What is your process for beginning a new play? I don’t think there’s any one way but like any writer I have to care about the topic a lot, I have to have a lot of feelings about it to want to invest the amount of time and effort a play requires. I also have to be interested in something weird or complex that doesn’t quite make sense … something I want to explore through scenario and character and what if. Then I try to understand what the play is about… I sketch it out, maybe write a poem about

Ella, a world-class fertility doctor, happens to be every cursed princess’ fairy godmother. Her perfectly controlled world gets turned upside down with the appearance of a most unusual maiden in distress who also happens to be a convicted criminal about to go to jail.

Columbia University School of the Arts presents seven new plays written by the Columbia MFA Playwriting Students of 2019. The esteemed faculty who have nurtured these students, including Tony©, Pulitzer, and Obie Award winners such as Charles Mee, Lynn Nottage, and David Henry Hwang invite you to experience these innovative new playwrights. From Head of Playwriting, David Henry Hwang, "These thesis productions from a remarkable group of young dramatists..."

Nothing Without a Company is kicking off season 13 with our second annual New Play Festival. This year's festival uses Berger Park Cultural Center and Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood as a backdrop to explore nine new worlds created by playwrights. Writers have responded to the location by writing one-act plays that are workshopped and rehearsed with actors leading up to their world premieres. Featuring new work by Shae Boyd, Dolores Diaz, Ray Goldberg, Duff Norris, Priyankar Patra, Ellan Read, Aalisha Sheth, Kevin Sparrow, Marianna Staroselsky, and B.J. Tindal.

Nora Sørena Casey, Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, Sari Caine, Veronica Cooper, Alex Hersler, Mateo Moreno, Lia Romeo, Kenzie Ross, Marianna Staroselsky, and Xavier Toby each debuted a short work at Symphony Space on Tuesday night, all based on a common theme: AN UNSEEN VISITOR (also the name of the evening). It was apparent watching these that Athena Theatre excels in their mission to create “contemporary, off-beat and irreverent psychological dramas and dark comedies that challenge traditional stereotypes.”

‘Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn’ explores how Russian Jewish refugee experience shaped its author's identity. Marianna Staroselsky was confused when her family moved to the United States from Russia when she was just over 6 years old. "My mother told me we were going to my favorite beach vacation spot on the Crimean Sea," she said. "Instead, we found ourselves in the midst of a Midwestern suburb, welcomed by synagogue-affiliated volunteers."

The taut, non-linear libretto by Marianna Staroselsky, based on her play, would be fascinating as spoken word without music and holds the opera together.

HEARTS ON THE WALL is a monthly night of new, in-progress work performed by friends, community members, and young theater-makers (singers, actors, poets, photographers, writers...)

The adjectives “charming” and “confessional” may seem like an odd pairing, but somehow they both apply to Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn at the Cornservatory. As narrator and protagonist Olya (Shaina Schrooten) recounts her Russian-Jewish upbringing, we see the birth of an inferiority complex. She's never good enough for her merciless Russian immigrant mother, Lena (Kristina Guzikova). She keeps falling in and out of love at the wrong times with various men. In a very real-seeming meeting...

Don't miss readings of new plays by playwrights who honed their craft at the La MaMa Umbria International Playwright Retreats (2017). Meet extraordinary writers from around the world. 100 AWKWARD WAYS TO BE A PERSON | 2:30 - 4:00 pm Written by Marianna Staroselsky Directed by Rory McGregor A play about the many ways in which it is anxiety-inducing as hell to be a person in the US today.

“Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn” is a post-soviet poetic memoir about fragmented cultural identity, emigration and the search for Pushkin's romantic hero.

Levana isn’t sure at what point she got tired of being married to herself, but at some point the honeymoon period wore off. “How I Married Myself and Other Misadventures,” is a surrealist adventure farce exploring the practice of self-marriage and being a person generally.

Quick. Your identity is in peril. You look in the mirror and you're like, who's that? Marianna Staroselsky (ABD) has come up with a solution: "Identity Quickies," a series of one act plays/bootcamp for your soul in existential crisis.

“1-800-WHY-DOES-LIFE-SUCK” tells the story of two imperfect strangers connected by the ultimate existential crisis hotline we all wish we could dial when life just SUCKS. Marianna Staroselsky wrote, directed, and produced this one act play as part of Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Summer One Act competition.

Performance + ethnographic lecture at ICQI, the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry. A look at identity and performance in modern life through Marianna Staroselsky's dissertation research on performance of the self through various theatrical practices such as improvisation, neo-futurism, and clown play.

"Bittersweet Card Trick" - a surrealist musical one-act play written by Marianna Staroselsky in 24 hours and performed in May 2015 by BYOT productions at Side Project Theatre in Chicago.

"1-800-Why-Does-Life-Suck" a short comedic dark comedy chosen from hundreds of submissions to be produced as part of Quirky Productions' One Act Festival in downtown NYC at 440 Studios on March 7th & 8th, 2015.

As a playwright in Writer's Room, the new play development workshop at The New Colony, I've been working on a brand new full-length play through a series of workshops involving readings and improvisation.

Marianna started writing "Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn" as part of the Stockyards' Play for Keeps Series and it was performed as a staged reading at the Public House Theatre in Chicago on November 24, 2014.

"I'll love you as long as I'm real." The full-length play-in-development, "Psychic Spelunking," is a about a clown named Pissy and Sappy with multiple personalities who decides to spelunk into his brain or the American Midwest.