about

writer | composer | performer

Jay Eddy is a writer, composer, and performer. Their solo show DRIVING IN CIRCLES won the Richard Rodgers Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), as well as the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award and Musical Theatre Award, (Kennedy Center). THE GULL, their musical adaptation of Chekov’s ЧАЙКА, also won the Kennedy Center’s Musical Theatre Award. They are a current Artistic Research Fellow with the Folger and a recent New Jewish Culture Fellow, New Harmony and Yaddo resident, New York Foundation for the Arts and Connecticut Office of the Arts fellow. Their work for the stage has been called, “Bracingly original, astonishingly resourceful, and daringly theatrical,” and, “a joy to listen to...a beautiful tapestry of sound.” As a performer, they’ve been called, “Kate McKinnon on a cocaine bender.” MFA in Playwriting at Boston University, MA in Music Theatre from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Their poems and essays have been published with North American Review, Tikkun, Pidgeonholes, Poets Reading the News, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and TulipTree. 

Their work as a generative artist is rooted in a trauma-informed and deeply neuroqueer Weird Futurity (meaning: predestined sense of what-is-to-come as a repeating pattern of what- has-been). They are interested in hybrid and transdisciplinary forms integrating music, theater and performance art, film and video art, installation, testimony and memoir, poetry and essay, translation, and ritual. They score their works with toy, parlor, electr(on)ic, and orchestral instruments in equal measure, undermining the primacy of the trained musician and emphasizing playability and plasticity. They believe in art-making that is process-oriented, anti-urgency, inquiry-driven; that resists nostalgia, plays in the liminal spaces of simultaneous remembering and forgetting, asks not what we remember but how; that repeats and reinterprets, refuses endings, returns to the beginning with new eyes and begins again.

NEWS & EVENTS

Driving in Circles will be running March 21-April 6 in a workshop production at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, directed by Sam Plattus.

Alligator-a-Phobia in 3D! will be running April 6-16 in a workshop production at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, directed by Shamus. Get your tickets here!

The Gull was awarded the Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Musical Theatre Award in 2023!

Jay has two installations with The Jewish Museum of Maryland’s Material/Inheritance exhibition (March 26 - June 11, 2023): The Other Death of Arthur, an audio installation featuring direction by Sam Plattus and performances from Sam Plattus and Zach Fontanez, and Threshold (Shvel), a collaboration with poet Mariya Zilberman, to which Jay contributed a sculptural imagetext element.

A first time, sneak peak, work-in-progress reading of Driving in Circles went up at Improv Acadia Presents on August 2-3, 2022, in collaboration with Sam Plattus, Zach Fontanez, and Shamus, following a developmental residency with the Dragon’s Egg and dramaturgical support from The New Harmony Project.

Driving in Circles was one of two new musicals this year to win the Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Press release here, recording of the live-streamed awards ceremony here.

Driving in Circles was also honored by the Kennedy Center as a recipient of the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award, co-recipient of the KCACTF Musical Theatre Award, and distinguished achievement for the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting.

Jay’s essay “Pear, or: My Body Feels Like Drag” was named the runner up for the Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was published in the Fall 2022 issue of North American Review.

SELECTED PRESS

“Magnetic, feral, and heartbreaking…Eddy’s performance feels fresh and unique, all wide eyes and exposed nerve…[They’re] a revelation.” (Noah Golden for OnStage)

“A rasping hoot…coarse, abrasive and a little bit brilliant.” (Christopher Arnott for Hartford Courant)

“Eddy plays Little Lady almost as a vampire, and the old-school kind: seductive, frightening, and probably crazy…Eddy has undeniable stage presence and a startlingly elastic voice, able to coo and screech, howl and sing.” (Brian Slattery for The New Haven Independent)

“Somewhat startlingly talented…Eddy takes over the sonic volume of the space with [their] huge voice….When the other performers join [them]…it’s a powerful reminder of the dynamic range possible with an ensemble of voices utterly unlike the vast majority of pre-packaged pop.” (Jeff Smith for Medium)