The Body of an American by Dan O’Brien

In The Body of an American, we are taken to Mogadishu in 1993. Paul Watson is a Canadian photojournalist who is about to take a picture that will win him the Pulitzer Prize. At Princeton in 2013, American writer Dan O’Brien is struggling to finish his play about ghosts. Both men live worlds apart but a chance encounter over the airwaves sparks an extraordinary friendship that sees them journey from one of the most dangerous places on earth to the depths of the human soul. Flying from Kabul to the Canadian High Arctic, The Body Of An American is an exhilarating new form of documentary drama that splices the dialogue with actual recordings and photographs by Paul Watson, placing these two men’s battles – both public and private – against a backdrop of some of the world’s most iconic images of war.

Bio:

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, librettist, and essayist. His play The Body of an American was co-produced off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre by Primary Stages and Hartford Stage (New York Times Critic’s Pick), at the Gate Theatre in London, and at theaters around the US. The Body of an American received the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the PEN Center USA Award, the Weissberger Award, and was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Theatre Award in London. His most recent play, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, premiered at Boston Court Pasadena and received a PEN America Award for Drama.

O’Brien is the recipient of fellowships and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center residency in Italy. He has received commissions recently from Center Theatre Group, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (American Revolutions), the Public Theater, and Portland Center Stage. Dan O’Brien: Plays One was published in 2018, and The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage was published in 2019, both by Oberon Books (Bloomsbury). His other plays are published by Samuel French (Concord Theatricals), Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, and Dramatic Publishing. 

O’Brien’s debut poetry collection, War Reporter, received the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for a First Collection. His other poetry collections are Scarsdale and New Life. A fourth collection, Our Cancers, was published in 2021 by Acre Books (University of Cincinnati Press). A collection of O’Brien’s essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas was published in 2021 by Dalkey Archive Press in the US and by CB Editions in the UK. He has taught playwriting at Princeton University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel. www.danobrien.org