Bio

Rhett Rossi’s play In God’s Hat earned critical acclaim during its 2010 New York production, while From Red to Black was a runner-up for the Laurents/Hatcher Award for emerging American playwrights. Rossi began his career as an actor before developing as a playwright under the guidance of his longtime mentor, director and dramaturg Kevin Kittle. For more than two decades, they have collaborated on plays, readings, and workshops. Rossi also wrote and performed three original solo shows, each directed and dramaturged by Kittle.

For television, Rossi has written for Netflix’s Seven Seconds and Fox’s Filthy Rich. In 2017, he was named one of Hollywood’s Top 100 New Writers. He has also developed projects with HBO and FX, including Bad Ice, an HBO pilot set in the world of minor-league hockey, and an animated comedy for FX about a domesticated gorilla with low self-esteem.

Rossi writes about working-class people grappling with loss, loyalty, identity, and the complicated ways we try to love one another. His characters tend to be wounded, funny, volatile, and deeply human—people carrying the weight of their past while searching for connection, dignity, or redemption. Moving between dark humor and genuine danger, his work explores what people keep hidden, what they cannot let go of, and the damage they sometimes do in the name of love.

Not-so-Professional Bio

I’m nowhere near as interesting as the characters that take up residence in my head. They demand their place on the page, and I wish I were as assertive as them. I suppose they’re an amalgamation of the things that have influenced me over the years: knotty pine walls, thrifted furniture, secondhand clothes, bad haircuts, suburban angst, weekends at Dad’s, Looney Tunes, roller skates, baseball in the street, Catholic school uniforms, priests, nuns, guilt, confession, family, and love—always love.

I’ve been informed by a misspent youth, public school, teachers, derelicts, addicts, alcoholics, tough guys, hard chicks, fistfights, introversion, shy girls, and the brutality of loss. By hallucinogens, SSRIs, booze, despair, rage, hate, fear, desire, loneliness, heartache, and resentment. By the educated man, the working man, the common man, the depressed, the mentally ill, ex-girlfriends, ex-friends, therapists, heavy metal, love songs, theatre, prose, poems, Polaroids, photographs, cinema, words, the beloved dictionary and its equally glorious domestic partner, the thesaurus. By consumerism, optimism, pessimism, the fear of God, the fear of no God, humanity, and the lack thereof. By the spell of fireflies, terrible summer noises, the sky above, and the earth below. By comedians, intellectuals, morons, TV, the news, the fucking internet, and my shitty neighbor, George.

I try not to take myself too seriously and fail routinely. I try to be carefree but find that I care and don’t feel so free. I ask my dog for advice; she seems to know the way. I give thanks every night for what I’ve been given and what I’ve been granted, and the list is long. I was born into love, and I consider myself blessed.

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