Calamity West may be her pen name, but this up-and-coming playwright (who declines to reveal her given name) is far from under the radar. In the past 18 months, the Missouri transplant has landed commissions from four Chicago playhouses. The latest, The Doll’s House Project: Ibsen Is Dead, opens May 8 at the Athenaeum.

In it, West sets Henrik Ibsen’s seminal three-act drama against the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No one had set [this play] in the ’80s,” says West. “I was thinking about the consequences of freedom—when you fight for freedom, and what happens after you obtain it.”