Hi! I'm Laura, a writer, storyteller, and theatremaker.
Theatre is my temple, my religion, and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe.
— Harvey Firestein
A Little About Laura
Laura Thoma is a trauma-informed theatremaker originally from Tidewater, Virginia. Laura began her career as a dancer and choreographer. She is proud to be a “late bloomer” playwright whose work is published internationally and challenges the current perspective of what it means to be an emerging playwright.
As someone who has never fully seen herself represented on the stage, it is essential for Laura to explore and write women-centric stories of identity, queerness, mental health, aging, and inter-generational connectedness. What do these labels mean? And who gets to define them? It is compelling to Laura that labels can be debilitating or empowering, depending on whether they are placed or claimed. She is committed to using her struggles, pain, and healing to create art that supports, uplifts, and shines a light on people who often remain in the dark and go unnoticed.
This year Laura was a part of the Desert Playwrights’ Retreat — an LGBTQ retreat held in Palm Springs where she worked on her latest play and enjoyed being in community. She had a week-long development workshop and public reading of her play Yours in Words, with her director, Bobby Johnson, through GreenStage Live Arts festival. Her play Writer’s Block was a part of The Bechdel Group’s Fall Reading Series at the Tank in NYC. She's currently working on a staged reading of her new Christmas play Miss Margaret's Barton Cottage Christmas Surprise. Laura is an alum of the National Playwrights Symposium and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. In 2022 her monologue turned short film “Me, Myself, and I,” written at the beginning of the pandemic and starring Broadway veteran Erin Stoddard, garnered 18 awards from short film festivals around the globe, including London, Paris, and New York.
Laura is a Co-Founder of Shoreline Playwrights, a partnership that develops and produces new works. Shoreline Playwrights are the resident playwrights at Drama Works Theatre in Old Saybrook, CT. She has also developed her work with The Bechdel Group, Cape May Stage, Legacy Theatre, Green Stage Guilford, Chicago Dramatist, Chestnut Street Playhouse, Marist College, Stage Door Theatre, Theatre Odyssey, and Pawling Theatre Exchange, where she was a playwright in residence.
In her other creative life, Laura’s a Life Coach and Motivational Speaker. She lives on the shoreline of Connecticut with her bookish wife, Chris, and their dog, Buddy Fitzwilliam.
