Latest Developments
Lee Roscoe is increasingly recognized as a major writing talent. Her radio play The Mooncusser's Tale was recently awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council (Brewster, MA) grant. In additional to the acclaim she has received for her plays, Roscoe's chapter in the The Cinema of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) received praised from Shock Cinema, the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine, and elsewhere.
Neil Silberblatt, founder of Voices in Poetry, interviewed Lee Roscoe about her writing in 2018: Listen Here
Roscoe is currently focused on bringing her powerful and timely play Impossible? to theatrical venues across the country. If you would like more information on this project, please contact her agent, Janet Murphy Robertson ([email protected]).
Biographical Information
Lee Roscoe began writing plays and studied acting as a child in Manhattan, studying with theatre luminaries, and working backstage and onstage off-Broadway and in independent films. Life then intruded in ways both dramatic and ordinary. When she returned to playwrighting in more recent years, it was with a stunningly clear voice, honed from engagement in real-world matters both local and national—to tackle stories of the destruction of the human heart by a dysfunctional society. With a jarringly fresh perspective, moving audiences through catharsis, traditional Aristotelian forms, and multi-media techniques, she has created a body of work to "repair the world."
A Yale Drama Series Finalist, Lee Roscoe is a former New Yorker now living on Cape Cod. Her plays have been seen in New York, Boston, and Cape Cod at such venues as the Living Theatre; Provincetown Theater; SlamBoston at Playwrights Theater Boston; Playwrights Platform, Waltham; Women’s International Theater Festival, Provincetown; Swan Day, Tilden Arts Center, Hyannis; the Piano Factory, Boston; and Great Plains Theater Conference, Omaha. They have also been heard on public radio in San Francisco and Brandeis University.
Roscoe is an accomplished and versatile writer whose poems have appeared in the Cape Cod Poetry Review, Counterpunch, Popular Resistance, WOMRfm, and Mutual Muses. She was poetry editor for Playboy Press “The Classic Woman” and former “Poetropes” columnist for the Barnstable Patriot.
A multi-faceted creative talent, Roscoe invented the first modular, multi-use, wrap and no-sew and single seam garments in the U.S, "The Instant Dress," featured in Life magazine, sold in stores across the U.S and in “Wrap Yourself a Designer Dress” (Grosset and Dunlap publisher). The techniques and the timeless, inexpensively elegant designs are now part of the fashion vernacular.
A former Equity actress, Roscoe trained at HB Studio, Circle in the Square, and American Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked backstage at a number of theaters Off-Broadway for a number of years. She later appeared Off-Broadway in the New Pinter Plays, and in the long run of “The Kitchen” directed by Jack Gelber, starring Rip Torn. The Boston Globe wrote “Roscoe is brilliant” regarding her role in “The Captain’s Doll," Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.
She was featured in Norman Mailer’s underground films. Check out her eponymous chapter, “Mailer’s Maja and Dark Lady Revealed,” in the recently-released book, The Cinema of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury Press, publisher.) The British Film Institute’s “Sight and Sound” just gave her chapter a great review and “Shock Cinema” called it “fascinating.”
Lee Roscoe is a journalist with hundreds of published pieces—hard news, arts, and science, both nationally (Natural History, Sierra, Oceanus, etc.) and regionally (The Cape Cod Times, Provincetown Banner, Cape Cod magazine, New York Conservationist, MassWildlife, etc.). She is the author of “Dreaming Monomoy’s Past, Walking its Present” and of a syndicated national radio show “Almanac of the American Revolution.” She is a Woods Hole Ocean Science Journalism Fellow and an award-winning environmentalist/educator.
Playwright 2000-Present
At the Hollow, WBRSFM in 2007, Great Plains Theatre Conference, 2008
The Shame of Daniel Shays, Nauset Fellowship, 2008
Pirandello’s Hex, “April Madness,” directed by Lisa Burdick, 2008. Boston, The Piano Factory
POOR–The Living Theatre, 2009
The Mobile, Provincetown Theater spring playwright’s festival 2009
Voted springfest favorite, most original playlet.
The Men, Cultural Center of Cape Cod, 2010,
The End of America in the Time of the Fireflies, Finalist Yale Drama Series, 2010
Pie, SlamBoston, 2010
Frames, Smoke and Mirrors, 2011 Ganameed Women’s Project, Boston
The Mooncussers, SF Public Radio, Shoestring Radio Theatre, 2011
Christmas Lovers, Swan Day, Boston Playwrights Theater, 2011
The Hurricane, Provincetown Theater, 2014
The Men or Stalking Random Pastels, Provincetown Theater, 2016
A Woman and a Lioness, International Women’s Playwright Festival, 2016
Impossible!, International Women’s Playwright Festival 2017
The Mooncusser’s Tale-Cotuit Center for the Arts, 2018