Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater 1930-2010 0810855321, 9780810855328

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HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Jon Woronoff, Series Editor Science Fiction Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2004. Hong Kong Cinema, by Lisa Odham Stokes, 2007. American Radio Soap Operas, by Jim Cox, 2005. Japanese Traditional Theatre, by Samuel L. Leiter, 2006. Fantasy Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2005. Australian and New Zealand Cinema, by Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, 2006. African-American Television, by Kathleen Fearn-Banks, 2006. Lesbian Literature, by Meredith Miller, 2006. Scandinavian Literature and Theater, by Jan Sjåvik, 2006. British Radio, by Seán Street, 2006. German Theater, by William Grange, 2006. African American Cinema, by S. Torriano Berry and Venise Berry, 2006. Sacred Music, by Joseph P. Swain, 2006. Russian Theater, by Laurence Senelick, 2007. French Cinema, by Dayna Oscherwitz and MaryEllen Higgins, 2007. Postmodernist Literature and Theater, by Fran Mason, 2007. Irish Cinema, by Roderick Flynn and Pat Brereton, 2007. Australian Radio and Television, by Albert Moran and Chris Keating, 2007. Polish Cinema, by Marek Haltof, 2007. Old Time Radio, by Robert C. Reinehr and Jon D. Swartz, 2008. Renaissance Art, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2008. Broadway Musical, by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2008. American Theater: Modernism, by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré, 2008. German Cinema, by Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer, 2008. Horror Cinema, by Peter Hutchings, 2008. Westerns in Cinema, by Paul Varner, 2008. Chinese Theater, by Tan Ye, 2008. Italian Cinema, by Gino Moliterno, 2008. Architecture, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2008. Russian and Soviet Cinema, by Peter Rollberg, 2008. African American Theater, by Anthony D. Hill, 2009. Postwar German Literature, by William Grange, 2009. Modern Japanese Literature and Theater, by J. Scott Miller, 2009. Animation and Cartoons, by Nichola Dobson, 2009. Modern Chinese Literature, by Li-hua Ying, 2010.

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Middle Eastern Cinema, by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, 2010. Spanish Cinema, by Alberto Mira, 2010. Film Noir, by Andrew Spicer, 2010. French Theater, by Edward Forman, 2010. Choral Music, by Melvin P. Unger, 2010. Westerns in Literature, by Paul Varner, 2010. Baroque Art and Architecture, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2010. Surrealism, by Keith Aspley, 2010. Science Fiction Cinema, by M. Keith Booker, 2010. Latin American Literature and Theater, by Richard A. Young and Odile Cisneros, 2011. Children’s Literature, by Emer O’Sullivan, 2010. German Literature to 1945, by William Grange, 2011. Neoclassical Art and Architecture, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2011. American Cinema, by M. Keith Booker, 2011. Contemporary American Theater:1930–2010, by James Fisher, 2011.

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Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater 1930–2010 Volume 1: A–L

James Fisher

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2011

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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by James Fisher All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisher, James, 1950– Historical dictionary of contemporary American theater, 1930–2010 / James Fisher. p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8108-5532-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7950-8 (ebook) 1. Theater—United States—History—20th century—Dictionaries. 2. Theater—United States—History—21st century—Dictionaries. 3. American drama—20th century— Dictionaries. 4. American drama—21st century—Dictionaries. I. Title. PN2266.3.F575 2011 792.0973'0904—dc22 2010048180

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Volume 1 Editor’s Foreword

Jon Woronoff

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Reader’s Note

xi

Acronyms and Abbreviations

xiii

Chronology

xvii

Introduction

1

THE DICTIONARY: A–L

19

Volume 2 THE DICTIONARY: M–Z

488

Bibliography

895

About the Author

941

v

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Editor’s Foreword

This is the third act in the series of Historical Dictionaries of American Theater, the first—which has not appeared yet—deals with the very beginnings up to about 1880, the second with the period roughly from 1880 to 1930, and this volume with the period from 1930 to the present. There is no doubt that American theatre has been maturing over the whole time span and it has reached a peak of sorts at present, one that will presumably be exceeded in the future. For now, after many decades of experimentation and practice, and numerous plays as well as countless performances, theatre in the United States has ceased being peripheral, let alone provincial, but become largely independent, although it obviously borrows from other traditions and imports occasional foreign works. Moreover, the flow has if anything shifted with Broadway increasingly becoming a source of plays and practices emulated worldwide. During this time, not only has the output increased, it has become considerably more varied, taking on virtually any topic of general and particular interest (including many it had avoided in the past), such as politics, war, and sexuality. Covering this period was no easy matter, since the chronology has to trace an evolution of about 80 years, and the list of acronyms has grown immeasurably. Fortunately, the introduction puts this all in context, while leaving the details to the dictionary section. This time it is even larger, with well over 1,700 entries. They include not only playwrights and actors, directors and producers, but also scene designers, costume designers, lighting specialists, critics and even agents. There are entries on all kinds of theatres, not only the big Broadway ones, but also those Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, some in other large cities, and an impressive batch scattered around the nation. The number of plays is very impressive and the major themes are increasingly varied. Still, as before, this volume can and should be read in conjunction with other works on American theatre, and a very rich source of further reading can be found in the bibliography. What is particularly notable about this Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater is that it was written by one person, James Fisher. Prof. Fisher is head and professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, following almost three decades at Wabash College, vii

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nearly half of this as department chair. Along with teaching, he has written numerous papers and articles on the topic and also coauthored the volume on American Theater: Modernism. Aside from this, he has crafted two plays of his own. Obviously, it would never have been possible to produce such a volume without extensive knowledge and experience, but also without an abiding passion for the theatre. These factors will make this a particularly useful volume to the many of us, including the editor, who are fascinated by American theatre and want to know how it has risen to become the very central player it is. Jon Woronoff Series Editor

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Acknowledgments

As the author of Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater: 1930–2010 I am grateful to the staff of Scarecrow Press for their patience and support, with particular thanks to the series editor, Jon Woronoff, for his impressive grasp of the big picture as well as his remarkable memory for details. His promptness in responding to many queries as well as his insightful suggestions and edits has helped enormously. Gratitude is also due to April Snider, Jayme Bartles Reed, and other staff members at Scarecrow. Further, I would like to express gratitude to and affection for Felicia Hardison Londré, my collaborator on Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism, for too many kindnesses to enumerate here, but mostly for the privilege of learning from her vast store of knowledge of American theatre history, the model of her thorough scholarship and elegant writing, and especially for her warm, generous friendship and encouragement. Thanks go to my supportive colleagues and students in the Department of Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for tolerating a department head too often distracted by the contemporary American theatre—and, similarly, I am grateful to my former coworkers and students at Wabash College where this volume was begun. My late parents, Clarkson S. and Mae H. Fisher; my brothers Dan, Scott, and Biff (and Biff’s family); my in-laws, Daniel and Kathleen Warner; and brother- and sister-in law Dan Warner and Mary Russo have all been caring and encouraging of my work. There are several departed friends who, at various times in my life, gave vital support to me, both professionally and personally: Fredric Enenbach, Kathryn England, Kenneth W. Kloth, Erminie C. Leonardis, John C. Swan, and Lauren K. “Woody” Woods. Appreciation is also due to some very live friends who, similarly, helped me along the way, especially Peter Frederick, Herman Middleton, Philip C. Kolin, Kaizaad Kotwal, Diane and Jamey Norton, the Penland clan, Warren Rosenberg, and Bert Stern. My children, Daniel and Anna, and my son-in-law Matthew Kohansky, fill my life with joy, and I am thankful for their encouragement, support, and love. Above all, my wife Dana has given me everything in life that matters, and her caring compassion, creativity, work ethic, and generosity in all things have taught me why I make theatre and teach. As such, this book is dedicated to Dana Warner Fisher. ix

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Reader’s Note

The plan of this volume follows the general format established for Scarecrow’s series of Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts—and, in particular, that of Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism. Although only eight decades of the vast history of American theatre are covered in Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater: 1930–2010, and despite the fact that the focus is narrowly on legitimate theatre, leaving musical and variety entertainments (not to mention film, radio, and television) aside, the impressive richness of the American stage between 1930 and 2010 necessitated somewhat selective coverage. To list every performer, designer, producer, or critic who made a mark on the theatre of this period, or to include an entry for every play of significance (and less important works reflecting the tastes of the times) and theatre companies and producing organizations might have doubled or tripled the length of this ample volume. Difficult choices of inclusion were made with an effort to understand the probable needs of prospective readers or researchers. Consideration was given to the relative influence of persons, institutions, and plays with attention paid to those boasting a potential for cross-referencing. Yet in doing so, the author’s discretion was applied in terms of including names and titles that represented both significant and obscure developments, individuals, and plays with the hope of creating a portrait of a rapidly changing and increasingly diverse era. The vastness and diversity of American theatre between 1930 and 2010 may be ascertained in the volume’s bibliography, which is divided into subcategories. Other approaches to the material are offered in the chronology, in the introduction, and in selected overview entries on some broad topics (actors, directors, designers, critics, etc.). These overview entries aim to include important names relevant to that category and to provide a historical context and a survey of innovations and representative work. Many overview entries are also included to provide insight into critical movements either requiring some context or, as in the case of musical theatre, a major development which otherwise is not covered in individual entries in this volume (with a few notable exceptions). Developments in African-American, Chicano, Feminist, and Gay and Lesbian drama, Yiddish theatre, academic theatre, xi

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the Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre movements, and international stars performing in the United States (or important international dramatists—William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht—whose works were profoundly influential between 1930 and 2010) are among the overview entries included. Individual entries in Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater are included on noteworthy dramatists, actors, directors, designers, producers, and critics, as well as important and representative individual plays, theatrical publications, companies, producing organizations, unions, technical developments, historical events, genres, archives, and regional activities, among others. Play entries include at least brief plot summaries, but may also emphasize important participants in the original production, critical response, pertinent anecdotes, information on noted revivals, and commentary intended to illuminate the play’s influence. In cases where the influence or accomplishments of an individual entry begins prior to 1930 but extends well beyond, the entry included here will stress post-1930 activity and a separate individual entry is likely to be found in Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism emphasizing pre-1930 accomplishments. To facilitate use, there is ample cross-referencing. Names, titles, terms, etc., included in the Modernism volume will be indicated with an asterisk (Eugene O’Neill,* for example), while names, titles, etc., given an individual entry in this volume will be identified by bold type. To avoid a counterproductive excess of bolding, a number of commonly used and familiar terms (actor, director, producer, manager, star, tour, legitimate, amateur, film, and their various derivations) and entries that appear in both the Modernism and Contemporary volume are formatted using small caps (Eugene O’Neill). Individual entries that are included in both volumes will be represented with a dagger (e.g., O’NEILL, EUGENE.†). See also is used as well in order to report entries which are related but not specifically mentioned (and bolded) in the entry. Finally, a bibliography of sources consulted in the writing of these entries will guide the reader to the vast storehouse of writing on this era of American theatre.

