Lisa D'Amour

Playwright

• Born: 1969
• Place of Birth: New Orleans, LA

Contribution: Lisa D’Amour is an award-winning playwright and performance artist. Her play Detroit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2011.

Background

Lisa D’Amour was born in 1969 in St. Paul, Minnesota, where her father was attending graduate school as a philosophy student. When she was nine years old, the family moved back to New Orleans, her mother’s home. D’Amour has two younger brothers. Her brother Todd is an actor and performance artist with whom she has collaborated. D’Amour’s father, a former professor, worked as an administrator at Xavier University in New Orleans. Her mother retired from teaching school.

D’Amour grew up in a very religious family. She and her brothers attended Catholic schools. As a student, she participated in the theater, but she did not consider studying it seriously until she encountered the small theater department at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. D’Amour spent her junior year at Hunter College in New York, where she took her first playwriting course. She graduated from Millsaps with a bachelor’s degree in English and theatre in 1991.

The summer after graduating from college, D’Amour worked as an intern at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut. The experience inspired her to pursue playwriting as a career. She moved back to New Orleans, where she worked at a law firm and a library, but focused most of her energy on writing. After two years, she was accepted into the playwriting program at the University of Texas, Austin. She got involved in the highly collaborative and experimental theater scene in Austin, an experience that she has often said changed her life. D’Amour completed the three-year program and stayed in Austin for a fourth year on a postgraduate fellowship. She earned her master of fine arts degree in 1996.

Career

While living in Austin, D’Amour met Katie Pearl, who became her longtime collaborator. The two women have never lived in the same city, but have been creating nontraditional theater pieces together since 1997 under the name PearlDamour. In 1998, they produced a site-specific performance tour called Dress Me Blue/Window Me Sky in Minneapolis. The piece features a mysterious woman in a blue dress moving through different rooms that represent stages of loss. It was originally commissioned for Austin’s Frontera Fest. PearlDamour’s best-known piece is called Nita and Zita, about the lives of two real-life sisters who had a dance act in the 1920s. D’Amour cowrote and directed the play. Structured as a question-and-answer session, the piece weaves together the facts that are known about the lives and art of the sisters—who died in the early 1990s. Nita and Zita premiered at the State Palace Theatre in New Orleans in June 2002. It played three performances at HERE Arts Center in New York, for which it earned a special Village Voice Obie Award in 2003.

After graduate school, D’Amour was awarded a fellowship through the Playwright’s Center and moved to Minneapolis. Her play Anna Bella Eema, about the tempestuous relationship between a mother and a daughter, premiered at Ten Thousand Things Theatre Company in June 2002. Her surrealist play 16 Spells to Charm the Beast, about a wealthy woman who cannot tell the difference between the things that are important in her life and the things that are not, premiered in November 2002 at the Mary Worth Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Both of these works highlight D’Amour’s love of poetic language and playful imagery. Tale of a West Texas Marsupial Girl—a musical that began as a one-act play in 1996—premiered at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis in January 2007. The play is about a girl who is ostracized because she was born with a pouch.

The Cataract, a play about two couples set in 1886 Minneapolis, premiered with the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf at the Perishable Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, in May 2005. Like D’Amour’s other works, Cataract is more impressionistic than linear.

D’Amour’s Detroit was premiered by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in September 2010, starring Laurie Metcalf. D’Amour wrote the play during a difficult time in her life—her husband had lost his job and the couple was barely making ends meet. The play is about two couples living as neighbors who gather for a backyard barbeque. Detroit struck a particular chord with audience members in the wake of the 2008 recession. The characters live in a crumbling suburbia, revealing their fears and anxieties about what the future might bring. Detroit was D’Amour’s largest critical and commercial hit. The play moved to the off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2012, in a production that featured actors David Schwimmer and Amy Ryan. Detroit was a finalist for the drama Pulitzer Prize in 2011.

D'Amour's next major play, Airline Highway, had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Downstairs Theatre in Chicago in late 2014 before moving to New York City's Samuel J. Friedman Theater for its Broadway premiere in April 2015. This time taking place in New Orleans, the play focuses on a group of people who have come together for an event to celebrate their dying friend. Largely well received, the production garnered four 2015 Tony Award nominations, including for actors K. Todd Freeman and Julie White. Airline Highway was also nominated for a 2015 Drama Desk Award in the category of Outstanding Play; Freeman and White received nominations as well, with Freeman claiming the award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play.

Impact

D’Amour has spent most of her career plumbing the experimental depths of the stage with PearlDamour and her own image-based, surrealist plays. Unlike her other works, Detroit—one of her most successful works to date—is a more traditional play about white middle-class characters. As a playwright, D’Amour is interested in the inner lives of her characters. Although she did not intend to create a politically themed work when she began Detroit, the play’s exploration of how financial turmoil affects the circumstances and emotions of everyday people resonated with audiences and critics.

Personal Life

D’Amour is married to composer Brendan Connelly. The couple divides their time between New York City and New Orleans. Connelly is a cofounder of the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf.

Bibliography

Faires, Robert. “16 Spells to Charm the Beast.” Austin Chronicle. Austin Chronicle Group. 28 Feb. 2003. Web. 29 July 2013.

"The Furies." Arkansas New Play Festival, 2017, arkansasnewplayfest.com/the-furies. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

"Lisa D'Amour Plays." Lisa D'Amour Website, lisadamour.com/plays/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Martini, Adrienne. “From Nothing to Bounty.” Austin Chronicle. Austin Chronicle Group. 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 22 July 2013.

Rodriguez, Bill. “Pure Magic: Perishable’s The Cataract.” Providence Phoenix. Phoenix Media Group. 19 May 2005. Web. 22 July 2013.

Royce, Graydon. “Anna Bella Eema Is Poetic, Intense.” Star Tribune. Star Tribune, 1 Jun. 2002. Web. 22 July 2013.

Ryzik, Melena. "Lisa D'Amour Juggles 'Airline Highway' and 'Milton,' a Tale of Five Towns." The New York Times, 19 Mar. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/theater/lisa-damour-juggles-airline-highway-and-milton-a-tale-of-five-towns.html. Accessed 30 Jan. 2020.

Sanford, Tim. “Interview: Tim Sanford and Lisa D’Amour.” Playwrights Horizons. Playwright Horizons, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013.

Szymkowitz, Adam. “I Interview Playwrights Part 92: Lisa D’Amour.” Adam Szymkowitz (blog). 11 Nov. 2009. Web. 22 July 2013.