Sarah Hammond
playwright & musical theatre writer
Full-Length Plays...
House on Stilts
Haunted by a tragic Fourth of July accident, Rutherford Stub lives alone in a borrowed house on the edge of Crooktail Island, waiting for the woman across the water to wake up—until an old friend and her teenage daughter arrive, wrecking his years of quiet solitude. When it's time to let go of the past, can he? A funny and heartbreaking tale of unexpected friendship set in the South Carolina lowcountry. [2M, 2W; 1 intermission]
Green Girl
A love story between a teen goth backwoods healer and a country club caddy in the Congaree Swamp where the woods are full of ghosts. With flashbacks to the Civil War and dream sequences in Afghanistan. [2M, 4W; 1 intermission]
Produced at the Summer Play Festival at the Public in 2008.
The Extinction of Felix Garden
After setting fire to an entire forest, an ex-forest ranger is required by law to move to Brooklyn. But even in the city she can’t escape wilderness. There’s a gargoyle catching prayers on the roof and her downstairs neighbor is raising a tiger in his bedroom. Brooke and Felix fall for each other. Felix’s tiger eats Brooke’s cat. A love story bent on destruction. [3M, 2W]
Kudzu
In suburban South Carolina, an ornery Confederate Reenactor tries - and fails - to reconnect with his nephew on the battlefield. [4M, 1W; 1 intermission]
“A brave, imaginative, well-researched work. ...Although Kudzu tells a serious story, it is also really funny.... Even here, for its first, it has the feel of something that will last.”—The State Newspaper
Circus Tracks
A circus orphan stranded in suburbia must journey through miles of freak-studded desert to find her way back to her mother under the saddest bigtop on the planet. An ensemble fairy tale for adults. [3M, 4W]
“Hammond is a singular writer with a mischievous streak. …Existential angst never felt so fun.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Produced by Seattle's Live Girls! and Dallas's Outcry Theatre.
Short Plays & a Rant
In the Heideman Award-winning Hum of the Arctic, we glimpse a lost moment between a deaf woman blasting Queen from her radio and the artist who barges in on her, in her bathroom, in the bathtub, with a blue paintbrush. Plus five other short plays. A lethal dress. The aftermath of a bakery explosion. A sketch of a train ride for two actors and a diorama. And an open letter titled "Who Put the Dead Bird in my Mailbox," produced in Chicago in Collaboraction's Sketchbook Festival.
"Who Put the Dead Bird in My Mailbox" at Collaboraction. Also famous on craigslist.