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

AADA ACT AEA AFA AGVA AIDS AJT ANT ANTA APA APT ART ARTEF ASF ASFTA AST ASTR ATA ATCA ATHE ATL ATW BA BAM BL BPT BTN CRC CRT CS CSC CSF CT CTC

American Academy of Dramatic Art American Conservatory Theatre Actors’ Equity Association Actor’s Fund of America American Guild of Variety Artists Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome American Jewish Theatre American Negro Theatre American National Theatre and Academy Association of Producing Artists American Place Theatre American Repertory Theatre The Workers’ Theatre Group Alabama Shakespeare Festival American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Academy Asolo State Theatre American Society for Theatre Research American Theatre Association American Theatre Critics Association Association of Theatre in Higher Education Actors Theatre of Louisville American Theatre Wing Broadway Alliance Brooklyn Academy of Music Broadway League Body Politic Theatre Black Theatre Network Circle Repertory Company Civic Repertory Theatre Center Stage Classic Stage Company Colorado Shakespeare Festival Crossroads Theatre Children’s Theatre Company xiii

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CTG DG DL DTC ELT EST ETC FSL FTP GT HGT HST HTC HUAC INTAR IRT JCR JRT KC KCRT LATC LATP LC LCT LHAT LORT LWT LTC MT MTC MTF MRT NAG NAT NATC NBT NEA NEC NJSF NP NPC NTC NTD

Center Theatre Group Dramatists Guild Drama League Denver Theatre Center Equity Library Theatre Ensemble Studio Theatre Eureka Theatre Company Folger Shakespeare Library Federal Theatre Project Goodman Theatre Hudson Guild Theatre Hartford Stage Company Huntington Theatre Company House Un-American Activities Committee International Arts Relations, Inc. Indiana Repertory Theatre Jean Cocteau Repertory Jewish Repertory Theatre Kennedy Center Kansas City Repertory Theatre Los Angeles Theatre Center League of American Theatre and Producers Lincoln Center Louisville Children’s Theatre League of Historic American Theatres League of Resident Theatres Long Wharf Theatre Lookingglass Theatre Company Mercury Theatre Manhattan Theatre Club Mark Taper Forum Milwaukee Repertory Theatre Negro Actors Guild National Actors Theatre Naked Angels Theatre Company National Black Theatre National Endowment for the Arts Negro Ensemble Company New Jersey Shakespeare Festival The Neighborhood Playhouse National Playwrights Conference National Theatre Conference National Theatre of the Deaf

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ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

NYSF NYTW OGT OSF OT OTC PART PBP PH PMA PMP PRC PS RCA RKO RSC RTC RTLC RTSL SAT SC SCR SCT SFMT SRT SS SSDC SST STC TCG TG TKTS TTP USF USITT VGT VSC WCP WG WTF YRT

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• xv

New York Shakespeare Festival New York Theatre Workshop Old Globe Theatre Oregon Shakespeare Festival Open Theatre Organic Theatre Company Pan Asian Repertory Theatre Paper Bag Players Playwrights Horizons Producing Managers Association Paper Mill Playhouse Playmakers Repertory Company Primary Stages Radio Corporation of America Radio Keith Orpheum Royal Shakespeare Company Roundabout Theatre Company Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre of St. Louis Studio Arena Theatre The Second City South Coast Repertory Seattle Children’s Theatre San Francisco Mime Troupe Seattle Repertory Theatre Syracuse Stage The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Second Stage Theatre Steppenwolf Theatre Company Theatre Communications Group The Theatre Guild Tickets Booth Tectonic Theatre Company Utah Shakespeare Festival United States Institute for Theatre Technology Victory Gardens Theatre Vermont Stage Company Westport Community Playhouse The Wooster Group Williamstown Theatre Festival Yale Repertory Theatre

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Chronology

Pre-1930 The development of American theatre and drama from its true beginnings in the eighteenth century to the Wall Street economic crash of late 1929 reflects the evolution of the history of the United States and, most significantly, its culture. The rise of modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century encouraged American dramatists to move away from romantic, sentimental, and melodramatic plays toward a serious drama in the mode of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and other titans of modern drama. Some experimentation by U.S. playwrights in this direction began as early as 1890, as in James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming and the work of a few other dramatists, most notably Bronson Howard, William Vaughn Moody, Clyde Fitch, and Edward Sheldon, who also experimented with realistic techniques and franker subject matter drawn from previously taboo areas. A major turning point came in the decade following World War I in the plays of Eugene O’Neill who, inspired by classical drama, modernist concepts drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, experimented with a wide range of new forms including expressionism, symbolism, and realism. O’Neill’s singular accomplishments inspired a generation of American playwrights who similarly contributed bold new concepts, supported by designers, directors, and actors similarly disposed toward realism and a new seriousness in subject matter. In the same era, a vigorous American musical theatre flourished and, along with O’Neill and his peers, a Golden Age of American Theatre commenced at the same moment the emergence of radio and sound films threatened the predominance of the live stage, as did a decade-long Great Depression resulting from the 1929 stock market crash. 1930 The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Circuit merges with Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to establish Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). The League of New York Theatres & Producers is founded. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston collaborate on a race-themed drama, Mule Bone, but it is not produced. New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre is founded. 26 February: Marc Connelly’s all-black The Green Pastures, based on biblical stories, opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 24 September: Once in a Lifetime opens; it is xvii

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the first of eight comedies George S. Kaufman writes in collaboration with Moss Hart. 3 November: Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse drama Elizabeth the Queen opens. 1 December: Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House opens in a production by Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (CRT) and wins the 1931 Pulitzer Prize. 1931 The Westport Country Playhouse begins operations in Westport, Connecticut. 26 January: Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs opens at the Guild Theatre; that same night, Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre opens its biggest commercial success, Camille. 27 January: Noël Coward’s Private Lives, costarring Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, opens on Broadway following a successful London run. 9 February: Katharine Cornell opens and scores a major personal success in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, merging producing with acting. 5 March: Rachel Crothers’s As Husbands Go opens. 28 September: The Group Theatre offers its first production, Paul Green’s The House of Connelly, under the direction of Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, with Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, Morris Carnovsky, and Franchot Tone among the cast on opening night. 26 October: Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, a trilogy inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia, opens in a Theatre Guild production starring Alla Nazimova, Alice Brady, and Earle Larimore. 6 November: Paul Muni rises to stardom when Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law opens at the Plymouth Theatre. 26 December: The musical satire Of Thee I Sing, with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and libretto by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, opens at the Music Box Theatre and becomes the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 1932 12 January: Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom opens starring British actor Leslie Howard, who becomes a major Broadway star. 25 April: Another Language by Rose Franken opens. 19 May: The Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical, Show Boat, is revived with Paul Robeson scoring a personal success singing “Ol’ Man River.” June: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne sever their successful relationship with The Theatre Guild, but return three years later when Lunt joins the Guild’s board of directors. 2 October: Yiddish theatre star Maurice Schwartz wins critical acclaim in his own adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yoshe Kalb, which moves from the Yiddish Art Theatre to Broadway in 1933. 6 October: When Ladies Meet, the 26th play by Rachel Crothers in 26 years, opens at the Royale Theatre. 22 October: George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Dinner at Eight opens to critical acclaim using an innovative revolving stage technique. 12 December: S. N. Behrman’s comedy, Biography, opens at the Guild Theatre. 20 December: Katharine Cornell, directed by her husband, Guthrie McClintic,

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opens in Thornton Wilder’s translation of André Obey’s Lucrece, Wilder’s first Broadway endeavor; a week later, Cornell is pictured on the cover of Time magazine. 29 December: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur score a Broadway hit with their comedy Twentieth Century, directed by George Abbott, which opens starring Eugenie Leontovich. 1933 Despite the deepening economic woes of the Great Depression, 151 productions are seen on Broadway during the 1933–1934 season. Eva Le Gallienne is forced to shutter her Civic Repertory Theatre due to financial strains exacerbated by the Depression. Robert Porterfield founds the Barter Theatre in Abington, Virginia, this year. 24 January: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne costar with Noël Coward in Coward’s risqué comedy, Design for Living, which opens at the Barrymore Theatre. 15 February: James P. Hagan’s comedy, One Sunday Afternoon, opens. 20 February: Katharine Cornell opens at the Belasco Theatre in Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn. 6 March: Maxwell Anderson’s drama, Both Your Houses, attacking political corruption, opens and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 13 April: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera opens but receives mostly negative reviews and closes within two weeks. 12 September: The Group Theatre stages its first major success with Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning medical drama, Men in White. 2 October: Eugene O’Neill’s first comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, opens in a Theatre Guild production starring George M. Cohan, making his first appearance in a play by another writer. 20 October: English dramatist Mordaunt Shairp’s controversial gay-themed drama, The Green Bay Tree, opens on Broadway in a Jed Harris production with Laurence Olivier among the cast. 23 October: Roland Young stars in his mother-in-law, Clare Kummer’s, comedy, Her Master’s Voice. 27 November: Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse historical drama, Mary of Scotland, opens at the Alvin Theatre starring Helen Hayes and Helen Menken. 29 November: The non-profit, politically inspired Theatre Union opens its first production, Peace on Earth, at the Civic Repertory Theatre. 4 December: Jack Kirkland’s adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road opens at the Masque Theatre, beginning its remarkable 3,182 performance run. 1934 8 January: Eugene O’Neill’s Days without End opens to negative reviews causing O’Neill to give up active production of his new plays on Broadway for a dozen years. 24 February: Sidney Howard’s drama, Dodsworth, starring Walter Huston and Fay Bainter, opens to critical acclaim. 29 September: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along, which tells its story in reverse, begins its run to a mixed critical reaction. 12 November: Ireland’s Abbey Theatre begins a New York season at the John Golden Theatre. 20 November: Lillian Hellman’s first play, The Children’s

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Hour, is successfully produced, although it causes controversy over hints of a lesbian relationship between the two leading characters. 20 December: Costarring with Basil Rathbone, Katharine Cornell wins critical acclaim as Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when it opens under the direction of her husband, Guthrie McClintic. 1935 The American National Theatre and Academy is founded by Cheryl Crawford and Robert Breen, and the New York Drama Critics Circle is formed. 7 January: After a decade of innocuous juvenile roles, Humphrey Bogart becomes a Broadway star playing a John Dillinger-style gangster when The Petrified Forest, Robert E. Sherwood’s drama of post-World War I disillusionments, premieres; that same night, Zöe Akins’s The Old Maid, starring Judith Anderson and Helen Menken, opens at the Empire Theatre. 30 January: George Abbott-John Cecil Holm’s comedy, Three Men on a Horse scores a hit with critics and audiences at its first performance. 19 February: The Group Theatre’s production of Clifford Odets’s drama Awake and Sing! wins critical acclaim as one of their most defining productions, with a cast including Stella and Luther Adler, John Garfield, Morris Carnovsky, Sanford Meisner, and Phoebe Brand, under Harold Clurman’s direction; little more than a month later, Odets’s Waiting for Lefty opens and also wins acclaim, as do two additional Odets plays produced by the Group that year. 26 July: Hallie Flanagan is appointed head of the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” administration; among its many lofty goals, the Federal Theatre Project aims to employ theatre workers and bring all forms of plays to all parts of the United States. 26 September: Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama in a modern setting, Winterset, premieres and a strong cast includes Burgess Meredith, who wins critical kudos. October: Elmer Rice is appointed New York Regional Director of the Federal Theatre Project and within weeks announces the creation of the “Living Newspaper” unit and the Negro Theatre unit, among others. 10 October: George Gershwin’s “folk opera,” Porgy and Bess, adapted from DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s 1927 play, Porgy, opens to mixed reviews—critics are confused, not sure if it is an opera or a musical. 24 October: Langston Hughes’s drama, Mulatto, begins a short run at the Vanderbilt Theatre with African American actress Rose McClendon in the cast. 28 October: Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, a naturalistic drama of New York street life during the Great Depression, is produced to critical acclaim. 27 November: George Abbott’s direction of Sam and Bella Spewack’s Hollywood spoof, Boy Meets Girl, opens for a long run. 26 December: Helen Hayes scores her greatest critical success playing Queen Victoria, aging from 18 to 80, when Lawrence Housman’s Victoria Regina begins its run.

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1936 Eugene O’Neill wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first and only American playwright so honored. 21 January: Ruth Gordon and Raymond Massey win critical kudos following the opening of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, adapted by Owen and Donald Davis, at the National Theatre. 23 January: Elmer Rice resigns as New York Regional Director of the Federal Theatre Project in reaction to attempts to censor “Living Newspaper” productions. 14 March: The first “Living Newspaper” production, Triple-A Plowed Under, opens at the Biltmore Theatre, generating controversy for the inclusion of a Communist character; a week later, the Federal Theatre Project stages T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which wins critical approval, at the Manhattan Theatre. 24 March: Robert E. Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight, costarring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, wins the Pulitzer Prize following its premiere. 9 April: The Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project opens an all-black version of Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem; set in nineteenth-century Haiti, critics label the production the “voodoo Macbeth.” 18 April: Irwin Shaw’s surreal antiwar drama, Bury the Dead, opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. 8 October: John Gielgud appears in Hamlet, supported by Judith Anderson and Lillian Gish, winning kudos for his poetic approach to the character; the production racks up 136 performances, breaking John Barrymore’s record of 101 (Leslie Howard brings his Hamlet to Broadway in a competing production on 10 November). 22 October: George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s comedy-drama, Stage Door, depicting the threadbare lives of aspiring young actresses, wins positive reviews when it opens at the Music Box Theatre. 27 October: Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, produced by the Federal Theatre Project, premieres on Broadway and, simultaneously, in cities across the country. 19 November: The Group Theatre stages the antiwar satire Johnny Johnson, under Lee Strasberg’s direction, at the 44th Street Theatre. 14 December: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You begins its long run at the Booth Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. 26 December: Clare Boothe’s The Women, a savagely satiric comedy on the frictions among New York society women, opens to mostly positive reviews at the Barrymore Theatre with a large female-only cast. 1937 The first outdoor drama, Paul Green’s The Lost Colony, opens in Virginia. 8 January: Orson Welles and John Housman open a Federal Theatre Project production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, with Welles directing. 9 January: Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor opens at the Martin Beck Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 5 March: Margaret Webster directs Maurice Evans in Richard II at the St. James Theatre. 19 May: The wacky John Murray and Alan Boretz backstage farce, Room Service, begins a long run under the direction of George Abbott.

