Evan Brodsky
Playwright, Actor
Evan Brodsky is a queer Brooklyn based playwright and actor, interested in exploring identity, intimacy, and the universe.
His full length plays include The Glass Between Stars (The Tank, 2024; New York Theater Festival, 2021, Winner of Most Creative New Play; Semi Finalist, ScreenCraft Stageplay Competition 2025), Kaleidoscope (Semi-Finalist, Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, 2022), The Memory Centre (reading with Dovecote Reading Series) and For(e)bear (staged reading at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, 2025). His 10-minute play Astronauts premiered at the Fresh Fruit Festival in 2025.
He earned a BFA in Drama from NYU and studied the Meisner Technique at William Esper Studio. Evan is also a co-founder of the production company, Patchworks NYC. Learn more about what Patchworks NYC is doing here.
Writing
Through writing, Evan hopes to explore how we reconcile the mysteries of existence with our need for connection and how we carry the weight of the past—cosmic, ancestral, or emotional—into the present.
The Glass Between Stars premiered at the New York Theatre Fest in 2021 where it was awarded most original new play. It was performed at The Tank in March 2024.
Claire and Gideon meet in high school at the age of 15 and fall in love quickly. Inseparable, the two dream of spending their lives together. Bonded by their musings on life and the universe, they have a relationship that goes beyond reality itself. After tragedy strikes them in their final year of high school, they ultimately go their separate ways. At 27, they run into each other at a cafe, where they ultimately decide whether their bond was a thing of the past, or if it's something that will stick with them forever. The Glass Between Stars is a non-linear journey of two people's griefs and the love that ties them together through eternity.
For(e)bear will have a staged reading at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research in March of 2025.
In For(e)bear, Ben, a queer student studying abroad in Berlin with his all-time favorite author, is assigned to craft a fictional narrative. Inspired by a box of his late grandmother's belongings, he discovers a portrait in a museum by Sonya Abrahmson, a lesbian painter from the Weimar Republic. What starts as a writing assignment quickly pulls Ben into Sonya’s life—and her world—blurring the lines between imagination and reality. As Ben uncovers queer history and his grandmother’s secrets, he begins to see how storytelling can connect the past and present in ways he never expected.
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Artistic statement
While taking an astrophysics final in undergrad, the stranger sitting next to me slipped his headphone into my ear and started playing Bon Iver’s “29 #Strafford APTS.” It was 2016, right in the middle of My Great Existential Crisis (one I’ve never fully recovered from). Little did that stranger know, the music he shared would not only worsen my existential spiral but also transform me into a playwright.
As the guitar strummed its tender acoustic melody and Bon Iver called out, “sharing smoke,” a melancholic nostalgia began to creep in. The song slowly unfolded with experimental textures and layered dissonance. If you listen closely, it becomes a story about two people—complicated and filled with longing.
The song played on repeat in my headphones: outside a movie theater, crying down Christopher Street, on a train in Barcelona. The cryptic lyrics—“A womb / An empty robe / Enough / You’re rolling up / You’re holding it / You’re fabric now”—felt like fragments of a memory begging to be deciphered. They lingered and rearranged themselves in my mind until, somewhere outside Barcelona, they unraveled into a scene in my notes app. That scene became my first play, The Glass Between Stars, a non-linear story of grief and love, mirroring the song itself.
My fascination with the universe began as a child. My head was always tilted toward the stars, captivated by the mysteries of the cosmos and the universes within human relationships. In college, my curiosity led me—a drama student without a background in science or math—to petition for astrophysics and metaphysics courses, determined to explore these questions further. I began to draw parallels between the stars—fragmented light blinking at us from the past—and the constellations of our emotional lives. This relationship between cosmic questions and intimate connections is where my writing lives.
If a stranger slipping a song into my ear taught me anything, it’s that even the smallest, strangest moments can change us—and it’s those moments I aim to capture in my work as a playwright.
