Faculty & Staff: Faculty

Contact Info Dept. of Drama & Dance Aidekman Medford, MA 02155 Phone: 617-627-4879 Email Lecturer

Drama

Ken Urban, Lecturer, playwriting (part-time)

Ken Urban's plays have been produced and developed at Summer Play Festival @ The Public, The Flea, The Chocolate Factory (NYC), Wlliamstown Theatre Festival, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, The Lark, The Huntington, Moving Arts, Theatre of NOTE, and Soho Rep. Recent productions: The Private Lives of Eskimos (Open Circle, Seattle), I (HEART) KANT (Collaborative Arts, NJ), and Nibbler (Theatre of NOTE, Los Angeles). He is the winner of the 2008 Weissberger Playwriting Award, the 2007/8 Huntington Playwriting Fellowship, the 2010-11 Dramatist Guild Fellowship, the 2009 Writers' Room of Boston Emerging Writers Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2008, 2009) and a Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South. His plays are featured in the anthologies Plays and Playwrights 2002 and New York Theatre Review as well as numerous monologue collections. Ken founded The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produces "catastrophic theatre." In addition to directing his own work, he has directed plays by Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams. He is currently working on two new plays (The Awake, The Correspondent), an adaptation of Aristophanes's The Wasps, and a screenplay adaptation of his play The Happy Sad.

Ken's articles on theatre include: a new introduction to Sarah Kane's Blasted (Methuen, forthcoming); an entry on Sarah Kane in The Methuen Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights (forthcoming); "Cruel Britannia" (in Cool Britannia: British Political Theatre in the 1990s, Eds. Saunders and D'Monte, 2008); "The Body's Cruel Joke: The Comic Theatre of Sarah Kane" (in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Theatre, Eds. Holdsworth and Luckhurst, 2007); "Ghosts from an Imperfect Past: Philip Ridley's Nostalgia," (Modern Drama, Fall 2007); "Contemporary American Playwriting: The Issue of Legacy, Jason Grote, Caridad Svich, and Anne Washburn in conversation with Ken Urban" (PAJ, September 2006); "Thoughts on Globalization and The Female Terrorist Project" (Contemporary Theatre Review, February 2006); "Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia" (NTQ, 2004); "An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane" (PAJ, September 2001).

He received his Ph.D in English Literature from Rutgers University in 2006. He is currently a Lecturer at Harvard University, where he teaches Contemporary Theatre and Playwriting. Since 2008, he also teaches a course in Playwriting in the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University.