LISA LEWIS
PLAYWRIGHT

"Competing drives and complicated ethics fuse in Lisa Lewis’s sexy and snarled SCHOOLED." 

​

Photo by Matthew Murphy

WINNER of the New York International Fringe Festival Overall Excellence Award for Playwriting, SCHOOLED had a critically acclaimed sold-out run directed by James Kautz, and was extended as part of the Fringe Encore Series at Soho Playhouse.  Published in The Best Plays from American Theater Festivals 2015, Applause Books.

It's about what happens outside the classroom

SCHOOLED is a fiercely funny and gripping new play about privilege, ambition, and the lengths we’ll go to succeed. Two students vie for a competitive grant from their roguish professor in a taut threesome that tests their romantic relationship and their ethics. A biting drama with surprising humor, SCHOOLED is an examination of the lies we tell ourselves, and the truths we refuse to believe.

Click here to read an excerpt

The cast of SCHOOLED: Quentin Maré, Lilli Stein, Stephen Friedrich. Photo by Darren Cox

"FOUR STARS!  WISED-UP and WHIP-SMART, and handled with REMARKABLE HUMOR and subtlety. This seriocomic love triangle moves smoothly and bristles with apt, STINGING lines and RICH, UNPREDICTABLE characters."

"Lisa Lewis is A WILDLY TALENTED PLAYWRIGHT. SCHOOLED is a complex power-play in which there is no predator or victim, but an intricate intertwining of ambitions from which

NO EGO EMERGES UNSCATHED."

"Questions of who has the right, or, more accurately, the privilege to make art, drive the CRACKLING PLOT, as the characters lob verbal grenades at one another. SCHOOLED has the makings of one of the Fringe premieres that ends up making a mainstream splash."

Peter Friedman, Phoebe Strole, James Kautz, Mara Davi at New Ohio Theater

ABOUT ME

A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Dramatic Writing Program, my work wrestles with class and the legacy of parentage, capturing dangerous conversations between people blinded by their assumptions.

My plays include Schooled, The Housewarming, The One-Fifth, Triple Cherry, and the television pilot, The Gamble. My work has been seen and developed by 24 Hour Plays (starring Amy Hargreaves, watch here), Maven Pictures, Naked Angels, Davenport Theatricals, The New Ohio Theatre, Core Artist Ensemble, and New Helvetia Theatre’s Sacramento New Works Festival, where I was an artist in residence.  My essays and artist profiles have appeared in The New York Times, ELLE Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, New York Theatre Magazine, and New York Press.

​

If you'd like to learn more, you can check out my resume here. 

In addition to my work as a playwright, I'm currently a Creative Director at SpotCo, an advertising, marketing and branding agency for the arts where I oversee creative strategy for a portfolio of entertainment brands.

The Housewarming

Twenty-five years after the Brooklyn Crown Heights riots, newlyweds Alysha and Corey have bought a renovated duplex in the gentrifying neighborhood. When Alysha's college best friend Franny and her boyfriend Oscar come by to help them unpack, long-simmering resentments rise to the surface in a collision of race and class that threatens to destroy the bonds that connect them all.

> Read and excerpt here

THe

One-Fifth

When her ambivalence about having children threatens her marriage, Tara and her wife become locked in a heated battle for their future. With her brother-in-law determined to be their sperm donor and his wife set against it, all four must grapple with the seismic change a child would bring to their lives. An exploration of love, responsibility, and the sometimes unbridgeable gap between what we want for ourselves and what we owe to each other. 

> Read an excerpt here