Conrad Earp wrote the fictional play performed within Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
Asteroid City uses a layered structure in which a television program presents the creation of a stage play, while the play’s events unfold in a desert town during a 1955 junior stargazers’ convention. Conrad Earp is the fictional playwright credited with writing that play.
Edward Norton portrays Earp in the film’s black-and-white television-show sections. The character’s role helps connect the framing narrative with the colorful stage-world story, where the audience sees actors performing the events of Asteroid City.
Conrad Earp is not a real historical playwright and should not be confused with the film’s narrator or its characters in the desert town. The layered storytelling deliberately separates the television production, the play, and the fictional events being dramatized. That structure is one of the film’s central formal devices.