Savannah Reich

Executive Assistant

Savannah Reich is a playwright, producer, director and screenwriter from the upper Midwest but currently based in Philadelphia. With her theater company, Eternal Cult, she has toured original work to bars, basements, art galleries, backyards and sometimes even theaters all across the country. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the winner of the Sloan Grand Jury Prize for her screenplay “Beebe and Barton”. She was a recent McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights Center, and currently teaches screenwriting at the University of the Arts. Past projects include a rock musical about the Temperance movement, a “dinner party ritual” that takes place in private homes around the dining room table, and a mash-up of “Oedipus Rex” and “Sleepless in Seattle” for two actors who have never seen the script.

Artist Statement

"Savannah’s work engages with the idea of structure in both theater and film. If the “default settings” of theater assume that a play tells a story, contains characters, pretends the audience is invisible, and so on, how can we create new works with a set of rules unique to each piece? If a film exists within a known genre, how can we highlight and push against the audience’s expectations of what is supposed to happen next? Her work is activated by rule breaking, rule bending, and exploring what new rules can be created in the absence of the old."