Incisive, witty, bitingly satiric, but with plenty of heart, Joshua Harmon’s plays deftly entwine the problematic and the comic. Harmon explores large themes in intimate family situations, revealing surprising emotional depth in larger-than-life characters or the hypocrisy of characters who are not all that they appear. The act of interrogation motivates Harmon’s work. He explains that his plays begin as “a question that I don’t have an answer to,” usually big-picture questions about identity, romance, religion, or history.
Harmon hails from Rye Brook in Westchester County, just outside of New York City. At age ten, his grandmother offered to take him to a Broadway show if he could finish reading the play beforehand: Euripides’ Medea. The connection with Medea seems apt for Harmon’s drama—though nowhere as lethal as the Greek tragedy, Harmon’s plays investigate tensions within families as microcosms of larger cultural issues.
From that early contact with drama, Harmon felt drawn to playwriting in high school. He went on to earn a degree in dramatic writing at Northwestern University and an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University. He also completed a rigorous fellowship at the Juilliard School, where Tony Award-winning playwright Christopher Durang served as Harmon’s mentor, extending him an extra fellowship year.
Harmon’s breakout play, Bad Jews, premiered at Roundabout Theatre in 2012. The play centers on cousins Daphna, Liam, and Jonah as they congregate after their grandfather’s funeral, bargain for an heirloom, and work through their relationship with Judaism. Bad Jews gained nationwide acclaim—it was one of the Top 10 Most Produced Plays in the United States during the 2014-15 season, according to American Theatre. It proved a smash hit at Studio during its thrice-extended 2014 run—it remains the best-selling play in Studio history, returning for a holiday remount in 2015. Artistic Director David Muse calls Bad Jews a “wickedly funny play that starts conversations because it’s about something real.”
Admissions (2018, Studio 2019) uses the college admissions process as a container for the play’s broader questions, which Harmon characterizes as “an examination of whiteness: white privilege, white power, white anxiety, white guilt, all of it...this play is trying to hold up a mirror to white liberalism.” Admissions won an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off Broadway Play, and the 2018 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play. Studio produced the play in Spring 2019, just as the Varsity Blues scandal broke, bringing questions about elite access to higher education into the center of a cultural conversation.
Harmon’s next major work came in a very different emotional key. A Prayer for the French Republic premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2022 in a production that moved to Broadway. Drawing from research among Jewish communities in the areas of France Harmon’s family is from, Prayer follows five generations of a French Jewish family from 1944 to 2016 as they navigate antisemitism, trying to decide whether they are safe, where they can be at home, and when it is time to make a new home elsewhere. The New York Times called the play “thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and wickedly funny.” The play won the 2022 Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding New Off Broadway Play, and its Broadway production was nominated for three Tony Awards, including Best Play.
With We Had a World (2025), Harmon grounds his writing back in its wellspring—his family. The play features a playwright named Josh, the grandmother who ignited his love of playwrighting, and his mother, whose relationship with her own mother turns out to be far more complicated than the ten-year-old Josh appreciated. Anchored by DC’s own Sarah Marshall and directed by Studio’s Associate Artistic Director Jess Chayes, We Had a World brings emotional vulnerability to a play that is as gutsy and complex as any of Harmon’s earlier works.
From influences as far flung as Euripides’ family tragedy, Joni Mitchell’s wealth of emotion and perceptive power, and Wendy Wasserstein’s poignancy and wit, Harmon writes in a voice balanced between tonal poles—brutal yet tender, funny yet heartbreaking, macrocosmic but acutely aware of his characters’ inner realities.
—Alexandra Kennedy & Adrien-Alice Hansel