Charlotte Higgins Biography

Charlotte Higgins

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS
(Playwright/Author)  is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the International Centre for Women Playwrights. Her work has been recognized by the O’Neill Playwrights Conference; the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival; the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Development Program, to name a few.

She wrote and performed with San Francisco’s Writers Who Act; was an artist-in-residence with Z Space Studio in San Francisco; and was a founding member of the former Reality Check theater company which wrote and performed their original works throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a recipient of a Zellerbach Family Foundation grant for the development of her work.

Charlotte’s most recent play, CRAZY BETTY, is the darkly comedic adventure of two Alabama women trying to beat a system run by a bunch of local male dimwits. The play was a finalist (one of 67 out of 1400 submissions) in the prestigious O’Neill 2019 National Playwrights Conference; a semifinalist in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the 2018 Austin Film & Writer’s Conference and in the Bechdel Test Festival 2019. This followed a very successful NYC reading in 2018.

Her play in five vignettes, ALABAMA BOUND, played to sold-out audiences in San Francisco and Sacramento, California.  The play was chosen for the 2013 NYC International Fringe Festival and was then selected from more than 180 shows as one of 27 published in IndieTheaterNow’s “Best of the 2013 FringeNYC Collection.”  The play most recently opened the 41st season of the Lighthouse Repertory Theatre in Crescent City, CA and was also produced by the Rogue Theater in Wisconsin.

Birmingham Blues, her darkly humorous, provocative play about a disgraced, troubled doctor who lives in her car beneath a railroad trestle in Birmingham, Alabama, explores the fragile homeless community she joins in order to survive and follows her difficult journey toward redemption. The play, a searing look at homelessness, played to sold-out audiences in Sacramento, CA and raised more than $2000 for homeless organizations in the area. It was selected as a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and received an award for Outstanding Achievement for Original Script from the Sacramento Area Regional Theater Alliance. During its development, the play was read in San Francisco at the Magic Theater as part of the Z Space reading series and in Oakland and New York.

Her play, Speak Ill of the Dead, a play in development, follows the saga of a multigenerational Southern family and how its secrets and lies are revealed as one of them lays dying. The play was a finalist in Berkeley Rep’s The Ground Floor Summer Residency/Development Program.

Mama Won’t Stay Dead, a short play, was selected as one of 30 from more than 900 submissions to be presented at the 2019 Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival at the Vineyard Theater in New York City. Charlotte’s short play, The Kitchen Table, was presented as part of the Women in the Arts and Media Coalition’s “Conversations in America:  Under the Gun,” an evening of performance and discussion about gun violence in America.  The Kitchen Table was also performed in Nashville at the Women’s Work Festival 2017,  presented by The Tennessee Women’s Theater Project.  Charlotte’s monologue No Breathing Room was selected for APPLAUSE Books’ “Later Chapters II:  Monologues for Actors over 50” was published in 2018.