One day people are going to realize that Kristen is the Chekhov of our time.
Laylage Courie
Hello Failure
Kristen Kosmas
November 2009
Hello Failure was presented in the Prelude Festival in 2007, and produced at PS 122 in March 2008.
About the Author
Kristen Kosmas is an American playwright and performer. She has had new works commissioned by the Chocolate Factory (NYC), Performance Space 122 (NYC), The Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf (NYC), Seattle University’s SITE Specific, Dixon Place (NYC), and the New City Theater in Seattle. Her plays and solo performances have been presented in Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago, and in New York City at numerous venues including the Chocolate Factory, the Prelude festival, Performance Space 122, Dixon Place, Little Theater, Barbès, the Ontological/Hysteric Downstairs Series, and the Poetry Project. Her play Hello Failure was published by Ugly Duckling Presse; her multi-voice performance text This From Cloudland appears in the latest issue of “PLAY A Journal of Plays”; her companion pieces, ANTHEM and The Mayor of Baltimore and her most recent play, There There, were published by 53rd State Press; and her play APEX appears in “15 Second Plays curated by the Debate Society” published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Other plays include Chapter of Accidents, H-O-R-S-E, and Palomino. Kristen is the writer/performer of four critically acclaimed solo shows, Blah Blah Fuckin Blah, Again, Slip, and The Scandal! As an actor, she has appeared in many notable new plays including Potatoes of August by Sibyl Kempson, Mark Smith by Kate Ryan, ASTRS and Some Things Cease To Be While Others Still Are by Karinne Keithley, The Internationalist by Anne Washburn, Producers of Fiction by Jim Strahs, The Florida Project by Tory Vazquez, and Hurricane by Erin Cressida Wilson. Kosmas is a founding member of the OBIE Award winning performance series Little Theater; the Brooklyn-based experimental writer’s collective The Ladies’ Auxiliary Playwriting Team; and The Twenty-Five Cent Opera of San Francisco, a monthly event for the enactment of texts and theatricals. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Whitman College and a member of New Dramatists.
Praise
The play opens quietly, more or less, on the Eastern Seaboard and then closes, more or less miraculously, somewhere else altogether, achieving on its happy and troublous way all the things a reader or audience member could hope for-- distance, speed, heart, submersion, emergence, truth, mystery, and more. By the end, in a plain and simple and fairly sad way, everything stands for everything else, nothing is not filled with mystery, and to be a living human being is seen to be-- despite the drawbacks-- the most enviable thing of all.
Will Eno
Kristen Kosmas is one of the most exciting and accomplished new voices in the American theatre... Her story of seven submariners' wives marries Chekhovian realism to a language reminiscent of Gertrude Stein for one of the best new plays of the season.
George Hunka
You can hate if you want but you're wrong.
Andy Horowitz
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-56-2
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 80 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: November 15 2009
Distribution: SPD
Series: Emergency Playscripts