At 31, Joshua Harmon is both a graduate student at Juilliard and an award-winning playwright with a sold-out, Off Broadway run under his belt. Harmon continues to successfully juggle both lifestyles as multiple productions of Bad Jews spring up across the country. While Bad Jews was his breakout work, his career as a writer started much earlier.
Harmon was born in 1983 in Manhattan, the son of a lawyer. His family eventually relocated to the suburbs, but he retained an unrelenting desire to someday move to Brooklyn: “The suburbs are fine, but I think I understood from an early age that if I ever had a shot at being cool, I would have had to stay in Brooklyn.” Wanting to be a writer, Harmon wrote poems and short stories in middle and high school that were frequently published in school magazines. After graduating from Northwestern University with a BFA in drama, Harmon returned to New York and worked as an assistant in film and theatre for several years. In 2010, he won a year-long fellowship from the National New Play Network to be a playwright-in-residence at the Actor’s Express and moved to Atlanta. In December 2010, Harmon went to the famed MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where wrote the first thirty pages of Bad Jews.
Bad Jews premiered in October 2013 at Roundabout's Black Box Theatre as part of the Roundabout Underground season. The initial run sold out and subsequently transferred to the bigger Laura Pels Theatre. The New York Times praised the play as the best comedy of the season; American Theatre commended Harmon for not only entertaining the audience but also “asking them to contemplate how people carry on the traditions and histories of their forebears.”
Harmon continues to multitask, working on commissions from Roundabout and Lincoln Center after completing The Franco-Prussian War, a romantic comedy that debuted at the Ernst C. Stiefel Reading Series at Manhattan Theatre Club. When asked about his future plans, Harmon replies, “In five years if I’m still able to make a living being a playwright and having plays that get produced, that in an ideal world mean something to someone, I mean, this is the dream.”
—Elizabeth Dinkova