Bio

Lydia Stryk was born in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire and flying ears of corn. She grew up between DeKalb and London, England, and as a child also lived in the holy city of Mashhad, Iran and in Yamaguchi, Japan where she studied Kabuki and performed on the stage. After high school, she trained at the Drama Centre, London and pursued an acting career in New York for exactly one year before returning to school to study History and Education at Hunter College and then Journalism at NYU.

While interning at the weekly journal, The Nation, she wrote a first play, coming full circle back to the theatre, but this time as a writer, inspired by the feminist idea circulating at the time that women might have other stories to tell and other ways of telling them, and she completed a doctorate in Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation, “Acting Hysteria: An Analysis of the Actress and her Part,” was an attempt to understand why her own short-lived experience acting the woman’s part on stage felt pathological.

Her plays, including Monte Carlo, The House of Lily, The Glamour House (After Dark Award), Safe House, American Tet, An Accident (Rella Lossy Playwriting Award), and Lady Lay (Berrilla Kerr Foundation Playwright Award) have been produced across the United States at theatres including Denver Centre Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, The Contemporary American Theater Festival, Magic Theatre, and 7 Stages and also in Germany and Canada. Actors have received nominations and awards for their work in her plays, most recently, the 2019 NAACP Theatre Award for Best Actress, for which she was also nominated for Best Playwright, for An Accident.

Individual plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing and Dramatists Play Service and in German by Per Lauke Verlag, Hamburg. American Tet appears in Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays from Northwestern University Press. The End of Civilization as we Know It appears in the anthology, Here Come the Brides! from Seal Press. She also writes personal essays on theatre aesthetics, economics and ethics, including exclusive and harmful theatre practices, and on other subjects which gravitate towards the dark side of humanity, like mass shootings and nuclear catastrophe, for various online journals.

Her work has been part of theatre festivals and playwrighting conferences across the country and internationally and has brought her to residency programs, including the William Inge Center, Hedgebrook and the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM, where she began work on her first novel, The Teachers’ Room, a process she describes in an essay entitled “A Playwright Crosses the Border into Fiction.” The novel will be published by Bywater Books in 2022.