Erik Abbott is a playwright, actor, and director. Originally from the US, he has lived in Luxembourg since 2009 and Europe since 2005.
He has authored over twenty plays, several of which have been professionally produced. His most recent play, Second Zechariah, was one of the winners of the 2024 Luxembourg National Literary Prize, placing third in the adult category.
Erik is a former Core Member of The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he served on the artistic staff for three years and was a two-time finalist for the Jerome Playwriting Fellowship.
He wrote his first play in high school as a class assignment, and his second as an undergraduate — won a small local playwriting award near where his parents were living at the time. He is one of the 56 playwrights who contributed to the anthology of playwriting exercises, The Playwright’s Toolbox, published in May 2024 by Applause Books and edited by Justin Maxwell.
An early member of the Luxembourg writers’ group, Writers Who Talk, Erik has in recent years written numerous short stories and is currently working on a novel.
As an actor, Erik made his professional theatrical debut as an actor at fifteen and has since worked on over one hundred professional productions. Stage credits include his original solo piece #WTF Happened? On the Phenomenon of Trump for Actors Repertory Theatre Luxembourg (Actors Rep), originally commissioned by Escher Theater d’Esch in 2017 as a series of monologues and performed for the Ville d’Esch-sur-Alzette ‘Nuit de la Culture’ in 2017. Also for Actors Rep, he has appeared in Big Boys, Dear Santa… (which he also wrote), Flowers in the Desert, and The Fever. He worked at US theatres including the Guthrie, The Lost Colony, and Charlotte Shakespeare Company, as well as with two theatres in Cologne, Germany.
He appears in the Irish-Luxembourgish feature film, The Runway, as well as the television films The Murder of Mary Phagan and Lucky Day. He has been in commercials for, among others, the Minnesota Twins Major League Baseball team, and was an English-language narrator for the German documentary film das geht nur langsam. In an interactive CD-ROM video game called Dracula Unleashed, he played ‘Dr Seward’ and was seen as ‘Professor Bergdahl’ in the Luxemburger Wort German website’s 2015 April Fools’ Day video.
Erik’s stage directing credits include Edward Albee’s The Goat Or, Who is Sylvia?, Daniel Pinkerton’s Do You Want to Know a Secret?, Daryl Lisa Fazio’s Greyhounds, and A R Gurney’s Love Letters for Actors Rep, as well as David Mamet’s Jolly for the New World Theatre Club (awarded ‘Best Production’ at the 2010 Festival of European Anglophone Theatrical Societies — ‘FEATS’ — and the Sydney Fisher Trophy at the 2010 British All-Winners Festival). He has also directed for Theatre Unbound and the Professional Theatre Workshop.
He has taught various theatre and communications courses at several campuses in the CUNY system, led writing workshops in Luxembourg, taught a playwriting course at The Loft Literary Center (Minneapolis), and was a playwriting Artist-in-Residence in the St Paul (MN) school system through SteppingStone Theatre for Youth.
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