Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. Her plays have been presented at Dixon Place, Soho Rep, Performance Space 122, Brick Theater, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, the Great Plains Theater Conference in Omaha, and Theater Bonn in Germany, and have been developed in workshops in the CATCH! Performance Series, Little Theater, and at New Dramatists. She is a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of New Dramatists class of ‘17, a four-time recipient of Dixon Place’s Mondo Cane! Commission (2002, ’07, ’09, ’11), and of individual grant support from the Greenwall Foundation 2009 & 2010. She is a founding member of the Joyce Cho Initiative, an affinity of playwrights dedicated to the staging of problem plays, and of Machiqq Women’s Auxiliary playwriting group. She earned an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, 2007, where she studied under the instigation of Mac Wellman. Her plays have been published by the 53rd State Press (CRIME OR EMERGENCY and, in JOYCE CHO PLAYS, ZEIT AF DER KÜRBISGEISTNACHTEN), PLAY Journal of Plays (POTATOES OF AUGUST), the Brooklyn Review (excerpts of CRIME and THE SECRET DEATH OF PUPPETS), and Midway Literary Journal (excerpt of THE SECRET DEATH OF PUPPETS).

Current and upcoming projects include an as-yet untitled collaboration with Elevator Repair Service; a New Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a new work in collaboration with Austin, TX groups Rude Mechs, Salvage Vanguard, Physical Plant, and Rubber Rep; a collaboration with David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group, and a commission from the Playwrights’ Department of NYC Players in partnership with Abrons Arts Center.

The 2011-12 season will see productions of her plays THE SECRET DEATH OF PUPPETS (OR) HOW DO PUPPETS DIE? (OR) PUPPETS DIE IN SECRET (at Dixon Place) and ICH, KÜRBISGEIST (by Big Dance Theater at the Chocolate Factory).

“… one of the most radical, transgressive, and hilarious playwright/performers out there. She has a singular theatrical imagination, a searing stage presence, a ferocious intellect …” – BOMB Magazine

“Anarchic talent …”
“… a playwright of terrifying gifts … frighteningly in command of devastating linguistic weapons” – Time Out New York.

PLAYS

CRIME OR EMERGENCY
4-8m, 5-7w
A routine medical examination goes critical, spirals. Normalized notions of cause and effect are challenged, possibly obliterated. Inner, personal violences take hold and multiply. A play about personal violence that you regret right away, and about the impersonal kind that you move on from immediately. It’s about the kinds of incidents that you’re not sure whether to call the cops about. It’s also a play that suggests post-logical incoherence as the basis for human motivation, feeling, and violence; a play threatening our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.
Commissioned by Dixon Place 2007, developed at Soho Rep Studio Series, 2008.
NY Premier at Performance Space 122, 2009, European Premier at Theater Bonn, Germany, 2010.
Individual grant support from the Greenwall Foundation.

Top Ten Best Plays of 2009, Time Out New York.

“Playwright-performer Sibyl Kempson’s calling-card play announced the arrival of a terrific new avant-garde voice… Kempson … doesn’t write like any of the avant-garders you’ve heard before. She has a passion for finely drawn characters, a perfect ear for dialogue and a short-story writer’s economy. Indeed, Crime or Emergency – despite its hipster cladding and brutal assaults on our senses – is downright literary.” – Helen Shaw, Time Out New York.

“A piece of hysterical realism that plays out in a doctor’s office, in a parking garage, at a rodeo, on a boat, etc. As both actor and playwright, Kempson has a gift for rendering the fairly normal as intensely weird.” – Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice

POTATOES OF AUGUST
2-3m, 2-3w
Four retirees encounter a sack of sentient potatoes, and find their outworn belief systems forcibly confronted by the challenges of a highly integrated, enlightened metaphysics. These potatoes have brains, have read their Swedenborg, and don’t always play fair. It is a fugue in both the musical and psychiatric sense. A flight is tracked from comprehensible identity and habitual perception into an unknowable environment of vastness, multiplicity, and high, high entropy.
For both dramatic text and music, composer Mike Iveson and Kempson digested Johannes Kepler’s 1619 work HARMONIES OF THE SPHERES. Research focused on places in history where nature, science, religion and art were not disparate or conflicting. The questions and confusions raised are rooted in the hope that a second Enlightenment can safely merge the forces of understanding in art, science, and religion and guide us toward better choices.
Commissioned by Dixon Place, 2008-09.
Songs by Mike Iveson, Jr. and Sibyl Kempson.

