Lauren Gunderson most produced living playwright in 2016 and 2017. Gunderson was awarded the Lanford Wilson award in 2016. Her play "I and You" was the winner of the 2014 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, and a finalist for the 2014 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Forward Theater, located in Madison, Wisconsin, will stage "I and You" from November 2–19, 2017. Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, will stage "I and You" from May 20 to June 17, 2018. Gunderson's play "Exit, Pursued By A Bear" has been performed around the country, winning Best Comedy in Austin,
Exit the King seems to me to be the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying". Les Essif in "Empty Figure on an Empty Stage" points out that "Exit the King" comes closest of all Ionesco’s plays to the paradigm of absurdism established by Samuel Beckett. Though Beckett and Ionesco are commonly grouped together under the name "Theatre of the Absurd" because of their shared themes of alienation and the difficulty of communication, Beckett’s plays generally present a stripped down, minimalist tableau whereas