Patricia Cotter
Heavyhead
Patricia Cotter’s (she/her) awards include The American Academy of Arts Letters, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Daytime Emmy Award, and the Writers Guild of America Award. Patricia Cotter’s (she/her) awards include The American Academy of Arts Letters, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Daytime Emmy Award, and the Writers Guild of America Award. Patricia is currently working with The Kilbanes on a commissioned musical theatre project, slated for a 2024 workshop at The Marin Theater Company. She is writing the book for the musical Heavyhead, a modern retelling of the Medusa myth which was commissioned for its first public reading at the Jersey City Theater Center in 2023 and was a semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's 2024 National Music Theater Conference. Her comedy The Daughters, (The Kilroys Honorable Mention) received its workshop premiere at San Francisco Playhouse in 2019. Her play, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About, was presented in 2020 as part of Centenary Stage Company’s Women Playwrights Series. Other plays include After All I Did For You a commission from Theatre Lab at FAU as part of the Fair Play Initiative, 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson) Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre 2017, Jeff Awards nominee for Best New Play, The Surrogate, winner of the 2016 Susan Glaspell Award, finalist at the 2016 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, produced at Centenary Stage Company, NJ, in 2017, Rules of Comedy, produced in 2015 Humana Festival of Ten-Minute Plays and featured on the podcast, “Playing On Air”. The Stars Look Very Different Today was produced as part of TheatreWorks 17th Annual New Works Festival, 2018. Drinking On A Plane in 2018, and The Anthropology Section in 2015 both produced by The Actors Theatre of Louisville’s The Tens, The Break Up Notebook (a GLAAD Award nominee). Musicals (librettist/ adaptations) include Rocket Science: A Musical, which received readings at Playwrights Horizons in New York (directed by Kathleen Marshall) and was produced at The Village Theatre, Seattle; The Break-Up Notebook: A Musical (based on her play), at The Vineyard Theatre in New York. She was asked by Disney Theatricals and MTI to write Mulan, Jr. (based on the Disney film Mulan), which is produced and performed nationally. Patricia adapted The Surrogate for Kanbar Entertainment which was released theatrically in 2021. She is an alumnus of The Bay Area Playwright Foundation’s Resident Playwrights program. In addition to writing for the stage, Patricia has written for Audible, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Disney Theatrical, and Comedy Central.