Jacqueline Goldfinger (she/they) is an American playwright, librettist, and dramaturg who is known for her plays Bottle Fly and Backwards Forward Back. She grew up in rural North Florida with a love of music and storytelling. Today, she is a playwright-librettist who seeks out unique collaborations, working across disciplines to create singular works of theater and opera. She works nationally and internationally on performative texts which speak to our shared humanity while honoring the nuanced identities of each character and culture.
She also teaches, mentors, and is the Director of Creative Affairs for the Sledgehammer imprint of Tripwire Harlot Press which publishes plays and play anthologies by under recognized playwrights.
Career
Writing for the stage
Goldfinger began her career in fringe theater in 2007 by creating site-specific work with the San Diego Playwrights Collective and touring a one-act version of The Terrible Girls to the New York International Fringe Festival.
Her full-length original plays include:
The Burning Season
Slip/Shot
Bottle Fly
Babel
Arsonist, The Terrible Girls, Click Skin & Bone Backwards Forwards Back Her full-length adaptations include: A Wind in the Door The Little Mermaid Little Women A Christmas Carol
Her libretti include:
A Bright Mornin Dawns (choral): Composer Dominick DiOrio
Twa (opera): Composer Justine F. Chen
Alice Tierney (opera): Composer Melissa Dunphy
Ascension (short opera): Composer Melissa Dunphy
Halcyon Days (choral): Composer Melissa Dunphy, 2021
Letter to Our Children (short opera): Composer Justine F. Chen, 2021
Set Myself Free (choral): Composer Melissa Dunphy, 2019
Her works have been developed and produced nationally and internationally, including with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, BBC 3 Radio (UK), Perseverance Theatre, Hangar Theatre, Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Voces8 (UK), Disquiet (Portugal), Gate Theatre (New Zealand), New Georges, Oberlin Opera, St. Martin in the Fields (UK), McCarter Theatre, Hangar Theatre, Theatre Exile, Unicorn Theatre, Resonance Works, Capitol Stage, Azuka Theatre, Wilma Theatre, Arden Theatre, The National Theater (UK), Philadelphia Theatre Company, People's Light and Theatre Company, Amuse Singers, Vortex Rep, Women's Theatre Festival, NYC International Fringe, and others.
Goldfinger has also written short plays and monologues.
Goldfinger's work has been supported by Yaddo, Opera America, National Endowment for the Arts, Millay Colony, The Orchard Project, The Lark's Playwrights Week, New Georges’ Audrey Residency, Drama League's First Stage Residency, Granada Artist Residency at UC Davis, Emerson Stage's Playwright Residency, Playwrights Collective at Florida Studio Theatre, Sewanee Writers Conference Dakin and Williams Fellowships, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, among others.
Major creative publications
Halcyon Days (choral): “A beautifully concordant and consoling prayer.” -Opera Today Bottle Fly (play): “Jacqueline Goldfinger is that rarity in American theatre--a poet-playwright. Bottle Fly is a gorgeous play, roaring with the sacred and the profane and--for all its passion--delicately conveyed.”—Dan O’Brien, playwright, The Body of an American and The House in Scarsdale, Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art (USA) The Arsonists (play): "Jacqueline Goldfinger’s spellbinding new play...The Arsonists, put me in mind of a kind of gender-reversed Sam Shepard—especially Shepard’s early collaborative work with Patti Smith...As in Shepard, there is a sense that love, loss, and betrayal are inseparable...What makes The Arsonists so extraordinary is in part its contradictory oddness. It’s realistic and gritty, but also beautifully poetic; epic in scale, but it runs only 70 minutes. There’s very little plot, but every line tells a story. By the time we reach the finale, the tone has shifted considerably. There is a sense here that the playwright honors a history of theater (the Greeks, Shepard, also Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra), but it’s also contemporary. Best of all, Goldfinger’s voice is distinctly, wonderfully her own." -Philadelphia Magazine The Terrible Girls (play): “3 Women comes to mind…Sharp comic timing brings a vital levity to the cutting plot twists and nightmarish revelations. It’s an interesting examination of need for authority, whether real or imagined, that keeps us in the most precarious situations. Emotional needs beat logic to the truth in this pressure-cooker drama.” -CityPaper