Elana Gartner
(Updated 12/18/2025) Internationally produced and recognized playwright Elana Gartner writes on themes of womanhood, disability and LGBTQIA+. Among her plays are The Shiva of Ethel Zimmerman (2025 Semi-Finalist, National Jewish Playwriting Contest), Jagged Journey (2022 Finalist: Gulfshore Playhouse New Works Festival, Reading: Media Arts), Runtime Error (2021 Semi-Finalist: Eugene O’Neill; Virtual reading: Transformation Theatre), Before Lesbians (2020 Dayton FutureFest Finalist; 2nd Place Recipient of the 2018 Henley Rose Playwriting Competition for Women. Readings: Oberlin College, Yellow Rose Productions. Virtual readings: Dayton Futurefest; Good Luck Macbeth), Because of Beth (Productions: Howick Little Theatre; The Workshop Theater), Outside (Reading: League of Professional Theatre Women, Playwrights Horizons Downtown), and Pilar’s Brother (Readings: Transformation Theatre; Repertorio Español).. Elana participated in the Kennedy Center Playwriting Initiative, the Midwest Dramatists Conference and the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Her play, Because of Beth, was published with Next Stage Press (2025). She has had monologues published from Because of Beth (Audition Monologues for Young Women #2: More Contemporary Auditions for Aspiring Actresses", by Gerald Ratliff, 2013) and Runtime Error in Smith & Kraus' Best Monologues for Men 2022. During the pandemic, Elana founded Four Walls Theater which produced socially responsible theatre virtually. She holds memberships with the Dramatists Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, Honor Roll!, Manhattan Oracles, and the International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP), where she was a board member for five years. She was the co-founding chair of the ICWP 50/50 Applause Awards, recognizing those theaters who were producing women in at least 50% of a given season. She was a co-founder of the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Book Reading Club of Plays, reading, analyzing and attending plays.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://www.elanagartner.com
FB: @elanagartner, https://www.facebook.com/elanagartnerplaywright
IG: @elanamgartner
NPX: https://newplayexchange.org/users/817/elana-gartner
MORE ABOUT ME
During the pandemic, I felt the electricity of my writing disappear and, therefore, the joy also disappeared. I became frustrated with myself and enormously impatient. My mentor told me I was not alone in these feelings and I needed to forgive myself for not having the spark in that moment. Years passed. I continued to write but it wasn't with the same joy. I loved my plays but it was harder work to push myself through it. Then, in the spring of 2025, I saw a post about the ever present argument: who had the better bagels in Brooklyn? Something urged me to open a new document and place that argument at a shiva, a Jewish mourning time. And suddenly, character after quirky character was walking through the door of this shiva with their own particular, weird story. It was happening so fast and it was so delightful and shocking to me that I took my hands off the wheels and let it occur. WIthin a week, I had 45 pages of a script and within ten weeks, I had a finished script, some parts more polished than others. And I was filled with joy about this script and sighing a great deal of relief that I had finally broken through!
WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Revisions of "The Shiva of Ethel Zimmerman"
KEYWORDS
Women, lesbian, sexual abuse, #MeToo, disability, epilepsy, drama, alternate time structure, historical, magical realism, surrealism, family, Judaism.
