C.A. Johnson is a Brooklyn-based playwright originally from Metairie, Louisiana. Her plays include ALL THE NATALIE PORTMANS (MCC Theater), THIRST (2017 Kilroys List, CATF), THE CLIMB (Cherry Lane Mentor Project, InterAct Theatre Company), AN AMERICAN FEAST (NYU Playwrights Horizons Theater School), I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW, SOMEBODY’S BODY, and TELL ME YOU'RE DYING. Most recently she was named a resident playwright with New Dramatists. She was previously the Tow Playwright in Residence at MCC Theater, the 2018 P73 Playwriting Fellow, The Lark's 2016-17 Van Lier Fellow, a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a member of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, a Core Writer at The Playwrights Center, and a 2018 Sundance Theatre Lab Fellow among other accolades. Her work has been commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club, Seattle Rep, Page 73, and Chautauqua Theater Company. C.A. also has an active career in film and television, with several projects in development, including at ABC Signature and Searchlight Pictures. She has written for several television series, including projects helmed by Drew Goddard, Marielle Heller, and Jon Robin Baitz. BA: Smith College MFA: NYU
ABOUT MY PLAYS:
If I have any one goal as a writer, it’s to write honestly about the lived lives of women. I have beliefs about those lives, about what it means to be socialized to care for others first (often to our own detriment). I also have beliefs about what it means to love a woman and what it means when a woman gives you her love—how that is no simple offering. So my plays often locate women in vastly different circumstances still tackling the same issues: self-actualization, locating and embracing brutal honesty, and loving without abandon. I like to imagine the impossible in my work, those sublime moments when a woman discovers her own truth and finds herself suddenly bare before an audience. I’m endlessly interested in what that nakedness can mean, how it is theatrical, and how it can teach us to be the best versions of ourselves, even when it kills us.
recent feature i wrote about the covid-19 closure of ALL THE NATALIE PORTmaNS at MCC Theatre.
