Carol Lashof

Carol S. Lashof is a playwright, educator, and theater producer. She has been challenging the major myths and stereotypes of western culture since 1981 when her play The Story, retelling the Book of Genesis, premiered at The Magic Theatre of San Francisco. Since then, Lashof has gone head to head with Sigmund Freud in Fraulein Dora and with Henrik Ibsen in Nora’s Daughter. She has also reimagined several Greek myths, moving marginalized points of view to the center of the stage. Notably, in Medusa’s Tale, Lashof constructs the Gorgon’s history from the hints in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and in Just Deserts, she tells the origin story of trial by jury from the point of view of the avenging Furies. Recently, Lashof has focused on specifically American stories, including The Melting Pot, which remixes early 20th c. sources to tell a quintessentially American love story: boy meets girl, and nation meets metaphor. She wrote the screenplay for Ryan Coogler’s award-winning short film “Gap,” which aired on BET nationwide, and is currently at work on a full-length stage play of the same name about myths and stereotypes in an American high school. Lashof has been a teacher most of her life and served on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College of California for twenty-five years. She left full-time teaching in 2008 to focus on writing plays and making theater. On International Women’s Day, 2014, she and Artistic Director Elizabeth Vega founded Those Women Productions, a Berkeley-based theater company with a mission to explore hidden truths of gender and power. More information about Carol Lashof’s plays can be found on the New Play Exchange.

Recent Productions:

• The Melting Pot (Everyday Inferno Theatre, NYC, 2018)
• Witch Hunt (Those Women Productions, Berkeley, CA, 2019). Witch Hunt reframes the familiar story of the Salem witch panic to focus on Tituba, the first person in 1692 to "confess" to witchcraft, and on her struggle to save herself and her family from the consequences of Puritan fears.