“Kempson splices avant-weirdness (are her potatoes escapees from Richard Foreman’s Potatoland?) to thrilling runs of everyday speech, thus forestalling the trance that poetically adventurous work can create. Her characters have bite and humor, which helps her lyricism maintain point and thrust. Want something impeccably julienned? Look elsewhere. But if you want to see the new Fornes (or Churchill or Kennedy) before she’s even peeled, get thee downtown.” Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“ … slyly bizarre … the play is filled with digressions about God, chaos and the nature of perception. The program’s suggested reading list includes Rudolf Otto’s “Idea of the Holy” and Copernicus’ “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” … this highly self-conscious and cerebral meditation, which juxtaposes a rigorously scientific view of the world with one of chaos and mystery, is less Roger Corman than Richard Foreman … The play, which includes lovely songs … proves a surprisingly compelling drama.” – Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

THE SECRET DEATH OF PUPPETS (OR) HOW DO PUPPETS DIE? (OR) PUPPETS DIE IN SECRET
9m, 6w
Three playlets about forbidden knowledge, in response and in homage to the work of Victoria Nelson. Written for puppets, objects, and object-inspired human performers.
Commissioned by Dixon Place, to be presented in November 2011. Developed at Little Theater, Dixon Place, and the CATCH! Performance Series.
Individual grant support from the Greenwall Foundation.

ICH, KÜRBISGEIST
3m, 5w
An old-tyme agricultural vengeance play, written in another language, for Hallowe’en.
Developed at the Flea Theater and at Dixon Place.
Premiere production by Big Dance Theater at the Chocolate Factory, in partnership with Performance Space 122, Fall 2012.

SO MUCH TO GO CRAZY (THE SHOW MIGHT GO ON) (SEHR LANGSAM)
8m, 2w
A translation of Knut Hamsun’s 1895 play VED RIGETS PORT: FORSPIL (AT THE KINGDOM’S GATE: PRELUDE), in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation that the source language must transform the target language, not the other way around. We experience our own English language, and Hamsun’s hauntingly brilliant and timely play, in Scandinavian syntax – a disorienting but immensely rewarding experience.
The Hamsun text is combined contiguously with Brahms lieder on love and death, also translated by Kempson and arranged by Mike Iveson, Jr.
Developed at Little Theater, presented in workshop at the Off Center in Austin TX, by the Fusebox Festival, 2010.

THE WYTCHE OF PROBLYMM PLANTATION
15m, 12w
The stories of Annie Palmer (the “White Witch” of Rose Hall) and Bertha Mason (Edward Rochester’s insane and hidden wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) entwine and fester in this histrionic and balmy musical set in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Commissioned and presented by Dixon Place, 2002.
Songs by Ashley Fleming.

“The play is a mess, but a good-natured one.” Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice.

BAD GIRLS GOOD WRITERS
6m, 6w
These girls are bad, bad girls. But they know how to write. But they are totally, completely badass. An ode to the Brooklyn College literary scene. Written on a dare by Mac Wellman.
Presented at the Brick Theater, 2006, and New Works Festival, Bennington College, 2007.

LITTLE EDGAR, LAMB OF GOD
For chorus
A play about a real lamb who is now a full-grown sheep, and which is also an Excel spreadsheet.
Developed at CATCH! Performance Series, 2011.

KYCKLING AND SCREAMING
11m, 6w
An adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which focuses on the attic which is hidden from our view in the original.
Commissioned by Soho Rep, 2007.

VISIONS OF THE BLESSED BRUDER KLAUS
For chorus
A play inspired by the C.G. Jung essay of the same title.

CHILD MEMORIAL, OR PEABODY: A RECITAL FOR AMBER REED
For chorus
A play about a library dedicated to the English language, within a much larger library, at an esteemed university in a stodgy city.