@dramatistsguild @duanekelly

“Erase the stigma surrounding death and grief through theatre and shared resources.” That is the mission of The Grief Dialogues, a nonprofit organization founded this past year by Elizabeth Coplan, an enterprising Dramatists Guild member in Seattle. Elizabeth sees American culture as death-phobic and is determined to make it less so.

In 2014 Elizabeth found herself struggling with deaths of a cousin and her best friend’s husband. At the same time she was watching her nonagenarian in-laws grapple with end-of-life issues. Those events inspired her to write a full-length play, titled Hospice: The Musical. From that script she extracted a ten-minute play, Hospice: A Love Story, and submitted it to the Island Ten-Minute Play Festival (Bainbridge Island, Washington), which selected and staged it in 2015. Writing those plays was Elizabeth’s form of self-administered grief-therapy.

Following performances of her ten-minute play, audience members would always approach Elizabeth to talk about their own experience of grief over the death of loved ones. Those conversations showed her that theatre can aid those in grief and be a catalyst to get people talking about death. From that realization was born the idea for The Grief Dialogues.

Elizabeth has accomplished a great deal in the past year, including forming a nonprofit organization, recruiting an advisory board, and establishing collaborations with organizations focused on dying and grief, and with theatres around the country. An interactive website (www.griefdialogues.com) is particularly impressive. 

Dramatists Guild Council member Charlayne Woodard met with Elizabeth in the early going and advised her to think large (not just Seattle and not just a few short plays). She also urged her to build programs around play performances in such a way that conversations with audience members are stimulated.

Elizabeth issued a national call for submissions of ten-minute plays and received over a hundred responses. Fifteen finalists were selected, including Guild members Jeffrey Fischer-Smith (Tucson), Daniel Guyton (Fayetteville, GA), Donna Hoke (East Amherst, NY), Stephen Kaplan (Bogota, NJ), Barbara Lindsay (Seattle), George Smart (Quincy, MA), Jeff Stolzer (NYC), Scott C. Sickles (Forest Hills, NY), and Aoise Stratford (Ithaca, NY). Composer and lyricist Carla Rose Fisher (Seattle) submitted a song that was selected.

These plays will receive workshops over the next year and some will be included in an event she is calling the Seattle Death Salon, being presented in Seattle in Sept. 2017, in conjunction with the End of Life Washington organization and the University of Washington School of Social Work.

Elizabeth is also in conversation with theatre companies and social agencies around the country about bringing The Grief Dialogues to their cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, and Sedona, AZ.

Elizabeth has said that the conversations her project has started, and the healing laughter that comes from sharing these stories, are what gets her up in the morning. “This is not only a labor of love, but also an incredibly healing process for myself. I like to say, ‘out of adversity comes art.’”

Hats off to Elizabeth. She has generated an impressive amount of momentum for her young project and raised the profile of death and dying in America’s national conversation.

Elizabeth Coplan

dkelly@dramatistsguild.com