Plays
"You might lose count of how many times a chill runs down your spine."
-Time Out Chicago
**** (Four out of four stars)
​​"... it is so clearly concerned with what we do about all of this now." 
-Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
Like so many great mysteries, it all began in an attic with a dusty old suitcase... The discovery of a stash of over two hundred letters in three languages opens clues to an untold history in THE LUCKY STAR – a gripping true story of resilience and determination to restore a family's legacy.
NEW GOLDEN AGE was a finalist for the 2023 SUSAN SMITH BLACKBURN PRIZE 
"Hartman does one better than Orwell."
​- TheaterMania
In an era just beyond our own, two sisters fight for human connection as they face down a big tech dystopia. A folk-hero professor defends our most intimate relationships, while her sister attempts a perilous inside maneuver within the corporation that owns and sees all. 
 
A thrilling revolutionary tale for today that reclaims a bond beyond data.

World Premiere: Primary Stages, 2022

Supported by a 2019-20 Guggenheim Fellowship.
"Brilliantly captures the confusion, and the moral ambiguity, about life on the edge of biomedicine.”
-Forbes
"Finely handled... Hartman lays out in accessible and compassionate fashion the missteps of the medical profession, as hemophiliacs began dying along with gay men and others stricken by the disease. Hers is not an indictment of medical malfeasance, it seems, as much as an account of the cascade of institutional errors that led doctors in failing directions before they found the right one.”
​-Washington Post
A gripping medical drama about intimacy, trust, and sacrifice at the onset of the AIDS crisis. Ray is a devoted single father desperately trying to keep his hemophiliac twins alive. Roz is a brilliant doctor who offers a cutting-edge miracle treatment for Ray’s boys. The two form an intimate bond until the miracle goes wrong, forcing impossible choices.
RATTLESNAKE KATE won 8 Henry Awards, including Best New Work!
"'Rattlesnake Kate' may be less a gunslinging saga of how the West was won than an example of how the West will be sung."
-The Denver Post
Hartman joins forces with singer-songwriter Neyla Pekarek (formerly of the Lumineers) to unearth the legend of Kate Slaughterback, Colorado native, rattlesnake slayer, and fast fashion queen of 1927. Western lore meets a modern eye, raising the spirit of a woman who played by no one's rules. Larger than life and stranger than fiction, with heart-stopping folk harmonies, RATTLESNAKE KATE sings forgotten history into an American tale for today. 
​Book by Karen Hartman
Music and Lyrics by Neyla Pekarek
World Premiere Denver Center, 2022
Winner: BEST NEW WORK in Colorado
"Hartman's smart-crazy dialogue elicits a constant low roar of happy laughter from the audience....The point of Goldie, Max, & Milk isn't that the liberal atheists or the tradition cleaving ​conservatives have all the answers. It's that the answers won't mean anything if we can't talk to each other."
- Broward Palm Beach New Times
Max, a single lesbian, just gave birth.  She’s unemployed, with a house that’s falling apart, an ex on the loose, and no clue how to nurse her newborn.  Can Goldie, an Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant, guide Max into motherhood?  Or will conflicting family values get the 
better of them both?

A surprising and deeply human comedy about motherhood, family, and doing what comes naturally.
"Karen Hartman’s new theater piece, 'Good Faith: Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department,' [is] superbly rendered in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre."
​-New Haven Register
"Over four years of research, Ms. Hartman — who lived in New Haven while a graduate playwriting student at Yale School of Drama — sat in on training sessions at the fire academy, rode in fire trucks and hung out among first responders."
- The New York Times
“"An artistic achievement that lights a way forward to a more empathetic justice system."
-Delaware County News Review 
Philadelphia is home to a revolutionary – and shockingly funny - treatment court for prostitute women. In Project Dawn, seven actresses double as a staff members and court participants, probing the thin lines between freedom and slavery, activism and obsession, on both sides of the law.

Other Published Plays