In the eighteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, the lives of four very different women collide on a Christmas Eve in Santa Fe
“A good playwright has to have some personal sense of what language is for and why we use it. Stess seems to me to revel in its power to convey and map our interiors, to be the medium through which we shape the story we tell ourselves and call our life.”—Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, from the Foreword
In this occasionally off-kilter and deeply honest play about isolation, resilience, and the healing power of community, Ariel Stess intertwines the lives of four women from different generations and social strata in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kara wakes up to find her husband and children missing. Twenty-one-year-old Emma runs away with a married man. Barbara’s ex-lover breaks into her home in the middle of the night. And the pipes in Miranda’s house burst. Through a tapestry of internal monologues and scenes, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA follows the journeys of four women whose major life crises collide on Christmas Eve, leading them to accidentally help each other find a way forward.
The play, the 2025 winner of the Yale Drama Prize, was chosen by competition judge Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright.