Gina Gionfriddo

Playwright

  • Born: ca. 1969
  • Place of Birth: New York, New York

Contribution: Gina Gionfriddo is an award-winning playwright best known for her plays Becky Shaw (2008) and Rapture, Blister, Burn (2012). Each was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 2009 and 2013, respectively. She is also a television producer and writer.

Background

Gina Gionfriddo was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in a suburb near American University. She attended Horace Mann Elementary and Georgetown Day School in the 1980s. Gionfriddo wrote stories as a child, but was mostly interested in acting. She began acting in plays while attending Barnard College in New York, where she studied literature. While interning for the then Off-Broadway theater company Primary Stages in the summer of 1988, Gionfriddo witnessed playwrights working on script revisions and edits. Already frustrated by the little control afforded to actors, Gionfriddo became interested in playwriting. She stayed with Primary Stages through college. After graduating from Barnard in 1991, she was hired as the theater’s general manager.

While working at Primary Stages, Gionfriddo met the experimental playwright Mac Wellman. Wellman offered to read one of Gionfriddo’s plays, and after doing so, advised her to pursue playwriting in a graduate program. Gionfriddo enrolled at Brown University, where Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel was then teaching. As a student, Gionfriddo wrote a play called Blue Movie, about teenagers reacting to the suicide of rock musician Kurt Cobain. The play was never produced, but it earned Gionfriddo her first agent. She graduated with a master of fine arts in playwriting from Brown in 1997.

Career

Gionfriddo’s thesis at Brown was a play called U.S. Drag (2002). Much like her next play, After Ashley (2004), the work looks at American culture with a wary eye. U.S. Drag examines the issues of greed and materialism among American youth. It won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Award, awarded annually to an outstanding female playwright, in 2001. Through the early 2000s, Gionfriddo continued to win grants, commissions, residencies, and awards, but productions at major theaters eluded her. Guinevere, about an alcoholic actor filming a movie about King Arthur, was developed at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference in the summer of 2001.

After Ashley (2004), a commission from the Philadelphia Theatre Company that was also developed at the National Playwrights Conference, is a sharp satire that examines how the media behaves in the wake of a tragedy. After a woman is murdered, her husband peddles a tell-all book and television show about her life while her teenage son grieves. In the play, Gionfriddo criticizes television shows for selling violent crime as entertainment. Nevertheless, after the play’s premiere at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival in 2004, the head writer of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–11) hired her as a staff writer on the show. She later wrote an episode of the crime drama series Cold Case (2003–10).

Gionfriddo, who professes a love for all things macabre and true crime, wrote six episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent during the 2005–2006 season. She also wrote for Law & Order in 2008 and 2009. In 2013, she wrote for the Emmy-nominated Netflix drama House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. The drama won a Writers Guild of America award for new series in 2014. Gionfriddo has also contributed occasional screenplays for the shows Borgia in 2011, Law & Order UK in 2014, Law & Order: True Crime in 2017, The Alienist in 2018, and FBI: Most Wanted from 2020 to 2022. She produced or coproduced numerous episodes of Law & Order and Law & Order: True Crime, as well as The Alienist and FBI: Most Wanted.

Gionfriddo’s award-winning 2008 play Becky Shaw was hailed as a modern comedy of manners. Sexual intrigue, social ambition, and crime all figure into the satiric comedy—billed as a play about a woman who wears the wrong dress on a blind date. The character Becky Shaw has been compared to the character Becky Sharp in William Thackeray’s nineteenth-century social satire Vanity Fair (1848). Becky Shaw premiered at the Humana Festival in 2008 and opened Off-Broadway at Second Stage theater in January 2009. It won an Outer Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009.

Gionfriddo’s play Rapture, Blister, Burn premiered at Playwrights Horizons in June 2012 to very positive reviews. The play—which takes its title from the lyrics of a song by the rock band Hole—was praised as an honest look at women and feminism in the 2010s. Catherine, played by television actor Amy Brenneman in the premiere, is a single academic in her forties, who secretly covets her friend’s life as a stay-at-home mom. Although it is a satire, it strikes a more complex note regarding the familiar “career or children” debate. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013.

Gionfriddo's dark comedy Can You Forgive Her? opened at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in April 2016, before making its Off-Broadway premiere in May 2017 at the Vineyard Theatre. In it, debt-ridden Miranda seeks refuge with couple Graham and Tanya one Halloween night from her threatening date. Can You Forgive Her? met with lukewarm reviews, as critics deemed it poorly plotted and heavy-handed in its treatment of themes such as women's financial independence.

Gionfriddo has also written several short plays, including the one-act shows Squalor and America’s Got Tragedy and the monologue Safe. The latter, about a cancer patient in remission, was included in 2004's Trepidation Nation: A Phobic Anthology.

Impact

Gionfriddo has said that her favorite plays inspire debate. She likes leaving the theater hearing audience members argue about which character in a play was the “good guy” and who was the villain. She has often attained this kind of moral ambiguity in her own work. As a satirist, she is a witty observer—of men, women, and American culture—but never tells her audience what to think.

Personal Life

Gionfriddo has a daughter named Ava who was born in 2011. She resides in New York City.

Bibliography

Cohen, Patricia. “Onstage, Tackling Ambition and Crime.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 29 Dec. 2008. Web. 23 July 2013.

Davidson, Susan. “Theater.” Washingtonian. Washingtonian Magazine, 1 Sept. 2005. Web. 23 July 2013.

"Gina GIonfriddo." IMDb, 2022, www.imdb.com/name/nm2059056/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

"Gina Gionfriddo's World Premiere Can You Forgive Her? Begins Next Month at Huntington." Broadway World, 24 Feb. 2016, www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Gina-Gionfriddos-World-Premiere-CAN-YOU-FORGIVE-HER-Begins-Next-Month-at-Huntington-20160224. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Gionfriddo, Gina. “All Hail ‘Heidi’: Beyond Feminism But Still a Dream.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 June 2012. Web. 23 July 2013.

Gionfriddo, Gina. “I Interview Playwrights Part 70.” Interview by Adam Szymkowicz. Adam Szymkowicz (blog), 8 Oct. 2009. Web. 23 July 2013.

Gionfriddo, Gina. Interview by Tim Sanford. Playwrights Horizons. Playwrights Horizons, n.d. Web. 23 July 2013.

Gionfriddo, Gina. Interview by Walter Bilderback. Huntington Theatre Company. Huntington Theatre Company, n.d. Web. 23 July 2013.

Moore, John. “TV Networks Channel the Stage for the Write Stuff.” Denver Post. MediaNews Group, 17 Apr. 2005. Web. 23 July 2013.

Pressley, Nelson. “A Local Debut for Tantalizing Pulitzer Finalist Becky Shaw.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 6 June 2013. Web. 23 July 2013.

Weber, Bruce. “Where Plays Escape the Curse of the Unseen.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Apr. 2004. Web. 23 July 2013.