#Playwrights

[americanmoths]

i love Interview with the Vampire for 500 million reasons but one of them is how playwright-centric it is. showrunner? pulitzer prize for drama nominee rolin jones. one of the stars? pulitzer prize for drama nominee eric bogosian. half the writing staff? playwrights (eleanor burgess && hannah moscovitch && jonathan ceniceroz for sure, probs others). it's playwrights all the way down motherfuckers, and that pleases me greatly.

[shakespearenews]

Shakespeare's Contemporaries Infographic

[elliehopaunt]

Wow.

[writerofscreen]

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This. Could I do it with a whole small house?

[wronghands1]

[lenbryant]

Boo for book banning.

[bottlecap-press]

From Andy Boyd's chapbook, Lil' Sweetums: Three Short Plays, available from Bottlecap Press!

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Kristina Lugn

Poet and playwright Kristina Lugn was born in 1948 in Tierp, Sweden. Lugn wrote eighteen plays and eight poetry collections. Her literary debut was the 1972 poetry collection Om jag inte, but she rose to prominence in 1983 with the play Bekantskap onskas med aldre herre. Lugn's works often dealt with sorrow and loneliness. She won the Selma Lagerlöf Literature Prize and the Bellman Prize, and was a member of the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kristina Lugn died in 2020 at the age of 71.

Image source

[hayleylovesjessica]

Amy Herzog and Heidi Schreck, playwrights

[frank-wedekind-baffles-me]

My favorite facts about German Playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening (1891)

This list has been collected through his wikipedia page and many, many bios printed in the hard copies of his plays that I possess.

1. He had an obsession with the circus and worked with a circus for the time, but every source I have run across refuses to tell me what exactly he did for the circus. 

2. There was a riot at his funeral.

3. His full name was Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (and he was conceived in San Francisco, which I only bring up because every bio I have read of him insists on mentioning it)

4. There are many reviews of his performance in his own play Censorship that remarked that he was quite bad but quite passionate, including the line “as an actor, he remains as ungifted as he ever was” and “He is not, of course, and actor and certainly will never be one”.

5. He wrote part of his tragedy Lulu in English but it’s such bad and incorrect English that translators have to try to salvage what they can of that section of the script so it makes sense with the other english text.

6. He went to jail because he insulted the Kaiser at some point (however, google will not tell me what exactly he said).

7. He was the great grandfather of author Douglas Adams who, of course, wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

8. There’s a weird section on his Wikipedia page that, when talking about his wife, mentions that “he felt pressure to maintain strenuous creative and sexual activity in order to please her.” and then does not elaborate. 

9. Similarly, his Wikipedia page contains the line “He also enjoyed the pleasure of platonic female company and kept his tendencies toward homosexuality and sadism in check.” which is, once again, not elaborated on. 

10. I can’t find a full list of all of his works anywhere. Every time I try to look, I find more plays and novellas. 

I will certainly think of more sometime later.

[gaaaaaaaayypr]

Her: have you read Tennessee Williams?

Me: *a beautiful, sweaty, bored, sexually repressed homosexual, filled with concealed rage, stares out the window lost in thought about dying dreams as I sip my neat whisky*

*Me- yes...I've heard of him.

[clemsfilmdiary]

Past Lives (Celine Song)

1/14/24

[shakespearenews]

Rauch had been told that the three pinnacles of theatre as a popular art in the Western world were Greek tragedy, English Renaissance drama, and American musicals. As a senior, he founded his own theatre company, and mapped out a mashup of “Medea,” “Macbeth,” and “Cinderella”—one exemplar of each style—so that they could be performed simultaneously. It was a way of seeing what they had in common, and how theatre could return to its populist roots.

---

After that production was over, Rauch, Carey and their friends, calling themselves the Cornerstone Theater Company, drove to North Dakota, where they recruited locals to put on “Hamlet” in an old vaudeville theatre. At one point, Carey took over pouring drinks in a bar so that the owners could perform. The locals they recruited worried that Shakespeare’s language was too arcane, so the company modernized it, converting “arrant knave” to “downright prick,” for instance. (They ultimately changed that one: “downright prick,” they were told, was something “smart-ass college kids” would say. A rancher suggested “horse’s rear,” and that went into the script instead.)

---

Rauch stayed in L.A. for fifteen years. He left in 2007 to become the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the country’s oldest and largest repertory-theatre companies, in Ashland, a small town just north of the California border. Rauch promised to expand its repertoire to include non-Western classics and to diversify both the company and the staff. He also announced a project called American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle—thirty-seven new plays to be written by a diverse group of playwrights and loosely modelled on the scope of Shakespeare’s collected works. Within a decade, actors of color made up around seventy per cent of the company, and they were putting on adaptations of Indian, Chinese, and Latin American classics alongside their Shakespeare productions. Meanwhile, American Revolutions, overseen by Alison Carey, achieved wide renown.

[betterinthedarkblog]

There is nothing worse than knowing another person's secret and not being able to help.

Anton Chekhov, UNCLE VANYA

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle in the middle of Times Square, ca. 1959.

Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life magazine