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16 June: Controversy surrounds the Federal Theatre Project production of Marc Blizstein’s musical satire, The Cradle Will Rock, under Orson Welles’s direction; its planned opening at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre is blocked when the theatre is padlocked by authorities in an attempt to censor the show’s content, but Welles and cast move to the vacant Venice Theatre and perform without scenery or costumes in defiance of the attempted censorship. 7 October: Susan and God, starring Gertrude Lawrence, premieres to appreciative reviews; it is playwright Rachel Crothers’s last Broadway play. 1 November: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne open at the Shubert Theatre in Jean Giraudoux’s comedy Amphytrion 38. 2 November: Legendary star and playwright George M. Cohan scores a personal success playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical satire, I’d Rather Be Right. 4 November: Clifford Odets’s drama Golden Boy wins critical acclaim in a Group Theatre production under Harold Clurman’s direction. 11 November: Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, presents a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar, offering parallels with the rise of fascism in Europe. 23 November: Of Mice and Men, adapted (and directed) by George S. Kaufman from John Steinbeck’s novel, opens at the Music Box Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 1938 The American Guild of Variety Artists is founded as a support organization, but by the following year it becomes a union. 17 January: The Federal Theatre Project’s “Living Newspaper” production, One Third of a Nation, written by Arthur Arent, premieres at the Adelphi Theatre. 3 February: Veteran character actor Dudley Digges wins acclaim for his performance as an old man in a battle of wits with Death, when he opens in Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time. 4 February: Thornton Wilder’s classic American drama, Our Town, begins its acclaimed run at Henry Miller’s Theatre under Jed Harris’s direction, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Wilder the first American writer to win the Pulitzer in two categories (having previously won for Literature for his 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey). 28 March: Uta Hagen appears in her Broadway debut in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Shubert Theatre, playing opposite Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, under the direction of Margaret Webster. 1 July: The Playwrights Company is incorporated by founders Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood. 22 September: The zany musical revue Hellzapoppin’, starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, is staged at the 46th Street Theatre for a remarkably long run of 1,404 performances. 10 October: Maurice Evans opens in the title role of Hamlet in an uncut version of the play. 15 October: Robert E. Sherwood’s historical drama, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, begins a run at the Plymouth Theatre, winning a Pulitzer Prize and laudatory critical comments on Raymond Massey’s

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portrayal of Lincoln. 19 October: Dramatic actor Walter Huston makes his musical debut in Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s Knickerbocker Holiday, which opens at the Barrymore Theatre; Huston delivers a memorable rendition of “The September Song.” December: Clifford Odets appears on the cover of Time magazine, with a story emphasizing his work with The Group Theatre. 22 December: Legendary actress Laurette Taylor returns to Broadway in triumph in a revival of Sutton Vance’s Outward Bound following a decade-long struggle with alcoholism; Taylor’s performance is seen at the Playhouse Theatre under Otto Preminger’s direction. 28 December: Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers fails to find favor despite Jane Cowl in the lead and Max Reinhardt’s direction when the gentle comedy opens at the Guild Theatre. 1939 The American Theatre Wing, a service and charitable organization, is founded by Rachel Crothers and other theatrical women. The Clarence Brown Theatre Company is established at the University of Tennessee and morphs into a repertory theatre in 1972. 3 January: Ethel Waters receives mixed reviews for her performance as a self-sacrificing mother in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters, which opens at the Empire Theatre. 15 February: Tallulah Bankhead scores a personal triumph as the avaricious Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s searing melodrama, The Little Foxes, which premieres under Herman Shumlin’s direction at the National Theatre. 28 March: Katharine Hepburn revives her fading career with a stellar performance in Philip Barry’s high comedy set among the wealthy, The Philadelphia Story, when it is staged at the Shubert Theatre with Joseph Cotten, Van Heflin, and Shirley Booth in the supporting cast. 13 April: William Saroyan’s first play, My Heart’s in the Highlands, opens at the Guild Theatre. 17 April: Young British actor Laurence Olivier supports Katharine Cornell in S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy, a hit at the Biltmore Theatre. May: The New York World’s Fair begins and has a negative impact on theatre ticket sales on Broadway. 30 June: Funding for the Federal Theatre Project is terminated by the U.S. Congress, effectively halting all operations and productions. 16 October: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner, begins a long run at the Music Box Theatre, affectionately satirizing Broadway and Hollywood personages such as Alexander Woollcott, Gertrude Lawrence, Harpo Marx, and others; Monty Woolley scores a personal success as the title character. 25 October: William Saroyan wins the Pulitzer Prize (which he rejects) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Time of Your Life, when it is staged at the Booth Theatre. 8 November: Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s comedy, Life with Father, adapted from Clarence Day’s stories, opens at the Empire Theatre and runs for a phenomenal 3,224 performances, with Lindsay playing

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the title character. 27 November: Key Largo, Maxwell Anderson’s drama, debuts at the Barrymore Theatre under Guthrie McClintic’s direction and with a cast including Paul Muni, Uta Hagen, and José Ferrer. 1940 Worsening war news in Europe has an impact on Broadway ticket sales. 9 January: The Male Animal, a gentle comedy by Elliott Nugent (who also plays the lead) and James Thurber, opens at the Cort Theatre. 31 January: John Barrymore appears in his final Broadway outing in the exploitive comedy My Dear Children, a slapdash affair filled with jokes echoing the alcoholic Barrymore’s off-stage troubles. 6 March: The Fifth Column, a rare play by Ernest Hemingway (in collaboration with Benjamin Glazer) focusing on the Spanish Civil War, premieres under Lee Strasberg’s direction for a short run. 29 April: Robert E. Sherwood’s drama about the Soviet invasion of Finland, There Shall Be No Night, wins the Pulitzer Prize following its opening at the Alvin Theatre, with a cast including Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Montgomery Clift, and Sydney Greenstreet. 5 June: The American Negro Theatre is founded in Harlem by Abram Hill and Frederick O’Neal. 18 October: The last collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, George Washington Slept Here, meets with a tepid response when it is staged at the Lyceum Theatre. 26 November: Ethel Barrymore gives one of her most acclaimed performances as Scottish schoolteacher Miss Moffat when Emlyn Williams’s drama, The Corn Is Green, opens at the National Theatre. 1941 10 January: Joseph Kesselring’s absurd dark comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace, starring Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, and Boris Karloff, begins a 1,444 performance run at the Fulton Theatre. 11 January: The pre-Broadway tryout of Tennessee Williams’s The Battle of Angels, produced by the Theatre Guild and starring Miriam Hopkins, folds in Boston. 12 February: Rose Franken’s popular comedy, Claudia, starring Dorothy McGuire, premieres at the Booth Theatre. 24 March: Under Orson Welles’s direction, Richard Wright and Paul Green’s drama of race prejudice, Native Son, adapted from Wright’s novel, is staged at the St. James Theatre starring Canada Lee. 1 April: Watch on the Rhine, Lillian Hellman’s grim drama about a German antifascist in the United States who faces returning to work in the underground in his native country, premieres at the Martin Beck Theatre to appreciative reviews. 31 May: The perennial Tobacco Road finally closes on Broadway after a record 3,180 performances. October: The Yiddish Art Theatre closes. 5 November: English dramatist Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit opens to an enthusiastic response and a long run at the Morosco Theatre. 18 November: Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields’s light comedy of adolescent shenanigans, Junior Miss, opens for a long run at the Lyceum Theatre;

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it is one of a series of such comedies that populate Broadway stages during the war years. 5 December: The thriller Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton, debuts at the John Golden Theatre for 1,293 performances. 7 December: The Japanese attack American forces at Pearl Harbor, leading to the entry of the United States into World War II. 1942 American involvement in World War II profoundly affects the functioning of Broadway, the road, and other aspects of the business of theatre in the United States. 2 March: The American Theatre Wing founds the Stage Door Canteen in a club under the 44th Street Theatre, with Broadway stars and other theatrical personnel serving as cooks and waiters for servicemen passing through New York. 18 May: The dimming out of Broadway lights is established as a means of avoiding air raid threats. 20 May: Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut star in Thomas Job’s drama, Uncle Harry, which opens at the Broadhurst Theatre. 7 October: Maxwell Anderson’s tragic wartime romance drama, The Eve of St. Mark, premieres at the Cort Theatre. November: New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson leaves his duties to become a war correspondent in Asia. 10 November: Katharine Hepburn stars at the St. James Theatre in Philip Barry’s comedy, Without Love, costarring with Elliott Nugent. 18 November: Thornton Wilder’s innovative seriocomic play, The Skin of Our Teeth, premieres at the Plymouth Theatre with a cast including Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead; under Elia Kazan’s direction, the play wins the Pulitzer Prize. 21 December: Katharine Cornell produces a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, costarring Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Judith Anderson, which opens at the Barrymore Theatre to admiring reviews. 1943 No Pulitzer Prize for Drama is awarded this year. 29 January: Sidney Kingsley’s The Patriots, a drama about the founding fathers, opens at the National Theatre. 3 March: Harriet premieres at Henry Miller’s Theatre starring Helen Hayes as Harriet Beecher Stowe. 14 April: Arnaud d’Usseau and James Gow’s Tomorrow the World, a drama about a young boy brainwashed to be a Nazi, begins its run at the Barrymore Theatre. 19 October: Paul Robeson is acclaimed in the title role of William Shakespeare’s Othello, when it opens at the Shubert Theatre; Robeson plays opposite Uta Hagen and critics uniformly praise the costarring of an African American and a white performer, once a taboo. 8 December: John Van Druten’s comedy, The Voice of the Turtle, starring Margaret Sullavan, debuts at the Morosco Theatre for an unexpectedly long run of 1,557 performances. 1944 The Donaldson Awards are created to honor Broadway’s best work. 3 January: Ruth Gordon stars in her own play, the comedy Over 21, at the

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Music Box Theatre. 20 February: The Equity Library Theatre (ELT) is founded. 12 April: Lillian Hellman’s antiappeasement drama, The Searching Wind, meets with mixed reviews at the Fulton Theatre despite a strong cast, including Dudley Digges, Montgomery Clift, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Dennis King. 27 June: Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, Ten Little Indians, premieres at the Broadhurst Theatre. 30 August: Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta, about an African American prostitute, opens in an American Negro Theatre production. 19 October: John Van Druten’s warm comedy of a 1910s Norwegian-American family, I Remember Mama, begins a long run at the Music Box Theatre; the cast includes Marlon Brando in his Broadway debut. 1 November: Mary Chase’s whimsical comedy, Harvey, opens at the 48th Street Theatre starring Frank Fay and Josephine Hull and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 23 November: Arthur Miller’s first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, closes after only four performances at the Forrest Theatre. 6 December: Paul Osborn’s A Bell for Adano, adapted from John Hersey’s novel set in wartime Italy, stars Fredric March at the Cort Theatre. 1945 14 March: Howard Richardson and William Berney’s Smokey Mountains fantasy, Dark of the Moon, debuts at the 46th Street Theatre. 31 March: Tennessee Williams’s “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie, opens at the Playhouse Theatre following a pre-Broadway run in Chicago where the show nearly closes, reaping enthusiastic reviews for both Williams’s play and Laurette Taylor’s memorable performance, with Julie Haydon, Eddie Dowling, and Anthony Ross as the supporting cast. 12 April: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies in Warm Springs, Georgia, inspiring impromptu onstage tributes from Broadway actors at the conclusion of performances. 8 May: VE (Victory in Europe) Day as the war in Europe ends with Germany’s capitulation. 6 August: The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. 9 August: The United States drops a second atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki, Japan, leading to the capitulation of Japan. August–September: The surrender of Japan is announced on 15 August and the official surrender of Japan is signed on 2 September, ending World War II. 26 September: Arnaud d’Usseau and James Gow’s drama about a white woman in love with a black soldier, Deep Are the Roots, is staged at the Fulton Theatre starring Barbara Bel Geddes. 10 November: Film star Spencer Tracy returns to Broadway for the first time since 1930 in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Rugged Path at the Plymouth Theatre. 14 November: Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s comedy, State of the Union, about a presidential candidate whose estranged wife revives his integrity, is staged at the Hudson Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 14 December: Betty Field scores a personal triumph in the title role of Elmer Rice’s comedy, Dream Girl, which premieres at the Coronet Theatre; Field was married to Rice at the time.

