgers University left Grote unemployed. He pivoted to television writing with work on Smash, a musical drama series that premiered in 2012. Grote relocated to Los Angeles, where he continued to work on television shows, including Hannibal, The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, Rogue (for which he was also story editor) and Knightfall (which he also co-produced).

For his work on the Mad Men episode "The Crash", International Business Times said that Grote and Matthew Weiner "got one of the very best performances we've seen from Jon Hamm in an episode that delivers scenes almost too funny to be believed alongside genuine, nail-biting terror." That episode was named the 9th best episode of the show by Entertainment Weekly. In 2012, he was one of the Mad Men writers nominated for the Writers Guild of America Awards for television drama.

Grote also co-wrote Poppy, a TV comedy pilot about the young George H. W. Bush with Will Menaker and Matt Christman of the Chapo Trap House podcast.

Other activities and personal life Grote has written for the BioShock video game franchise and was a contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. In addition to his writing, Grote has taught writing at Rutgers University, the University of California, San Diego, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Queens College (CUNY), the University of Rochester, Hollins University, Point Park University and Whitman College. He was also a DJ on the New Jersey free-form radio station WFMU. Of that event he said "We can't hope to overwhelm this level of late-capitalist spectacle, but we can grab it, transform it and reverse its purpose: we can use it to reveal." 2006 Box Americana Premiered at the Working Theater, New York City 2007 1001 Premiered at Denver Center Theater 2008 Hamilton Township Premiered at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Austin, Texas 2008 This Storm Is What We Call Progress Premiered at Rorschach Theatre, Washington, D.C. 2008 Maria/Stuart Premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. 2008 Darwin's Challenge First reading at Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York City 2009 Three Classics Collection of three one-act plays: (Anti)gone, In His Bold Gaze, My Ruin is Writ Large and Prometheus Rendered 2011 Civilization (all you can eat) Premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C., 2012 2012 Children of Kings Premiered as a play within a play during David M. Levine's performance installation Habit 2014 Basetrack Live Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival 2015-6 Tarzana A collaboration with Radiohole at Mass Live Arts and The Performing Garage 2017 Shostakovich, or Silence 2018 One Thousand Nights and One Day Musical adaptation of 1001 with music by Marisa Michelson

Television Year Title Writer (individual episodes) Story editor Producer 2012 Smash 2013 Mad Men 2014 Hannibal 2015 The Lizzie Borden Chronicles 2015–16 Rogue 2017–18 Knightfall