Playwright and Screenwriter Stephen Karam grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a Lebanese-American family. He graduated in 2002 from Brown University and then apprenticed at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.
Karam is a three-time winner in “The Blank Theatre’s Nationwide Young Playwrights Festival” in 1997, 1998 and 1999. His winning plays “A Work of Art” (1997), “Agnes” (1998), and “Lies in the Eye of the Beholder” (1999) took home the award each year respectively.
His play “Sons of the Prophet”, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and his play “The Humans” were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the years 2012 and 2016. Most recently, “The Humans” took home the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play of the year.
“Sons of the Prophet” was produced in 2011 at the prestigious Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. The play, finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as mentioned earlier, went on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel Awards for Best Play that year.
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Karam specializes in painful comedies that really shouldn’t be as funny as they are. He writes about loss and the messy, haphazard, necessary ways we get on with our lives afterward.”
In an article about Karam, the Huntington Theatre Company, wrote, “Karam has an uncanny knack for echoing American culture in ways that amuse and compel audiences equally. Karam’s humor is notable, and he can be funny in remarkably few words.”
The Washington Post has also said of Karam that “he has demonstrated an acute perceptiveness for the ways people lean on one another even as they get under each other’s skins.”
Karam currently teaches at The New School in New York. His plays have appeared both Off-Broadway and on Broadway. Most recently, Karam was the “Writer in Residence” at the 2016 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, USA.
