Eric Olson
Playwright · Actor · Director
Eric Olson is a playwright, actor, and director and a member of Iowa Stage Theatre Company's Resident Artist Company in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the architect of Iowa Stage's NewWorksLab, an in-development new-works program designed to move plays from early drafts through workshop production.
His plays investigate identity performance, confession under pressure, and the mythologies people build to survive each other. The work spans registers from screwball farce to intimate grief, sharing a common engine: characters who mistake witnessing for wisdom, who conflate surviving change with causing good, and who build stories that become cages for everyone who comes after them.
Coming to playwriting from acting, directing, and twenty years in professional theatre and communications work, his background shapes how he writes: thinking about what the actor needs to do, not just what the character needs to say.