About Deborah Brevoort
Deborah Brevoort is a playwright and musical theatre librettist/lyricist from Alaska who now lives in the New York City area. She is an alumna of New Dramatists.
She is best known for The Women of Lockerbie, which won the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Award and the silver medal in the Onassis International Playwriting Competition. It was produced in London at the Orange Tree, off-Broadway at the New Group and Women’s Project and in Los Angeles at Tim Robbin’s Actors’ Gang. It has been produced all over the US, as well as in Scotland, Japan, Greece, Spain, Australia and England. Published in the US by Dramatists Play Service, it has also been published in Poland and Greece.
Her play The Poetry of Pizza, a comedy about love, was produced at Jeff Daniel’s Purple Rose Theatre, Virginia Stage, Mixed Blood Theatre, California Rep, Centenary Stage, Theatre in the Square and Stage 3. Her latest play, The Blue-Sky Boys, about NASA’s Apollo engineers, was written with a commission from the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology project and was workshopped at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre’s Playfest and was produced at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia in 2010. She recently completed the The Velvet Weapon, a back stage farce inspired by the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia with a grant from CEC ArtsLink. She is currently writing The Comfort Team, a new play about military families with a commission from the Virginia Stage Company.
She is the librettist of King Island Christmas with composer David Friedman, which won the Frederick Loewe Award. A cast album with orchestrations by Peter Matz was produced by 12-time Grammy winner Thomas Z. Shepard, featuring Chuck Cooper and Marin Mazzie. There have been over 40 productions, at such places as the Paper Mill Playhouse, Lyric Stage, Theatre IV, NYSTI and Perseverance Theatre. Deborah also wrote the book and lyrics for Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing, with composer Scott Richards, which also won the Frederick Loewe Award and was produced at the University of Houston and Perseverance Theatre. She received the Paul Green Award from the National Theatre Conference for her musical book writing. She is currently writing Crossing Over, a hip hop musical set in Amish country with composer Stephanie Salzman and Embedded, an opera inspired by Edgar Allan Poe stories for the American Lyric Theatre with composer Patrick Soluri. Upcoming projects include Steal a Pencil for Me, a full length opera about holocaust survivors with composer Gerald Cohen, based on the documentary and book of the same title.
Blue Moon Over Memphis, her Noh Drama about Elvis Presley, is published by Applause Books in “The Best American Short Plays.” Into the Fire won the Weissberger Award and is published by Samuel French. Signs of Life won the Jane Chambers Award, a Rockefeller Foundation grant and is published by Samuel French.
Deborah has received grants and commissions from the NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, NYFA, CEC Arts Link, New Jersey Arts Council, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Danish American Society, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Brown University, The Harburg Foundation & Banff Playwright’s Colony. She received the Joe Calloway Award and was a MacDowell Fellow. She has done playwriting residencies in Canada, Mexico, Australia, Denmark and the Czech and Slovak Republics. She is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders with Roberta Levitow, Catherine Filloux and Erik Ehn.
She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University and an MFA in Musical Theatre writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she currently teaches. She also teaches in the MFA playwriting programs at Columbia University and Goddard College. Her web site is www.DeborahBrevoort.com. She is represented by Elaine Devlin Literary Agency of New York and Meg Davis of MBA Literary Agency in London.
