Playwright · Screenwriter · Lyricist

Darrah Cloud

Writing for the stage, the screen and the places where beautiful things become dangerous.

Enter the work

Prologue

“Make the world safe for poetry.”

Act IV · The Writer

A career built across stage and screen.

Darrah Cloud is a playwright, screenwriter and lyricist whose work ranges from Off-Broadway drama to musical theater and television.

Most recently, her play House of McQueen was produced Off-Broadway at Hudson Yards. She is working with David Simpatico and Michael Holland on a musical adaptation of Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone for Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis, opening April 2027.

She wrote the lyrics for the musical version of Willy Holtzman’s play Sabina, which premiered in April 2022 at Portland Stage and is being published by Broadway Play Publishing. Her musical Be Safe, I Love You received a 2026 NYSCA grant and is in development at Ancram Opera House.

Her play Turning, about the 1936 Olympic women’s gymnastics team, premiered at Centenary Stage in March 2021. She has received numerous honors, including an NEA award, a Rockefeller award and the Macy’s Prize for Young Audiences.

Her television work includes more than a dozen movies produced for CBS, NBC and FOX. She is a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and co-founder of A Howl of Playwrights, a Hudson Valley playwriting development corps. She is also a former Town Supervisor of Pine Plains, New York.

12+Television movies
NEAAward recipient
2026NYSCA grantee
2027World premiere

Intermission

Selected works and moments.

Commissioned plays, musical theater and stories that move easily between wit, danger and tenderness.

01

Sabina

Lyrics for Willy Holtzman’s musical adaptation. Premiered at Portland Stage in 2022.

02

Turning

A play about the 1936 Olympic women’s gymnastics team. Premiered at Centenary Stage in 2021.

03

What’s Bugging Greg?

Commissioned and produced by Cincinnati Playhouse.

04

Joan the Girl of Arc

Commissioned and produced by Cincinnati Playhouse.

05

Understudy Jesus

“Everyone is absolutely murdering their Galileean accents.”

06

Our Suburb

A tribute to Thornton Wilder, set in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977.

Selected Play

Our
Suburb

A tribute to Thornton Wilder, set in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when Nazis sought to march through the community.

Stage Manager

If you really examine the strength of the human spirit, it’s hard to believe it just snaps out like a light at the end of a life. It has to find some other place to be, in other bodies.

I think the dead make up the living. Every human being is a congregation of all the dead people he or she ever knew or was related to. So our souls are overpopulated with voices that argue and sing. At the center of the atom? It’s all song. Life is music. Life is heaven.

It’s getting late in Skokie, Illinois. The traffic is dying down out on Dempster Street. The crows no longer line the telephone wires despite the wind; they’re tucked in safe now, in the branches of the second generation trees.

The street lights are on, preventing darkness even in our bedrooms. The Nazis will march and be turned back again and again and again.

It’s eleven p.m. The Skokie Swift is bringing someone’s father home from work. At the far end of a cul-de-sac, someone’s mother’s left the light on for him.

Cue 119. Good night. Go.

Finale

“I like workin’ with scary things.”

Contact

Begin a
conversation.

darrahcloud@gmail.com Facebook darrahcloudplaywright.com