Katrin Arefy
Playwright, Essayist
I strive to turn my observation of the realities of our daily lives to writing and invite my audience to examine those realities with me. Playwriting has proved my most effective tool for communicating ideas to a wide group of people. I hope that even those who attend the theater primarily for the entertainment aspect will find my work sparks questions they'll ponder long after the curtain falls.
In my plays, as well as in my essays, I explore subjects such as anti-Semitism, the question of terrorism, xenophobia, love, and other absurd realities that we experience in our daily lives. Although audiences and readers often perceive my plays as absurd theater, fitting into that style isn’t necessarily my aim.
In my writing, I don’t try to offer an answer, because some questions are better than answers. Or as Madeleine L’Engle put it “An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers.”
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Plays
The Elbisnopsers!
Written in 2015
Premiered in 2016 in NYC
Synopsis
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Breaking news about a distant civilization turns the prosaic tedium of a middle class household’s day to a tempest in a teapot. Their attempt to overcome their fear-inducing ignorance by turning to their limited resources results in a farcical event.
Using an absurd situation, The Elbisnopsers aims to question the idea of us versus “the other.”
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Two men, one woman
Dear Citizens! Dictators Don’t Exist!
Written in 2016
Synopsis
This one-act absurdist play looks at the origin of dictatorship from the angle of accountability. Who is responsible for the genesis and development of an evil presence in a society?
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Two men and a crowd of 12 people
Script Sample
A Massacre
Written in 2016
Premiered in 2017 in NYC
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Synopsis
Discovering a pile of dead bodies in the middle of their office, work colleagues seem nonchalant about the carnage and instead become embroiled in petty arguments. Their repetitive discussions and responses are predetermined and nonnegotiable.
Written in a surreal manner, A Massacre observes the bigger world we live in, and highlights the limitation of the smaller world in which we live—our minds.
Two women, three men
Love Is a Carrot! or Can You Love the Umbrella?
Written in 2018
Premiered in 2019 in NYC (as part of a trilogy)
Synopsis
Awakened by sounds from a machine that warns of impending danger, six pseudo-intellectual housemates get into endless groundless arguments, contradicting themselves and creating a cacophony of mad unreason.Unable to listen to each other or think outside of their very limited “open” minds, the characters are truer to our own world than we would like to believe.
Like the other parts of the trilogy, Love Is a Carrot explores the question of how to oppose evil, this time by presenting fear and distrust on one hand and suicidal feebleness on the other.
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Two women, four men
Peace, a Massacre, and the Umbrella (trilogy)
Completed in 2019
Premiered in 2019 in NYC
Synopsis
Peace, a Massacre, and the Umbrella is a trilogy written in a surreal manner that aims to question the idea of us versus “the other.”
Breaking news about a distant civilization turns the prosaic tedium of a middle class household’s day to a tempest in a teapot. Their attempt to overcome their fear-inducing ignorance by turning to their limited resources results in a farcical event.
Discovering a pile of dead bodies in the middle of an office, work colleagues become embroiled in repetitive, predetermined, and nonnegotiable discussions.
And finally, six pseudo-intellectual housemates get into endless groundless arguments, contradicting themselves and creating a cacophony of mad unreason. Unable to listen to each other or think outside of their very limited “open” minds, the characters are truer to our own world than we would like to believe.
The Portrait of an Angel, a Lion, a Monster
Written in 2020
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Premiered 2022 in Manhattan NYC
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A lyrical, nonlinear, three-act play with absurdist elements and a strong Jewish backdrop. The play takes the audience through an intimate internal journey that suggests happy families are not all alike.
O Lubvi
Written in 2021
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O Lubvi is a thirty minute play with dark humor dreaming about love. The play is a reminder of how often the universal need for love ironically goes hand in hand with our inability to connect.
A Helmet Is a Helmet Is a Helmet
Written in 2022
A Helmet Is a Helmet Is a Helmet is a ten-minute play that considers the subject of identity. The play focuses on Jewish identity, sexual identity, Don Quixote’s identity, as well as Jonathan’s identity.
The Living Room And Death
Written in 2022
The Living room and Death is a full-length farcical play that creates a multilayered atmosphere around the themes of death, grief, and mortality. The play offers juxtapositions between mortality and immortality, the mundane and deeper human needs, and between the longing for connection and the reality of disconnection. As if mocking the human condition, the most heated arguments in the play don’t go any further than a storm in a teacup. The play is written in the style of meaningful nonsense, AKA absurd.
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More Than Thirty Faces of the Rouen Cathedral
Written 2023
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A monologue in the absurdist style, More Than Thirty Faces of the Rouen Cathedral features an elderly woman talking to her grandchild, drawing on a cache of memory mixed from haze and clarity.
Contact Me
1809 University Avenue,
Berkeley, CA, 94703
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