Murphi Cook

Murphi Cook makes whole worlds for small rooms. 

One hot summer while on tour with a puppet show about a time-traveling clown, she did a little show in a gallery called Gravelmouth in San Antonio, Texas. Soon after, she packed up all her things and moved there. Before that, she lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she received her MFA in Dramatic Writing at Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds a BA in English and Women's Studies from the University of Connecticut. 

When Murphi was four, she sat in the backseat of her parent's Toyota Corolla with a burnt cupcake in one hand and a preschool diploma in the other; it was then that she knew that life would only go down from there. Because of this, she writes plays about very small people trapped inside a quickly spinning universe. Like tiny hamsters with human heads, these characters are sometimes grotesque and other times endearing as they trod along a wheel that goes only where it wants, which is often nowhere at all. Basically, her plays are fast-moving investigations of disappointment, memory, and impossible people inside entirely mundane surroundings.