Sherry Kramer
Sherry Kramer’s work includes David’s RedHaired Death, When Something Wonderful Ends, The Wall of Water, and Three-Quarter Inches of Sky. Her plays have premiered at The Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Soho Rep, Second Stage, Humana Festival, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Her book Writing for the Stage and Screen: Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience is published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Biography
Kramer’s plays are part of her ongoing conversation with America about the American Dream and how we are failing it. She has written about our role in destabilizing the Middle East over oil (When Something Wonderful Ends), anti-Semitism in the heartland (Ivanhoe, MO.), the power of the press to distort the shape of a nation’s soul (The Ruling Passion), and two plays about the American idea of money and philanthropy (How Water Behaves and The Bay of Fundy). All of these plays invite their audience to find new ways to understand who we are, as a nation, and how we might find our way back to being the generous, openhearted people we believe we used to be.
Kramer’s plays have been performed in theaters here and abroad and include productions at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Second Stage in New York, Soho Rep, Yale Repertory Theatre, the EST One Act Marathon, the Rude Mechanicals, and the Tokyo International Arts Festival. Other plays include David’s RedHaired Death, A Thing of Beauty, The Long Arms of Jupiter (a croquet performance piece), Things That Break, What a Man Weighs, The Law Makes Evening Fall, The World at Absolute Zero, The Wall of Water, About Spontaneous Combustion, The Release of a Live Performance, Partial Objects, and two music-theatre pieces: an adaptation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita with composer Margaret Pine and Napoleon’s China, with Ann Haskell and Rebecca Newton. She is a recipient of NEA, NYFA, and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Award, a New York Drama League Award, LA Women in Theatre New Play Award, the Jane Chambers Award, commissions from The Moscow Arts Theatre/Iowa International Writers Workshop (The Dream House) and the Audrey Skirball Kenis Foundation (The Mad Master). She was the first national member of New Dramatists.
Kramer taught playwriting regularly at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, where she served as head of the workshop. She was a core member of the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis multiple times. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing. Kramer taught at Bennington from 2007 to 2025.