Diana Lobontiu is a Romanian American playwright, actor, and educator. They graduated in 2023 with an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brooklyn College, were named a 2023 Jane Hoppen Resident with Paragraph Workspace for Writers, and received the Puffin Grant for their play My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay. Recent writing includes Rentabutch (a 2023 Bushwick Starr Reading Series Finalist), and Ducky (Brooklyn College Weasel Festival @The Brick Theater, June 2023).
Lobontiu is at work a new play called If You’re A Man At Night You Gotta Be A Man In the Morning, in which disgraced Olympic swimmer Ryan L*chte sulks alone in his McMansion, desperately trying to milk attention from his robot wife, Deirdre, a cyclops Michael Phelps, and the audience themselves, while he mulls over celebrity winner culture and the geography of failure.
While at MacDowell, they researched radioactivity and dreamed up some scenes of a longer play in which a young girl playing with uranium kills her entire village with radiation poisoning. She miraculously survives, but is forced to live a series of dwindling half-lives as a charming (but failed) cult leader, as a rat king, as some tuna melt on a glowing sandwich, and “god knows what else.” It will all be an inquiry into the dangerous instability of art and the shapeshifting/decay of (queer and trans) bodies, environments, desires, fantasies, and power.
