Paula Kamen
Playwriting/Screenwriting
Evanston, IL
Playwriting/Screenwriting
Paula Kamen, an author and playwright, is based in Evanston. Her part-documentary play Jane: Abortion and the Underground, had a Jeff-nominated production (for Best Ensemble) last fall with Idle Muse in Chicago. In early 2024, it will have benefit readings for local abortion funds by PowerStories Theatre in Tampa, Florida, and The Fat Theater Project in Chicago. It had an off-Broadway celebrity reading in late 2019 at Rattlestick in NYC to benefit A is For, starring Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Najimy, and many others. So far it has had seven full productions and dozens of readings across the U.S.
Her two most recent plays are dramedies, exploring life on the fringe and in progressive communities in the 1990s in the Chicago area. That includes Dionne's House: Agony and Primal Ecstacy (Mostly) on the Michigan Riviera, a 2022 O'Neill finalist. Her newest play, The Pardoned: A Punk-Rock Evolution, was the October 2024 selection in the Readings at Red Theater series in Chicago. She developed both of these plays in the ongoing Scene Shop Class with Will Dunne at Chicago Dramatists.
As an author and playwright, Paula Kamen, born in 1967, has been interested in how women’s ambitions, medical treatment, and control over their own bodies are dramatically impacted by whichever generation they happen to be born into.
She is most known for her darkly comedic memoir/journalistic report, All in My Head, which Salon.com said “connects the dots on this issue of women and chronic pain in a way nobody else has done.” She is also the author of what has been widely noted as the first Gen X feminist book, Feminist Fatale, from 1991, which provides a comprehensive field report on activism of that era, and, like the Jane play, serves as a feminist primer to the younger generations. Feminist scholar bell hooks called the book “one of the most well-researched and thoughtful discussions of the factors that shape responses to feminist thinking among younger women.”
Her papers from her first three books and other writing are archived at Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. That includes extensive files on post-boomer women and feminism, dating from the late 1980s to early 2000s.