BIOGRAPHY
Kelsey Puttrich is a playwright and actor based in New York City. Most recently, her play Someone Should Start premiered in the Awakenings Reading Series, where it was presented alongside Your Name Means Dream, written and directed by José Rivera, as well as new works by Regina Taylor, Catherine Filloux, and Erik Ehn. Her other plays include Saddled, The Itch (The Studio Players, KY), Ripe for the Taking, I Can’t See You Clearly (Clementine Players, NY), AFI’s Top 100 (The Chain Theatre, NY), And They Lived Beneath the Waves (In Death’s Company, NJ), and Start Video (Playdate Theatre’s “Screen-Play” Festival Finalist). Her short films include Ellipses (third place at New York’s 48 Hour Film Festival) and The Master of Secrets (finalist in the “Yes We Cannes” Festival). Her most recent short film, Warm/Fuzzy, will screen in New York as a finalist of the Organization of Independent Filmmakers’ Festival in October 2025.
Kelsey became a member of The Actor’s Studio PDW in 2024, and developed the play Someone Should Start in her first year. As a member of acclaimed NYC writer’s group Naked Angels since 2022, Kelsey has workshopped and developed numerous pieces, including a full-length play, a solo performance piece, and six one-acts.
Throughout 2020, she made weekly contributions to The Shelter Studio’s Monday Monologue Jam, writing custom monologues for different actors weekly based on a ten minute conversation and rotating theme. Her poetry has been published in Fresh Words Magazine in 2023 and 2024.
As a playwright, Kelsey is interested in playing with form and centering strong, female voices. She often flirts with absurdism while maintaining real, grounded characters. Her work was once described as “outrageous, filthy, and human,” and it’s the best compliment she’s ever gotten.
As an actor, Kelsey got her first professional job at the age of 8 in The American Girls Revue in Chicago. She continued performing from that point on, eventually getting her BFA in Musical Theatre at Emerson College. She moved to New York to pursue performance before becoming a writer/performer.
More information on Kelsey’s work can be found here: Kelsey Puttrich New Play Exchange
SCRIPTS
Someone Should Start
Synopsis
The play opens with a riotous act, setting the stage for a revealing journey through the tangled lives of a group of friends in New York City. At the fringes is Marv: awkward, earnest, and hopelessly smitten with the kind-hearted but elusive Karen. As the group navigates shifting dynamics of desire, identity, and belonging, Karen finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Marv, despite (or because of) his outsider status.
Spanning years and emotional terrain, Someone Should Start explores the sex lives, love affairs, existential spirals, and performative instincts of those trying to find authenticity in a world that demands masks. Through absurdist humor and a refusal to stay in one emotional lane, the play digs into who we are when no one’s watching—and who we become when everyone’s looking. At once a raunchy comedy and a philosophical inquiry, this ensemble-driven piece is a kaleidoscopic portrait of intimacy, alienation, and the surreal drama of just trying to be a person.
Saddled
Genre: comedy
Synopsis
The Itch
Synopsis
Maude can’t stop itching. Lou is almost, sort of, maybe ready to tell her he loves her. But first he needs to know: can she handle it?
What unfolds is a funny, tender, and offbeat one-act that leaps forward in time as Maude sidesteps Lou’s love with desperation and increasingly ridiculous excuses. As Lou waits and Maude flails, “The Itch” digs into the fear of intimacy, the weight of vulnerability, and how hard it can be to accept love when it starts to feel like surrender. A two hander with absurdist comedic beats and a deep emotional core.
Ripe for the Taking
Genre: 10 min play, comedy
Synopsis
On a warm summer night, Mary lounges on her porch, lost in Little Women—again. Like her heroine Jo March, she dreams of writing her own story, on her own terms. But when Robert steps out of the shadows, the air shifts.
Suddenly, a sultry narrator begins describing Robert’s body and movements with absurd, exaggerated lust. But this isn’t just any narrator—it’s Craig, a man Mary has hired to narrate men the way male authors narrate their female characters.
What unfolds is a laugh-out-loud satire about gender, storytelling, and taking control of the narrative—one overwritten male entrance at a time. “Ripe for the Taking” is a playful, subversive ode to feminism, fiction, and the power of flipping the script.
Cosmic
Genre: 10 min play, comedy, LGBTQIA+
Synopsis
Cindy is living the dream—or so she keeps telling herself. With a handsome (enough) husband, a pristine minivan, and a well-ordered life in a quiet suburb, she’s perfectly content. Enter Annabelle: the chaotic new neighbor with a tray of brownies and zero social filter.
