Theresa Rebeck is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist best known for the television series Smash and her plays Bad Dates, The Understudy, and Mauritius. Originally from a Catholic family in Cincinnati, Rebeck attended Notre Dame University and then spent nearly a decade at Brandeis, getting three more degrees in everything from Playwriting to Victorian Melodrama.
Her breakout hit, Bad Dates premiered at Playwright’s Horizons in 2003 and soon made American Theatre Magazine’s list of most produced plays nationwide. In 2007, Broadway debut Mauritius, quickly joined the ranks of most produced plays in the United States as well. In her thirty year career, she has written over twenty full-length plays, worked as a writer on eleven television series including Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue, and published three novels. She was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won a Peabody Award.
A champion of fellow creative women, Rebeck co-founded The Lilly Award for women in theatre. In 2011, Newsweek named her one of the 150 Most Fearless Women in the World. Rebek continues to live up to her reputation as a prolific playwright. In addition to the September 2018 premiere of her fourth Broadway play, Bernhardt/Hamlet, which the New York Times called “so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts,” her play Seared premiered as part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s 2018 Season, and Downstairs with Tyne and Tim Daly opened at Primary Stages in November.