Brad Erickson is an award-winning playwright and arts administrator recently located from California to Summerville, SC, where he and his husband have founded an artists residency. From 2003-2022, Brad served as executive director of Theatre Bay Area, one of the nation’s largest regional performing arts service organizations.
As a playwright, Brad’s produced plays include American Dream, el sueño del otro lado which premiered in 2014 at New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) in San Francisco. His play, The War at Home, premiered in 2006 at NCTC and won “Best New Script” from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Woody & Me, named best new play in the 2000 Festival of Emerging American Theatre, received a grant from the NEA for its 2001 premiere at Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis. Other produced plays include A Benediction, Sexual Irregularities, and Public Lives. Scripts in development include Burning Louise, a devised work of music theatre which received workshop productions at Z Space Studio in San Francisco. Brad penned the libretti for two operas now in development, Gertrude & Alice and Cisco, working with composer Sanford Dole. Gertrude & Alice received a workshop performance in 2012 by the musical group CMASH in San Francisco and continues in development. Cisco has been workshopped by Goat Hall Productions in San Francisco. Milagro received staged readings with the Marin Playwrights Lab and NCTC. Brad is currently partnering with composer and lyricist Min Kahng on a new musical, Kinda Home, which received a developmental workshop at PURE Theatre in Charleston in 2019. His recent play, Kansas, is also in development at PURE. Brad's newest play, Colorful Me, centers around two gay artists living the historic home he now occupies.
Brad holds a BFA in Acting from Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama, now the Theatre School of DePaul University.
Plays
American Dream, el sueño del otro lado (the dream of the other side) follows the lives of seven characters, each of them crossing borders—personal, political, transnational. The play is set in San Diego, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico border, during the early years of the Obama Administration, a peak of anti-immigrant sentiment. Tom and Cara, a recently divorced couple, are attempting in very different ways to rebuild their lives. Tom is a successful architect of 45 who has come out late; he’s also the father with Cara of a teenage girl, Julie. Tom travels to Mexico and falls in love for the first time in his life—with his 25 year old Spanish teacher, Salvador. Cara, a business executive who easily controls her professional life, cannot command what she wants the most—her old life back with Tom, who is still her closest friend. Tom’s and Cara’s futures lie across seemingly impenetrable borders. During the course of the play, the characters confront their own frontiers as they try, each one, to cross with their dreams to the other side. The play received its world premiere at San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre Center in 2013 and runs about two hours.
KANSAS tells the story of a Midwestern family where the recent suicide of the father has sparked a conflagration of recrimination and turmoil. Gathered after the funeral, the three sons try to make sense of the senseless situation. “It’s got to be somebody’s fault!” cries the youngest. But whose? Pushed apart by their own life choices and the tornado of politics, the brothers fight to make peace with the past and each other.
Synopsis
On a rustic stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast (think Night of the Iguana) we find three multi-racial couples—one straight, one lesbian, one gay—and a handsome local artist. The action conjures A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but if the youths in the Athenian woods encounter the inexplicable, magical nature of falling in love, these couples uncover the startling miracle (milagro) of forces that can bind hearts through the outrageous fortunes of a lifetime. In the play, Oberlin, an Episcopal priest stationed in an affluent expat community in Mexico’s colonial highland for the past 35 years, “borrows” his church’s money to purchase a one-of-a-kind collection of “milagros” – folk art depicting modern-day miracles wrought by the saints. On the run, and needing cash to pay back the church’s coffers, he enlists his estranged wife, Teresa – a renowned Mexican chef, now a devoted leftist working to feed the poor of Mexico’s South – to help him. Oberlin conscripts Teresa, along with his assistant Paco, in the opening of an “eco-resort” on a rugged portion of the Mexico coast. Their first guests, Robert and Michael, and Paula and Stephanie, happen, like the Athenian youths, into a world brimming with almost magical possibility. Robert, a second generation Mexican-American, now a San Francisco marketing executive, has mistaken the eco-friendly (read: barebones) “Bahia Luna” resort of the play with the posh “Bahia Media Luna” establishment featured in a luxury guidebook. His plan to entice Michael, his partner of five years, into formally tying the knot with a proposal staged with Champagne, waving palms and 350-thread-count sheets is blown to pieces by the rustic realities of their surroundings. Michael, for his part, is deeply anxious over the future of their relationship having just received the sobering news that he has tested positive for HIV – a virus he knows he has acquired from an out-of-town fling. Paula has tagged along with Stephanie, her one-time lover, partly to mark her ex’s 50th birthday and partly to uncover what spurred Stephanie’s mysterious disappearance (and hasty marriage) twenty years before. Paula hopes to find an opportunity to rekindle their flame in the tropical sunsets until she elicits the truth of Stephanie’s emotional cowardice and willingness to hide from her own identity. Oberlin and Teresa spar relentlessly, in their usual manner, until Teresa pressures a confession from Oberlin that breaks through their long-standing defenses. Paco puckishly revels in his role as trickster and matchmaker holding up a shimmering vision of a “milagro” that just might be within reach for each of the couples if they can just see the miracle before them. At the end, as in a good Shakespearean comedy, wedding vows all around conclude the action.
A devised work of music theater, Burning Louise is set during the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s and follows the unlikely friendship of two adult roommates. Louise, a middle-aged, wealthy San Francisco gallerist deals in Asian artworks, and Bern, a broke gay photographer from New Orleans, is on the run from something. Despite their many differences and deep emotional wounds, the two are drawn to one another. They develop a psychic bond that defies explanation and serves to expose their darkest secrets, while offering a key to release them from their pasts. The piece features lush, evocative music, more in the harmonic style of contemporary opera than traditional Broadway. The score ranges from rhapsodic to arresting, showcasing the soprano and baritone voices of the two protagonists. Burning Louise is performed in two acts, on a unit set, with video projections, a cast of two actor/singers, soprano and tenor, and a small band. Run-time with intermission is under two hours.
Winner of the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best New Script for its world 2006 premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco, THE WAR AT HOME is set in the contentious moment following the first legal gay marriages in Massachusetts in 2004 and long before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision 11 years later. Jason, a Southern Baptist preacher’s gay son returns from New York to his Charleston, SC home with a new play he’s authored, and a wedding band he hides on a necklace beneath his shirt. The militantly gay-positive play's upcoming premiere in Charleston’s renowned arts festival provokes angry protests, bitterly divides Jason's parents, Dinah and Bill, and forces Bill to choose between his son and his pulpit.