Photo by Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy at The Bushwick Starr

Photo by Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy at The Bushwick Starr

As a playwright, I celebrate the individuality of spoken language to force a kind of double take - to see value where you didn’t before - in how people speak, where they come from, and who they are.” - Christina Masciotti

My mission to magnify the heroic dimensions of people out of harmony and without relevance in the world is fueled by having grown up the daughter of an immigrant in a historically Pennsylvania Dutch community where an accented, unorthodox use of English aroused suspicion. My work became a way to communicate what I saw in the shattered conventions of speech: how unusual turns of phrase popped with significance, a spontaneously gnarled idiom brimmed with new meaning, and the most mundane exchanges evoked poetic depths.” - Christina Masciotti

“…for …‘poetry’ to be attributed to the voice of an 80-year-old, Pennsylvania Dutch, deaf, retired pretzel factory worker who dropped out of junior high to support her family – that’s significant. Or the shoe salesman who happens to be a veteran, who was traumatized before he ever enlisted, with gaps in his schooling and profound shame about what he’s had to do to survive – to regard his shattered voice as lyrical – that’s important and true, and also healing for me...” - Christina Masciotti, Natfluence, 2019

To an extent that’s what writing a play is to me: taking these misfit scraps of language that seemingly belong on a trash heap and methodically extracting the hidden richness. So people used to being looked-through, or looked over, or looked down on, finally get a chance to be seen.” - Christina Masciotti

“Truthful about how money and society work and funny as fuck, Masciotti is major—she is our heir to Molière.” - Helen Shaw, Best Shows of 2015, Divers Alarums

Masciotti's writing is superb, simultaneously unforced and lyrical...she does a magic trick, in which language as it is spoken somehow becomes poetry. And Masciotti deserves a prize for putting a retired pretzel-machine worker center stage, for figuring a way to write an entire play about how money changes hands in America that seems truthful and wry.“ - Helen Shaw,Time Out New York

This dramatist’s implicit thesis is that if you listen closely enough, there’s significant artistry in insignificant talk... There’s a determined empathy in Ms. Masciotti’s work that enlivens the senses, making you realize that nothing and no one is boring — once you’re forced to pay close attention... I remained absorbed by Ms. Masciotti’s logorrheic characters... June is not unlike that eternal chatterbox Winnie, buried up to her neck in sand in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” a person for whom there’s life as long there’s talk... she, too, becomes an existential heroine of sorts, a life force that persists even as it shrinks into nothingness.” - Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Masciotti’s vital… Raw Bacon From Poland …With great empathy and precision… shows just how limited life’s options can quickly become for returning veterans… a compelling and richly detailed portrait of an antihero emblematic of his country, at once ferocious and fragile… As is the case with many veterans… the very qualities that helped [them] survive… deployment have become personal liabilities in peacetime… The optimistic or ‘tough’ attitude he feels that he must project as he moves through the world belies the terrifying precarity that in fact pervades his day-to-day life…Evincing another quintessentially American tendency, he neglects the past in favor of a fantasied future…Masciotti is fond of letting the seams of language show. She writes dialogue that is heavily salted with… linguistic slippages that remind us of what an intensely personal, malleable, and imprecise tool language is for positioning ourselves in relationship to others, for making ourselves known and understood...“ - Jessica Rizzo, Johns Hopkins University Press

Christina Masciotti writes working-class tragedies with characters no one else is writing about and language no one else is using - a language so hyper-real it becomes poetry - or rather is simultaneously naturalistic and surreal - and action that is about quotidian events that are simultaneously existential crises and cultural vivisections…” - T. Ryder Smith, Actor/Writer/Director

Christina is attuned to the nuances of Americans in a way that is hilarious and meaningful…She takes a simple relationship…and destabilizes it. I love to see the intelligence she brings to what appears to be… straightforward.” - Richard Maxwell, Writer/Director/Artistic Director, New York City Players

I see her work as an extension of Artaud’s plea that drama be about ‘shifts between spiritual states’,  and that it express something about how we might apprehend what life is and the world is: this monumentally precarious realm of overlapping interpretations. Artaud aspired to do this with immersion in an ecstatic total-theatre event, but Masciotti does it with words, blocks of raw language that are the culture’s subconscious speaking.” - T. Ryder Smith, Actor/Writer/Director

I’m really excited by artists such as…Christina Masciotti…who…feel like their practice is about colliding form and content in a spectacular way.” - Sarah Benson in Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft by Paulette Marty

Production Photos by Maria Baranova

Masciotti’s plays have been presented and/or developed with A.R.T./NY, Waterwell, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Abrons Arts Center, HERE, PS 122, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Arts Emerson (Boston), None Too Fragile (Akron), Circle X (Los Angeles), Duke University (Durham) and internationally in Germany, Chile, France, Italy, Greece, and Croatia. She has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, a multiple-year finalist for the Princess Grace Award, a multiple-year semi-finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and has been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Award, the Doric Wilson Independent Theater Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Her work has been made possible, in part, with the generous support of these funders:

Take a closer look at the shows here!