Howard Pflanzer is a playwright and poet. His award winning, operas, plays and devised pieces have been performed at LaMaMa (The House ofNancy Dunn with Steve Weisberg/Andy Craft), Playwrights Horizons, Symphony Space, Medicine Show Theatre (Living With History: Sartre Camus De Beauvoir, On the Border, Walter Benjamin), Kraine Theater (Cocaine Dreams, Freud and Cocaine), The Living Theatre, LaborFest (Lucy Parsons: Anarchist), Fresh Ground Pepper (My Loving People) and broadcast over WBAI and WNYC FM. His multi-media theatre piece, Alien, created in collaboration with Teatr Palmera Eldritcha in Poland was presented at the 2011 Malta International Theatre Festival. Currently developing Raus, at Medicine Show Theatre (Directed staged reading 2017).
Awards
He was the winner of a Play Commission in Jewish Theatre from NFJC (Jersey Nights at Medicine Show), a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, two ASCAP Awards, a Puffin Foundation grant and co-winner of an NEA Media Arts grant for the opera, Dream Beach (with Michael Sahl). He was the featured poet in November 2013 for the Poetry Company. He was a Fulbright Scholar in theatre (spring 2003) in India where he directed the world premiere of The Terrorist at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai. Residencies: VCCA, Ragdale Foundation and Fundacion Valparaiso.
Poetry
He has performed his edgy short poetic plays and poetry including Dead Birds or Avian Blues, (published by Fly By Night Press in 2011) at The Bowery Poetry Club, KGB, Palante A La Luz (Nuyorican, New Year’s Day, 2018) The Living Theatre, Theaterlab, A Gathering of the Tribes, LaMaMa, TRACT 187, the Saturn Series, the Cornelia Street Café in New York and San Diego Writers Ink and Sweet Briar College, Virginia. His work has been published online and in many magazines and anthologies including Nebula Rift,FIVE Poetry, And Then,Downtown Brooklyn, Poems:LES Festival of the Arts Dedicated to the Lower East Side (TNC 2016, 2017),Tribes, An Unnatural Election (2016),Word: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes (2017) and Barrooms and Burgers (Main Street Rag 2017). His hybrid performance piece, Walt Whitman Opera, adapted from Whitman’s poetry with music by Constance Cooper, was presented at the undergroundzero festival in New York in July 2014.