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1946 9 January: Quoted in Variety, José Ferrer laments the limited opportunities for black actors on American stages and announces that he will not appear before segregated audiences; other white actors soon follow suit. 23 January: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne star in Terence Rattigan’s O Mistress Mine at the Empire Theatre. 4 February: Judy Holliday receives enthusiastic reviews as Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s comedy, Born Yesterday, which premieres at the Lyceum Theatre; film star Jean Arthur quit the production during its out-of-town tryout, providing Holliday with a starmaking role. 20 May: Laurence Olivier and the Old Vic Company appear for a season on Broadway, with Olivier impressing critics with his performances in a varied repertory, including Oedipus Rex and The Critic. 8 October: José Ferrer wins critical acclaim as Cyrano de Bergerac at the Alvin Theatre. 9 October: The last Eugene O’Neill play produced on Broadway during his lifetime, The Iceman Cometh, premieres at the Martin Beck Theatre with a cast including James Barton, Dudley Digges, and E. G. Marshall. 6 November: Eva Le Gallienne, Margaret Webster, and Cheryl Crawford found the American Repertory Theatre, but financial stresses permit only a single season that begins on this date with a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. 18 November: Ingrid Bergman wins acclaim in the title role of Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama Joan of Lorraine, which opens at the Alvin Theatre under Margo Jones’s direction. 20 November: Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman’s prequel to her 1939 play The Little Foxes, is staged at the Fulton Theatre and wins acclaim for actress Patricia Neal. 3 December: Ruth Gordon’s nostalgic semi-autobiographical comedy, Years Ago, opens at the Mansfield Theatre. 1947 The American Theatre Wing establishes the Antoinette Perry “Tony” Awards to honor Broadway excellence. The Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, is founded; Julian Beck and Judith Malina create The Living Theatre in New York; and actors Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer found the La Jolla Playhouse. 29 January: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons opens at the Coronet Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 5 March: Eugene O’Neill’s final drama, A Moon for the Misbegotten, folds during its pre-Broadway tryout in Detroit, Michigan, where the local censor calls it a slander on motherhood. 6 April: The first Tony Awards ceremony is held. 1 October: William Wister Haines’s Command Decision, a drama of an Air Force officer nearly driven to suicide by the pressure of sending pilots to near certain death, premieres at the Fulton Theatre. 5 October: The Actors Studio offers its first session. 20 October: Judith Anderson wins acclaim from critics in Robinson Jeffers’s free adaptation of Euripides’ Medea at the National Theatre under the direction of John Gielgud; Marian Seldes makes her Broadway debut in the production appearing in a small role. 3 December:

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Tennessee Williams’s searing drama, A Streetcar Named Desire, wins critical acclaim at the Barrymore Theatre and is awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award under Elia Kazan’s direction, with a cast including Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, all of whom are also acclaimed. 1948 Broadway actors and directors begin working with regularity in television shows originating from New York. 19 January: Katharine Cornell is pictured on the cover of Newsweek magazine accompanying an article celebrating her numerous stage triumphs. 18 February: Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s comedy-drama Mister Roberts begins its 1,157 performance run starring Henry Fonda, who receives critical kudos for his performance as a self-sacrificing officer on a Navy cargo ship during the last days of World War II. 6 October: Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke premieres at the Music Box Theatre. 17 November: Film star Madeleine Carroll opens in Fay Kanin’s romantic comedy Goodbye, My Fancy at the Morosco Theatre. 18 November: Moss Hart’s backstage satire, Light Up the Sky, is staged at the Royale Theatre. 22 November: A cover story in Time magazine on Tallulah Bankhead traces her long career and her recent Broadway success in a revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. 8 December: English actor Rex Harrison makes his Broadway debut playing Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama, Anne of the Thousand Days, at the Shubert Theatre. 1949 Small New York theatres begin to coalesce into what eventually becomes known as Off-Broadway through arrangements with Actors Equity Association and other theatrical unions. On Broadway, the top theatre ticket price is $6.60 on weekends. The Drama Desk Awards are established. 10 February: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premieres at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre under Elia Kazan’s direction, with Lee J. Cobb starring as the tragic central character, Willy Loman, with supporting performances by Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy, and Cameron Mitchell; the play, which is regarded by many as the quintessential American drama, wins the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 23 March: Sidney Kingsley’s naturalistic drama, Detective Story, opens at the Hudson Theatre. 19 May: New York’s Palace Theatre unsuccessfully attempts to revive vaudeville for the first time since 1933. 2 November: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne star in S. N. Behrman’s comedy, I Know, My Love, at the Shubert Theatre. 1950 5 January: Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, starring Ethel Waters and Julie Harris, premieres at the Empire Theatre winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 21 January: T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party debuts at Henry Miller’s Theatre. 26 January: Katharine Hepburn

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appears to critical acclaim as Rosalind in As You Like It at the Cort Theatre. 15 February: William Inge’s first play, Come Back, Little Sheba, opens at the Booth Theatre in a Theatre Guild production featuring Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer. 24 April: Film star Jean Arthur wins critical approval in a revival of Peter Pan, costarring Boris Karloff. 27 June: U.S. President Harry S. Truman commits U.S. military troops to Korea and the Korean War begins. 16 August: Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage is founded. 10 November: Clifford Odets’s newest play, The Country Girl, stars Uta Hagen and Paul Kelly at the Lyceum Theatre. 1951 13 January: Darkness at Noon, Sidney Kingsley’s anti-Communist drama, opens at the Alvin Theatre. 2 February: New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre, founded by José Quintero and Theodore Mann, presents its first production, Howard Richardson’s Dark of the Moon. 3 February: Maureen Stapleton wins critical kudos in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, which opens at the Martin Beck Theatre. 8 March: F. Hugh Herbert’s risqué comedy, The Moon Is Blue, opens at Henry Miller’s Theatre starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson. 8 May: The World War II prisoner-of-war comedy-drama Stalag 17, written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, premieres at the 48th Street Theatre. 26 June: J. Edward Bromberg, a member of The Group Theatre, refuses to cooperate when testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). October: Judy Garland brings two-a-day vaudeville back to New York’s Palace Theatre for an announced four-week run that turns into a record-breaking 19-week engagement; other performers follow suit, with none matching Garland’s success. 24 October: The husband-and-wife acting team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy win critical acclaim at the Barrymore Theatre in Jan de Hartog’s The Fourposter, directed by José Ferrer. 28 November: Julie Harris scores a personal success as Sally Bowles in John Van Druten’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” I Am a Camera, when it premieres at the Empire Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 13 December: After a lengthy run and tour in Mister Roberts, Henry Fonda returns to Broadway in Paul Osborn’s Point of No Return, which opens at the Alvin Theatre. 20 December: British stars Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who are married, arrive to acclaim on Broadway playing the title characters in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. 1952 Herbert Blau and Jules Irving found the Actors Workshop in San Francisco, an early regional theatre. 15 January: Joseph Kramm’s The Shrike opens at the Cort Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 20 February: Helen Hayes garners appreciative reviews in Mary Chase’s Mrs. McThing at

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the Martin Beck Theatre. 12 March: John Garfield appears in a revival of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy at the ANTA Playhouse under Odets’s direction. 10 April: Elia Kazan testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, “naming names” of alleged Communists in theatre and films. 24 April: Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke is revived at the Circle in the Square under José Quintero’s direction, with Geraldine Page winning praise for her performance as Alma Winemiller. 15 October: Shirley Booth wins critical praise in Arthur Laurents’s comedy-drama The Time of the Cuckoo at the Empire Theatre. 29 October: Frederick Knott’s thriller, Dial M for Murder, debuts at the Plymouth Theatre starring Maurice Evans. 20 November: Tom Ewell opens in George Axelrod’s hit comedy, The Seven Year Itch, at the Fulton Theatre. 1953 The number of Broadway productions drops to around 50 during the 1953–1954 season. 22 January: Arthur Miller’s historical drama, The Crucible, depicting the seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials, premieres at the Martin Beck Theatre with critics finding the play a metaphor for the anti-Communist witchhunts and blacklisting spearheaded by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. 23 January: Yiddish theatre star Menasha Skulnik makes the transition to Broadway, appearing in Sylvia Regan’s comedy The Fifth Season at the Cort Theatre. 19 February: William Inge’s comedy-drama, Picnic, opens at the Music Box Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 19 March: Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, a symbolic drama featuring characters from literary history, is pilloried by critics in its Broadway premiere at the National Theatre, inspiring Williams to write a letter to the New York Times defending this highly experimental work. 30 September: Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy opens at the Barrymore Theatre and scores a hit despite controversy over its homosexual theme. 5 November: Josephine Hull wins critical approval in her last Broadway role as a little old lady taking on corporate interests in George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann’s The Solid Gold Cadillac at the Belasco Theatre. 11 November: Margaret Sullavan appears in Samuel Taylor’s popular romantic comedy, Sabrina Fair, at the National Theatre. 29 December: Novelist Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House opens at the Playhouse to critical acclaim. 1954 Joe Papp founds the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre begins operations. 20 January: With a cast including Henry Fonda and Lloyd Nolan, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny CourtMartial opens at the Plymouth Theatre. 18 February: Audrey Hepburn wins critical approval in Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine, which opens at the 46th Street Theatre. 10 March: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Op-

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era wins critical acclaim Off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys with Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, appearing in a leading role. 27 October: Kim Stanley opens at the Playhouse Theatre in Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady and scores a personal success. 28 October: N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker opens at the Cort Theatre starring Geraldine Page and Darren McGavin. 8 December: Maxwell Anderson’s The Bad Seed, a thriller about a murderous child, opens at the 46th Street Theatre. 1955 The Williamstown Theatre Festival is founded at Williams College. 10 February: Joseph Hayes’s Tony Award-winning thriller, The Desperate Hours, opens at the Barrymore Theatre with a cast including Karl Malden, George Grizzard, and Paul Newman. 2 March: William Inge’s Bus Stop, starring Kim Stanley in a comedy-drama about travelers stranded in a Midwestern blizzard, premieres at the Music Box Theatre. 24 March: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wins critical acclaim at the Morosco Theatre as well as a Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award; the cast includes Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, Burl Ives, and Mildred Dunnock. 21 April: Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized dramatization of the Scopes “Monkey” trial debate on evolution versus creationism, opens at the National Theatre starring Paul Muni, Ed Begley, and Tony Randall. 1 September: Actor Philip Loeb commits suicide and his death is blamed, in part, on the fact that he had lost his leading role opposite star and writer Gertrude Berg in TV’s popular series The Goldbergs due to the blacklist; Berg battles with television executives to save Loeb’s job, but cannot. 29 September: Arthur Miller’s one-act, A View from the Bridge, premieres at the Coronet Theatre with a cast including Van Heflin and Eileen Heckart. 5 October: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank wins the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Tony Award for its dramatization of the experience of a young Jewish girl caught up in the Holocaust. 20 October: Andy Griffith scores a personal success as a genial country boy in the U.S. Army in Ira Levin’s No Time for Sergeants at the Alvin Theatre. 9 November: The Actors Studio production of Michael Gazzo’s drama about drug addicts, A Hatful of Rain, opens at the Lyceum Theatre starring Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara. 5 December: Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a revision of his 1938 flop The Merchant of Yonkers, begin its run at the Royale Theatre starring Ruth Gordon, who wins critical acclaim for her performance as the irrepressible Dolly Gallagher Levi under Tyrone Guthrie’s direction. 1956 The Obie Awards are established by the Village Voice to honor theatrical achievement in Off-Broadway theatres, and the American Society for Theatre Research is founded. 12 January: Orson Welles directs himself in a

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production of King Lear at the City Center. 8 February: Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night opens at the ANTA Theatre starring Edward G. Robinson in a rare return to Broadway. 15 February: Tallulah Bankhead appears in a controversial limited-run City Center revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with some critics and audiences feeling Bankhead’s camp persona overwhelmed the delicate role of Blanche DuBois. 19 April: Samuel Beckett’s “Theatre of the Absurd” play Waiting for Godot debuts on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre to puzzled responses from most critics and audiences; Bert Lahr, E. G. Marshall, Kurt Kasznar, and Alvin Epstein are the cast. 8 May: A revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, directed by José Quintero, premieres at the Circle in the Square to critical acclaim for the play and actor Jason Robards, who begins a close association with O’Neill’s plays. 29 June: Arthur Miller marries film star Marilyn Monroe. August: Colleen Dewhurst scores an early success in Joe Papp’s production of The Taming of the Shrew; this performance, as well as her role OffBroadway in The Eagle Has Two Heads, brings Dewhurst an Obie Award. 31 October: Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s comedy Auntie Mame, adapted from Patrick Dennis’s novel, opens at the Broadhurst Theatre for a long run. 7 November: Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night debuts with a cast including Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards, and Bradford Dillman, directed by José Quintero, at the Helen Hayes Theatre; O’Neill, who had left his widow instructions not to permit production until 25 years after his death, wins a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, as well as a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award. 18 December: Uta Hagen stars in a rare Broadway production of a Bertolt Brecht play, in this case The Good Woman of Setzuan, at the Phoenix Theatre. 1957 7 February: Gore Vidal’s satiric comedy, Visit to a Small Planet, opens at the Booth Theatre in a production directed by and starring Cyril Ritchard. 18 February: The House Un-American Activities Committee indicts Arthur Miller for contempt of the U.S. Congress when he refuses to answer questions. 21 March: Tennessee Williams’s classically inspired drama, Orpheus Descending, revised from his 1940 flop Battle of Angels, opens at the Martin Beck Theatre under Harold Clurman’s direction; critics are mixed, although appreciative of the performances of Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson. 10 July: Morris Carnovsky and Katharine Hepburn costar to acclaim in an American Shakespeare Festival production of The Merchant of Venice. 1 October: English dramatist John Osborne’s “angry young man” drama, Look Back in Anger, opens at the Lyceum Theatre, to mixed reviews. 28 November: Ketti Frings’s adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel opens at the Barrymore Theatre with a cast including Anthony Perkins, Jo Van Fleet, and Hugh Griffith. 5 December: William

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Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, starring Pat Hingle, Teresa Wright, and Eileen Heckart, wins critical approval in its first performance at the Music Box Theatre. 1958 Joseph Cino establishes the Caffe Cino, considered the epicenter of the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement. 16 January: Anne Bancroft plays opposite Henry Fonda in the two-character play, Two for the Seesaw, winning critical approval at the Booth Theatre. 30 January: Dore Schary’s historically based drama, Sunrise at Campobello, opens at the Cort Theatre with Ralph Bellamy playing Franklin D. Roosevelt in his struggle to return to politics after polio. 12 February: Laurence Olivier is acclaimed for his performance as a bitter music hall performer in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, at the Royale Theatre. 5 May: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne appear in their last Broadway roles in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, and the theatre in which they are appearing is renamed in their honor. 10 June: Blacklisted actor Zero Mostel wins critical kudos at Off-Broadway’s Rooftop Theatre in Padraic Colum’s Ulysses in Nighttown, adapted from James Joyce. 2 October: Eugene O’Neill’s previously unproduced drama, A Touch of the Poet, opens at the Helen Hayes Theatre under the direction of Harold Clurman and starring Helen Hayes, Kim Stanley, and Eric Portman. 11 December: Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning verse drama, J.B., debuts at the ANTA Theatre starring Raymond Massey, Christopher Plummer, and Pat Hingle, under Elia Kazan’s direction. 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower breaks ground for the construction of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. The number of Broadway productions declines as the regional theatre movement, fueled by the founding of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, grows. The Dallas Theatre Center is also established. 16 February: Gertrude Berg and Cedric Hardwicke appear in Leonard Spigelgass’s comedy of cultural understanding, A Majority of One, at the Shubert Theatre, winning a Tony Award for Berg. 10 March: Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Geraldine Page and Paul Newman, opens at the Martin Beck Theatre to positive reviews. 11 March: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun debuts at the Barrymore Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and much praise for the play and its cast including Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands; it is the first Broadway play by an African American woman. 15 July: Jack Gelber’s The Connection, a drama about drug addicts, is staged Off-Broadway in a Living Theatre production under Judith Malina’s direction. 19 October: Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke win critical acclaim as teacher Annie Sullivan and her pupil, Helen Keller, in William Gibson’s Tony Award-winning play, The

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Miracle Worker, at the Playhouse Theatre. 5 November: Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man opens at the Booth Theatre with a cast including Yiddish theatre actor Jacob Ben-Ami. 1960 The San Francisco Mime Troupe, a theatre collective inspired by leftwing politics and the traditions of commedia dell’arte, forms and inspires creation of other political, ethnic, and gender-themed companies. Asolo State Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, is founded by the Drama Department of Florida State University, and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park begins operations. The Association of Producing Artists is established by Ellis Rabb. Back Stage, a theatrical trade newspaper, begins publication. 14 January: Edward Albee’s one-act The Zoo Story, inspired by existential philosophy and Theatre of the Absurd techniques, is staged Off-Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse, winning critical approval and a long run. 25 February: Lillian Hellman’s semiautobiographical period drama, Toys in the Attic, premieres at the Hudson Theatre starring Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton, Irene Worth, and blacklisted actress Anne Revere. 31 March: Gore Vidal’s political drama, The Best Man, is staged at the Morosco Theatre. 10 November: Tennessee Williams’s A Period of Adjustment, a rare comedy from the playwright, debuts at the Helen Hayes Theatre. 30 November: Tad Mosel’s dark family drama, All the Way Home, opens at the Belasco Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 1961 Ellen Stewart founds La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, a major force in Off-Broadway theatre. Peter Schumann establishes the Bread & Puppet Theatre. 24 January: Edward Albee’s one-act absurdist play, The American Dream, is produced at Off-Broadway’s York Theatre under Alan Schneider’s direction. 22 February: Neil Simon’s first comedy, Come Blow Your Horn, scores a hit at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. 4 April: Kim Stanley wins praise from critics in Henry Denker’s A Far Country, a drama based on a Sigmund Freud case, at the Music Box Theatre. 28 September: Ossie Davis’s comedy about friendship between the races in the “Jim Crow” South, Purlie Victorious, opens at the Cort Theatre with a cast including Davis, Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, and Alan Alda. 9 November: Paddy Chayefsky’s drama, Gideon, concerning the relationship of God and man, stars Fredric March under Tyrone Guthrie’s direction at the Plymouth Theatre. 28 December: Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana premieres at the Royale Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; the drama stars Margaret Leighton, Patrick O’Neal, and Bette Davis, in a rare stage appearance. 1962 26 February: Arthur Kopit’s absurdist tragic-farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, debuts Off-

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Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre. 17 March: The APA Repertory Company begins its first season. 5 April: Jason Robards scores a personal success in Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 1 June: Actors Equity announces that its members will no longer appear in any theatres requiring the audience to be segregated. 18 June: Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival’s Delacorte Theatre opens in Central Park with a production of The Merchant of Venice starring George C. Scott. 13 October: Edward Albee’s first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, generates controversy at the Billy Rose Theatre with a cast including Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill; the play shatters prior taboos on strong language and adult situations, causing it to be denied a Pulitzer Prize when the selection committee opts not to give the award, although the play is otherwise acknowledged with a Tony Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 8 December: A New York newspaper strike begins and lasts for several months, undermining the runs of Broadway shows which can neither advertise nor be reviewed. 1963 The Open Theatre is founded by Joseph Chaiken and Peter Feldman. Baltimore’s Center Stage and the Seattle Repertory Theatre are founded. 8 January: George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Rip Torn are acclaimed in a Circle in the Square revival of Eugene O’Neill’s tragedy, Desire Under the Elms, under José Quintero’s direction. 16 January: Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens at the Morosco Theatre, but poor reviews close the play within two months. 11 March: The Actors Studio Theatre revives Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude under José Quintero’s direction and a cast including Geraldine Page, Franchot Tone, and Jane Fonda. 28 March: A rare Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is staged at the Martin Beck Theatre starring Anne Bancroft. 15 May: Kenneth Brown’s The Brig opens at the Living Theatre. 23 October: Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park begins a long run at the Biltmore Theatre under Mike Nichols’s direction, with an acclaimed cast including Elizabeth Ashley, Robert Redford, and Mildred Natwick. 22 November: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas; on Broadway, theatres are dark that night and again on the following Monday, the day of Kennedy’s funeral. 1964 The American Conservatory Theatre is founded by William Ball in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (although it later moves operations to San Francisco, California). Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville is founded by Richard Block and Ewel Cornett, and the American Place Theatre is established by Wynn Handman and Sidney Lanier at New York’s St. Clement’s Church. The Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Center is

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established in Connecticut and the South Coast Repertory is founded in California. 1 January: Tallulah Bankhead opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in her last Broadway appearance in a revised version of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, but critical apathy closes the play after five performances. 23 January: Arthur Miller’s After the Fall premieres at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre to predominantly negative reviews; critics fault Miller for what they consider a thinly veiled, selfserving portrait of his late wife, Marilyn Monroe. 23 March: LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) stages his racially themed one-act Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre. 9 April: Richard Burton wins acclaim in Hamlet, in a modern-dress, “rehearsal concept” staging at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre with a cast including Alfred Drake, Hume Cronyn, and Eileen Herlie under John Gielgud’s direction. 23 April: James Baldwin’s race-themed drama, Blues for Mr. Charlie, opens at the ANTA Theatre under Burgess Meredith’s direction in an Actors Studio production. 25 May: Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses premieres at the Royale Theatre, winning critical kudos for cast members Martin Sheen, Jack Albertson, and Irene Dailey, as well as a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 27 May: Ann Jellicoe’s Off-Broadway comedy, The Knack, begins a long run at the New Theatre. 22 June: An Actors Studio revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, starring Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page, opens at the Morosco Theatre under Lee Strasberg’s direction. 2 July: United States President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. 12 October: James Earl Jones wins critical kudos for his performance in the title role in Othello, in a New York Shakespeare Festival production at the Martinique Theatre. 11 November: Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, and Alan Arkin win praise in Murray Schisgal’s dark comedy, Luv, at the Booth Theatre. 3 December: Arthur Miller’s drama Incident at Vichy is produced at the ANTA Theatre with a cast including Hal Holbrook, David Wayne, Joseph Wiseman, and Tony Lo Bianco. 18 December: Two LeRoi Jones race-themed plays, The Toilet and The Slave, open at the St. Mark’s Playhouse. 22 December: Jason Robards is praised by critics for his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s one-act Hughie, which begins performances at the Royale Theatre. 29 December: Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice opens to puzzled critical response at the Billy Rose Theatre, despite a distinguished cast including John Gielgud and Irene Worth. 1965 Public demonstrations against the Vietnam War grow in size and number. The first major Asian American theatre company, East West Players, is founded. Luis Valdez establishes El Teatro Campesino, a theatre company dedicated to improving conditions for Chicano farmworkers in California. The Long Wharf Theatre opens in New Haven, Connecticut. John Clark Donahue opens The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapo-

