jess eichen

• *about
• *plays
• *work

WRITER PERFORMER DIRECTOR

"Bold and unflinching.... Eichen's writing is excruciatingly honest and daringly exact."

- Good Apples Collective (via New Play Exchange)

Jess Eichen is a writer, director, and theater artist.

*(Also, a wannabe Substack influencer.)

His plays include Chastity (Good Apples Collective Rootstock Reading Series 2025 Finalist; The Larking House Playwrights' Intensive 2025 Finalist; SheNYC Summer Theatre Festival 2026 Semifinalist, The Tank 2025 Moonlight Series Reading; Vino Theatre Production), The Jackal (SheNYC Summer Theatre Festival 2025 Semifinalist), and Year Of The Goat (Lovechild Theatre Co. '25 Season Finalist, NYU Goldberg Theater Production). He is a member of the Fresh Binder Productions Spring 2025 Writers' Cohort.

it's all fun and games...

He has performed in the Off-Off-Broadway Theatres UCB Theater, Dixon Place, The Tank, The Vino Theater, and A.R.T/NY.He has a special love for sketch comedy, and tours with NYU's premiere sketch troupe Hammerkatz. He lies awake at night dreaming of being Jordan Peele.His best quality is his beautiful curls. His worst quality is his pretentious movie taste.

Comedy Companies:
Hammerkatz NYU (Class of '23 - '27)
Free Healthcare (Summer '25)
KnifeDog Play Festival (Spring '25, Fall '25)
Broke People Play Festival (Spring '25)

Venues:
Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (Introduced by SNL's Chloe Troast)
A.R.T./NY The Great Room
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner NYC
Under St. Marks Theatre
Yale University

Two ghost hunters are called to investigate The House. It starts to get to them.A play about dissociative amnesia and child abuse, through the lens of haunted houses, butterflies, and video tapes."Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die, but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly.- Vladimir Nabokov, "On Discovering A Butterfly"

Produced By:
Foul Fiend Theatre Troupe - 2025 Summer Season
July 31st through August 3rd
Prospect Park, BrooklynWriter:
Ley Nikfarjam

A play about queerness, masculinity, addiction, brotherly love, marriage, shame, memory, Nietzsche, and Egyptian mythology.In a rehab facility tucked deep in the mountains of Oregon, a middle-aged man named David is struggling to overcome a decade-long opiate addiction. Once a nationally ranked powerlifter, he's now nursing a chronic injury and in the care of his younger wife Mindy. When he gets assigned to mentor the wiry and reclusive teenager Striker, David struggles to get him to open up. Striker keeps to himself, refusing to participate in therapy, and keeps mumbling about the "Animal Man" - an imaginary monster who threatens Striker when he does something bad.

Awards:
SheNYC Summer Theatre Festival 2025 Semifinalist Selection
Developed with the Fresh Binder Productions Spring 2025 Writers' CohortReadings:
Broke People Play Festival Fall 2024
Bridge Productions Summer Showcase 2024

A n erotic horror comedy short film.

Produced by:
Hannah Weisz & Emalea RookeWritten by:
Hannah Weisz

A gay space opera, with reference to Boltzmann and Descartes.Em, a lonely consciousness, lives in an empty hotel room in an uninhabited dimension. He doesn't know any life outside of his one room, in which he has been trapped for his entire million-year existence.
Until, a young man named Abram gives Em the ability to travel to different dimensions and let him explore the multiverse. Em, enraptured with the beauty of the multiverse but unable to touch anything or anyone while he is outside his home, still feels like something is missing. And Abram, the beautiful, strapping man who introduced him to the world, is hiding some devastating secrets about who - and what - both of them are.

Produced by:
Broke People Play Festival
In association with New York UniversityWriter:
June Zhang

A play about sex.

Produced:
The Vino Theatre - January 30th to February 1stAwards:
SheNYC Summer Theatre Festival 2026 Semifinalist
Good Apples Collective Rootstock Reading Series 2025 Finalist
Larkin House Playwrights Intensive 2025 FinalistReading:
The Tank Moonlight Series - October 30th

A Southern Gothic play about God, evil, mercy, sex, femininity, and truth, set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.It's 1899. A pious pastor Theo lives a quiet life in Charleston with his wife Mabel, making forgiveness his life's work, working to help even the widowed prostitute Molly living on the street corner confess her wrongs. Until, a mysterious traveller only referring to himself as "Lyman" wanders through town, asking for help from a religious man. Carrying with him stories from more debaucherous parts of the world, he asks Theo to teach him how to cleanse his sins and find God. As the winter weeks leading up to the New Year go on, Lyman starts putting himself between Theo and Mabel, and Theo starts to question what this otherworldly man's true motives are.

Produced:
Goldberg Theater - Spring 2025
With the support of the NYU Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic WritingReading:
Broke People Play Festival Spring 2024finalist selection for the Lovechild Theatre Co. '25 Off-Broadway Mainstage