Evan Peterson is a playwright and screenwriter based out of New York City. His plays have been developed and staged through the Playwrights' Center, the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Susquehanna University, and Augsburg University. His first play, Faults of Carbon, premiered at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in August 2016 and was later workshopped in partial fulfillment of departmental honors at Augsburg University in April 2018. His second play, Snow Over Atlantis, was produced at Augsburg University in April 2018. His film work has been screened twice at the Walker Art Center, as well as at Bryant-Lake Bowl, IFP MN, the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, Phoenix Film Festival Melbourne, Machinima Expo (Selected Honorable Mention), and the North American Film Awards (Silver Award recipient.) He has developed sound design work locally with Augsburg University, Hennepin Theatre Trust, Other Tiger Productions, as well as in Seattle with Taproot Theatre Company.
Plays
Four astronauts are trapped inside a spaceship en route to terraform a distant planet. Discussions of memories evolve into heated discussions on whether or not ghosts and aliens exist. Then, when the lights begin to falter, they gradually begin to expect the worst. Then the unimaginable happens.
Against the arid backdrop of the Dust Bowl, Abital digs in the farmland soil for a hidden lake prophesied to her in a dream—her last-ditch effort to reclaim water after growing concerns that the nearby river basin is soon to run dry. Meanwhile, her brother Gabriel charts weather patterns in hopes to predict the next rainfall. Inside their generations-old house, the children’s sheltered and skeptical mother—a frontierswoman and a barkeep—washes away the myths spun to her at the saloon as she searches for her missing acquaintance. Over one long night, at the arrival of a Western outlaw, the children are forced to reckon with the deadly potential of the dust that their mother has kept hidden from them, as they decide whether to leave their land or if they’re too indebted, owing too much to ever leave.
A play about the American frontier myth and what it means to be forgotten by history.