Patricia Cotter

Featured in:
Rules of Comedy
Wild and Precious Life

Award-winning playwright Patricia Cotter has had two of her theatrical works performed as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s The Tens. The first, The Anthropology Section, produced in 2015 and Drinking On A Plane, produced in 2018. Other notable works for the stage include: The Stars Look Very Different Today which was produced as part of Theatreworks 17th Annual New Works Festival, 2018, Rules of Comedy, which was produced at the 2015 Humana Festival Ten-Minute Plays, 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson) produced at Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre 2017, and GLAAD Award nominee, The Break Up Notebook which was produced in Los Angeles at the Davidson Valentini Theatre.

Her piece The Surrogate, was the recipient of the of the 2016 Susan Glaspell Award, and was also a finalist at the 2016 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. It was then first produced at Centenary Stage Company, NJ, in 2017.

Patricia’s most recent work, The Daughters (originally developed at the PlayGround Festival of New Works) is both a semi-finalist at the 2018 O'Neil National Playwrights Conference, and will be featured at the 2018 Playwrights Foundation Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

As a librettist, she wrote Rocket Science: A Musical, which received readings at Playwrights Horizons in New York (directed by Kathleen Marshall) and was later produced at The Village Theatre in Seattle. The Break Up Notebook: A Musical (based on her original play) was produced at The Vineyard Theatre in New York and at The Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles. She was asked by Disney Theatricals and MTI to write Mulan, Jr. (based on the Disney film Mulan), which is produced and performed nationally.

In addition to writing for the stage, Patricia has written for Twentieth Century Fox Television, Disney Theatrical, and Comedy Central. She was a member of the Playground Writers Pool, and is a 2016 Playwrights Foundation Resident Playwright.

Patricia’s honors include the American Academy of Arts Letters, a Richard Rodgers Award, an Emmy Award, and she is a three-time Heideman Award Finalist.