Lana’s work explores the complexity of memory, grief, and identity through a lens that is at once lyrical, psychological, and darkly funny. She brings an emotionally intelligent, collaborative, sonically and visually rich sensibility to the stories she tells – onstage and onscreen.
Lana is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA, AEA, and the Dramatists Guild.
Selected Works
Funeral Game (Writer)
World Premiere, Bread & Butter Theatre, San Francisco, CA 2020
TBA Recommended Production
Lana Palmer’s “Funeral Game’ is a haunting and powerful drama that escalates to an intriguing conclusion, marking her as a playwright worth watching.
– Theatrius
The North Pool by Rajiv Joseph (Director)
Bread & Butter Theatre, San Francisco, CA 2019
Tension builds, as we wait, breathlessly, for the next reveal…
Fascinated, we feel secure in the hands of two masterful actors, who never let us down. In that simple school room, Rajiv Joseph explores love, privilege, and the struggle for self-forgiveness.
– Theatrius
Palmer’s engrossing, entangling direction, builds the secrets and the suspense behind a passive aggressive interrogation. She keeps her two actors at odds and the audience guessing on who is in real control.
– VMedia
The How and the Why by Sarah Treem (Director)
Dragon Theatre, Redwood City, CA 2019
SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Nomination, Best Production of a Play
It’s definitely not to be missed as presented by Dragon Productions Theatre in Redwood City through Aug. 4…. That’s because producer/director Lana Palmer found the perfect foils to play the biologists: Kelly Rinehart as the seasoned, highly acclaimed professor and scholar, Zelda Kahn, and Alicia Piemme Nelson as the graduate student who has written (or maybe co-written) a thesis that she hopes to present at an upcoming conference… Suffice to say that it’s absorbing all the way to the final lines.
– Joanne Engelhardt, The Mercury News
Directed by Lana Palmer, the Dragon’s production is intimate, compelling and full of interesting ideas… the actors share palpable chemistry, which is all-important in a two-person show. You root for them both, and for their fragile — evolving, if you will — relationship.
– Karla Kane, Palo Alto Online
Works in development
The Dream Museum (Book, Music, Lyrics)
The Dream Museum is a darkly whimsical, psychologically charged musical that plunges audiences into a surreal world where memory, power, and imagination blur. When a clever teenager named Charlotte returns to a mysterious museum of dreams to save her sleeping parents, she finds herself entangled with its enigmatic curator, Nox—a figure as magnetic as he is menacing. Blending gothic fairy tale with cutting-edge theatricality, the show fuses haunting original music with dream-logic storytelling and explosive ensemble numbers. Think Coraline meets Cabaret —a provocative, visually rich journey through the subconscious that asks: who gets to shape our reality, and at what cost?