KALLAN DANA
Playwright of Episodes
Kallan Dana is a playwright originally from Portland, Oregon. Productions include Lobster (The Tank/Needy Lover, Best Theater of 2025 in The New Yorker and Vulture/New York Magazine) and RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR (The Hearth/A.R.T. NY and Artists Repertory Theater). She has developed or presented work with Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Hearth, The Tank, Artists Repertory Theatre, The Cell, Portland Theater Festival, Bramble Theatre Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist, a 2025 Audrey Resident, and a recipient of the 2025 National Theatre Conference Paul Green Award. She co-founded the artist collaboration group TAG at the Tank and makes theater with her company, Needy Lover. MFA: Northwestern University.
Why are you excited to bring this piece to the O'Neill and what are you hoping to accomplish here?
This play is very personal. I’m borrowing a lot from the landscape of my mom’s childhood in LA, and I’m also revisiting friendships from my own life that are sensitive and confusing for me. This is probably my most-rewritten play. I keep on doing massive revisions in quick bursts, then putting it away for months at a time—then when I come back to it, I feel lost. I know that what I really need is dedicated time to put life aside and totally focus on working out the play. I’m so excited to do that this summer at the O’Neill, where I was briefly a student at the National Theater Institute! It’s a place that made a very large impression on me and I’m so grateful to get to go back and spend time there.
What inspired you to create this piece?
I began writing the play after my grandma (my mom’s mom) died, as a way of kind of trying to understand her by fictionalizing her. The piece came from a place of curiosity about what my mom’s upbringing in 70s/80s LA was like, and then I got interested in the dynamics of sets of mothers and daughters. I was thinking a lot about the girls I was thrust into relationships with a child because our moms were friends—and then I started thinking about reverse: the women my mom was thrust into relationships with because I was friends with the daughter. I am interested in the ways that a competitive spirit can wriggle its way into relationships, despite our best efforts to be generous people.
Why are you drawn to plays/musicals as a medium for storytelling and/or for telling this particular story?
I really love the succinct duration of a play. I love that you get a complete story in an hour to two hours, and I love that the story is told live, in person, without the option to pause or rewind. With this particular play, I was interested in trying to sort of riff on Brechtian principles of epic theater, by having the play span a lot of time and change locations with great frequency. I also believe that all theater is fundamentally connected to childhood, and because this is a story about childhood, it felt like an appropriate medium!
What advice would you give to aspiring playwrights?
I think the best thing to do is to read a lot and pay close attention to behavior! Notice everything!
Kallan's reading recommendations to accompany your experience with Episodes:
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Mercy by Joan Silber
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez