—This is a page that asks the question, how endless can an endless bio be? We will soon find out. Read at your own risk. It would not be a good idea to print out this bio and use it for official purposes or, say, a program. Do not use it to introduce Jenny Lyn Bader or you will find yourself rambling and stuck behind a podium. No, no, no. It's more of a romp.
Jenny Lyn Bader is a playwright and author. She is the playwright in residence of the Mirror Rep, which will be producing one of her plays next season. Her play In Flight, a comedy written in heroic couplets, won the 2009 NAAA Festival and received a festival presentation at the Bridewell Theatre in London. Her play None of the Above received its world premiere downtown at New Georges (artistic director Susan Bernfield; managing director Sarah Cameron Sunde), introducing Alison Pill in her professional stage debut, and had its Off-Broadway premiere at the Lion Theatre on Theatre Row.
Her play Manhattan Casanova premiered at Hudson Stage Company in Westchester. Manhattan Casanova and was featured in the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, where it won the Edith Oliver Award named for the New Yorker critic for the play that, "in the spirit of Edith Oliver, has a caustic wit that deflates the ego but does not unduly damage the human spirit." The play is excerpted in Leading Women: Plays for Actresses, vol. 2 (Vintage). It was then featured in Chicago Her-Rah: "A Festival of the World's Best Women Playwrights and Their New Plays," produced by the International Centre for Women Playwrights.
Meanwhile, Actors Theatre of Louisville commissioned her to write the short play Worldness, which premiered in the Humana Festival of New American Plays as part of a dramatic anthology about Heaven and Hell at ATL in Louisville, Kentucky. The whole group of plays, Heaven and Hell: A Divine Comedy, was published by Dramatists Play Service and in Humana Festival 2001 (Smith & Kraus). Worldness also appears in Best Scenes of 2001 (Smith & Kraus). The compendium has been produced in professional and student productions around the country - in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio. South Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Virginia — as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. Jenny Lyn's work has also been performed in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina, Washington, and Washington DC, and is coming up in Indiana. Please do drop a line if your state was not mentioned and you feel fairly certain you performed in Jenny Lyn's plays there.
Her play cycle Out of Mind: 7 Short Plays with Some of the People Missing was produced at NYU/Strasberg. Three of the plays in that cycle are now published in Best 10-Minute Plays: 2007 (Smith & Kraus).
The cycle includes her one-act Popcorn Sonata. Originally written for Primary Stages for their invitational "Moment of Bliss" project, this piece was optioned for publication by the Guthrie Theatre and is in the collection Best Ten-Minute Plays for 2 Actors: 2004 (Smith and Kraus) edited by Michael Dixon. The play was produced in the Summer Shorts festival at City Theatre in Florida and performed at the Ring Theatre in Miami and the Broward Center for the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale. City Theatre has since commissioned her to write a play for their Shorts 4 Kids series but they haven't performed it... yet.
New Georges commissioned her to adapt the Dawn Powell short story You Should Have Brought Your Mink and then produced her adaptation at the 78th Street Theatre Lab as part of the citywide Dawn Powell Festival.
She wrote heaps of one-acts that season, including The Superstore Cycle for Reader's Theatre which was performed by WORKS Productions at Barnes & Noble/Lincoln Square.
Her short play Compulsive Behavior, commissioned by PCPEP, was performed at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
Her work has also been produced at Vital Theatre, HERE Arts Center (Village Voice "Choice"), Center Stage NY, John Montgomery Theatre, NY Int'l Fringe Festival ("Best of the Fringe" selection), Henlopen Theatre Project, Stamford Fringe Festival, Cafe Theatre at George St. Playhouse, and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, among others.
Some of the more endless biographical passages one sees discuss at length not only play productions but play development! Workshops and readings, too. Anything is fair game. Prizes almost won! Plays hemi-semi-produced! Jenny Lyn's work has been developed by The Women's Project Directors Forum (w/ Eli Wallach), Guild Hall (3-week workshop production starring Mercedes Ruehl), LA Stage & Film (w/ Tony Shalhoub), Neighborhood Playhouse, The Directors Company, The New Group (w/ Anne Jackson), Mulford Barn, Joint Theatre (CBS Studios), Cherry Lane Theatre, Primary Stages, Seattle's Mae West Fest "Ultimate Female Protagonist" project, among others. She was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award and has been a three-time finalist for the Heidemann Award.
With Bill Brazell, she co-authored He Meant, She Meant: The Definitive Male-Female Dictionary — What Men Think They're Saying, What Women Really Mean (Warner), published in Italy as Secondo Lui e Lei (Sperling & Kupfer). In Italy, her book has been hailed as "the most extraordinary invention for sex life since The Pill."
Her articles and musings have shown up a bunch in The New York Times too, particularly the "Week in Review." She has also written for some other sections of the paper, including Sunday Styles, House & Home, Culture, The Sunday Times Book Review, Circuits, Education Life, and Real Estate. While at college, she served as campus stringer for The New York Times.
Her prose has been anthologized in Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation (Norton), Who We Are (St. Martin’s), Signs of Life in the USA (Bedford), Ethics (McGraw Hill), The Blair Reader (Simon & Schuster) American Voices (Mayfield), and other collections.
She wrote both seasons of the web serial drama Watercooler (MSN). She has been on the faculty of The New School, where she taught a course on internet writing with Elizabeth Cohen (the first semester she gave a 2-hour lecture on how to get a job writing for a web soap, the second semester she gave a 2-hour lecture on the history of the web soap).
She has also been a guest artist at Barnard College for the last few summers. In 2007, she was a guest artist at Cornell University, where she participated in a theatre symposium celebrating the life of Wendy Wasserstein and taught a playwriting workshop. In 2008, she was a guest artist at Villanova University, where she spoke to drama and literature classes and gave a public lecture.
Jenny Lyn wrote an adaptation of the fairytale The Fisherman and his Wife, commissioned by White Bird Productions for Boro Tales: Manhattan. Her adaptation, The Fisherman's Wife, was performed at HERE Arts Center.
Jenny Lyn has received TV script commissions from the WB (Warner Bros. Studios, producers Laura Ziskin and Pam Williams), NBC (NBC Studios, producers Jamie Tarses and Karey Burke), and HBO (producers Billy Crystal and Cheryl Bloch).
She is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she won the Whitehill Prize for humane letters and arts and the Carolyn Isenberg Award for outstanding achievement in the performing arts.
She has been a Lark Playwriting Fellow, nominated by Wendy Wasserstein. A member of the Writers Guild, the Dramatists Guild, and the Authors Guild, she is married to Roger Berkowitz, a scholar and professor.
The truth is, even an endless bio ends... Eventually.