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lis, Minnesota. The National Theatre of the Deaf is founded by David Hays and the Roundabout Theatre begins operations in New York. The League of Resident Theatres is set up by Peter Zeisler. 28 January: Arthur Miller’s expanded version of his 1955 one-act drama, A View from the Bridge, opens at the Sheridan Square Theatre and has a long run with Robert Duvall, who receives critical praise for his performance as longshoreman Eddie Carbone. 10 March: Walter Matthau and Art Carney open at the Plymouth Theatre in Neil Simon’s comedy The Odd Couple. 8 April: James Baldwin’s first play, The Amen Corner, based on his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. 26 April: Terrence McNally’s first Broadway play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, flops at the Royale Theatre. June: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts. 15 June: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy win praise in a revival of The Cherry Orchard at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 15 November: Douglas Turner Ward’s one-acts, Happy Ending and Day of Absence, are produced at the St. Mark’s Playhouse. 8 December: Film actress Lauren Bacall wins praise for her performance in Abe Burrows’s comedy, Cactus Flower, at the Royale Theatre. 1966 The Yale Repertory Theatre is founded by Robert Brustein. 3 March: James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, starring Rosemary Harris and Robert Preston, opens at the Ambassador Theatre. 21 April: Dustin Hoffman wins praise from critics in the Off-Broadway production of Ronald Ribman’s The Journey of the Fifth Horse at the American Place Theatre. 13 June: Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen debuts at the 81st Street Theatre with a cast including Sylvia Miles and Rip Torn. 22 September: Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance premieres at the Martin Beck Theatre with a cast including Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and Marian Seldes; the play is awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 5 October: British dramatist Frank Marcus’s lesbian-themed play, The Killing of Sister George, opens at the Belasco Theatre. 11 October: Megan Terry’s anti-Vietnam War musical play, Viet Rock, is staged at Yale University. November: The Roundabout Theatre Company stages its first production, a revival of August Strindberg’s The Father. 7 November: Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah opens at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. 17 November: Woody Allen’s comedy Don’t Drink the Water scores a hit at the Morosco Theatre. 1967 Joe Papp converts the old Astor Library into the New York Public Theatre with the goal of promoting diverse contemporary plays by new writers. Christopher Martin founds the Classic Stage Company and the Ensemble Studio Theatre is established to develop new American plays. Richard Schechner establishes the avant-garde The Performance Group and The

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Play-House of the Ridiculous commences operations. 22 February: Barbara Garson’s satire of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Macbird!, debuts at the Village Gate Theatre. 23 February: John Herbert’s searing prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, opens at the Actors Playhouse, generating controversy for its depiction of homosexuality. 13 March: Robert Anderson’s three one-acts with the overarching title You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running is a popular success at the Ambassador Theatre. 14 April: The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California, stages its first production. 16 October: Eugene O’Neill’s likeness appears on a U.S. postage stamp, the first time an American dramatist is so honored. 24 October: Michael McClure’s The Beard premieres Off-Broadway at the Evergreen Theatre under Rip Torn’s direction; it creates considerable controversy for its use of nudity, strong language, and simulated sexual scenes. 31 October: Ingrid Bergman returns to Broadway costarring with Colleen Dewhurst and Arthur Hill in an unfinished and previously unproduced Eugene O’Neill play, More Stately Mansions; the author had not wished it to be produced because it was unfinished. 1968 The Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California and the Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia, are established. Barbara Ann Teer founds the National Black Theatre. 2 January: The Negro Ensemble Company stages its first production, Peter Weiss’s Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. 16 January: Zoe Caldwell wins critical praise for her performance in the title role of Jay Presson Allen’s adaptation of Muriel Sparks’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which opens at the Helen Hayes Theatre. 17 January: Al Pacino appears in Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx at the Astor Place Theatre, scoring one of his first successes. 25 January: Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father premieres at the Longacre Theatre. 7 February: Arthur Miller’s The Price, about the sibling resentments of two middle-aged brothers, premieres at the Morosco Theatre. 14 February: George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton each play three characters when they open in Neil Simon’s comedy, Plaza Suite, made up of three one-act plays set in the same hotel suite. 14 April: Mart Crowley’s drama depicting the lives of homosexual men, The Boys in the Band, is staged at the Theatre Four, running for over 1,000 performances. 13 June: Rochelle Owens’s Futz!, a one-act satire about the relationship of a boy and a pig, debuts at the Theatre De Lys. 3 October: James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander win critical praise in Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope at the Alvin Theatre following a run at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage; the play wins the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 5 December: Dustin Hoffman wins praise in Murray Schisgal’s comedy, Jimmy Shine, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

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1969 Lanford Wilson and Marshall W. Mason found the Circle Theatre Company, eventually known as the Circle Repertory Theatre. 5 February: Lonne Elder III’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men debuts at St. Mark’s Playhouse in a Negro Ensemble Company production. 10 February: Terrence McNally has a success with his comedy, Next, which is presented on a double bill with Elaine May’s Adaptation at the Greenwich Mews Theatre. 12 February: Woody Allen stars in his own comedy, Play It Again, Sam, which opens at the Broadhurst Theatre. 4 May: Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody wins the Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a black man and to an Off-Broadway production. 17 June: The taboo-busting revue, Oh! Calcutta!, with skits exploring sexuality and nudity contributed by such noted writers as Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, and John Lennon, is staged to a controversial response at the Eden Theatre. 20 July: NASA lands a man on the moon. 13 October: Arthur Kopit’s Indians, about the exploitation of Native Americans, begins a comparatively short run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. 21 October: The long-running comedy, Butterflies Are Free, premieres at the Booth Theatre starring Blythe Danner, Keir Dullea, and Eileen Heckart. 28 December: Neil Simon’s comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers, starring James Coco, opens at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 1970 Broadway productions continue to decline in number as Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatres multiply. Newspapers report almost daily on controversies and attempts to censor the content of plays, whether in the areas of sexuality and nudity or politics and race. During the year, Joanne Alkalaitis founds the Mabou Mines theatre company and the Manhattan Theatre Club begins operation in New York. 7 April: Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds begins its run Off-Broadway at the Mercer-O’Casey Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 6 May: Zoe Caldwell wins critical approval in the title role of Elinor Jones’s Colette, adapted from Colette’s writings, at the Ellen Stewart Theatre. 9 May: Stars and producers read statements and ask audiences for moments of silence in memory of four students killed by National Guardsmen during protests of continued U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War at Kent State University. 30 June: Bruce Jay Friedman’s Steambath, directed by Anthony Perkins, opens at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. August: Daniel Berrigan’s Trial of the Catonsville Nine premieres at the Mark Taper Forum accompanied by FBI agents aiming to arrest Berrigan for destroying draft board records; Berrigan’s play moves to Off-Broadway in February 1971. 13 December: Maureen Stapleton gives an acclaimed performance in Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady, at the Plymouth Theatre, and wins a Tony Award.

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1971 The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is dedicated in Washington, D.C. Robert Moss founds Playwrights Horizons. The American Theatre Hall of Fame is established by Earl Blackwell, Gerald Ostreicher, James M. Nederlander, and Arnold Weissberger. A feminist group, Interart Theatre, is founded, and the Theatre of the New City, an Off-Off-Broadway company, is established. The Dell’Arte Players is founded in Blue Lake, California, by Carlo Mazzone-Clementi with an emphasis on mime and improvisation. 20 January: Peter Brook’s novel staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream transfers from London to New York’s Billy Rose Theatre in a Royal Shakespeare Company production, winning critical kudos; increasingly, Broadway is dominated by such English transfers. 10 February: John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves premieres at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. 25 February: Julie Harris, Estelle Parsons, and Nancy Marchand appear in Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little when it begins its run at the Morosco Theatre. 26 May: Cliff Gorman is praised by critics for his performance in Julian Barry’s Lenny based on the life of iconoclastic stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. 6 June: Helen Hayes gives her farewell performance playing Mary Tyrone in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in Washington, D.C. 7 November: David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, a surreal drama about a Vietnam veteran returning to the United States, debuts at the Public Theatre before moving to Broadway, where it wins the Tony Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 11 November: Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue opens at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 14 November: George Furth’s Twigs stars Sada Thompson, who wins acclaim and a Tony Award playing three middle-aged sisters and their elderly mother, at the Broadhurst Theatre. 6 December: The American Place Theatre is founded. 1972 The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is founded in Anniston, Alabama; John Housman establishes The Acting Company at the Juilliard School. The Indiana Repertory Theatre begins operations. Seattle, Washington’s Intiman Theatre opens its doors. Ping Chong’s first major work, Lazarus, opens at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. The Asian American Theatre Workshop is established in San Francisco, California. 21 February: Moonchildren, Michael Weller’s drama of “The Sixties” generation, premieres at the Royale Theatre with a cast including Edward Herrmann, James Woods, Christopher Guest, Jill Eikenberry, and Robert Prosky. 2 April: Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings opens at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre; during its run, Williams steps into the cast to play a role with the goal of boosting box office returns. 2 May: That Championship Season, Jason Miller’s searing drama about a reunion of high school basketball players turned unhappy grown men, premieres at the Public Theatre prior to a move to Broadway,

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where it wins the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. 10 November: Critic Eric Bentley’s documentary drama, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, chronicling the House Un-American Activities Committee anti-Communist witch hunt, is first performed at Yale University. 30 November: Arthur Miller’s biblical comedy, The Creation of the World and Other Business, opens at the Shubert Theatre to predominantly negative reviews and closes after 20 performances. 20 December: Neil Simon’s comedy about warring aging vaudevillians, The Sunshine Boys, scores a hit at the Broadhurst Theatre. 1973 22 March: Lanford Wilson’s Hot’l Baltimore debuts Off-Off-Broadway in a Circle Repertory Company production before moving to the Circle in the Square Theatre for a long run. 27 March: Joseph Walker’s The River Niger opens in at Negro Ensemble Company production on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre following an Off-Broadway run at St. Marks Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 4 June: Mike Nichols directs an all-star cast, including George C. Scott, Nicol Williamson, Julie Christie, and Lillian Gish, in an acclaimed revival of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Circle in the Square Theatre. 25 June: A discount ticket box office opens in Times Square, ultimately becoming known as TKTS. 8 November: David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room opens at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. 27 November: Neil Simon’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s stories, The Good Doctor, premieres at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre starring Christopher Plummer. 6 December: Mark Medoff’s When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? is first performed at the Eastside Playhouse with Brad Dourif and Kevin Conway leading a strong cast. 29 December: Eugene O’Neill’s last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, wins acclaim in a revival directed by José Quintero and starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst at the Morosco Theatre. 1974 The American Theatre Critics Association is founded. The Jewish Repertory Theatre begins operations. A feminist theatre group, At the Foot of the Mountain, is established in Minnesota. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company is formed in Chicago, Illinois. 2 January: John Hopkins’s gaythemed Find Your Way Home opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, bringing Michael Moriarty a Tony Award for his performance. 5 May: Terrence McNally’s Bad Habits moves to Broadway’s Booth Theatre following a successful Off-Broadway run. 23 May: Miguel Piñero’s harsh prison drama, Short Eyes, wins critical approval at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre following a run at the Public Theatre. 5 June: A headline in Variety announces “Theatre Is Now a National Invalid” lamenting the falloff in theatre productions, the decline of Broadway, and the paucity of outstanding playwrights. 9 August: Richard M. Nixon resigns the U.S. presidency in the midst of the Watergate scandal; Gerald R. Ford becomes the 38th President of the United

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States 24 September: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens in a hit revival that wins acclaim for Elizabeth Ashley as “Maggie the Cat.” 24 October: Equus, Peter Shaffer’s intense drama of a psychiatrist attempting to fathom the reasons why a young man blinds horses, opens at the Plymouth Theatre following a successful run in London; the play wins a Tony Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 1975 South Vietnam surrenders to North Vietnam, which essentially ends the Vietnam War. North Carolina’s Playmakers Repertory Company (PRC) is established. 20 January: Terrence McNally’s farce, The Ritz, set in a gay steambath, opens at the Longacre Theatre. 26 January: Edward Albee’s Seascape premieres at the Shubert Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 4 May: Ed Bullins’s drama of a black man raping a white woman, The Taking of Miss Janie, debuts at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre. 26 June: George C. Scott scores a personal triumph in a Circle in the Square revival of Death of a Salesman, which he also directs with a cast including Teresa Wright, Harvey Keitel, and James Farentino. 29 September: David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago debuts at St. Clements Church and wins an Obie Award. 30 December: An all-star revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family wins critical acclaim at the Helen Hayes Theatre, with a cast including Eva Le Gallienne, George Grizzard, Rosemary Harris, and Sam Levene. 1976 The multiethnic Mixed Blood Theatre Company is founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 3 February: Katharine Hepburn returns to Broadway in Enid Bagnold’s A Matter of Gravity with a cast including Christoper Reeve at the Broadhurst Theatre. 22 March: Jack Heifner’s Vanities, a comedydrama about the lives of three cheerleaders from the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the present day, debuts at the Westside Theatre. 28 April: Julie Harris scores a personal triumph as Emily Dickinson in the one-woman play, William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst, at the Longacre Theatre. 10 June: Neil Simon’s comedy, California Suite, opens at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 15 September: Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, a poetic drama about the coming-of-age experiences of black women, premieres at the Public Theatre with Shange among the cast. 12 December: Charles Fuller’s The Brownsville Raid is staged at the Theatre De Lys in a Negro Ensemble Company production. 14 December: Sly Fox, Larry Gelbart’s adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, opens at the Broadhurst Theatre starring George C. Scott. 1977 The Pan Asian Theatre Company and Theatre Rhinoceros, a gay theatre company, are founded. 16 February: David Mamet’s American Buffalo, directed by Ulu Grosbard, opens at the Barrymore Theatre to critics complaining of the play’s strong language. 31 March: Actor Michael Cris-

