CALAMITY WEST

Calamity West is an award-winning playwright and educator whose work has been produced and developed at The Lucille Lortel Theatre, Primary Stages, The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Roundabout Underground, The Goodman, and Jackalope Theatre Company - to name a few. 

From 2022 to 2026, she is in residence at Primary Stages as a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group, where she has written FEAST! (2023) and Sgt. Hank Cole’s Drama Club of Algona (2024). FEAST! also received development through The Lortel’s Alcove program (2024). She is concluding the residency with the development of her newest play, PARALLAX (2026).

At the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, West received the Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission, which resulted in The Last Supper and Three Years Later (2022). Her play, Inside the World of Somewhere Else, is currently being commissioned and developed by Red Yes Studios in New York City (2025).

Her plays span more than a decade of productions: In the Canyon (Jackalope, 2018; The Constructivists, 2024), Hinter (Steep Theatre, 2018), The Retribution Play (Jackalope, 2020), Engines and Instruments of Flight: A Fantasia in Three Acts (Roundabout Underground, 2018; Goodman’s New Stages Festival, 2019), Rolling (Jackalope, 2016), Ibsen Is Dead (Interrobang, 2014), and The Peacock (Jackalope, 2013). Most recent development includes Greetings from Moscow: A Love Story with Northlight Theatre and the University of Chicago (2025).

Calamity teaches at the University of Chicago, the Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts, and Webster University. In 2018, she founded the Playwrights Lab at Jackalope Theatre Company, where she has been a company member since 2014.

You can subscribe to her monthly newsletter by going to calamitywest.com.