JOYCE VAN DYKE
Playwright
News
Daybreak
Daybreak and the two women whose stories inspired the play are featured in the current exhibition, “Armenian Woman: Victim and Heroine of the Genocide,” at the Armenian Genocide Museum and Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, April 2024–April 2025.
The Oil Thief
The Oil Thief is now included in 100 Plays to Save the World by Elizabeth Freestone and Jeanie O’Hare (TCG Books 2023, Nick Hern Books 2021). “A thrilling compendium of plays that speak to the enormous environmental crisis of our time.” —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater
Representation and How to Get It
A touring one-woman show about the charismatic Julia Ward Howe and her cry for representation for women. For more information or to book a performance, click here.
The Women Who Mapped the Stars
The most recent production was by Theatre Conspiracy, Fort Myers, FL, February, 2024.
Selected Plays
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Press
“[The Women Who Mapped the Stars,] Joyce Van Dyke’s intricate and bracing new drama, which ranges across time and space…to illustrate the connections among real-life women of science from two different eras.”
—Boston Globe
“The Women Who Mapped the Stars is awe-inspiring…It’s a great piece of theatre that could work in a large or intimate venue.”
—New England Theatre Geek
“[Cecilia Payne] pulses with the ambition not just to have her achievements recognized, with her own name pinned to them, but also to experience the creative “ecstasy” of being the first human being to discover a phenomenon.”
—The ARTery / WBUR
“[The Women Who Mapped the Stars] spreads out over a bare stage, backed by a screen that displays stunning projections (designed by SeifAllah Salotto-Cristobal) of a night-time sky, as if the viewers were seated in an IMAX theater.”
—The Patriot Ledger
“[The Women Who Mapped the Stars is] a revelatory and triumphant telling of one of the many ways in which brilliant, curious women have contributed to science.”
—EdgeBoston
“Director Lucie Tiberghien mines [Daybreak’s] pathos, comedy and mystery with her dazzling staging…Superbly realized by its highly theatrical presentation…[Daybreak is] an entrancing theatrical spectacle.”
—Theatre Scene
“[Daybreak] has a marvelous cast headed by Nicole Ansari who beautifully embodies Victoria at different points in her life. Tamara Sevunts is spirited and moving as Varter, Michael Irvin Pollard draws lots of laughs as the cantankerous Harry, and Robert Najarian is very charming in a series of love interest roles.”
—Edge Media
“[Daybreak’s first scene] sets up the poetic, dreamlike quality of the storytelling that runs throughout the performance.”
—Theater Pizzazz
“Daybreak is…a story of perseverance and healing.”
—TDF Stages
“Somehow, [in The Oil Thief] Joyce Van Dyke fits not just a love triangle but 450 million years of geological time into a taut, mesmerizing 80 minutes.”
—Boston Globe Critics’ Picks
“An eloquently written new play about the intimidating passage of time in both the earth’s life and our own individual ones…All of the human drama is crystalline in The Oil Thief.”
—Boston Phoenix
“A Girl's War – Joyce Van Dyke's moving and thoughtful play about ethnic tensions in the Caucasus – though it applies to just about any war in the world.”
—Boston Globe Critics’ Picks
“In the thrilling A Girl’s War at the New Repertory Theatre, playwright Joyce Van Dyke focuses on individual conflicts as a way to bring us dangerously close to the gunfire.”
—Boston Herald
“The Sarkisians’ story [in A Girl’s War] makes for a drama as explosive as a pistol shot.”
—Digital City
“I didn’t take my eyes off the stage or find my attention wavering for one moment. Written by Newton playwright Joyce Van Dyke, A Girl’s War is beautifully composed, well-acted with wide emotional range, smartly produced and very affecting.”
—The Patriot Ledger
“The Becket Arts Center also brought sheer joy in May when it staged Joyce Van Dyke’s Representation and How to Get It. Inspired by suffragist and human rights activist Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” this play gave me hope to carry on. Thank you, Julia Ward Howe and Joyce Van Dyke.”
—Berkshire Edge
Bio
Joyce Van Dyke is an Armenian-American playwright whose plays put women center stage. Her most recent productions are The Women Who Mapped the Stars (Theatre Conspiracy, 2024) and Representation and How to Get It (4th Wall Stage Company, 2024). A MacDowell Fellow and Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow, Joyce is also a Shakespeare scholar who teaches Shakespeare and playwriting at Harvard Extension School.
The Women Who Mapped the Stars, about five extraordinary astronomers, was commissioned and first produced by Central Square Theater in 2018.
Representation and How to Get It is a touring one-woman show featuring the charismatic Julia Ward Howe and her cry for representation for women.
Joyce’s plays centering Armenian culture and characters include Daybreak, the lyrical story of two women friends remaking their lives after cultural trauma. Daybreak premiered Off-Broadway in a 2018 production by Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. Inspired by the true stories of the playwright's Armenian grandparents, the play was an O’Neill Finalist, and had an earlier workshop production by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre under the title Deported / a dream play.
Other Armenian-themed plays include A Girl’s War (produced by Golden Thread Productions, New Repertory Theatre, and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and winner of the Gassner Award); and Friends of Armenia, a site-specific play commissioned and produced for the centennial of the Armenian genocide (Faneuil Hall, 2015).
Her play The Oil Thief is now included in the climate crisis collection, 100 Plays to Save the World, by Elizabeth Freestone and Jeanie O’Hare (TCG Books, 2023 / Nick Hern Books, 2021.) The Oil Thief was originally commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre Sloan Project and produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, winning Boston’s Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script.
Script samples coming soon on NPX