It is 1815 and Napoleon is in his final exile on St. Helena. As he caroms between the colliding realities of his new jailers and old retainers, he enters a strange new world where nothing is quite what it seems. Torn between power and its loss, history and memory, the ghost of Joan of Arc falling through the ceiling and an omnipresent chorus of sardonic rats, he becomes the pivot point for a vividly theatrical and darkly comic meditation on the nature and perils of greatness.

Laura's plays and musicals have been produced regionally, Off-Broadway, in Europe and in Canada.

Some of her more recent credits include: The Book of Hours, premiering at Wellesley Summer Theatre in 2005; SSIBAJI, (score: Ye Sung Lee) a chamber opera commissioned by Leon Major, world premiere 2005; Hallowed Ground, Portland Stage Company, 2002, Boston Playwrights Theater, 2001, winner of the Clauder Competition and Boston's IRNE Award for Best New Play; and The Song of the Silkie, (score: Elena Ruehr), Rockport Chamber Festival.

Film work includes the award winning SONIA, commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada (SONIA toured festivals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe and was nominated for 3 Genie Awards); the Emmy Award winning SECRETS for WCVB-TV, Boston, and SMALL PARADISE, winner of the Writer's Guild of America Fellowship.

She has recently adapted four radio plays for the WGBH "Scribbling Women" series: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Anne Petry's "The Bones of Louella Brown.," Julia Peterkin’s “The Merry Go Round,” and “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” by Kate Chopin. These and other radio plays can be accessed at www.scribblingwomen.com

Ms. Harrington teaches playwriting at Harvard where she is a Visiting Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, and at M.I.T. and Wellesley College where she is currently an artist in residence. Awards include a Bunting Institute Fellowship at Harvard/Radcliffe College, a 1997 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Playwriting, a Whiting Foundation Grant, the 1996 and 2001 Clauder Competition Award for Playwriting, a Boston "IRNE" Award for Best New Play, 2001; the Joseph Kesselring Award for Drama, Opera America development and commissioning grants, a New England Emmy, and a Quebec Cinemateque Award.

She is currently writing a new opera with the composer Deborah Drattell.