Rebecca Leah "Bekah" Brunstetter (born June 13, 1982) is an American writer. Her published plays include F*cking Art, which won top honors at the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, I Used to Write on Walls, Oohrah!, Be a Good Little Widow, Going to a Place Where You Already Are, and The Cake, a play inspired by events leading to the US Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. She is a founding member of The Kilroys, which annually produces The Kilroys' List. Her television work includes writing for I Just Want My Pants Back, Underemployed, Switched at Birth, and American Gods, and both writing and producing on This Is Us.
Early life and education
Rebecca Leah Brunstetter was born on June 13, 1982, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is the daughter of former North Carolina Senator Peter S. Brunstetter and Jodie Brunstetter. She was raised as the only daughter among three brothers in a conservative Christian home. Brunstetter wrote poems and short stories from a young age, and became involved with theater after moving from a private Christian middle school to Mount Tabor High School, a public school.
As a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brunstetter initially pursued creative writing through poetry, but feedback from her creative writing professors convinced her to try playwriting. She wrote her first play as a first-year student and decided to pursue playwriting as a career. By the time Brunstetter graduated from UNC in 2004 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, the UNC Theater Department had fully staged several of her plays. She continued to study playwriting for three years in the School of Drama at The New School, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Career
Early plays
After graduating with her MFA, Brunstetter worked at a corporate job while continuing to write plays. I Used to Write on Walls, her play about three women who fall for a religious man who surfs and draws graffiti, premiered at the Gene Frankel Theatre Underground in New York in 2007, with Gwen Orel of Backstage calling it a "would-be feminist fable" that is "less convincing than cute". Duncan Pflaster of BroadwayWorld observed that the play seemed to "reinforce the stereotype that women need men to feel complete", but praised Brunstetter's writing and character development. Robert Hurwitt's review in the San Francisco Chronicle of the play's 2010 West Coast premiere also praised the quality of the dialogue, but called the lengthy play "a bit too much of one initially good thing".
In 2008, her play F*cking Art, about a cheerleader who visits her cancer-stricken classmate, was a winner at the 33rd Annual Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, and was subsequently published by Samuel French. The following year she was named Playwright in Residence at Ars Nova, and her play Oohrah!, a story about the family lives of people in a North Carolina town changing as veterans return home from Iraq, premiered off-Broadway at Stage 2 of the Atlantic Theater Company. In his review of Oohrah!, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised Brunstetter as an up-and-coming new playwright, but found the play "generally unconvincing". Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News assessed Oohrah! as "about as deep as your average sitcom", while drawing attention to the quality of Brunstetter's dialogue and writing of female characters.
Brunstetter's play Miss Lilly Gets Boned, a story about a religious woman whose disappointment in love causes her to plot revenge against a South African man who lost his wife in an elephant attack, premiered in 2010 at the Finborough Theatre. Writing for The Guardian, Michael Billington found the development of the main character to be unconvincing, but noted the high quality of the production and acting. In 2019, Rogue Machine Theatre produced the play's West Coast premiere in Los Angeles. Jeffrey Scott's BroadwayWorld review of the Los Angeles production praised the play, actors, and production quality, particularly the performance of Larisa Oleynik in the lead role, but also suggested that the story could be split into three one-act plays in future productions.