What begins as a polite welcome spirals into a hilariously uncomfortable interrogation of Cindy’s marriage and entire sense of self. Annabelle’s reaction to a photo of Cindy’s husband—bursting into laughter, then gasping apologies—shocks Cindy to her core. But even more shocking is the conversation that follows, as Annabelle veers between compliments, innuendo, and brazen invitations, flipping Cindy’s carefully manicured world on its head.
“Cosmic” is a sharply funny ten-minute two-hander about repression, desire, and what happens when someone with no filter meets someone who’s never questioned the script.
Deerfield High School, Class of ’07
Synopsis
At their high school reunion, Lainey steps into the old choir room—once a sanctuary, now a time capsule—to find Michael, her former high school sweetheart, already there. What begins as casual small talk quickly cracks open long-buried tension. Michael expected a different reunion—one where Lainey finally asked why he left. When she does, the truth unravels: she followed him to college, and he disappeared without a word. They haven’t spoken since. The room hums with unresolved love, betrayal, and years of what-ifs as Lainey tries to hold her ground, afraid of being hurt again. But Michael didn’t just come for nostalgia—he came to see her.
I Can’t See You Clearly
Synopsis
“I Can’t See You Clearly” is a lyrical, surreal duet about becoming. It explores the thrill and terror of self-reinvention, the joy and risk of intimacy, and what it means to grow beside someone who may not stay the same.
Beneath a blossoming tree, a woman hums alone—until she sees a strange figure she can’t quite make out. They call themself a Lion, but say they feel more like a galaxy. As they speak, something in Clara begins to shift. The Lion suggests that names—and selves—aren’t fixed. Clara, inspired, transforms into Varagond: bold, brave, and entirely new. As they explore identity, desire, and transformation, a love begins to grow—tentative, electric, but complicated by the Lion’s ever-changing nature.
To Gloria, Or Not To Gloria
Synopsis
In a cozy Brooklyn coffee shop, Wren is eating an entire, oversized box of chocolates, one decadent piece at a time. Sitting nearby, Cody—a charming, somewhat clueless novelist— can’t help but comment on the spectacle. “You’re really going to eat that whole box?” he asks, all wide-eyed and bemused. Big mistake.
Wren’s response is swift and fiery: “Who gave you permission to watch me?” What follows is a hilariously tense, whip-smart verbal tennis match between a woman who refuses to shrink herself and a man who’s used to being adored for far less. Cody fumbles through missteps and accidental offenses while trying to decode Wren’s sharp tongue. Wren, for her part, is determined not to give an inch—but she’s intrigued by his novel, and that pisses her off.
As they spar over feminism, attraction, self-image, and whether it’s ever okay to accept a date from a man who made you feel weird about your snacks, sparks fly—intellectual, emotional, and maybe even romantic ones. But will Wren’s inner feminist let her forgive Cody’s clumsy charm? And can Cody figure out how to genuinely engage with someone who doesn’t exist for his amusement?
And They Lived Beneath the Waves
Genre: 10 min play, drama, LGBTQIA+
Synopsis
Siblings Amanda and Josh reunite at their father’s funeral after years of distance. Amanda is focused on honoring his memory and moving forward. Josh, however, is consumed by a single, unsettling question: Did we ever really know him?
Tensions rise as buried resentments surface—especially Amanda’s anger at Josh for disappearing during their father’s illness. As the two navigate their grief, they uncover hidden truths about the man who raised them, and about each other.
Closed
Synopsis
A year and a half ago, Harper and Allison fell into something rare: a love so raw and intimate it exposed every nerve. It was short, electric—and terrifying. Harper, engaged to a man she thought she loved, finally felt alive. Allison, flawless on the outside but emotionally barricaded, fled the moment it got too real.
Now, after a year of silence, Harper sits in the bar where they shared their first kiss, called there by a vague message from Allison, hoping for clarity, maybe closure—or a miracle. But when Allison arrives with small talk about apartment renovations and work, Harper can’t bite her tongue any longer. She confronts Allison with the story of their almost-love: a searing memory of connection, abandonment, and the emotional wreckage left behind.
“Closed” is a taut, emotionally charged two-hander about timing, fear, and the magnetic pull of unfinished love. It asks whether two people can find each other again when the past still trembles between them.
