Emilie Pascale Beck
She/Her/Hers
Los Angeles, CA
Emilie Pascale Beck is a playwright living in Los Angeles.
Biography

Emilie Pascale Beck’s plays include Sovereign Body (Productions: Road Theatre, Winding Road Theatre; Workshops: Playwrights Theatre, Elephant Theatre, Road Theatre; 2011 Smith Prize Finalist),  Number of People (Production: Piven Theatre Workshop; Development: Hartford Stage, Pasadena Playhouse, Playwrights Theatre, Piven Theatre Workshop), And Let the Skies Fall (Production: El Portal Theatre), and Trace (Development: Boston Court Pasadena). For over a decade she served as the Literary Manager/Director of New Play Development at Boston Court Pasadena, where she ran the Playwrights' Group and curated the New Play Reading Festival.  Directing credits: How the Light Gets In (winner of 2020 Steinberg/ATCA Award for a new play), Shiv, and Cassiopeia (Ovation Award) at Boston Court Pasadena, Miss Keller Has No Second Book (Gulfshore Playhouse), Block Nine (LA Weekly Awards) (Elephant Theatre), Because They Have No Words (Jeff Award) (Lounge Theatre, Piven Theatre Workshop), among others. Dramaturg: The Children, Heavier Than, Alcestis, RII, Everything You Touch, The House in Scarsdale, Everything That Never Happened, and Both And: A Play About Laughing While Black (Boston Court Pasadena). Publications: Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Howlround, LA Stage. She has taught creative writing at UT Dallas, acting at Cal Poly Pomona, has been a guest lecturer at the UC Riverside MFA in Writing Program, and a guest speaker in the UCLA Theatre Major and USC’s Professional Writing Program. Her degrees are from Northwestern University (B.S. in Performance Studies) and Warren Wilson Program for Writers (M.F.A. in Fiction).

Plays

by Emilie Pascale Beck

HANNAH LUMENS is a young investigator for the Texas Innocence Project, which works to mitigate the sentences of prisoners on Death Row. She’s haunted by her mother, victim of a violent crime years earlier. And she’s wary of love. ROJELIO MARTINEZ, the prisoner whose life Hannah is investigating, is both a victim and a perpetrator, far from his home. He’s given up on saving his own life. THE WARDEN has come to call Rojelio his friend, even as he readies to put him to death. The impending loss of friendship haunts the Warden. These stories intertwine, investigating the lasting impact each human being has on another, and how we might—or might not—free ourselves from the prisons of our own making. 

Cast:
WARDEN -- Male, 60s, Caucasian. Texan. ROJELIO -- Male, 30-40, Mexican. HANNAH -- Female, 30, Caucasian, speaks Spanish fluently (for a white girl). DIANE -- Female, 40, African-American. MOTHER -- Female, 50s, Caucasian. ZACH -- Male, 30s, Non-white. EUGENIA -- Female, 50-60, Mexican Note on casting: A Latina actress who can pass as Caucasian can double as MOTHER and EUGENIA. However, neither Eugenia nor Rojelio should be played by Caucasian actors. Eugenia’s doubling is only possible in one direction.
by Emilie Pascale Beck

Leo Gold is in the early stages of dementia, and has trouble keeping straight the important facts of his life. As Leo forgets, he also remembers. He sees the world in terms of numbers, explaining events through statistics, and people through the numeric symbols that represent them in his mind. Numbers, to him, can reveal a whole life. 

Cast:
Leo Gold - A Jewish man, older.

Successes

New York Times on NUMBER OF PEOPLE production:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28cncpiven.html