Abe Koogler

Abe Koogler's plays include Deep Blue Sound (Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks, upcoming), Fulfillment Center (Manhattan Theatre Club), Kill Floor (Lincoln Center Theater), Blue Skies Process (Goodman Theatre's New Stages Festival), Lisa, My Friend (Kitchen Dog Theater), Advance Man (UTNT), and Aspen Ideas (Studio Theatre, postponed due to COVID). He is the winner of an Obie Award for Playwriting, the Dramatists Guild's Lanford Wilson Award, and the Weissberger Award. Premieres of his plays have been directed by Arin Arbus, Daniel Aukin, Lila Neugebauer, Les Waters, and Will Davis, among others. He earned graduate degrees from UT-Austin's Michener Center for Writers and Juilliard. With playwrights Gab Reisman and Katie Bender, he co-wrote the immersive journey plays Slip River and Church of the Passionate Cat, which premiered in Austin. Abe has taught playwriting at Primary Stages and Bennington College, and he also works as a political speechwriter. He was born and raised in Washington State.

• “Koogler’s brilliance as a playwright is how he captures the real while hinting at the eternal. Just when it seems like he is trying to strangle your heart with tension, he goes ahead and breaks it with simplicity.”

  — Newcity Stage

• “Koogler’s characters are earnest, idiosyncratic, and suspicious of hierarchy. Often bitingly funny, Koogler’s plays…reveal larger truths about the economic and racial systems under which we all live.”

  — The Yale Review