VINCE Gatton
Actor. Playwright. New Yorker. Lefty.
ABOUT
Vince Gatton is a New York-based playwright and Drama Desk-nominated actor. His full-length play BETTER is one of the four winners of the 2025 Ashland New Plays Festival; his short THE OKTAVIST was the winner of the inaugural Gary Garrison Playwriting Award, and was published by The Tusculum Review; the original short of BETTER was a winner of the 2018 Samuel French OOB Festival; JAM won Best Play in the 2015 LIC Short Play Festival at the Secret Theatre; and his full-length ALEXANDRIA won Sanguine Theatre Company’s Project Playwright Festival. Other shorts have appeared in Motolla Theatre Project’s annual Cherry Picking at the Wild Project in NYC, and he’s a three-time finalist for the National Playwriting Award from City Theatre in Miami. His full-length WAKE is published by Next Stage Press, and various shorts and monologues can be found in collections from Smith & Kraus and Applause Books. He received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Play for David Johnston's Candy and Dorothy, and other notable acting credits include Leigh Fondakowski’s SPILL at Ensemble Studio Theatre; I Am My Own Wife and Fully Committed at Barrington Stage Company; I Am My Own Wife again at Coachella Valley Rep and Two Turns Theatre Company; and The Temperamentals at New World Stages, standing by for Michael Urie. He’s appeared on TV in BLUE BLOODS and LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, and ZERO DAY on Netflix. You can also catch him being himself on a certain rerun of Jeopardy, in the documentary Married & Counting, and as a guest bloviator on various podcasts.
HIGHLIGHTS
CASSIE STRICKLAND IS NOT UNDER THE BED
Trapped and terrified by a dark presence he believes is under his bed, Clay makes a desperate call to Howie, his only remaining friend. Howie is sure that no matter what sounds Clay thinks he hears, whatever deathly chill he thinks he feels, any demons Clay is plagued by are strictly the inner kind… and that definitely, absolutely, beyond any doubt, Cassie Strickland is not under the bed.
Adapted from the short play by Vince Gatton, and starring PJ Sosko and Gatton, Cassie Strickland is Not Under the Bed is a scary, poignant, and sometimes funny meditation on gun violence, mental health, friendship, and what it means to be haunted.
CHAGUTOK is...
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A Semifinalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference
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An Official Selection at the Actors Theatre of Louisville/Louisville Fringe Storytelling (R)Evolution Festival
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A Part of Vivid Stage's Meet The Artist Series
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A Finalist at Dayton Playhouse's FutureFest 2026
Four Americans each make a solitary pilgrimage to a remote, unpopulated island off the Alaskan coast, hoping to witness an obscure and mysterious atmospheric phenomenon known as the Chagutok Lights, which occurs only once every seventeen years. They each expect to be camping alone out there, but find themselves stuck in each others' company - an unwelcome situation for these people-skills-challenged individuals, but they manage...until a dead body appears. And it's just the first. Alone on this barren island, these four loners must work together to solve the mysteries of the dead, the Lights...and each other.
BETTER is one of the four winners of the 2025 Ashland New Plays Festival!
In a high-security meat-processing plant in the Ozarks, middle-aged line workers Ruth and Donna have long ago settled into a routine based on decades of shared resentments. But when a new figure shows up in town, cracks start to break wide open - between Ruth and Donna, and in the world high above their workstation. And what’s up with all these Security alerts lately? BETTER is a darkly comic drama about the personal and systemic forces that conspire to resist change — often and especially change for the better.
A Christmas Carol
Kevin Jones' and Rhonda Dodd's site-specific one-man adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the historic Merchant's House Museum in New York's East Village, alternating performances with Mr. Jones; Summoners Ensemble Theater presents an intimate, atmospheric, and unique way to experience this creepy, beautiful, and ever-timely story.
On I AM MY OWN WIFE at Coachella Valley Rep:
“Any actor or student of theater must see this performance. It is epic. There are moments which are beyond description…This is beyond brilliant—it’s a feat of memory and acting techniques that will leave any of us gasping. Occasionally, we might think we will actually glimpse the actor underneath it all … but then the chameleon changes again, and slips away from us.”
-- VJ Hume, CV Independent
WAKE is available from Next Stage Press!
4M, 1 W
90-minutes, no intermission
Ghost Story/Thriller/Domestic Drama
Dan and Eric have a new marriage license, a new baby, and a new house in the country. As they settle into this new life, Dan is having what seem to be sleepwalking episodes. A ghost story told by a young visitor leads Eric to suspect that Dan's sleepwalking incidents are actually something far more sinister -- but are they what he thinks they are? Or are there other forces at work?
WAKE is a ghost story for the post-AIDS generation, a play about marriage, expectations, and the power of narrative to both heal and harm.
Get it here: https://www.nextstagepress.com/wake/
YOU HAVE EARNED BONUS STARS
Madlab Theatre, Columbus
Directed by Katie Palczak
With Jessica Gibson, Susie McGarry, Tyreese Bowman, Kasey Meiniger, and Dallas Ray
"You Have Earned Bonus Stars kicks off with one of the most exciting half hours I’ve seen on a stage in a while...It strikes a perfect, thorny tone – leavening an understanding of these characters with the tonic of some acidic humor – that embraces the fact that our petty complaints with one another, our craven jealousies, our arbitrary social hierarchies don’t change when something terrible happens. That gratitude at being alive, and the guilt of being alive, still swims in the sea of who we are, for better or worse."
-- Richard Sandford, Columbus Underground
THE THING THAT HAPPENED
On April 10, 2023, a mass shooting occurred in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky -- just a few blocks away from the site of another mass shooting in 1989. These horrors have become so common and so normalized that there have now been two of them in the same few blocks of the same street within my living memory.
As it happens, I've written several plays focusing on one such (entirely fictional) incident. In response to this happening (again) in Louisville, I've decided to make this anthology of the short plays available to download for free for a limited time. (All performance rights reserved, though; email me about that if you're interested.) I hope for us to see past the lists of names and grasp the far-reaching repercussions of these events -- how they reverberate across time and geography, affecting countless lives in unexpected ways.
Synopsis: A seemingly normal day at the office gets a shocking twist. The Thing That Happened takes a sideways look at the event by exploring the stories along its margins – moments that touch directly or indirectly on what occurred on that one terrible day. Hopping around in time, place, and genre, these six funny, scary, sweet and sad short stories look at the ripple effects of violence and the unseen threads that connect us all.
A companion piece to the full-length You Have Earned Bonus Stars.
contact
Film/TV/Theater Commercial: Firestarter Entertainment
Auditions: admin@fsetalent.com
Bookings/Pins:
Chondra Profit
212-651-9042 x709
