Timothy Braun

Plays and Operas and Stuff

I've written around 130 plays and operas, most of them one-acts, most of them awful. I call my esthetic “American Baroque.” Character-driven works that begin in emotional realism and gradually bend the world into something stranger, funnier, and more fragile. These plays explore memory, failure, and human connection through heightened language, unconventional spaces, and intimate theatrical encounters.

I prefer working in site-specific spaces (I have a deep love of subway cars, bath tubs, and elevators as performance spaces), festivals, and black box theatres. Some of these venues include LaMama Ect, The Ohio/SoHo Think Tank,  The Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Flea, HERE Arts Center, Bowery Poetry Club, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Off-Center, Salvage Vanguard, Seattle Fringe Festival, The New York International Fringe Festival,

Here are some examples:

Coney Island Land, or The Great Existential Actuality at The End of The Universe (first 20 pages)

The Hotel Vanya, or A Metaphysical-Paradigm At The End of Everythingness

You can find the Hotel Vanya…trailer here.

Mirrorball (10 minute play)

Screenplays

Narrative-driven screen work rooted in character, rhythm, and visual storytelling. These scripts explore how private emotional lives collide with public myths, often blending grounded realism with stylized or surreal elements told in a tight space and frame.

Here are some examples:

Slow Wave Sleep, or The Place We Go While Waiting to Become Ourselves Again

Teenagers Laying on the Floor of the IKEA Showroom, or We Were Just Looking for Somewhere to Exist Until the World Figured Out What to Do With Us

The Hotel Between, or We Spent the Night Waiting for an Explanation and Got Each Other Instead 

Essays.

Personal essays that braid memoir, cultural criticism, and narrative storytelling. These pieces examine grief, place, art, and identity with humor, vulnerability, and an attention to structure and voice. Warning: Several of my essays will make you cry.

Some examples:

I have the great pleasure of being published by the NY Times Modern Love colum twice. You can read those stories and listen to the podacst of those stories here.

You can obtain my Huffingtonpost archive here

My story The Zozobra, or What I talk About When I Talk About 9/11 can be found here. (Named a “Medium Stories That Defined 2021”)