about me


​Stacie is a writer who uses her whole body.
This artistic maturity is beautiful and rare.
                                     Jenny Factor​, poet 

MY WORK
My big solo plays are about home, place, prying open the locks on the shackles of history. 

Looking for Louie is my search for my great-grandfather — the patriarch who brought us here to the US — about whom nobody would ever speak. 

What She Left gives voice to a descendent of a female partisan, a vigilante, who managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto into the forest.

In 2003, mid-Intifada, I received a commissioned to write a play in Israel Palestine. The DIG: death, Genesis + the double helix (2017 Los Angeles Stage Raw Award) is about an American archaeologist, Sally Jenkins, who is summoned to an excavation in the ancient Arab-Hebrew town of Jaffa, at the southern tip of Tel Aviv. Sally is a world-renowned expert in ancient DNA. Her partners are an inscrutable Israeli operative and a Palestinian expert in ancient text and artifact. Together they give up what is most precious to each of them, to make a new story, in order to protect ravaged land. 

There’s almost always a second voice, a live musical voice, which has its own volition. We argue, we tangle, we riff. In Louie, it's an upright bass; in The DIG, it's Yuval Ron's brilliant score for oud and saz. 

RWANDA
I make art about rough stuff. That's how I got hired to create national performance events for Kwibuka20 the 2014 commemoration of the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. I spent more than a year as an outsider inside that jagged place, seeking a new way to tell that story. It sort of worked. Sort of not. And yet I am prouder of that work than I am of anything else I have made. 

During the pandemic, I wrote a memoir I cannot publish (NDA) called Remember Rwanda: A rainbow of broken glass, like teeth. Memoirist Gayle Brandies calls it “powerful and necessary.” She says I’m “plumbing both personal and cultural trauma, and using story to heal both. It’s “stunning,” she says. “It took my breath away.”

EMPTY SPACE
Yuval's new music for The DIG had its Los Angeles premiere mid-2019. We were scheduled to go out on tour in 2020, when the world came to a halt. Then the war in Gaza cast grave doubt on whether it would ever have a further life. But The DIG is about making a new story for that fraught land — and what it costs to make a new story. So we pray for peace, and hope to breathe life once again into the brave and difficult soul of Sally, at the center of The DIG.

Since 2016, I’ve built, in bits and pieces, a piece that I call Terrain Vague (Empty Space). It’s a phrase coined by architects, referring to absence at the center of a metropolis: leftover spaces, parking lots, empty lots, unusable real estate. Empty space implies freedom, expectation. Promise.

For many years, I lived in Downtown Los Angeles, at the center of Second and Main, a block from City Hall. Aside from our historic building, it was all parking lots, ancient bars, hotels, their upper floors burnt out, pigeon-and rat-infested. Joe’s Auto Parks bought the block; they’re poised to tear it down. To build what? What should be there?

Last year, my partner and I relocated to Detroit, Michigan, to be close to family who needed our care. The population of Detroit has decreased from two million to less than seven hundred thousand in the past thirty years. Thirty percent of the land in Detroit is empty space, where neighborhoods used to be.

TEACHING
Performance faculty at the University of Southern California School of Dramatic Arts; Fulbright Senior Specialist in Story and Performance (Tel Aviv University); Story Consultant for New Ground: a Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change; facilitator of "difficult conversations across differences" for Resetting the Table. Since 2001, I've facilitated What’s the Story? a workshop for writers and performers making powerful stuff based on personal material.  

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT
I am grateful for the generous support of the Wallis Annenberg Helix Project; the Center for Cultural Innovation; the Durfee Foundation; the Fulbright Foundation; USC Visions & Voices; California Arts Council; Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; USC Arts Initiative; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity; and the Hebrew Union College Artist in Residency grant. I'm honored to have been an Artist-Fellow of the 2018-2019 Helix Project; and a Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Trailblazer, 2019 - 2020.
What luck to have caught this very special theater artist in her courageous, fierce, tender and intelligent performance of  The DIG. She's a seasoned and thrilling artist
of the theater, gifted as both a playwright and as an actress.
​​
Melissa Licker
The DIG is an opus that is simultaneously profound, controversial, moving ….  

Stacie is a fearless entertainer
in the best sense of the word.

​ Unblinking, she invites audiences
on what can be a dangerous
journey, but navigates as a trustworthy narrator.
​
Kenneth Schlesinger
dramaturg