Perhaps because she came to theatre as an actor, Amy Herzog’s writing is one of nuance and intimation. Where some writers angle for the pleasures of flawlessly articulated arguments or extravagant theatricality, Herzog’s interests are character-based. “More than anything,” she says, “I hope people connect to the texture of relationships as they emerge during the course of my plays.”
Her own performance career ended when, after graduating from college, she went on tour with a production of Ramona Quimby and discovered it made her “utterly miserable.” When she returned to New York, she co-founded theatre company The Tank with classmates from Yale and rekindled her interest in playwriting. Soon after, Herzog received a J. R. Humphrey Fellowship in Dramatic Writing from Columbia University to develop the play In Translation, which earned her acceptance into the Yale School of Drama. Upon graduation, Herzog worked with Youngblood and the writers’ group at Ars Nova. In 2008, she won the Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights, around the same time she started writing After the Revolution, which premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2010. The production, which transferred to Playwrights Horizons, was hailed as the arrival of a major writer.
After the Revolution follows Emma, the daughter of two generations of American radicals, as she navigates the revelation that her recently deceased grandfather—blacklisted during the 1950s for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Committee and lionized in the family’s mythology—had spied for the Russians. After the Revolution was loosely based on an incident in Herzog’s own extended family, and the play features Vera Joseph, the widow of Emma’s grandfather, who continues as one of the central characters in 4000 Miles.
Her Yale Rep commission, Belleville, premiered in the fall of 2011. Belleville anatomizes the dissolution of the marriage of a seemingly perfect American couple living the expat bohemian dream in Paris. The play—praised by The New York Times as “thrillingly good”—received its New York premiere in the spring of 2013 at New York Theatre Workshop.
Herzog’s latest play, The Great God Pan, premiered in 2012 at Playwrights Horizons in New York. With a deft and empathic hand, Herzog develops a story of how the specter of trauma shifts protagonist Jamie’s deepest understandings of himself, his family, and his future. The New York Times called the play “haunting, deeply affecting, and unfailingly honest,” and praised Herzog as “one of the bright theatrical lights of her generation.”
Amy Herzog writes with honesty, wisdom, and generosity. As John Lahr wrote in a review of After the Revolution in The New Yorker, “The ability to listen is, perhaps, the definition of love. Herzog’s accomplishment is to trap this rare sense of connection.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel