So you’re proooobably wondering how I got into this situation, huh?

I was three-years-old the first time I watched the 2001 Chicago movie.

My Mom showed it to me because… I was three, she wanted to watch it, she thought that I wouldn’t really pay attention, and that I was “too young” to know what was going on, but… that plan backfired. I was OBSESSED! I sang the songs to, from, and AT preschool and probably said something like “Hi my name is Hannah, my favorite color is yellow, and THEY HAD IT COMING” at circle time. But to her credit, while my Mom always told me that Chicago was feminist, I didn’t actually know the story of the musical Chicago was until middle school.

But what I did know that Chicago was telling a story about something and that I wanted to tell stories like that too, that I wanted to tell the kind of stories that made people think.

I was the kind of little kid who did complex bits with my Grandpa, performed self-written self-insert Star War inspired Jedi Epics with my cousins, and played with stuffed animals and dolls till a questionable age, using them to perform fan scenes I wrote from [ANIME REDACTED].

And now, I am a professional theatre creator in New York City with a masters degree in musical theatre writing from NYU. So aim for the moon and you will end up in the pizza shop by my apartment in Astoria with me and my roommates on a Saturday night! (or however the saying goes…)

While nowadays I don’t typically write about murdering abusers (I mean Chicago already did it perfectly), all of my writing, from my original musical theatre pieces to my creative nonfiction essays, depicts queer individuals surviving unrealistic, impossibly campy, and zany situations.

But I don’t JUST write about people looking for their orthodontists in the apocalypse FOR FUN.

I tell larger than life stories about queer people struggling through, and eventually thriving in, scenarios where their gender and sexual identity is not the main focus of their stories, because when I was a kid the media I watched made it seem like the only story about queer people worth telling were centered on their queer identities. I’ll be the first to state the importance of coming of age queer films, but in my writing I wanted to show little me that queer people can ride dinosaurs, fall into a distracting love triangle, and stress about taxes the same as an other straight character. Everyone faces their own sorts of impossible odd and in my writing I show people overcoming life’s challenges by coming together and that is the same for queer people too.

I believe one of the greatest issues in America today is the fact that many people don’t know people with different backgrounds from their own. I mean, even I struggle with this. I graduated college during the pandemic into a confusing world full of divisive politics, hatred, and unemployment. So in my writing, I feature very a diverse range of characters living through “out of this world” circumstances to show how at everyone’s core we are all just human beings that we can laugh alongside and sympathize with.

Great comedy writing connects people over the simplest universal truths about being human… we humans can be really stupid sometimes and that is something that we can all laugh at.

So, I use comedy strategically to help mainstream audiences bond with all kinds of characters! Ones that are trans, gay, or even just weirdos into fringe internet comedians and D&D, in order to help audiences see the humanity in the many other beautiful cultures, communities, and people that exist in our world.

At my core, I believe that every person is doing their best with this crazy, impossible to write about, world that we’re stuck in.

So no matter what genre I am writing in, from musical theatre to creative nonfiction, I write dark comedies where even if the main characters don’t get everything they want… their story still ends optimistically and what the audiences wondering what they would do if they were in the characters shoes.

Hannah Z. Morley is a librettist, playwright, and a writer of every sort. Morley’s work has been performed in venues such as 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, The Tank, Pennsylvania’s Media Theatre, New York University’s African Grove Theater, The University of California, Santa Barbara, and their bedroom where they make TikTok sketches about rocks!

Member of Maestra since 2024.

Member of Opera America since 2024.

Associate Member of The Dramatist Guild since 2024.