Agnes Borinsky

Borinsky comes from Baltimore and her mother is from Boston.^[1] She lived for some years in New York before she moved to Los Angeles. In 2012, she joined Donna Oblongata, who was directing a play based on Les Misérables. The unconventional play was said to be unlicensed,^[2] although the original book of Les Misérables is out of copyright.^[3] The play was performed for a week on the east coast of America after the fifty-plus cast had rehearsed the work under a circus tent.^[2] In 2016, she became an artist-in-residence at the University Settlement^[4], where Alison Fleminger encouraged her to abandon the restrictions of writing a conventional play. As a result, Borinsky led over twenty collaborators to create a participatory show called "Weird Classrooms". Her next project was a working group based in Brooklyn at the Bushwick Starr theatre.^[2]

An early experimental theatre piece, Of Government, was commissioned in 2015 and performed in 2017.^[5] It was reviewed by the New York Times as having a "globe-crossing plot that is as twisty and slippery as ... an eel", with an opening musical number reminiscent of The Little Mermaid.^[6] Borinsky's first novel was published in 2020.^[7][8] Sasha Masha is a coming-of-age story about a queer Jewish American girl, but, according to Kirkus Reviews, unlike other books of the genre "doesn't arrive at a clear resolution possessing all the answers, instead displaying a sense of peace with the ongoing journey ahead".^[7][9] The same year Borinsky established The Working Group for a New Spirit, which brought together creative practitioners online during the COVID-19 pandemic to discuss texts.^[2][10]

In 2022 Borinsky retold the biblical book Song of Songs through a queer perspective, which debuted at the Bushwick Starr, with the writer also in a central role, and was directed by Machel Ross.^[11][12] A participatory work, audience members were invited to place paper offerings on an altar, referred to by the reviewer as a "shrine to the dead".^[13] The New York Times described the work as "deeply affecting" and one that led the "audience toward a meditative consideration of their own mourning for those they have lost, to death or otherwise".^[13]

In 2023 her play The Trees premiered at Playwrights Horizons' theatre; the work imagines the lives of siblings whose bodies root into the earth in a Connecticut park.^[14][15][16] Directed by Tina Satter,^[17] the play deals with themes of mutual care, community, queer liberation and civil rights.^[18] The New York Theatre Guide criticised Borinsky's plot, but also compared the work to Waiting for Godot.^[17] In a similarly mixed review, the New York Times described how in the play "Borinsky invites guesses; the problem is that we might not care enough for any of the people or ideas onstage to bother hazarding them".^[19] The work has been compared to Sagittarius Ponderosa by MJ Kaufman and How to Live in a House on Fire by Kari Barclay.^[20] The three works examine the impact of (wild)fire through queer perspectives.^[20] Indeed, Borinsky's work has been discussed as part of a "trans theatre" movement.^[21]

• 2021: Lambda Award nominee for Sasha Masha^[22]

Borinsky is Jewish American; she is also transgender.^[23][8] She lives in Los Angeles.^[24]