Kate Cortesi
Playwright
Selected Plays
Ten Grand
South Coast Rep Commission
Pacific Playwrights Festival '25
Finalist: O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Ojai Playwrights Conference
Semifinalist: Blue Ink Award
In a Boston Goodwill, employees and customers form tender alliances and strange rivalries one winter and spring in the early 2010s. But when one of them finds a gun in the donation bin, workplace drama takes on life-or-death stakes. TEN GRAND is a new play about community, America’s gun obsession, and how the stories we tell become our destiny.
Great Kills
Princess Grace Award WINNER
Premiere Stages New Play Festival
A high school achiever's college essay sends her Staten Island family into a tailspin. Is this ambitious young woman deformed by violence, as her essay claims, or by America's culture of achievement that has trained her to market herself at any cost?
Love
Sky Cooper New American Play Prize WINNER
When Penelope is asked to join a group of women making harassment allegations against her former boss, she finds herself in a tight spot. The man accused was a former lover and he remains a dear friend. As the other women's stories unfold, however, Penelope begins to question everything she did and everything that happened to her.
Is Edward Snowden Single?
7 BroadwayWorld nominations including Best New Play
O'Neill Center Residency
Venturous Fund Grant
Much like the US government, two besties find themselves in a crisis of integrity, whatever the hell THAT word means. Two virtuosic actresses and an amorous puppet play all 19 roles in this volcanic comedy about pretty lies and ugly truths.
ONE MORE LESS
NYFA Award WINNER
Relentless Award Finalist
Little Brother is shy. Big Sister is cocky. Mother is mean. And the guy dressed like a cop doesn't know what he's doing on stage. ONE MORE LESS uses everything from Supersoakers to Ferris Bueller to delve deep into the American psyche and its deformation by police brutality.
A Patron of the Arts
Cherry Lane Mentor Project
KIT Italia In Scena Festival
When a high school drug dealer does a drop-off at a new address, he's reunited with the father of his childhood best friend. The recently laid off art teacher is looking to return to his fine arts glory days; the young entrepreneur wants to help. So they come to an unusual arrangement: swapping drugs for art.
Let's Pretend We're Married
Huntington Theatre Breaking Ground
A girl with a deathly allergy to the Sun is left home alone for the first time in her life. It goes very badly but it's terribly romantic. A love story about death. Or is it a death story about love?
Kate Cortesi is a Brooklyn- and Boston- based playwright from Washington DC. Select full-length plays: Ten Grand, Let’s Pretend We’re Married, Love, One More Less, A Patron of the Arts, Great Kills, and Is Edward Snowden Single? Productions and development: Playwrights Horizons, Cherry Lane Theatre, The Jungle Theater, South Coast Rep, The O’Neill Theater Center, The Pool, Marin Theatre Company, Keen Theater Co, Single Carrot Theater, Primary Stages, WP Theater, Colt Coeur, Dorset Theatre Festival, Jackalope, Premiere Stages, Second Thought Theatre, Bardo Theatre Company, Players’ Ring, The Lark and the Ojai Playwrights Conference. Awards and honors: New Dramatists resident playwright, Princess Grace Award, NYFA Award, three time Kilroy’s List, Huntington Playwriting Fellow, O’Neill Theater Center Artist in Residence, Columbia University’s Karen Brownstein Award, and Hear Me Out Monologue Competition Winner. Select finalist designations: Philip Seymour Hoffman Relentless Award and the McKnight National Residency/Commission. Plays published by: Dramatists Play Services and Samuel French. Commissions: Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Rep, Keen Theater Company, and the Lucille Lortel Theatre. In Film and Television, Cortesi has written original and adapted features and pilots for Lionsgate, AMC, Universal Pictures, Amy Pascal, Working Title, and Fremantle.