Tim J. Lord is the recipient of the inaugural Apothetae-Lark Fellowship for a writer with a disability and a 2017-18 Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. As a native of the Midwest and a member of the disability community he tells stories of people and communities who are often overlooked on our stages and strives to illuminate ignored and underrepresented perspectives.
His play We Declare You a Terrorist examines the 2002 Moscow Theatre Hostage crisis and the ways in which it changes one of the survivors, leading him down a road of dissent and resistance against the burgeoning dictatorship his home is turning into. The play received a finishing commission from Round House Theatre and will be produced in their 2021-22 season.
As the 2019 Reg E. Cathey Writer-in-Residence at the Orchard Project, he began writing The Hard Price which tracks the effects of our two wars in Iraq on two generations of a family over a decade and a half in North Dakota’s oil country. Using the House of Atreus mythology as a model for the play’s Erekson family, it interweaves the ambitions, atmosphere, and urgency of ancient drama into a familiar, contemporary narrative and asks how denying one’s own human weaknesses can become more disabling than a physical disability?
He is also working on a radical re-imagining of the Oedipus story in the form of a trilogy of plays set in contemporary Southern Illinois. Over the course of his Lark fellowship, he wrote and developed the plays Down in the face of God, a post-apocalyptic mashup of The Bacchae and Antigone; and On Every Link a Heart Does Dangle; or, Owed, a riff on Oedipus which pushes the title character offstage, replacing him with a young woman with a physical disability who undertakes a difficult quest to discover what’s slowly destroying her hometown. The final play, currently in development, will be I Never Cared for You; or, Lies, which will explore the global refugee crisis via the story of Oedipus’ exiled father.
Other work has been developed and produced at The Public Theater, The Lark, The Kennedy Center, Actors Theatre of Louisville, New Harmony Project, The Playwrights’ Center, Pillsbury House + Theater, Circle Rep, the Summer Play Festival, The Cutout Theatre, The Vagrancy, Barn Arts Collective, and The Working Theater.
Tim studied with Paula Vogel while a resident of Providence, RI, and is a graduate of the MFA Playwriting Program at the University of California, San Diego.
CONTACT:
Representation:
Gurman Agency: Susan Gurman, agent
email: susan [at] gurmanagency [dot] com
Tim J. Lord 
i just saw “we declare you a terrorist”. it was quite an intense play and one of the better things that i have seen in long time.
i had a discussion with some people and one of thoughts battered around was,
“was the writer dead or alive in the last scene?”
not knowing what he had signed i assumed that maybe he admitted to being a terrorist and had been executed followed by the scene with the young girl who is dead.
this is puzzling to me so i would love to know what the writer meant it to be.
hoping to hear from you.
ruth burkhoff
“we declare you a terrorist” is one of the best plays i have seen in a long time. we were commenting after the show about one aspect which brought controversy,
my take on the ending of the show was that after he signe the paper that he was not allowed to read he was executed because the last scene he was communiicaring with the young girl who was dead. i maintained that he was dead while others thought he was still alive.
Could you clear this up for us?
thank you,
ruth burkhoff
looking forward to seeing other plays by tim lord.