Oren Safdie

Oren Safdie (אורן ספדיה; born April 20, 1965) is a Canadian-American-Israeli playwright and screenwriter, and the son of architect Moshe Safdie.

Safdie was born in Montreal, Quebec, to Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie.

His father's family is Sephardic Jewish and of Syrian-Jewish descent.

They are related to the Safdie brothers.

Oren Safdie originally planned to become an architect like his father Moshe Safdie.

He obtained a master of architecture degree, attending the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University in New York.

This was an attempt, he explained, "to get closer to my dad."

During his final semester there, he took an elective playwriting course and was hooked on it after winning a competition run by the Columbia Dramatists.

He wrote a 10-minute scene, drawing on his experience at Columbia presenting a design to a jury of critics, which involved three ego-driven architects and one student.

This eventually became Private Jokes. He stayed another four years at Columbia and completed an MFA in Fiction Writing.

Safdie was awarded a Woolrich Fellowship, and founded The West End Gate Theatre, a student theater company that included actors like Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke and The Whole Nine Yards actress Amanda Peet.

Broken Places, a dark comedy about the effects that parents can have on their children's future relationships, was first produced at the Tribeca Lab in New York in 1995.

La Compagnie, a character driven comedy, set in the garment district of Montreal, includes characters of different classes and ethnic backgrounds working at a small, family run, towel manufacturer that supplies stores across Canada.

In an environment of minimum wage workers, slimy salesman, and penny-pinching bosses, everyone is dependent on each other.

The link between these worlds is Frank Casselli, a hard working company foreman who has to keep everything running smoothly.

He became a playwright-in-residence at La MaMa back in 1996, and he produced the first ever Canadian Theatre Festival in New York.

He also spent a year at Iowa State University where he taught architecture and studied with Jane Smiley.

La Compagnie was first produced at the Alma Shapiro Center in New York in 1996 and performed by La MaMa E.T.C. The play was optioned by Castle Rock and CBS and a half-hour comedy pilot script Fashion Avenue was written.

Jews & Jesus, a musical, satirizes the naiveté of young Jews, half-Jews, Christians who date Jews and vice versa, while questioning the place of religion in this unfettered age.

The story follows two young couples, of secular upbringing, from North America to Jerusalem as they come to grips with their religion.

Ronnie Cohen wrote the music and lyrics.

Safdie wrote the 1998 film You Can Thank Me Later, based on his play Hyper-Allergenic.

It stars Ellen Burstyn, Amanda Plummer, Ted Levine, Mark Blum, Mary McDonnell and Geneviève Bujold.

It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Newport Film Festival.

It subsequently premiered on Showtime in the United States.

The musical was first produced by La MaMa E.T.C. in 1998.

Anita Gates described the play as "lovable" and "a terrific original work" in a New York Times review.

Fiddler Sub-Terrain, another musical collaboration with Ronnie Cohen, is a contemporary satire of Fiddler on the Roof set in the backdrop of politics in Quebec, Canada.

It was produced in 2001 by La MaMa E.T.C. but was greeted with mixed reviews: "[T]he play is often not funny and sometimes hard to follow. Some of the humor nears gross-out status and gets to be too much; a lot of it is just sophomoric and barely generates a smile."; or: "There is so much wrong with Fiddler Sub-Terrain that it is hard to know where to start. The acting is amateurish, the music tuneless and the lyrics insipid."; and: "You don't have to know Fiddler on the Roof to be bored by Fiddler Sub-terrain, the leaden new satire playing at La MaMa. But exposure to the earlier piece will most likely make it even more dismaying."

Private Jokes, Public Places debuted at the Malibu Stage Company in 2003 and went on to play in New York at La MaMa E.T.C. before transferring to the Center of Architecture for a 5-month run.

It was also productioned at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Wellfleet Harbor Actor's Theatre in Wellfeet, Massachusetts, the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, The New End Theatre in London, England, and the National Theatre of Romania in Timișoara and was translated into Japanese.

Beginning in 2007, he held the position of Interim Artistic Director of the Malibu Stage Company (now the Malibu Playhouse).

Safdie teaches playwriting and play analysis at the University of Miami and also advises the Astonishing Idiots, a new student-run theater company, housed under the Department of Theatre Arts.

The Last Word..., debuted Off-Broadway in 2007 in New York City, starring Daniel J. Travanti in the title role.

He resides in Los Angeles with his wife, actress and playwright M. J. Kang, and their daughter born in 2008.

He commutes to Miami every week and returns home for the weekends.

Private Jokes, Public Places was a critical off-Broadway hit and was singled out in 2010 by Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal as one of the best half-dozen new plays he had seen since he started reviewing.

It offers a disturbing, humorous glimpse inside the contemporary world of architecture as Margaret, a young Korean-American student, presents her thesis for a public swimming pool to an all-male jury of famous architects.

This premise is a starting point for an examination of academia, intellectual pretension, the failure of postmodernist culture and the state of the male-female power struggle.

The play is performed regularly by students at architecture schools to mark the beginning of the year.