Plays & Musicals
Grief Dialogues’ theatrical work explores real human experiences of grief, love, and meaning. Through live presence and collective witnessing, it holds sacred space to bring difficult stories into the room.
Immersive Experience
In The Wake of Life
Produced by Elizabeth Coplan, Directed by Dani Davis
Using immersive theatre to support empathy, reflection, and community connection.
An immersive theatrical experience combining short plays, poetry, music, and guided audience reflection to explore dying, death, and grief. Tender, awkward, and often unexpectedly humorous, each piece offers a distinct perspective on loss. Through innovative storytelling and optional participation, the experience creates a supportive space for honest dialogue.
Immersive Experience
In Honor
Produced by Elizabeth Coplan, Directed by Dani Davis
An immersive, artful theater experience about loss, love, and what it means to be human. A tribute to those who served. In Honor examines the cost of courage and the silence that follows the battlefield.
MUSICAL
Let's Write a Musical
Written by Lawrie Chiaro & Elizabeth Coplan, Directed by John Coppola
Life’s final act deserves a showstopper.
A joyous celebration of the power of love and an ode to classic musicals.
A heartfelt and inspiring journey that follows David Hamilton and his wife as they write a romantic comedy in the wake of David’s cancer diagnosis. As their real-life challenges unfold, so does the story of Olive and Blake, a young couple in the 1950s navigating love, laughter, and misadventures.
Play
Til Death
Written by Elizabeth Coplan, Directed by Chad Austin
One mother’s choice unveils a family’s long-buried secrets.
As Mary’s life-altering decision sends shockwaves through her loving-but-turbulent family, they all must confront their past, reconcile the present, and pick up the missing pieces in the process.
PLAY
Hospice: A Love Story
Written by Elizabeth Coplan
Hospice: A Love Story (14 mins) presents two sisters who appear so close during their mother’s dying days but have vastly differing perceptions of the actual death.
Themes: Death and all its complications – relationship, physical, spiritual.
Play
Honoring Choices
Written & Directed by Elizabeth Coplan
Honoring Choices (17 mins) presents a dying elderly father and his adult daughters who, along with his own doctor, encourage him to prepare his end-of-life plan But he is not having any part of it.
Themes: Family dynamics, disagreements and resentments and the difficulty of discussing end of-life wishes on any level with someone who is not yet ready to accept the concept of their own mortality.
This play is available in culturally appropriate formats including English/Spanish language scripts and a script adapted for African-American cast/audiences.
(Adapted with COVID references)
Play
Untold
Written by Elizabeth Coplan
Untold (12 mins) presents a young woman with conflicted emotions as she faces giving birth to a stillborn baby. The attending doctor and nurse relive their own stories of child loss – for better or for worse.
Themes: The communication challenges that arise after a stillbirth or child loss and how best to honor a lost child.
Play
Death, Doctor
Written & Directed by Elizabeth Coplan
Originally commissioned for Virginia Mason Hospital
Death, Doctor (10 mins) presents medical doctors in various scenarios from residency to middle age and their association with death.
Themes: The ebb and flow of compassion in the life of a medical provider and its implications for the practice.
Play
Life Lines
Written by Donna Hoke
Life Lines (10 mins) focuses on the grief of a mother struggling to accept the unacceptable death of her young son.
Themes: The need of many struggling through traumatic grief to seek more of the deceased. Memorialization as helpful or harmful?
Play
Dead Giveaway
Written by Daniel Guyton
Dead Giveaway (10 mins) is a comedy about planning for future. Husband buys a funeral plot to surprise wife for V-day. But, if he dies before her, she’s getting remarried.
Themes: End of Life Planning