Bekah Brunstetter

Rebecca Leah "Bekah" Brunstetter (born June 13, 1982) is an American writer.

Her published plays include F*cking Art, which won top honors at the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, I Used to Write on Walls, Oohrah!, Be a Good Little Widow, Going to a Place Where You Already Are, and The Cake, a play inspired by events leading to the US Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

She is a founding member of The Kilroys, which annually produces The Kilroys' List.

Her television work includes writing for I Just Want My Pants Back, Underemployed, Switched at Birth, and American Gods, and both writing and producing on This Is Us.

Rebecca Leah Brunstetter was born on June 13, 1982, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

She is the daughter of former North Carolina Senator Peter S. Brunstetter and Jodie Brunstetter.

She was raised as the only daughter among three brothers in a conservative Christian home.

Brunstetter wrote poems and short stories from a young age, and became involved with theater after moving from a private Christian middle school to Mount Tabor High School, a public school.

As a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brunstetter initially pursued creative writing through poetry, but feedback from her creative writing professors convinced her to try playwriting.

She wrote her first play as a first-year student and decided to pursue playwriting as a career.

By the time Brunstetter graduated from UNC in 2004 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, the UNC Theater Department had fully staged several of her plays.

She continued to study playwriting for three years in the School of Drama at The New School, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

After graduating with her MFA, Brunstetter worked at a corporate job while continuing to write plays.

I Used to Write on Walls, her play about three women who fall for a religious man who surfs and draws graffiti, premiered at the Gene Frankel Theatre Underground in New York in 2007, with Gwen Orel of Backstage calling it a "would-be feminist fable" that is "less convincing than cute".

Duncan Pflaster of BroadwayWorld observed that the play seemed to "reinforce the stereotype that women need men to feel complete", but praised Brunstetter's writing and character development.

In 2008, her play F*cking Art, about a cheerleader who visits her cancer-stricken classmate, was a winner at the 33rd Annual Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, and was subsequently published by Samuel French.

The following year she was named Playwright in Residence at Ars Nova, and her play Oohrah!, a story about the family lives of people in a North Carolina town changing as veterans return home from Iraq, premiered off-Broadway at Stage 2 of the Atlantic Theater Company.

In his review of Oohrah!, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised Brunstetter as an up-and-coming new playwright, but found the play "generally unconvincing".

Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News assessed Oohrah! as "about as deep as your average sitcom", while drawing attention to the quality of Brunstetter's dialogue and writing of female characters.

Robert Hurwitt's review in the San Francisco Chronicle of the play's 2010 West Coast premiere also praised the quality of the dialogue, but called the lengthy play "a bit too much of one initially good thing".

Brunstetter's play Miss Lilly Gets Boned, a story about a religious woman whose disappointment in love causes her to plot revenge against a South African man who lost his wife in an elephant attack, premiered in 2010 at the Finborough Theatre.

Writing for The Guardian, Michael Billington found the development of the main character to be unconvincing, but noted the high quality of the production and acting.

Be a Good Little Widow premiered at Ars Nova in 2011, with a cast including Jill Eikenberry and Wrenn Schmidt.

Writing for The New York Times, Adam Hetrick reviewed the play positively, praising Brunstetter for writing straightforward dialogue and genuinely emotional characters.

A review by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune was less favorable to a 2011 Collaboraction staging of the play, calling Be a Good Little Widow "sincerely meant but structurally immature".

Kathleen Foley later reviewed the Los Angeles premiere positively in the Los Angeles Times, observing that Brunstetter was adept at manipulating the audience's emotions to good effect.

While working as a playwright, Brunstetter started a business writing audition monologues for actors and looked for other writing work to supplement her playwriting income.

Her theater agent introduced her to a television agent in Los Angeles, and she was hired as a writer's assistant by MTV.

After spending a season as an assistant on the short-lived MTV show I Just Want My Pants Back, she became a member of the writing staff for another MTV show, Underemployed, before moving to the ABC Family drama Switched at Birth, where she worked as a staff writer for three seasons.

Brunstetter continued her playwriting while working as a screenwriter, premiering her work Forgotten Corners of Your Dark, Dark Place, which starred actresses in wheelchairs, at the Theater Breaking Through Barriers' annual festival of new plays.

Anita Gates of The New York Times praised the actresses' performances, but expressed concern that the play was unclear about whether or not it was mocking feminist self-examination groups.

Brunstetter also collaborated with other Los Angeles-area writers to create The Kilroys' List, an annual list of plays by female and transgender playwrights modeled on the Black List but intended to promote gender equity.

The list featured her own play The Oregon Trail, about a girl who withdraws from social life as she plays the video game The Oregon Trail.

The play subsequently premiered at the Women's Voices Theater Festival, with Nelson Pressley of The Washington Post concluding that "even some over-explaining in the final steps doesn’t erase the pleasure of this quest".

In 2015, Brunstetter began writing The Cake, a play about a baker who is asked to bake a cake for the wedding of her best friend's daughter but refuses because it is a same-sex wedding.

The play was inspired by real-life events that eventually led to the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission Supreme Court case, and by her father's opposition to same-sex marriage, a view with which she disagrees.

The play premiered in Los Angeles, with Debra Jo Rupp in the starring role.

In 2019, Rogue Machine Theatre produced the play's West Coast premiere in Los Angeles.

Jeffrey Scott's BroadwayWorld review of the Los Angeles production praised the play, actors, and production quality, particularly the performance of Larisa Oleynik in the lead role, but also suggested that the story could be split into three one-act plays in future productions.

During her Ars Nova residency Brunstetter wrote a new play, titled Be a Good Little Widow, about the relationship between a woman and her husband's mother before and after the husband's death.