Kevin Anthony Kautzman is a playwright originally from North Dakota, a 2009 Tennessee Williams Scholar, and a 2009-10 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis.  He is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, where he studied history and philosophy.

Kevin has studied drama in Minneapolis and London at the Workhouse Theatre Company, the Central School of Speech and Drama, and the Royal Court and Soho theatres.  His work has been performed in New York by the American Story Project, the Living Theatre, and Poliglot Theater and in London at the Dogstar, the Soho Studio Theatre, and the Tristan Bates Theatre.

Kevin's play THEN WAVES was a finalist for the 2009 Yale Drama Series and the Seven Devils and Great Plains theatre conferences.

He currently lives in the Twin Cities and is online at www.kevinkautzman.com.

(Photo by Dwayne Williams)

Search for published plays by Kevin Anthony Kautzman...

Then Waves

Description

A discharged American soldier returns from war to do violence upon his estranged son, who may not be his at all.  Set in the American Midwest, Then Waves explores the issues of violence's echo, the cost of war, and the impulses toward destruction that ravage families and destroy the future. 

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Birth Night

A Play in One Act

2FvM * 23pg


Description Foot and Mouth are trapped in a basement with just one candle left to light up the dark. Fighting over this, they reveal something of the nature of power and the struggle to control perception and thus reality.

See this link for stills and video from the November 2007 production at the King's Head, London.

L'Elue

A Play in One Act

2F/1M * 51pg
Description
Aaron is an expatriated American man living in an overpriced flat in London. Surely he can't afford it on his own on his poet's wages and with a broken leg.  He grudgingly nurses his leg and a healthy cynicism as he listens to Stravinsky. In his ample free time he talks to the birds and waits for spring to come. He may be a ballet dancer. He may be a liar.  Chrissie is an Englishwoman from the midlands about to get exposed to Aaron's secret world.  L'ELUE explores this collision, the mysterious nature of attraction, addiction, and the very abstract and tired idea of the nation state itself.

First performed the summer of 2007 as a reading by the American Story Project, directed by John Hansen-Bravetti of Poliglot Theater.

The Fisherman

A Play in One Act

3M * 19pg
Description
An aging academic accurately predicts a future disaster leading to a land war on American soil.  Remembering his grandfather, a soldier recounts a time before war was incessant and present in his very backyard and the lessons his grandfather taught him to prepare to kill and, if necessary, to die...

First performed as readings at the Soho Studio Theatre, London, and the Dogstar, Brixton in the summer of 2007.

Quiver

A Play in One Act (Full Length)

3F/1M * 81pg
Description
The Christian patriarchy movement in the United States stresses the differences between the sexes, insisting upon woman’s role as “helpmeet” for her man in an attempt to turn back the clock not to the nineteen-fifties but to some pre-industrial state of gender relationship, modeled after the Old Testament Patriarch.  When Faith, a devoutly submissive mother of seven living in Iowa, is drawn deep into the pro-life movement by her pastor, she comes to question not just her adoption of the so-called “Quiverfull” lifestyle but her belief in, and understanding of, her Christian God.

The Survivalists

A Play in Three Acts

2F/4M * 150pg
Description
A fourth-generation jeweler, Michael, goes into crisis when his Cancer-stricken mother is left to die alone after his father, David, abandons her side to attend a baseball game.  Michael takes up survivalism and converts a storage space beneath a mall into a bunker.  David thinks his son is paranoid and wasting his time until a Sickness abruptly lays waste to nearly everyone on the planet.  Left in the bunker are David (whom the Sickness has blinded), Michael, and a cellular phone salesman from the mall named Reginald.  The three men form an uncomfortable allegiance inside the bunker and pass their time hunting lions that have escaped from the zoo (Michael), avoiding the outdoors while making elaborate outfits wreathed with countless diamonds (Reginald), and creating elaborate fantasies about the present, past, and future (David).  This contentedly doomed society of three is threatened when a Catholic seminarian and a young woman from Venezuela arrive looking for other survivors in order to start rebuilding the world.

THE SURVIVALISTS ONLINE

Nails

A Play in One Act

2F/1M *47pg
Description
In a theatre: a Doctor named Bill and a mysterious Lady who appears to be nailed by her wrists to a table - a black Mason jar neither wants to discuss - a dead but walking woman named Anna who makes the best coffee - the sound of hammering, and, when the Lady closes her eyes, another sound so terrible it threatens to destroy Bill’s sanity - NAILS is the new one-act play that explores the line between the surreal and the real in what might be ultimate act of love, and the turmoil of a man who, for a moment, regrets it and so must face an infinity without illusion…