BRENNAN COLUMBIA-WALSH
PLAYS PLEASANT
Comedy Western Autobiography
College Play
2 hrs 9m, 3f
Production, New Haven Off Broadway Theater, February 2026 (dir. BCW)
Winner, Yale Creative and Performing Arts Award
Staged Reading, Yale College, January 2026 (dir. BCW)
Synopsis: As five roommates confront their looming graduation, a narrator guides the audience through a day in their life, their commencement ceremony, and a vision of their future. Featuring familiar professors, deans, parents, and friends, College Play is a play about the people of Yale College, played by the people themselves. A creative writing senior thesis for Brennan Columbia-Walsh, inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Published in the Yale Literary Magazine.
The Opossum
30 mins 3m
Production, Kaleidoscope Kabaret, Burgdorff Center for the Arts, November 2022
Staged Reading, Jersey Shore Arts Center, March 2021
Production, The Theater Project, February 2021
Winner, NJ Young Playwrights Competition
Synopsis: Sparks, spit, and nicknames fly in this no-good, double-crossing, yellah-bellied Western comedy when outlaw “Fatman” Shaw teams up with lawman “Slim” Welsh to catch the notorious Murdock “The Opossum” Monroe. Everything is set for the sting—when Fatman starts to suspect that he’s the real target, Slim’s lying, and somebody’s playing dead.
Sins of the Father
30 mins 3m, 3f
Winner, NJ Young Playwrights Competition
Synopsis: West Orange, New Jersey, 1998. Frank Quigley’s Funeral Parlor. The body is scrubbed, glued, and dried, the casket is open, and Paul Brennan is prepared to bid his mother farewell. Nothing could disturb this wake—nothing except for the sudden arrival of Paul’s long-abandoned daughter, Meg, who’s got a mind for other motives than paying respects to the dead.
Sins of the Father recounts the true beginnings of the Columbia-Walsh family.
PLAYS UNPLEASANT
Tragedy Philosophy Adaptation
Martyring Antonius
[in development]
1.5 hrs 5m, 3f
Synopsis: Belfast, 1974. The Troubles. When IRA firebrand Éamon Linney discovers that his commander doubles as a British spy, he devises a plan to win sympathy for Irish independence by staging his assassination and pinning it on the enemy. Soon, this idea transforms into a production involving hundreds of stopgap thespians—before Éamon finds himself transported before an ethereal council of history’s greatest martyrs.
Part-apocrypha, part-historical drama, Martyring Antonius is a play that begins with a brawl between the IRA and the cast of Julius Caesar and ends with a theological twist worthy of the heresiarchs, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and “Three Versions of Judas.”
Fear and Trembling
1.75 hrs 4m, 1f
Production, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Hill Street Theatre, August 2025 (dir. BCW)
Production, Yale Schwarzman Center, November 2024 (dir. BCW)
Winner, Yale Creative and Performing Arts Award
Staged Reading, Montclair Luna Stage, August 2024 (dir. BCW)
Synopsis: Three professors attempt to understand the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice his son upon Mount Moriah. Fear and Trembling is an original dramatic adaptation of Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843 treatise by the same name, which the father of existential philosophy prized as his most perfect work. Split between the modern academic scene and the land of Canaan, 2000 B.C., the play contends with faith and the absurd by telling and retelling scripture’s most harrowing legend.
The Butcher of Mauthausen
2 hrs 6m, 2f
Staged Reading, Davenport College Theatre, April 2024 (dir. BCW)
Production, Montclair Deetjen Theatre, May 2022 (dir. BCW)
Staged Reading, The Theater Project, March 2022 (dir. BCW)
Synopsis: In 1933, Dr. Johann Werner fled persecution in Dresden and sought refuge in Passau under the alias of Dr. Friedrich Kaiser. Eight years later, when the infamous Nazi Aribert Heim recruits him to oversee the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Kaiser faces an impossible choice: join the enemy or risk revealing his true identity. The Butcher of Mauthausen tells the tale of a doctor’s dive into the heart of his oppressor––and of the wicked temptations that follow his taste for absolute power.
Touching the Poet
1.5 hrs 6m, 9f
Synopsis: Professor Judith Reynolds Keating of Kearns College has just accepted the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her prize-winning anthology, however, has emerged from a life of sorrow surrounded by a constellation of lost souls. Narrated in reverse chronological order over twenty-six years by Judith’s Muse, Touching the Poet whisks us through the ecstasies and nadirs, the friends and lovers, in which a poet finds her inspiration.