Biography of Mike Broemmel

Mike Broemmel is an award-winning American playwright, author and journalist whose work has been staged across the United States, Off-Broadway and internationally. During the past 20 years, more than three dozen of his plays have reached the stage, with many earning critical acclaim, awards, extended engagements and multi-year productions.

Broemmel’s writing is distinguished by an enduring fascination with complicated people—particularly historical and cultural figures whose public identities often obscure more difficult, intimate and profoundly human stories. His plays frequently examine people at moments of reckoning, exploring the intersections of history, identity, ambition, loss, prejudice, resilience and consequence.

Recent years have marked one of the most prolific and successful periods of Broemmel’s theatrical career.

The Wind Is Us: The Death that Killed Capote, his one-actor exploration of Truman Capote, has developed into one of Broemmel’s signature works. Featuring Eddie Schumacher as Capote, the production received the Best Actor Award at the 2024 United Solo Theatre Festival at Theatre Row in New York City. In 2026, The Wind Is Us received Outstanding Overall Production and Outstanding Actor in a Lead Role at the Colorado Theatre Festival. The play has been staged in the United States, Off-Broadway and internationally, including performances in Northern Ireland.

In 2025, Broemmel premiered An Echoing Spring: A Story of Matthew Shepard, an intimate examination of Matthew Shepard and his mother, Judy, and the enduring human consequences of the young man’s 1998 murder. The play continues Broemmel’s longstanding commitment to creating theatre that confronts injustice while focusing on the individual lives behind history.

That same year brought When Strawberries Bloom: The Creation of Golda Meir, chronicling the journey of the woman who became Israel’s first female prime minister, and Queen of the Painted Sisterhood: The Story of Mattie Silks, Broemmel’s examination of one of the most formidable women of the American West. His work has continued to cross international borders, with productions and festival appearances in Northern Ireland as well as the United States.

Broemmel’s expanding body of work also includes Stand Still & Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr, a production that has enjoyed a six-year performance history; The Bonfils Girl: The Life Story of Helen Bonfils, which helped reopen Denver’s Historic Elitch Theatre for live theatrical performances after 33 years; I’m Harvey Milk, staged Off-Broadway; and Taking Tea with the Ripper, another of his long-running one-actor works.

His newest plays continue his exploration of remarkable and frequently misunderstood figures. They include Witness: A Story of Virginia Hill, The Unreachable Star: A Story of Connie Francis, Divinely, Alone: A Picnic with Divine, and Vicious Circles & A Writer of Note: The Tempest of Dorothy Parker. His developing dramatic work also includes plays centered on Meyer Lansky, Al Capone and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

A Life Beyond the Stage

The breadth of Broemmel’s writing reflects a professional and civic life that began far from the theatre.

As a young man in the 1980s, Broemmel worked at the White House, beginning in the Office of Media Relations & Planning and subsequently serving in the East Wing during the administration of President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan.

He later spent nearly a decade deeply involved in American politics and political communications, working on federal, state and local campaigns and for elected officials. In the mid-1990s, he served as a national vice president of the Young Republican National Federation.

He managed campaigns for candidates seeking federal, state and local office and eventually stepped from behind the scenes to become a candidate himself, seeking a seat in the State Senate. He ultimately left the GOP and is a fierce critic of Trumpism.

Those experiences eventually became part of a much broader life in writing, the arts and community service rather than the defining feature of his career.

Broemmel has devoted substantial portions of his adult life to nonprofit and civic leadership. Most notably, he spent 10 years as chairperson of the board of one of the Midwest’s largest human-services nonprofit organizations. When his board leadership began, the organization served approximately 300 families in a single city. By the conclusion of his tenure as board chair, it had grown to serve approximately 40,000 people and families across a four-state region.

The transformation required far more than organizational growth. It involved years of governance, strategic planning, community partnerships and the responsibility of helping guide an institution serving people confronting some of life’s most difficult circumstances.

Putting Himself on the Line

Throughout his life, Broemmel has also demonstrated a willingness to put himself on the line for causes he believes in, particularly when confronting hatred, intimidation and discrimination.

In the mid-1990s, Broemmel became a prominent target of the Westboro Baptist Church, the extremist Kansas congregation notorious for its virulently anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations and for later picketing funerals, including those of American service members and Matthew Shepard, the gay college student whose 1998 murder became an international symbol of anti-LGBTQ+ violence.

Broemmel’s response to that intimidation was not to retreat.

Instead, he ultimately opened a dance club down the street from Westboro’s compound and deliberately created a place that welcomed people from throughout the community, including LGBTQ+ men and women. At a time when members of Westboro sought to intimidate and publicly humiliate LGBTQ+ people and those who stood beside them, Broemmel helped create something very different: a place where people could gather, dance, socialize and simply be themselves without apology.

Broemmel’s Club Paradox became, in its own way, a safe haven—a direct and very public answer to those who sought to make LGBTQ+ people afraid in their own community.

That experience also gives Broemmel’s later theatrical work an unusual personal dimension. Decades before writing An Echoing Spring: A Story of Matthew Shepard, he had already confronted some of the same forces of hatred and intolerance that would descend upon Shepard’s funeral and attempt to turn a family’s unimaginable grief into a public spectacle.

For Broemmel, confronting hate has therefore never existed solely on the page or the stage. It has been part of a much longer personal commitment to standing with people targeted for who they are—even when doing so meant becoming a target himself.

Broemmel’s community involvement has also included leadership in the arts. He served six years as chair of a metropolitan arts council and held a leadership role in a statewide coalition of community arts agencies. Throughout his career, he has advocated for theatre and the arts not merely as entertainment, but as essential components of healthy and engaged communities.

Writing Beyond Theatre

Although best known today for his plays, Broemmel’s writing extends across genres. He is the author of novels, short fiction, biography and nonfiction. His book projects include Death American Style: Rituals, Rites & Practices in the 21st Century, an examination of the ways Americans experience death, mourning, memorialization and the changing rituals surrounding loss.

In 2025, Broemmel also returned to feature and investigative journalism, resuming a form of writing that had been an important part of his earlier career.

Across theatre, fiction, nonfiction and journalism, a common thread runs through Broemmel’s work: an interest in the lives people actually lived rather than the simplified versions history remembers.

Whether writing about Truman Capote confronting the wreckage of celebrity, Matthew Shepard and the mother who survived him, Golda Meir before she became an international figure, Divine beyond the outrageous public persona, or forgotten and misunderstood figures from American history, Broemmel returns repeatedly to the same fundamental territory—the complicated, contradictory and resilient nature of human beings.

It is an approach shaped not simply by a career in theatre, but by decades spent in politics, government, journalism, nonprofit leadership, community service and, when circumstances demanded it, standing publicly against hatred and intimidation.

For Broemmel, the objective remains straightforward:

Theatre that makes a difference.