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tofer’s The Shadow Box, a play about the lives of people turning to hospice care, wins the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. 24 April: Al Pacino wins critical approval when he appears at the Longacre Theatre in the title role of David Rabe’s Vietnam-themed play, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, revived on Broadway six years following its Off-Broadway premiere. 5 May: Maria Irene Fornés’s feminist drama, Fefu and Her Friends, debuts at the American Place Theatre. 21 May: Albert Innaurato’s comedy-drama about a college student contemplating his sexuality in Philadelphia, Gemini, moves to the Little Theatre following a successful Off-Broadway run. 6 October: Directed by Mike Nichols, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy appear in the Pulitzer Prize-winning two-character drama The Gin Game, by D. L. Coburn, at the John Golden Theatre. 20 October: David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre premieres at the Theatre De Lys. Frank Langella scores a personal triumph in the title role of a revival of John Balderson and Hamilton Deane’s Dracula, adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel, at the Martin Beck Theatre in a production designed by Edward Gorey. 21 October: Wendy Wasserstein’s feminist play, Uncommon Women and Others, is staged at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre. 4 December: Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, a semiautobiographical play about a widower who falls in love again opens at the Imperial Theatre. 28 December: Jason Robards returns to Eugene O’Neill’s plays in a revival of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, costarring with Geraldine Fitzgerald, at the Helen Hayes Theatre. 1978 5 January: David Mamet’s The Water Engine is produced at the Public Theatre. 2 February: Harvey Fierstein’s one-act, The International Stud, a comedy-drama about a drag queen, is staged at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club; the play is the first of three ultimately titled Torch Song Trilogy. 26 February: Ira Levin’s long-running thriller, Deathtrap, opens at the Music Box Theatre. 2 March: Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class arrives at the Public Theatre following a run at London’s Royal Court Theatre the previous year, and it wins an Obie Award. 27 April: Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, about a gay disabled Vietnam veteran and his family, premieres in a Circle Repertory Company production. 1 May: Barnard Hughes wins critical acclaim in the title role of Hugh Leonard’s Da at the Morosco Theatre and wins the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 1 June: Jack Lemmon returns to Broadway in Bernard Slade’s Tribute at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre with more praise for Lemmon than the play. 3 October: Henry Fonda and Jane Alexander win critical kudos in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s The First Monday in October at the Majestic Theatre. 5 December: Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, a dark drama about a dysfunctional American family, opens at the Theatre De Lys and wins the Pulitzer Prize.

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1979 The Second Stage Theatre is founded to produce worthy plays that experienced problems in their original productions. 28 January: Veteran actress Constance Cummings wins praise and a Tony Award for her performance as a stroke victim in Arthur Kopit’s Wings at the Lyceum Theatre, where it runs following its debut at the Public Theatre. 18 February: Newspapers report that Asian American actors picket the Public Theatre demanding more opportunities. 28 February: Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond, a comedy-drama about an elderly couple facing the end of their lives, debuts at the Apollo Theatre starring Frances Sternhagen and Tom Aldredge. 25 March: Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit moves to the Winter Garden Theatre following a successful run at the Mark Taper Forum; the musical play illuminates Chicano life in California. 17 April: Scottish actor Tom Conti wins acclaim in Brian Clark’s drama about a disabled man, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, at the Trafalgar Theatre. 19 April: Bernard Pomerance’s drama set in the nineteenth century concerning the life of deformed John Merrick, The Elephant Man, opens at the Booth Theatre and wins the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 3 May: Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, a prequel to his Fifth of July, debuts in a Circle Repertory Company production and wins the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 6 June: Michael Weller’s Loose Ends premieres at the Circle in the Square Theatre. 2 December: Martin Sherman’s Bent, a grim drama about the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis, begins a run at the Apollo Theatre. 13 December: Samm-Art Williams’s Home, concerning a black man’s refusal to serve in Vietnam, is staged by the Negro Ensemble Company at St. Mark’s Playhouse. 1980 Robert Brustein founds the American Repertory Theatre. The lesbian theatre company, Split Britches Theatre, is established. 31 January: Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque premieres at the Morosco Theatre starring Irene Worth; the play, dismissed by critics, closes within two weeks. 30 March: Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God, concerning a deaf woman who marries her teacher, opens at the Longacre Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 10 April: A revival of Paul Osborn’s failed 1939 comedy Morning’s at Seven scores a major hit at the Lycem Theatre with a cast including veteran actresses Elizabeth Wilson, Nancy Marchand, Teresa Wright, and Maureen O’Sullivan. 30 April: Neil Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures debuts at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 8 June: David Henry Hwang’s FOB is staged at the Public Theatre. 8 October: Steven Tesich’s Division Street opens at the Ambassador Theatre for a short run starring John Lithgow. 17 December: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, exploring the rivalry of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, transfers from London to the Broadhurst Theatre and wins a Tony Award. 21 December: Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, about the

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relationship of three Southern sisters, opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 23 December: Sam Shepard’s True West is staged at the Public Theatre following a run at the Steppenwolf Theatre. 1981 5 February: Jane Lapotaire wins critical kudos in the title role of Pam Gems’s Piaf at the Plymouth Theatre. 7 May: Film star Elizabeth Taylor makes her Broadway debut in a well-received revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes at the Martin Beck Theatre; the supporting cast includes Maureen Stapleton and Anthony Zerbe. 21 October: Christopher Durang’s controversial satire of a nun and her pupils, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, opens at Playwrights Horizons. 20 November: Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, about a murder among black soldiers in World War II, is staged by the Negro Ensemble Company production at the Theatre Four and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 1982 Boston University establishes the Huntington Theatre Company (HTC), which becomes a not-for-profit theatre in 1986. 15 January: Harvey Fierstein stars in his own Torch Song Trilogy at the Actors Playhouse, and later moves to Broadway’s Little Theatre, where it wins the Tony Award. 3 February: Variety reports that “B’Way Season Looms As Worst in Years: Hit Shows Scarce, Attendance Down.” James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer are praised by critics in a revival of Othello at the Winter Garden Theatre. 24 February: A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room premieres at Playwrights Horizons. 30 March: John Pielmeier’s drama Agnes of God, concerning the murder of a baby in a convent, wins critical praise for its stars, Amanda Plummer, Geraldine Page, and Elizabeth Ashley, but little for the play. 2 May: Zoe Caldwell is acclaimed for her performance in the title role of a revival of Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Medea at the Cort Theatre with Judith Anderson, who played Medea in the original 1947 production, appearing as the Nurse. 4 May: Athol Fugard’s Master Harold . . . and the Boys, concerning race relations in South Africa, opens at the Lyceum Theatre. 11 November: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy return to Broadway in Foxfire, a drama about an Appalachian Mountain family written by Cronyn and Susan Cooper, at the Barrymore Theatre. 29 December: Caryl Churchill’s feminist play, Top Girls, makes its American debut at the Public Theatre. 1983 The first Asian American theatre company, MinaSama-No, is founded in Chicago, Illinois. 22 February: A legendary theatrical flop, Moose Murders, opens and closes at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 27 March: Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first of three semi-autobiographical plays Simon writes, opens at the Alvin Theatre, wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and runs for over 1,500 performances. 31 March: Marsha Norman’s dark drama about a suicidal woman, ’night, Mother, premieres

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at the John Golden Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 4 April: An all-star revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You begins a run at the Plymouth Theatre; the cast includes Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, James Coco, and Elizabeth Wilson—it is subsequently filmed for television. 26 May: Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love debuts in a Circle Repertory Company production. 22 November: Tina Howe’s Painting Churches is staged at the Lambs Theatre. 11 December: Michael Frayn’s backstage farce, Noises Off, a hit in London, begins a long run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. 1984 The number of Broadway productions for 1984–1985 drops to 31. 25 March: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, a bleak drama about corruption among real estate salesmen, opens at the John Golden Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 29 March: Dustin Hoffman is acclaimed in the title role in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Broadhurst Theatre, with a cast including Kate Reid and John Malkovich. 27 May: Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest debuts at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 31 May: Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre brings its revival of Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead to New York, winning critical kudos at the Circle Repertory Company. 7 August: David Rabe’s Hurlyburly moves from Off-Broadway to Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre with a cast including William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Christopher Walken, Cynthia Nixon, and Jerry Stiller. September: Charles Ludlam’s camp pastiche The Mystery of Irma Vep, debuts Off-Off-Broadway in a Ridiculous Theatrical Company production. 11 October: August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens at the Cort Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; Wilson’s drama set in a 1920s’ recording studio, is his first Broadway production. 1 November: Larry Shue’s farcical comedy, The Foreigner, is staged at the Astor Place Theatre; the play will have a long run and become a staple of regional, community, and university theatres. 1985 David Mamet and William H. Macy found the Atlantic Theatre Company. 21 January: John DiFusco’s Tracers, about Vietnam War veterans, is staged at the Public Theatre. 21 February: Maria Irene Fornés’s The Conduct of Life, dealing with the relationship of sexual power and violence, premieres at the Theatre for a New City. 28 March: Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical comedy-drama set during World War II, Biloxi Blues, scores a hit at the Neil Simon Theatre and wins the Tony Award as well as critical praise for its star, Matthew Broderick. 21 April: Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, an indictment of the failure of various government, medical, and social institutions to respond adequately to the AIDS pandemic, begins a controversial run at the Public Theatre. 1 May: William Hoffman’s AIDS-themed drama, As

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Is, debuts at the Circle Repertory Company. 16 May: Christopher Durang’s satiric comedy about a married couple, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, is staged at the Public Theatre. 19 June: Charles Busch’s camp satire Vampire Lesbians of Sodom begins an over 2,000 performance run at the Provincetown Playhouse. 27 August: Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, a controversial play about a woman fascinated with Nazism, debuts in London in a New York Shakespeare Festival production. 11 November: I’m Not Rappaport, Herb Gardner’s drama of the friendship between two old men, one black and one white, opens at the Booth Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 5 December: Sam Shepard’s drama of two families bound together by the violent marriage of their offspring, A Lie of the Mind, is staged by Shepard at the Promenade Theatre. 1986 9 March: Kevin Kline garners critical praise for his performance in Hamlet at the Public Theatre. 13 March: Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice about the trial of Dan White, the murderer of Harvey Milk, ekes out a short run on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre. 4 June: Spalding Gray appears in his monologue drama, Swimming to Cambodia, at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre for a short run. 19 November: Tina Howe’s Coastal Disturbances has a brief run at the Second Stage with praise for leading lady Annette Bening. 4 December: The third of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical plays, Broadway Bound, opens at the Broadhurst Theatre, with Linda Lavin winning acclaim for her performance. 1987 26 March: August Wilson’s Fences, a drama set in 1940s’ Pittsburgh about an ex-baseball player from the Negro leagues and his family, is critically acclaimed at the 46th Street Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 15 April: Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy debuts at Playwrights Horizons and ultimately wins the Pulitzer Prize. 28 May: Eric Bogosian appears in his own play, Talk Radio, at the Public Theatre. 19 June: Robert Harling’s comedy-drama about the friendship of Southern women, Steel Magnolias, premieres at the Lucille Lortel Theatre following a run at the WPA Theatre. 13 October: Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 14 October: John Malkovich and Joan Allen star in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This at the Plymouth Theatre, following runs at the Mark Taper Forum and Circle Repertory Company. 1 September: Rocco Landesman assumes the presidency of Jujamcyn Theatres. 1988 The Irish Repertory Theatre is founded in New York. 14 February: The inter-active Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding begins its phenomenally long run. 20 March: David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly premieres at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre starring John Lithgow and B. D. Wong and wins the Best

