The Playwright: Bob Bartlett’s plays include UNION, a sometimes fiction chronicling Walt Whitman’s years living and loving in Washington, DC during the Civil War; E2, a contemporary reimagining of Marlowe's Edward II, which recently premiered at Maryland's Rep Stage; SWIMMING WITH WHALES (1st Stage; O'Neill Finalist); HAPPINESS (AND OTHER REASONS TO DIE) (The Welders); THE REGULAR (O'Neill Finalist; Seven Devils Playwrights Conference); THE ORBIT OF MERCURY (O'Neill Finalist); BAREBACK INK, a queer reimagining of the Ganymede myth, which had runs at the Capital and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals and NYC's Hard Sparks. Recently, Bartlett has been producing his own site-specific work: his play THE ACCIDENT BEAR had a successful run in the Avenue Laundromat in Downtown Annapolis; during the first year of covid, he staged his play THREE STRANGERS SITTING AROUND A BACKYARD FIREPIT AT TWO IN THE MORNING LISTENING TO BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S NEBRASKA in his backyard; he recently staged his horror play, LÝKOS ÁNTHRŌPOS, in a wooded clearing in the middle of the woods on a farm in Maryland; his romcom LOVE AND VINYL premiered in the summer of 2023 at KA-CHUNK!! Records in downtown Annapolis; and he wrote the covid-inspired, twelve-episode DUCK HARBOR with EM Lewis for 1st Stage in Tysons which aired in 2021. Bartlett is an affiliated artist with the National New Play Network and a member of The Dramatists Guild of America. He lives in Central Maryland in an old farmhouse and is a founding member of The Welders, a Washington, DC-based, producing playwrights collective. He earned the MFA in Playwriting at Catholic University of America, and he is a member of the theatre faculty at Bowie State University in Maryland, where he teaches dramatic literature, playwriting, and screenwriting.
