About the Playwright - Lauren Gunderson

Lauren Gunderson, born in Decatur, Georgia in 1982, is America’s most produced living playwright. She was drawn to theater at an early age and began acting in Atlanta at the age of 10. Her first play, Parts They Call Deep, was workshopped right here at Portland Center Stage in 2001 and produced at Essential Theatre in Atlanta when she was just 17. Below is an interview with Gunderson by Siran Babayan for MetroSiliconValley about Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women published in September 2025.

Since its publication more than 150 years ago, Little Women has been adapted into plays, musicals, operas, ballets, silent movies, feature films, TV series and Japanese anime. One of the most referenced literary works in pop culture, it was even name checked on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, whose star—neurotic curmudgeon Larry David—described the March sisters “mawkish and twee.”

Playwright Lauren Gunderson adds her own spin on the classic Civil War-era story in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, running at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Sept. 24 through Oct. 12. In Gunderson’s adaptation, directed by Giovanna Sardelli, Alcott is inserted into the play to show how much of her life directly influenced the book and its themes of family, feminism and resilience.

“I have always loved the book,” Gunderson says. “I was in middle school when I played Jo March in our production, and it meant so much to me back then. I really wanted to do something special with it. So instead of just being the story of the March sisters, it’s also the origin of those beloved characters and Louisa discovering the reason to write them, and stepping into the story through herself and putting her sisters into it. We get to know both the Alcott and the March families.”

‘Alcott admits that so much of the book is drawn from her life and her sisters,’ playwright Lauren Gunderson says. ‘So it was really easy to see them in each other.’  Gunderson, who lives in San Francisco, has created several plays inspired by famous historical women, namely supreme court justices, French revolutionaries, tennis player Billie Jean King, author Lorraine Hansberry, astronomer Henrietta Levitt and the first woman in congress, Jeannette Rankin.

TheatreWorks recently staged part of her trilogy Christmas at Pemberley, based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and co-authored by Margot Melcon. The theater, along with City Theatre Company (Pittsburgh), Northlight Theatre (Skokie, Ill.) and People’s Light (Malvern, Pa.), co-commissioned Gunderson to come up with a “fresh take” on Little Women “that is still really true to the book.”

“It’s really a rare model for developing plays,” Gunderson says. “All of the theaters were looking for a similar thing. But because of the cuts in arts funding and precariousness of our arts sector, none of the theaters could really do this commission on their own, so they all came together. It was a wonderful, fruitful collaboration. And I love all these theaters independently. It was a chance to meet all of them and talk about what each of them is looking for. I just absorbed all of that and filtered it through my own artistic lens.”

Gunderson began writing the play in 2023 and the following year presented a reading of the script at Alcott’s Orchard House and museum in Concord, Mass., where Little Women takes place.

In her interpretation, Alcott’s real-life mother and sisters interact with the fictional Marmee, Meg, Beth, Amy and Jo (the middle March sister and aspiring writer, who also plays the author). The characters speak Gunderson’s dialogue as well as some of the original language from the book, which was published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The male characters—Laurie, John, Friedrich and the sisters’ father—are also represented. Gunderson’s modern take highlights the parallels between the novel and Alcott’s biography, but it also retains the story of a close-knit family struggling with war, poverty, independence and gender roles in 19th-century society.

“Alcott admits that so much of the book is drawn from her life and her sisters,” Gunderson says. “So it was really easy to see them in each other. By working that into the script we could mix it up. They don’t just stay in their lane. There’s a lot of Meg in Jo, and there’s a lot of Jo in Marmee. Beth isn’t just weak and Meg isn’t just domestic and sweet. Meg has some of Amy’s pluckishness and humor in her. They’re one unit as a family, but they build upon each other’s characteristics.”

After debuting last year at the Northlight Theatre, the production has been commissioned by other theaters beyond the end of its initial run in 2026.

“I hope the audience sees this as an American classic and a classic that is as universal as American classics written for men and boys,” Gunderson says. “Little Women is not a polite, tidy, easy and sweet story, but something that’s raucous, deeply intellectual and romantic. It’s all the things that I want from a great work of literature. And I want audiences to be reminded that women can be brave, brazen, creative, ambitious and, yes, absolutely head over heels in love. And they deserve a big, full-throttled love story.”