Adelynn
Anderson
Actor / Writer / Director
About Me
Adelynn is an actor, director, and writer (theatrical and prose), based in New York City, but she considers New England home. Their favorite non-theatrical activities are studying Greek classics, designing spreads for their bullet journal, and driving their family's 50 year old motorboat around the lake (that is, when it actually starts).
Her first experience as an actor was playing a little orphan boy in Oliver! when she was eleven and now has recently graduated with a BFA in Drama from NYU. The pickpocket to theatre school pipeline is real.
While at NYU, Adelynn's training with Playwrights Horizons Theatre School deepened their performance skillset and introduced them to a previously unknown love of theatre making as a designer, director, and devisor. She appeared in a number of theatrical productions at NYU (including the Fall 2021 Tisch Mainstage) and directed a full-length play in her final semester at Playwrights.
Adelynn's favorite pieces of media (across all mediums) are, in no particular order, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," Dead Poets Society (1989), "Succession," It Chapters 1 and 2 (2017-19), The Bacchae by Euripides, Romeo and Juliet (1996), "Stranger Things" Season 2, "Bury Me At Makeout Creek" by Mitski, and the 2015 revival of Spring Awakening by the Deaf West theatre company.
The kinds of work Adelynn is most invested in are pieces that re-examine existing (often Classical) texts through queer and/or trans lenses and new work that focuses on the tiny, intricate moments that color our interpersonal relationships, often blurring lines between platonic and romantic intimacy.
Performance Reel
Personality Reel
Directing and Playwriting
Click for video/script!
Role: Playwright
Currently Workshopping
Full Length Two-Act
Three college students are thousands of miles from their campus, their other friends, or any people they know at all. Switching between two timelines, that which happened in their old life and that which is transpiring at once too quickly and incredibly slowly in their present life, these three friends are forced to confront what defined their old relationships and how that is transforming their connections to one another.
This play has been drafted over the course of two years and is currently in workshops. The script linked above is how it currently stands, but come back for updates: the piece is changing at the same pace as the lives of the characters: at once too quickly and incredibly slowly.
Role: Director
Venue: Playwrights Downtown
90-Minute Classical Greek Tragedy
This iteration of Anne Carson’s Bakkhai is a radical interrogation of Euripides’ story and characters through a queer-and-trans-affirmative lens.
It sought to discover the degree to which the original text houses a story of queer self-discovery (despite its occasionally conservative language regarding gender expression); at the same time, we consciously ignored the playwright’s original morality and chose to approach the story through an examination of the degree to which one must experience a grand and painful destruction in order to transcend self-imposed restriction and achieve pure and unfettered joy.
Role: Playwright
Venue: "Dinosaur, Roar!" Play Festival
10-minute Play
In an unidentified and unimportant area of forest, two girls spend the day searching for their favorite snack: leaves.
Frog is determined to get the perfect specimen for their meal, Newt is just having fun with her best friend.
Frog is searching, but does she really know what for?
This script is in it's final form and was my first completed work. A companion play is currently in drafts.
Essays
"Chased by Walt Whitman"
Medium.com
2019
An examination of the character Neil Perry from Peter Weir's 1989 classic Dead Poets Society, specifically his untimely death by his own hand (though it was arguably his father who dealt the blow) and this plot point's relationship to his coding as homosexual. This essay argues that the story can only be logically understood if Neil is, in fact, gay, and the film supports this argument through his relationship with classmate Todd, various motifs, and his journey with theatre.
"'The Desire Before the Desire': Trans Thematics in Bacchae’s Pentheus"
Medium.com
2022
A companion text to Adelynn's directorial vision of Bakkhai in 2022, this essay argues for a trans reading of Euripides' play utilizing extensive support from the scholar and translator Anne Carson. Not only is the Bacchae a play that tells an inherently trans story, but there is room for interpretation that it is in many ways trans-affirmative. Pentheus' journey from rigidly masculine monarch to soft, inquisitive, and feminine maenad under the influence of the endlessly gender fluid Dionysos is, at points, genuinely touching and beautiful.
Recent Work
Chasing Geese
Columbia University Short Film
Dir. Casey Friedman
Role: Eva
Two sisters, Eva and Fernanda, travel to New York City during their spring break in hopes of exploring their recently deceased grandmother's Upper West Side community. Fernanda is there to try to understand who she is and where she came from. Eva is just there to spend time with her.
Described as "Brilliant and high-strung ... [and] despite her ambitious course load and busy schedule adjusting to life at MIT, there is nothing [Eva] wouldn’t do and nowhere she wouldn’t go for her little sister."
Filmed in early March 2023, this project was created in conjunction with Columbia's CUFP club and premiered at the Obscura Film Festival in April.
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