India Pale Ale by Jaclyn Backhaus

In this poignant and smartly funny play, a tight-knit Punjabi family in a small Wisconsin town prepares to celebrate the engagement of their only son just as their strong-willed daughter Boz announces her plans to move away and open a bar. Worried she will tear her family apart, haunted and fortified by ancestral and familial journeys, Boz sets out on her quest, but not before one sudden event alters her course and brings her back home. A play about food, family, and pirates.

BIO:

Jaclyn Backhaus was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, to a pair of botanists. Her love of language came from accompanying her parents on desert hikes, where they would identify plants by their Latin names. She graduated high school and moved to New York for college, determined to become an actor; during her course of study she came into contact with the works of Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, and María Irene Fornés and decided that she would rather construct worlds rather than inhabit them. Her mission as a writer is to uncover what truths, worlds and possibilities she has yet to see onstage, and construct them using frameworks of potential and hypothesis. Her plays include Peter/The Forgetting of Things with director Andrew Neisler; The Three Sisters, or MASHAMASHAMASHA!, Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play, and You On the Moors Now with John Kurzynowski and Theater Reconstruction Ensemble; Folk Wandering with Andrew Neisler and eleven composers; Bulls Hollow with Andrew Neisler and Mike Brun; Black Canyon City; Shoot the Freak; Men On Boats; India Pale Ale; andWives. She was honored to receive 2016 Tow Foundation Fellowship for Men On Boats and the 2018 Horton Foote Prize for India Pale Ale alongside her favorite play, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee. She continues to work on her future plays Aleena, Boss, End-of-Life and others forthcoming, including her monologue Black Market Caviar, which will be produced by NAATCO as part of Out of Time, directed by Les Waters, at the Public Theater in 2022.When she is not writing, she is teaching at NYU in the Dramatic Writing department and the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, parenting a kindergartener, facilitating creative process programming with Fresh Ground Pepper, and cooking. www.jaclynbackhaus.com