Built for This
Lauren Gunderson – Book
Kira Stone – Music & Lyrics
Built For This is an athletic, feminist, all-femme pop musical centering five fierce young gymnasts confronting inner demons required for top tier competition, as well as a real demon preying on their youth, ambition and vulnerability. Set months before the first new story drops about the abuses of Larry Nassar (though we never hear his name anywhere in the script), this musical is a journey of self discovery, community coherence and collective truth-telling. The musical sings through the bravery of reckoning with these teenager’s secrets including safely coming out, battling eating disorders, and the rot of sexualized shame. Who will hear? Who will believe?
Lauren Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015 topping the list thrice including 2022/23. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for I and You and The Book of Will, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Arthur L. Weissberger Award, and John Gassner Award for Playwriting. Her musical adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife premiered on The West End last fall, and is writing the Broadway-bound new play about Billie Jean King. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Bloomsbury just published her first anthology of plays called Revolutionary Women, and her radical AI play anthropology premiered at Hampstead Theatre in London last year. Her play The Catastrophist, about her husband virologist Nathan Wolfe, premiered digitally in January 2021 and is now in The COVID Art Capsule in the Library of Congress. She co-authored the Miss Bennet trilogy with Margot Melcon. The Half-Life of Marie Curie premiered off-Broadway and at Audible.com. Her work is published at Playscripts (I and You; Exit Pursued By A Bear; The Taming and Toil and Trouble), Dramatists Play Service (The Revolutionists; The Book of Will; Silent Sky; Bauer, Natural Shocks, The Wickhams and Miss Bennet) and Samuel French (Emilie). Her picture book Dr Wonderful: Blast Off to the Moon is available from Two Lions/Amazon. She is the book writer for musicals with Dave Stewart and Joss Stone (The Time Traveler’s Wife), Ari Afsar (Jeannette and I and You), Joriah Kwamé (Sinister), Kira Stone (Built for This) and Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk (Justice and Earthrise). She is a board member of The Playwrights Foundation, and a member of the Aspen Institute Science and Society cohort. www.laurengunderson.com
Kira Stone is a composer , lyricist, songwriter , playwright, performer , and music producer fueled by the rhythms and rhymes of pop & hip-hop music, and led by the storytelling of musical theater . Her current musicals include SALEM; Built for This (book by Lauren Gunderson); Revival; and a new thriller/ /dark comedy musical about a secret society of killer housewives (book by Matthew Greene). Kira is passionate about telling stories that center complex female perspectives and incorporating genre-defying and genre-blending pop, hip-hop, and highly theatrical scores. Her work (so far) has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Goodspeed, Circle in the Square Theater , the New York Musical Festival (R.I.P.), New York Theatre Barn, University of Southern California, University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and 54 Below. Residencies include: The BringAbout (Brooklyn), Chateau d’Orquevaux in Champagne, France. Finalist: The Civilians’ R&D 2020-2021 Group (Built For This), Rhinebeck Writers Retreat (2022; SALEM), New Dramatists Composer Librettist Studio, Pace New Musicals, Fault Line Theater “Irons in the Fire” New Works Series (2x). Kira also writes & produces music for TV/Film, currently Sesame Street. She resides in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two daughters. Kira is a proud member of The Dramatists Guild, ASCAP, Actor’s Equity, and Maestra. www.kirabethstone.com