Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes: This recipient of the Heidi Thomas Writers’ Initiative is a surprising comedy about opening your home, occasionally your wallet, and always your heart. Marian, the matriarch of a far-flung Jewish family, had happily settled into retirement life with her new husband Richard. However, when a pregnant niece, the troubled boy next door and a distressed daughter with a secret show up at her door, Marian’s empty nest ends up a little fuller than she imagined. This firecracker play by DC area playwright Dani Stoller takes the dysfunction, puts it back in the family, then gives it a hilarious—and subversive—stir. (World Premiere Signature Theatre, featured in NY Times) 

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Blunted Daggers: A modern-day adaptation of Romeo & Juliet that examines what would happen if the happy dagger hadn't been sharp enough and Juliet survived. An exploration of love, loss, fame, and violence in the social media era.

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The Joy That Carries You: (Co-Written with Awa Sal Secka) A drama about an interracial couple in crisis that melds sharp comic dialogue and moving spoken-word poetry. This new play about love and family, privilege and responsibility, introduces us to Shiri and Alaia, navigating their first year together as a couple. Over the course of a few days, their relationship is tested by events that underline the radically different ways each of them, one Black, one Jewish, experiences the world. Strikingly personal in its intimacies, this play is a poetic reckoning with love and the pain woven through it. (World Premiere Olney Theatre Center)

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Accepts With Pleasure: A group of close-knit college friends have gathered for the wedding of two of their own. But time apart has done little to quell the built-up tensions, competitive spirits, and tucked away feelings. While drugs and drinking and harmless flirtation seem like the perfect route back to reliving the “old times,” eventually, long-held secrets come to light, and now they’re stuck with the consequences. Accepts With Pleasure is a dark comedy about love and friendship in the millennial era. (Featured in SigWorks through Signature Theatre)

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The Play About the Shiva: (Finalist for the 2022 Theater J Patty Abramson Play Prize) Directly after the funeral of their grandmother, siblings Eliza and David, along with Eliza’s goyishe fiancé, Oliver, return to their mother Linda’s Brooklyn brownstone to begin sitting Shiva.
Eliza and David immediately begin battling over who knows how to correctly care for their mother in her time of grief (although if it were up to her, no one would be coddling her ever) But until well into the afternoon, none of them even mention their estranged sibling and daughter, Rachel, who cut off almost all contact with the family after the tragic death of Linda’s husband and the siblings’ father several years prior.
When Rachel shows up at her mother’s door, the night takes a turn (albeit comedic, even if it’s darkly so, I mean, you can’t have a play about Jews and not have at least some humor, right?) And the group falls into a conversation about why Rachel left and what makes a Jew “good”? The Play About the Shiva is an examination of death, grief, guilt (again, these are Jews we’re dealing with), pride, and the Jewish desire to rebuild what was once destroyed.

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Just Great: a retelling of some book by F Scott Fitzgerald: Crazy parties, high-end fashion, glamorous homes, fame. Through his social media feeds, high schooler Jason Carraway has seen it all and wants it all. Newly enrolled at the elite Dalton Prep, Jason moves from seeing the lives of the elite via social media to seeing it all in person. This is his chance to rise to the top and to have everything he’s ever wanted. Or, at least, he hopes.

Using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterful novel The Great Gatsby as a springboard, playwright Dani Stoller’s world premiere play is a sharp and biting look at authenticity, social media and the ways we try to find self-worth in the modern world. This play was commissioned by Signature Theater for their Signature in the Schools Program, and was performed by a cast of high school students. This play is perfect for high school and college-age performers and was recently published by Broadway Licensing. Copies and performance rights can be purchased here.

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Girlhood: The 21st Annual Sarah Metzger Memorial Play for Round House Theatre. A patch of land beneath an abandoned overpass serves as a common, yet sacred, ground for a group of teenage girls as they navigate adolescence. Identity, sexuality, and their unique upbringings all play a part in how they transition from childhood to young adulthood and figure out what comes next. Girlhood explores the dreams, fears, humor, and heartache of coming of age in an intimate series of vignettes, commissioned for the Round House Theatre Teen Performance Company. 
Content note: Girlhood is an honest portrayal of the issues and challenges of growing up in our society, and as such includes frank discussion of sexual activity, assault, and bullying, among other topics.

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The Voices on Blackwell Island: In 1888, a daring female journalist goes undercover and a falsely committed inmate rebels in this riveting original play. Inspired by Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Packard, and featuring a cast and crew of area high school students with award-winning actor Holly Twyford, the most ambitious Signature in the Schools production to date descends deep into the horrors of Blackwell Island, the notorious women’s asylum. 2022/2023 Signature in the Schools commission

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The Healers: World Premiere at 2020 Q-Fest 10-minute play festival. A daughter decides to help her mother through her divorce by hiring an energy healer named...Deb.

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You can read all my work on The New Play Exchange by clicking here: https://newplayexchange.org/users/32449/dani-stoller​