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About Aviv’s Theatrical Work
Aviv Gijsbers van Wijk (they/them) is a playwright from Pasadena, Texas, now based in Brooklyn, NY. They’re currently under commission by Ensemble Studio Theatre & The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They have been a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee, a 2021 & 2019 Princess Grace semi-finalist, and won the national 2018/19 DVRF Playwrights Program. Amy has recently been an Ensemble Studio Theatre Youngblood finalist, a three-time Bay Area Playwrights Festival semi-finalist, and a two-time O'Neill NPC semi-finalist. Their work has been developed or presented with House Of International Theatre Copenhagen (WORLD PRIDE 2022), New Georges, Pipeline Theatre Company, Fresh Ground Pepper, New Light Theatre Project, Dixon Place, Project Y, and elsewhere. New Georges affiliated artist. BA, Brooklyn College. Recent MFA graduate, Carnegie Mellon University with Rob Handel.
Aviv has also written about robots in theatre for American Theatre magazine, and for the online performance journal Culturebot. They have been a guest lecturer at NYU/Playwrights Horizons and Seton Hall University, taught playwriting with EPIC Players, Writopia Labs, the New South Young Playwrights Festival at Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, and at Carnegie Mellon University (during MFA candidacy).
From 2018 - 19, Aviv was the Manager of Artistic Development at Pipeline Theatre Company. Formerly, Aviv worked at Equal Justice USA, and briefly had a stint making radio journalism as a News Lab Intern at Houston Public Radio.
REVIEWS OF THEIR WORK
“In a high-octane 90-minute exhibition of various darkly comedic portraits of modern femininity and sexuality, […]‘feminine octagon [or aristotle can eat me]’ tackles themes of feminism, patriarchy, capitalism and the ways women, femme and female-identifying people experience them….With a shapeshifting cast of troubled characters, the play is fast-paced, funny, loud and savage.
It’s also unsettling: Van Wijk blatantly acknowledges that at the root of traditional femininity is the threat of harm and seeks to subvert and explore it…
‘feminine octagon [or Aristotle can eat me]’ is well performed, with great enthusiasm and infective energy, while the momentum leaves little time to dwell on imperfections. ” – Copenhagen Post – Lena Hunter September 16th 2021
DIRTY DIRTY
Full-length drama // 2W, 2M
In this provocative, sexy drama, renowned journalist Violet Miller sets out to write about HardBall, a porn studio with a safe, sex-positive reputation and sky-rocketing female viewership. But when Violet meets CJ, the breakout male star at the center of HardBall’s success, she’s caught between her professional persona and her newly awakened desires, and begins to question who’s really in control. DIRTY DIRTY begs us to consider our most public selves, our most private desires, and the boundaries in between.
The first in a cycle of plays exploring the dynamics of sex, bodies, and the femme gaze.
Development/Honors
Industry Reading in May 2019 featuring: Tina Benko (Violet), Kyle Beltran (Markus), Andrew Durand (CJ), Mirirai Sithole (Layla), and Fig Chilcott (SD).
Semi-finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2020
Semi-finalist, Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship 2019
Semi-finalist, O’Neill New Play Conference 2019
Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation 2018-2019 Playwrights Program award winner
Full-length // 5NB, 2W
(formerly titled, skin_hunger_ touch _starved)
It's 2025. Everyone works remotely from a home office. Everyone has a home gym. Everyone is connected. Physical touch and intimacy are deeply restricted. Beryl, a touch specialist who works at The Agency, helps people supplant the desire for in-person touch with simulated touch. Jay, Beryl's client, sends anonymous gifts to their mom, Miray, half-way across the country. And Elliot, Beryl's partner, has disappeared. HITOUCH investigates what we gain, and what we lose, when society is left with the absence of physical intimacy, and given online connection. Who are we without touch, and who do we become?
Commission, The Farm Theater 2020-21
MILDRED’S UMBRELLA Festival Reading, dir. Lyam B. Gabel 2021
Reading, dir. Kat Yen 2020
HITOUCH
(a play for physical distance)
feminine octagon
[or, aristotle can eat me]
Full-length poetic comedy // 5W, 1M, 1 N/GNC, a chorus of 3 - 200 male voices
Allure and Candy become goddesses. A man falls from the sky. Flowers + Mary Shelley fall in love. & cam girl Eurydice_19969 wants to make that ca$$$h. feminine octagon [or, aristotle can eat me] is one hour/one night/one hundred nights in the search for an unforgettable, life-changing party.
Development
World Premiere, Copenhagen House of International Theatre, WORLD PRIDE 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark, dir. Jessica O’Hara-Baker
The Alternate Possibilties of Our Past and Future History with Particular Regard to the Identification of the Eastern Puma and the Corps of Discovery
Full-length queer eco-futurist dramedy // 4W, 1M
In a desert world that has collapsed in the wreckage of climate change, Lewis is a topographer. Lewis secretly wants a museum more than anything in the world. Secretly hoards objects she find buried in the dirt, and hides them from her eco-engineering girlfriend, Clark — and their friend Dev, but he's probably too busy embroidering pillows to notice. At the site of pre-apocalypse ruins, two men find Lewis digging away in the desert, and they just won't stop asking her for directions and calling her "Sacajawea." Whatever that means.
Development/Honors
Semi-finalist, O'Neill Conference
Semi-finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival
Finalist, PlayPenn
Finalist, The Ground and Field Theatre Festival at UC Davis
Currently in development. // 3W, 1M
Franchesca gets a job as the sole assistant at a small non-profit, excited to do good for the world and she’s also seeing someone she’s into. Things are looking up. (She might be able to make her credit card payments!) But one day, something bad happens, and she’s the only staff person left to help the head of the company out of a crisis. And things start to get weirder. A play that explores what it means to put other people’s needs above your own, every day, from 9-5, for money.
THE ASSISTANT OR, MY PLEASURE
cardinal song
Full-length drama (currently in development) // Written for: 1 female-identifying person and 1 enby/NB/GNC/GQ person
When she was a child, Willow spent twenty-two hours at the bottom of the old well in the woods. As an adult, she barely even remembers it — the darkness, the cold, the strange little red bird. Until Russell, the person who saved her, appears, and asks for her help to stop dreams that torment him — dreams that remind him of their shared past. cardinal song digs into how trauma claws its way to the surface, even as decades pass.
Full-length comedy (currently in development) // 5W, 2M
Millie, a queer fat femme, shows up for what she suspects to be her surprise birthday party, only to find her family staging a weight-loss intervention. An explosive, genre-bending comedy exploring fatphobia, femme-ness, and (kitchen-sink) family (drama) trauma that examines what it takes for one womxn to (actually, truly) love herself.
Morbid Obesity Surprise Intervention Birthday Party
Full-length drama // 3W, 2M
"Am I unlike myself?" The question reverberates in Clarissa's mind after. After: the car accident. After: the emergency. After: reconstructive surgery. And now comes the question of a new after: who is she? Does her husband, a celebrity plastic surgeon, even recognize her? Does she recognize herself? An exploration of loss, trauma, and aesthetics, Second Skin examines the wounds and scars left in the wake of healing.
Workshop production, American Theatre of Actors, dir. Courtney Ulrich
Wide-Eyed Theatre Company Apprentice Playwright Group project