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Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer whose works include the novels, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day, Tunnels of Love, I Wish I Had A Red Dress, and Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do; several plays, including "Blues for an Alabama Sky," "Bourbon at the Border," and "Flyin' West;" two books of essays, Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman's Guide to Truth and Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot; and a book of short fiction, The Brass Bed and Other Stories. She is also a performance artist, collaborating frequently with her husband, Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., under the title Live at Club Zebra. The two have performed sold out shows at both the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, and The National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, GA.
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A native of Alabama, Gilman is a resident playwright at the Chicago Dramatists. Rebecca Gilman's plays include The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, The Glory of Living, and the Goodman Theatre world premieres of Spinning Into Butter, Boy Gets Girl, and Blue Surge. Her plays have also been produced at the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York, Royal Court Theatre in London, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Manhattan Class Company, as well as other theaters around the country and abroad. She received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa in 1991. Chicago Tribune Arts Critic Chris Jones has said of Gilman that "she writes plays with such intriguing plots that the audience finds itself hungry for what is going to happen next-and once she has the viewer under that narrative spell, she does not shirk from exposing complex themes with a strongly feminist sensibility, dispensed with just the right quirky touch of nouveau Southern gothic."
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Lanford Wilson began writing plays in the early 1960s and has written many memorable ones including Talley's Folly, Balm in Gilead, Burn This, and Fifth of July. His plays explore themes of alienation, loneliness, and crumbling illusions. Actor Christopher Reeve has called Lanford Wilson the modern Chekhov and Actress Swoozie Kurts says that Wilson "plays the music of the theatre on his wondrous typewriter."
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Keith Reddin is a long established writer and actor who is considered by many to be a staple of Chicago theatre. He has written and acted in numerous plays with many local, regional, Off-Broadway, and Broadway theatres. Keith Reddin graduated from Northwestern University and attended The Yale School of Drama. As an actor, he achieved critical acclaim for his performance as a Russian clerk mistaken for a powerful official in The Goodman Theatre's 1985 production of "The Government Inspector." As a writer, Reddin made his debut with the dark comedy "Life and Limb" at Wisdom Bridge in 1984, and since then many of his plays have been produced around the world with considerable success. His works have been premiered in Chicago by such legendary theatre companies as Wisdom Bridge, Remains, American Blues Theatre (now American Theatre Company), and Goodman.
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Neil Simon is the world's most successful playwright. He has had dozens of plays and nearly as many major motion pictures produced. He has been showered with more Academy and Tony nominations than any other writer, and is the only playwright to have four Broadway productions running simultaneously. His plays have been produced in dozens of languages, and have been blockbuster hits from Beijing to Moscow. His true success, however, is in his unique way of exposing something real in the American spirit. Born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, Marvin Neil Simon grew up in Manhattan and for a short time attended NYU and the University of Denver. By the 1960s, Simon had begun writing plays for Broadway. His first hit came in 1961 with "Come Blow Your Horn," and was soon after followed by the very successful comic romance "Barefoot in the Park." Simon's brother, Danny, provided the inspiration for one of Simon's most enduring hits. After his divorce, Danny moved in with another divorced man, and this situation became the set-up for "The Odd Couple" (1966).
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John Guare's plays include Muzeeka (Obie Award), Cop-Out, The House of Blue Leaves, (4 Tony Awards), Two Gentlemen of Verona, Moon Over Miami, Six Degrees of Separation (Obie Award, The New York Drama Critics Circle Award, London's Olivier Award for Best Play), and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, (4 Tony Award nominations).
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Romulus Linney has written more than twenty-five plays including The Sorrows of Frederick, Holy Ghosts, Childe Byron, A Woman Without a Name, Sand Mountain, Three Poets and 2. His plays have been produced widely over the past thirty years in theatres across the U.S. and abroad. Six of his one-act plays have appeared in Best Short Plays, including Laughing Stock, which was also featured in Time Magazine as one of the ten best plays of 1984. He has also written for film and television, including the teleplays The Thirty-Fourth Star (CBS), Feeling Good (PBS), and a film version of his play Holy Ghosts. Many of his stories, essays, and articles have appeared in literary journals such as Pushcart Conjunctions and Kenyon Review. He received the National Critics Award for 2 (in its 1990 Humana Festival production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville) and for his adaptation of his 1962 novel Heathen Valley, which appears in Best Plays of the Year 1987-88. In 1998, Gint, his Appalachian version of Peer Gynt, was invited to the International Ibsen Festival at the Norwegian State Theatre in Oslo.
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Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1905, Lillian Hellman saw her young life populated by eccentric and avaricious relatives, who later appeared only thinly disguised in her plays. Moving back and forth between New Orleans and New York as a child, Hellman witnessed the diverse cultures within her national borders. After graduating from high school, she briefly attended both Columbia University and New York University. Leaving school, she found a job at a publishing house, where she got her first glimpse of the bohemian lifestyle of the 1920s writer and artist. She married one of these young writers, Arthur Kober, and with him moved to Hollywood.
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Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, the first son and second child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. His mother, the daughter of a minister, was of genteel upbringing, while his father, a shoe salesman, came from a prestigious Tennessee family which included the state's first governor and first senator. At the age of 16, he encountered his first brush with the publishing world when he won third prize and received $5 for an essay, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?," in Smart Set. A year later, he published "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in Weird Tales. In 1929, he entered the University of Missouri. His success there was dubious, and in 1931 he began work for a St. Louis shoe company. It was six years later when his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis, in many respects the true beginning of his literary and stage career.
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The French poet, writer, artist, and film maker Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau was born to a wealthy family on July 5, 1889 in a small town near Paris, France. Cocteau's father committed suicide when he was about 10 years old. In 1900, he entered a private school and was expelled in 1904. After his expulsion from school, Cocteau ran away to Marseilles where he lived in the "red light district" under a false name. Police discovered him in Marseilles and returned him to his uncle's care. In 1908, Cocteau associated himself with Edouard de Max. De Max was a reigning tragedian of Paris stage at this time. De Max encouraged Cocteau to write and on April 4 of that year rented the Theatre Femina for the premiere of the young writer's poetry. The First World War broke out in the summer of 1914 and though Cocteau never served in the military, he did help run an ambulance service. He acquainted himself with a group of marines. Cocteau was arrested and returned to civilian life in 1915. In 1917, he met Pablo Picasso. Cocteau and Picasso went to Rome where they met up with Diaghilev. At this point, Cocteau helped prepare the ballet Parade. Picasso designed the sets, Erik Satie wrote the music, and the ballet was choreographed by Leonide Massine. The Paris opening in May of that year was a disaster. A few years later the ballet was successful. After the war Cocteau continued his association with several well known artists. He founded a publishing house called Editions de la Sirene. The company published Cocteau's writings and many musical scores of Stravinsky, Satie and a group of composers known as Les Six.
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