Bio
CRAIG POSPISIL is an award-winning playwright, a filmmaker and essayist. He is the author of the comedy JOURNEY TO THE POLES OF INACCESSIBILITY, which premiered at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City in December 2023 and is published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide, as well as the plays MONTHS ON END, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN, THE DUNES, LIFE IS SHORT, and the collection CHOOSING SIDES, which are published by Dramatists Play Service. He is a six time Heideman Award finalist, and received the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival’s award for Excellence in Playwriting.
MONTHS ON END had its world premiere at the Purple Rose Theater Company and has been produced around the country, as well as in Australia and Hong Kong. In 2015, Craig adapted the first scene from MONTHS for the screen and directed it as a short film called JANUARY, which was accepted into over a dozen film festivals, including the Berkshire International Film Festival, Big Apple Film Festival, Cayman International Film Festival, and the Big Easy Film Festival among others.
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN premiered at the Detroit Repertory Theater and has since had more than sixty productions, including ones in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Paris. THE DUNES was produced by the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, after a workshop at the Venice Theatre, readings at the Barrow Group and Michael Chekhov Theatre in New York, and winning Theatre Conspiracy's New Play Contest. Craig wrote the book to the musicals DRIFT, music and lyrics by Jeremy Schonfeld, which was produced at the New York Musical Festival, and DOT COMET, music and lyrics by Michael Ogborn, commissioned by the New Musical Development Fund.
Craig collaborated with playwrights Gretchen Cryer, Lynne Halliday, James Hindman, and Arlene Hutton to create the play THE GORGES MOTEL, which premiered at the 20th annual New York International Fringe Festival, where it won a FringeNYC Overall Excellence Award for its ensemble. Halliday, Hindman, Hutton and Pospisil went on to write ONE CHRISTMAS EVE AT EVERGREEN MALL, which premiered at the 21st annual FringeNYC. Both plays are published by DPS. More recently, they wrote BY THE NUMBERS, an inventive collection of short plays inspired by math theorems, published by TRW.
Craig was the head writer for theAtrainplays, the acclaimed twenty-four hour theatre company, for which he has written sixteen short plays and musicals, including IT'S NOT YOU, TOURIST ATTRACTION and THE BEST WAY TO GO, which are published by Playscripts in theAtrainplays and theAtrainplays Vol. 2. IT'S NOT YOU in the anthology Take Ten II: New Ten Minute Plays, and it was translated into Chinese and published in An Anthology of Contemporary American Short Plays in Beijing. TOURIST ATTRACTION is collected in Best Stage Scenes 2006. Another Atrainplay FREE is part of CHOOSING SIDES and has had runs at the City Theatre in Miami and Rogue Machine Theatre in Los Angeles.
Other publications include ON THE EDGE in Under Thirty: Plays for a New Generation; THERE'S NO HERE HERE in The Best American Short Plays 2014-2015; GUERILLA GORILLA in Plays and Playwrights 2001; PERCHANCE in the Best Ten Minute Plays 2006; HAPPENSTANCE in The Best Ten Minute Plays 2015; THE BIG SHELL in The Best Ten Minute Plays 2019; and his one-act DISSONANCE is included in Best American Short Plays 2010-2011. His one-act plays, ON THE EDGE, INFANT MORALITY, PUT ASUNDER and THE SUBWAY were produced for radio broadcast by Stage Shadows Productions at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
Craig's work has been seen at New World Stages, Bay Street Theater, New York Musical Festival, Barrington Stage Company, Cherry Lane Studio Theater, New York International Fringe Festival, City Theatre (Miami), Ensemble Studio Theatre, Road Theatre and Stage West Theater, and has been performed in Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Samoa, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. His plays MONTHS ON END and LIFE IS SHORT were translated into Japanese by Noriko Takahashi and published by Jiritsu Shobo in Tokyo. His plays have also been translated into Cantonese, Danish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Mandarin and Spanish.
Starting in the fall of 2021, Craig began contributing essays to Frenchly, a webzine focused on French culture and travel. In addition, he was the editor of The Apartment Complex and Somewhere in America, two volumes of previously unpublished plays by Pulitzer Prize-winner William Inge; Outstanding Men’s Monologues and Outstanding Women’s Monologues, Vols. 1 and 2; Outstanding Short Plays, Vols. 1, 2, 3, and 4, published by Dramatists Play Service, and TRW Presents: Short Plays, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, published by TRW. More recently, he edited TRW Presents: Men’s Monologues, Vol. 1 and TRW Presents: Women’s Monologues, Vol. 1. A native New Yorker, Craig attended Wesleyan University, received his Masters from New York University’s Dramatic Writing Department and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. He lives in New York with his wife Bloomberg TV news anchor Alix Steel and their daughter.