Lauren Gunderson is America’s most produced living playwright. She typically writes plays that focus on the lives of real and imagined heroines. Her latest effort, “Lady Disdain,” has a strong female character, but the story is actually a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
The play is set in an audiobook recording studio. Two acrimonious exes, Bea and Ben, are voicing a dragon, witch, vampire title. They’re rival voiceover artists, and they soon become locked in a battle of wits and words spiced by their wildly inconvenient attraction to each other. “Lady Disdain” has all the passion and sexual sizzle of the 2023 enemies-to-lovers blockbuster, “Anyone But You.” But it’s also packed with lines lovingly borrowed from the original Shakespeare.
“Lady Disdain” is onstage at Asolo Repertory Theatre June 6-27 in the Mertz Theatre. Asolo Rep is the second stop on the play’s rolling world premiere. For tickets, visit https://asolorep.org/show/lady-disdain/ or telephone 941-351-8000.
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There’s much ado about something in the rolling world premiere of this whip-smart, laugh-out-loud new romantic comedy from one of America’s funniest and most celebrated playwrights, Lauren M. Gunderson. “Lady Disdain” is a fast-paced, razor-sharp riff on the deliciously dramatic world of fantasy romance novels. Veronika Duerr and Casey Murphy star as Beatrice and Ben.
“Lady Disdain” gives Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” a makeover – and Beatrice and Benedick a do-over – in a fierce and sexy comedy about the hottest books on the market and standing up for those you love – including yourself. The play is at its heart a celebration of the wit, intelligence, and emotional depth of women who refuse to shrink themselves — all while having a tremendous amount of fun.
Asolo Rep production part of ‘Lady Disdain’s rolling world premiere
As part of a rolling world premiere, Forward Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, was the first company to stage the new play. The April 2026 production in the Overture Center for the Arts was also presented as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, a statewide festival celebrating new plays and musicals. The play earned great reviews as a witty "enemies-to-lovers" story.
Lauren Gunderson & Shakespeare
“Lady Disdain” is the latest of Gunderson’s plays to pay homage to the Bard.
In 2013, she wrote “The Taming,” a feminist political commentary that is an irreverent take on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and one of four productions that compose her Shakespeare cycle. The play appeared in more than 40 cities on Inauguration Day 2017, raising generous sums for progressive causes. The following year, she launched a campaign against gun violence, organizing free public readings of her one-woman show “Natural Shocks” in theaters across the country.
She following “The Taming” in 2018 with “The Book of Will,” an imagining of the creation of Shakespeare’s First Folio by the surviving members of his theater company. Commissioned by Denver Center Theatre Company, the play received the 2018 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award.
Science-themed shows
Many of Gunderson's plays focus on women in the sciences.
As an English major at Emory University in 2004, the school’s resident theater company, Theatre Emory, staged her play “Leap,” which explores the discoveries and legacy of Isaac Newton. Reflecting her interest in both the sciences and the stage, “Leap” provided early evidence of the themes that would define much of her professional work.
South Coast Repertory commissioned two of her earliest works, “Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight” (2009) and “Silent Sky” (2011), both of which are based on the lives of women in the sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her 2015 play “Ada and The Engine” centers on Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, a Victorian math whiz who worked on the first computer algorithm and “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” revolves around the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Hertha Ayrton, the friend who helped Curie recover from a public controversy that threatened her reputation and career. [FGCU TheatreLab performed “Silent Sky” in 2024 and The Naples Players produced “Half-Life” in 2025.]
Her recent work, “The Catastrophist” (2020), is based on the life and work of virologist Nathan Wolfe (Gunderson’s husband), a pandemic expert.
More about the playwright
Lauren Gunderson occupies a unique place in the world of theater: a woman in a field still dominated by men; an artist enamored by science; and a playwright without a day job.
She was born Feb. 5, 1982 in Decatur, Georgia. Both of her parents had careers in the arts and sciences—influences that would later inform her work as a playwright.
She developed an interest in theater at a young age. She performed in a number of Atlanta-area productions while still a student and her first play,” Parts They Call Deep,” was produced by Atlanta’s Essential Theatre when she was just 17 years old.
Gunderson earned an M.F.A. at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was also a Reynolds Fellow in social entrepreneurship. A prolific writer, she enjoyed almost immediate success. She wrote two plays in 2011, “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” and “The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog!” (2011), which was commissioned by the Kennedy Center and later adapted as a picture book.
Her 2013 play “I and You” won the prestigious 2014 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. “I and You” was lauded by the American Theatre Critics Association for its wisdom and its humor, and the play earned nationwide praise for its tender explorations of morality, friendship, and youth, as well as its artfully surprising ending.
In 2016, she partnered with Margot Melcon to write “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” an original sequel to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
In 2019, she was commissioned a second time by The Kennedy Center to write “Earthrise,” a children's musical, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing. “Peter Pan and Wendy,” her adaptation of the J.M. Barrie classic, premiered later that same year at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
“The meat of any play is its dramatic journey: complex and engaging characters in states of complication, taking risks and making urgent choices that lead to triumphs or tragedies,” stated Gunderson. “The ending is more than the last thing that we see before the curtain falls. It's the final meaning, the consummation, the last held breath before the unscripted world courses back in.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
