Sarah Lunnie is an interdisciplinary new-works dramaturg and producer.
Over almost two decades, her primary Occupation has been the cultivation of long-term dramaturgical collaborations in the theater, born from and sustained by mutual affinity. She has nurtured such ongoing conversations with David Adjmi, Jeff Augustin, shaun and Abigail Bengson, Lyndsey Bourne, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Lucas Hnath, The Mad Ones, Mara Nelson-Greenberg, Lila Neugebauer, Heidi Schreck, and Else and Emma Went, among many others; and has worked closely with these ArTISTS on the development and first productions of some indelible plays, including Hnath’s The Christians and A Doll’s House, Part 2; The Mad Ones’ Miles For Mary and Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie; Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities and Rheology; Schreck’s What The Constitution Means to Me; and Else Went’s Initiative. Along the way, She has held resident positions at the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, and Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she curated and developed new work for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Over time, her work has expanded to include engagement with other modes of live performance, including dance; with new orientations toward collaboration, including writing and directing; and with recorded media. including, lately, television.
In all cases, Her practice is grounded in relationship and in sustained dialogue, over time and across projects. If time is our medium, she believes our work is fundamentally a habit of attention. While her taste is wide-ranging, She tends not to respond to work that is narrowly psychological in its perspective. Likewise, though her working mind is associative and pattern-seeking, she is generally suspicious of dramaturgy that seeks to enforce an overly tidy structural discipline, or to signpost meaning (“A poem should not mean / But be”) — though sometimes it’s useful to build scaffolding and then tear it down. She thinks as much about music and shape as she does about story. While each project insists on its own process, her effort is always to help whatever this thing is find its full expression and form. It’s a very lucky gig.