My name is Colin Speer Crowley.

I am an award-winning playwright-lyricist from Westport, CT with a wide number of theatrical and lyrical works to my credit – including 14 straight plays, 4 musicals, a few screenplays, and over 50+ awards from various theater companies.

While I studied history, political science, international relations, and security studies at university – and while my “real” work life involves being a customer experience executive – my heart has always been most invested in the theatrical arts.

Over the past 15 years, I have steadily grown my playwriting career and am subsequently sharing many of the highlights of my career and my work on this website. (This does not include work I do not believe is suitable for public eyes!) My straight plays have been winners or finalists in over 50 playwriting contests since 2012 and have been performed in Washington, Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Colorado, Texas, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. I am also proud of the fact that a few plays of mine have been presented Off-Off-Broadway in New York City and in London’s Covent Garden. My screenplays have similarly received distinctions in national and international screenwriting contests and songs to which I’ve written the lyrics have been performed in a number of musical revues. I even stepped into the producer’s role in 2012 and founded a not-for-profit theatrical group in Connecticut – Speerhead Theatricals, Inc. – of which I proudly served as President from 2012-2014. I am an equally proud member of the Dramatists Guild, The Lambs in New York City (the oldest professional theatrical society in the United States), the New Play Exchange, The Playwrights’ Center, ASCAP, and also Phi Beta Kappa.

As for “what makes me tick,” I love theater because theater is both uniquely democratic and aristocratic. Theater is aristocratic to the extent that it lacks the mass appeal of Hollywood and therefore tends to be specialized in its target audience. This restriction helps to make theater unique and also helps to maintain certain artistic standards. Theater is democratic in that it is easily accessible to people in their communities and something which everyone can widely experience. Not everyone can be in a movie, even a small-budget movie, but anyone can audition for a local play and be on the stage. I also love theater because theater has limitations that force artists to be more creative than they normally would have to be in more generous circumstances. In screenwriting, for instance, you can write a movie script without any regard for the number of characters or the number of locations or the extravaganza associated with the special effects. In theater, however, presuming you want your work to be produced (!), you have to be conscious of the people you use and the space you use – often for purely economic reasons. The positive result of this limitation is that it forces artists to squeeze every ounce they can out of a character or a set or a scene – and, in all that, you find a depth to theatrical creativity that is unique vis-à-vis other art forms.

When I tell people I’m a playwright, one of the first questions I’m inevitably asked is “What type of plays do you write?” – which is a fair question and to which I typically give an unfair answer… because I hate to think I do write a “type” of play. One of my major goals in playwriting (which I have already violated – albeit seldomly) is never to write the same play twice – so I consciously try to write different types of plays. To that end, I have written traditional dramas, psychological dramas, dark comedies, gritty thrillers, offbeat/avant-garde works, tragicomedies, farces, satires, and beyond. Still, there are some general themes you can discern in my work. One is that I love history and frequently use historical events and people as subjects for (or inspiration for) my plays, from Warren G. Harding to Dorothy Parker to Napoleon to John Dos Passos to the more remote Irene Craigmile Bolam (who would undoubtedly hate to be on the list). Another factor is that I like character-driven plays with limited fuss that elevate the raw art of acting above all else – which is to say I believe in a more “classical” view of theater at variance with the tendency of many modern playwrights to write plays as if they were screenplays, employing an overdose of spectacle and manic changes of time and place. Shamelessly, I still believe in these things called “monologues” and “soliloquies” (I love a good speech) and have no problem letting my characters go on and on for quite a few lines – and indeed, I partly love theater because it’s an art form that still does allow people to say something meaningful and actually have substantive conversations. One last commonality is that, as a Christian, I frequently use my plays to explore Christian themes – sometimes more obviously, sometimes less.

In regards to my theatrical development, I confess I have learned my art organically, having never taken a playwriting class in my life (or any theatrical course, for that matter) and admittedly having very little desire to start doing so now. (I sincerely hope this is not a sign of obnoxiousness, but rather admirable honesty.) Rather. I learned theater by a combination of osmosis and absorption – which is to say, I read and watched plays rather voraciously – especially enjoying the work of Tennessee Williams, Peter Shafer, James Goldman, the much-underrated Bob Merrill, and Alan Jay Lerner. (I actually have a collection of several original scripts by Lerner, including “My Fair Lady”, “Brigadoon”, “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever”, and even less well-known works like “Dance A Little Closer”, “The Little Prince”, “Coco”, and “Carmelina”.) In short, I discovered my artistic voice in relative isolation without much commentary from living, breathing artists, which has its positives and negatives, but has, I feel, given me a rather unique artistic voice. I also came (hat in hand) to the theatrical arts by a life route that was not solely focused on theater – especially those who study theater in college and then make a beeline for Manhattan – which has further nuanced my storytelling. (One well-known director from Hollywood once described my plays as “complicated” – which, while not the sort of word you’d like used to describe you as a friend, I took as a compliment for my plays.) Logistically, I can typically write very fast – perhaps because, when I do write, I have faith in my voice – and also tend to write in spurts. I will go for a year without writing (some of that spent trying to decide what to write next) and then write something very, very fast. (I generally complete a good – emphasize “good” – first draft of a full-length, 110-page play in 3-4 weeks.)

In my “real” life, far from the theater scene, I am a customer experience executive with over 15 years of experience managing global customer experience teams and promoting technological changemaking. Previously, I served as AVP of Consumer Transactions at the event ticket marketplace TicketNetwork, the inaugural VP of Customer Experience at the food tech company Freshly, SVP of Customer Experience at the fintech company Albert, Senior Director of Customer Engagement at the software company Freshworks, and VP of Customer Support at Maven Clinic. In those various roles, I have built and scaled world-class global customer support teams from a single person to over 350 people globally and been an innovator in the use of AI and automation technologies – and, throughout all that, frequently harness my creative side in my “real” work life. In truth, there is actually a great deal of similarity between the world of theater and the world of customer support – on which I have previously discoursed and which you can read more about here!

On a more personal note, I was born in Massachusetts, but now live in Westport, CT with my beautiful wife, Dianne – and to boot, I have three children: step-daughter Chloe (all grown up!) and little sons Callen and Canaan.

Please do please enjoy navigating through my site and examining my theatrical work and progress – which, on both accounts, I trust – with God’s help first and a producer’s help second – will only continue to grow over time!