Aren Haun | playwright
Aren Haun is a playwright, director, and teacher living in Los Angeles.
Plays include Kill the Editor, produced at Desert Ensemble Theater, Eulogy for an Insignificant Man, which received a Commendation at the BBC International Radio Play Competition, and Love-All, a semi-finalist in the O’Neill Playwriting Conference.
He’s directed multiple productions of his own work in San Francisco and New York City.
He has an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.
Artistic Statement
Before I found theater, I was a film lover. I grew up watching as many films as possible, educating myself on the great filmmakers. I discovered, early on, that many - or most - of my favorite films tended to be "small" films, those with only a few characters, such as Steven Soderberg's sex lies and videotape. I was also drawn to great dialogue, and discovered I had an ear for it. I got into acting in my twenties, but realized that I was more interested in the plays and the playwrights than I was the performing aspect. So I began reading. To this day, there is nothing I enjoy more than reading plays by my favorite authors. My first full-length play was called Done to Death, a variation on Death of a Salesman in the style of Christopher Durang. Around the same time, I wrote Expecting, which was influenced by Harold Pinter and the films of John Cassavetes. Other plays, while drawing from personal experience, have been influenced by many different writers. Most recently, I've been writing a series of plays inspired by the work of Anton Chekhov. I'm always learning as a playwright, and every new play still feels like it's the first.