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Play Tony Award. 27 March: August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the 1910s’ entry in his 10-play series of decade-by-decade plays about African Americans, premieres at the Barrymore Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 14 June: Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst appear in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Neil Simon Theatre under José Quintero’s direction; the production plays in repertory with O’Neill’s comedy, Ah, Wilderness! 20 October: A. R. Gurney’s The Cocktail Party debuts at the Promenade Theatre starring Nancy Marchand, following a run at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California. 17 November: Neil Simon’s Rumors opens at the Broadhurst Theatre. 1989 The Asian American Ma-Yi Theatre Company and the National Asian-American Theatre Company are founded in New York. 5 January: Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, a comedy about well-to-do Manhattanites, debuts at the John Golden Theatre following a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). 16 February: Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money, dramatizing hostile corporate takeovers, is staged at the Minetta Lane Theatre. 2 March: Ken Ludwig’s farce Lend Me a Tenor premieres at the Royale Theatre. 9 March: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles opens at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre following a run at Playwrights Horizons; starring Joan Allen, the play wins the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 19 March: Constance Congdon’s Tales of the Lost Formicans, a comedy-drama about aliens observing a troubled American family, debuts at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. 6 June: Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata, starring Nathan Lane as a gay opera buff, wins critical kudos at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 22 August: A. R. Gurney’s two-character Love Letters, about a lifelong correspondence of two lovers, begins a run at the Edison Theatre following its debut Off-Broadway; numerous well-known actors will play the roles, often as fundraisers for various theatres and causes. 15 November: Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, a military courtroom drama, opens at the Music Box Theatre; following an increasing trend. 14 December: Robert Morse wins acclaim and a Tony Award playing Truman Capote in Jay Presson Allen’s one-character play, Tru, at the Booth Theatre. 1990 The National Endowment of the Arts withdraws grants to four artists (subsequently known as the NEA Four) over what is deemed obscene works; the artists include performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. 9 February: Eric Bogosian’s Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll debuts at the Orpheum Theatre with Bogosian the sole performer. 14 March: Craig Lucas’s romantic fantasy, Prelude to a Kiss, opens Off-Broadway prior to a

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transfer to Broadway. 21 March: Kathleen Turner is praised by critics in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. 22 March: The Steppenwolf Theatre’s acclaimed production of Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, moves from Chicago to Broadway’s Cort Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 16 April: August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, set in the 1930s as an African American family decides what to do with an heirloom piano, premieres at the Walter Kerr Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 14 June: John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, concerning a young black man attempting to convince a wealthy white couple that he is Sidney Poitier’s son, opens at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre. 1991 The Gulf War begins. With the goal of encouraging nonmusical plays, the Broadway Alliance is founded. The Signature Theatre Company is established in New York. 21 February: Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, concerning two young boys left with a formidable grandmother and a mentally challenged aunt in the 1940s, premieres at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award. 17 March: The Substance of Fire, Jon Robin Baitz’s drama about a Holocaust survivor publishing scholarship on Nazi medical experiments, debuts at Playwrights Horizons. 14 April: The Steppenwolf Theatre Company moves into a new state-of-the-art theatre space in Chicago, Illinois. 25 June: Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart begins a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 10 December: Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre offers a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as its first production at the Belasco Theatre. 1992 New York’s Mint Theatre Company, dedicated to reviving neglected American and English plays, is founded. 29 January: Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz premieres in a Circle Repertory Company production and wins an Obie Award. 24 March: Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women receives tepid reviews at the Neil Simon Theatre. 29 March: Herb Gardner’s Conversations with My Father premieres at the Royale Theatre and wins acclaim for Judd Hirsch’s Tony Award-winning performance. 12 April: Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin are critically praised for their performances in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Barrymore Theatre. 13 April: August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, set in an African American restaurant in Pittsburgh in 1969, is staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 12 May: Anna Deavere Smith’s solo performance of her Fires in the Mirror, concerning contemporary racial conflicts, begins a run at the Public Theatre. 20 October: Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me, a sequel to his AIDS-themed The Normal Heart, opens at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 22 October: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters

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Rosensweig, a comedy-drama about three middle-aged sisters, debuts at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre prior to a move to Broadway. 25 October: David Mamet’s controversial two-character drama, Oleanna, concerning political correctness and sexual harassment, begins performances at the Orpheum Theatre. 27 October: John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama, a solo performance, opens at the Westside Theatre. 1993 Neil LaBute’s first major play, In the Company of Men, is performed at Brigham Young University. 14 January: Natasha Richardson, daughter of English actress Vanessa Redgrave, wins critical acclaim in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, costarring with Liam Neeson. 25 February: “New vaudevillians” Bill Irwin and David Shiner appear in Fool Moon at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and run for over 1,000 performances. March: Jane Martin’s Keely and Du, an abortionthemed play, premieres at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays; it is ultimately revealed that Jane Martin is a pseudonym for the ATL’s artistic director, Jon Jory. 6 March: Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, a comedy about a gay man’s life in the era of AIDS, debuts at the Minetta Lane Theatre starring John Michael Higgins. 4 May: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, an epic “gay fantasia” of life in America during the 1980s, opens at the Walter Kerr Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; the second play, Perestroika, opens a few months later and plays in repertory with Millennium Approaches and wins a Tony Award as well. 27 June: Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh, about the spiritual search in India of two aging women, debuts at the Manhattan Theatre Club starring Zoe Caldwell and Frances Sternhagen. 14 November: Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle is staged at the Royale Theatre; the play won a Pulitzer Prize while running at the Mark Taper Forum following a run in Seattle, but it fails to find a Broadway audience and closes within a month. 22 November: Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, starring Nathan Lane as a television comedy writer during the 1950s, opens at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. 1994 Only 29 productions are seen on Broadway during 1994–1995. The Drama Dept., a nonprofit theatre collective with the mission of producing new plays or forgotten American classics, begins operation. 13 February: Edward Albee wins a third Pulitzer Prize when his drama, Three Tall Women, premieres at the Vineyard Theatre prior to a move to Broadway, where it wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 17 April: Anna Deavere Smith appears in her solo play about the Los Angeles race riots sparked by the Rodney King beating, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, at the Cort Theatre. 4 June:

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The National Endowment of the Arts finally awards grants to the controversial “NEA Four,” whose grants were revoked on claims of obscenity in 1990. 1 November: Terrence McNally’s AIDS-themed comedy, Love! Valour! Compassion!, debuts at the Manhattan Theatre Club before transferring to Broadway, where it wins the Tony Award. 12 December: Tony Kushner’s Slavs! Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness is produced at the New York Theatre Workshop; the play is described as a coda to Kushner’s Angels in America plays and is set in the collapsing Soviet Union at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. 1995 6 April: Sarah Delaney’s Having Our Say, about the close relationship of two elderly black sisters, debuts at the Booth Theatre. 9 April: Neil Simon’s London Suite opens to middling reviews and a short run. July: Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky premieres at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. 24 August: Nicky Silver’s The Food Chain is staged at the Westside Upstairs Theatre. 1 October: Carol Burnett returns to Broadway in Ken Ludwig’s backstage farce, Moon over Buffalo, at the Martin Beck Theatre; Burnett costars with Philip Bosco. 24 October: Uta Hagen wins critical approval in her final stage appearance in Nicholas Wright’s Mrs. Klein at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 5 November: Terrence McNally’s Master Class, starring Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas, premieres at the John Golden Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 1996 Eve Ensler begins performing her controversial The Vagina Monologues and wins an Obie Award for this groundbreaking examination of women’s bodies and attitudes about sexuality and rape. The Flea Theatre is established in an attempt to revive the glory days of Off-Off-Broadway theatre and wins a 2004 Drama Desk Award for distinguished achievement. 28 March: August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, set among African Americans in 1940s’ Pittsburgh, premieres at the Walter Kerr Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 21 April: Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is revived at the Nederlander Theatre and wins acclaim for the play and its cast, including Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard, Elaine Stritch, and Mary Beth Hurt. 30 April: Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Buried Child, opens on Broadway in a revival—his first on Broadway—in a Steppenwolf Theatre production. 22 August: Al Pacino is lauded for his performance in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie at the Circle in the Square. 17 September: The Atlantic Theatre Company revives David Mamet’s Edmond to critical praise, despite the play’s earlier failure. 1997 27 February: Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, concerning anti-Semitism at the time of the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone With

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the Wind, debuts at the Helen Hayes Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 9 March: Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare, a grim drama of the Black Plague, is staged at the Public Theatre and wins an Obie Award. 16 March: Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, focused on the moral questions surrounding an incestuous relationship between an uncle and his niece, premieres at the Vineyard Theatre and wins the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 25 March: Christopher Plummer wins critical praise playing John Barrymore in the solo play, Barrymore, at the Music Box Theatre. 27 March: Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta premieres at the Longacre Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 13 April: Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter opens at the Cort Theatre starring Kate Nelligan, but critics are not appreciative. 20 May: Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories is staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 12 November: Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain begins a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club with a cast including Patricia Clarkson, Bradley Whitford, and John Slattery. 7 December: Tina Howe’s Pride’s Crossing opens at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre and wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk Award for actress Cherry Jones. 1998 31 May: Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul opens at the Vineyard Theatre focusing on the moral compromises posed to a screenwriter and his script about AIDS. 25 June: Warren Leight’s Side Man, probing the lives of jazz musicians, is staged at the Criterion Center Stage Right and wins the Tony Award. 19 September: Margaret Edson’s Wit debuts at the Manhattan Class Company and wins the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award. 5 October: Joe DiPietro’s comedy, Over the River and through the Woods, concerning a family striving to keep their son from leaving New Jersey, debuts at the John Houseman Theatre. 13 October: Controversy, pickets, and bomb threats accompany a production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi at the Manhattan Theatre Club, but it wins the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. 18 October: Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, a black comedy about a violent trailer park family, begins a run at Soho Playhouse. 16 December: Amy Freed’s Freedomland opens at Playwrights Horizons. 19 December: The United States Congress votes to impeach President Bill Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice; he is subsequently acquitted. 1999 The Classical Theatre Company of Harlem is founded at the Harlem School of the Arts. 25 February: Tennessee Williams’s early play set in a prison, Not About Nightingales, is staged at the Circle in the Square Theatre following a successful London production. 16 May: Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning into Butter, concerning the ramifications of a racial incident on a college

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campus, premieres at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago prior to its New York production. 4 November: Donald Margulies’ Dinner with Friends opens at the Variety Arts Theatre under Daniel Sullivan’s direction and wins the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Lucille Lortel Award. November: Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood is produced at the Public Theatre with Charlayne Woodard heading the cast. 2000 February: The Tectonic Theatre Project debuts its production of The Laramie Project, which is based on interviews with the citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of the hate crime murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard; the production is first performed at the Ricketson Theatre in a Denver Theatre Center production. 1 February: Edward Albee’s The Play about the Baby premieres at Century Center for the Performing Arts following a run at the Alley Theatre and wins the Lucille Lortel Award. 22 March: Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery opens at the Promenade Theatre starring Eileen Heckart, who wins an Obie and a Drama Desk Award. 9 April: Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, previously produced in London and at the Public Theatre, is produced at the Ambassador Theatre to mixed reviews. 23 May: David Auburn’s Proof is staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club and wins the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and the Drama Desk Award when it moves to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. 14 September: Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree, a solo play performed by Gien, is presented at Playhouse 91 and wins an Obie Award. 2 November: Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre following an Off-Broadway run, winning the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award. 7 November: The vote is so close in the United States presidential election that a victor cannot be determined for a month; ultimately, George W. Bush is declared winner. 2001 1 May: August Wilson’s King Hedley II debuts at Virginia Theatre following runs at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre and in other regional theatres and is nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award. 26 July: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog premieres at the Public Theatre, wins the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Desk Award, and critical acclaim for actors Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def. 11 September: Terrorists crash two airplanes into the World Trade Center, causing its twin towers to collapse; another plane crashes into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth crashes in a field in Pennsylvania; New York City is in a state of emergency for several days, shutting down theatres and many businesses, but a sign of renewal comes when Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres reopen a few days later. 30 October: Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living is staged at the Manhattan Class Company under Philip Seymour Hoffman’s direction.

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November: Melissa James Gibson’s play, [sic], set among twenty-something artistic New Yorkers, opens at the Soho Repertory Theatre. 19 December: Tony Kushner’s Obie Award-winning Homebody/Kabul, an examination of the West’s relationship to Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of an unhappy English family, begins a run at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW); critics hail it as prophetic since the play was written and in rehearsal prior to the 9/11 tragedies. 2002 21 February: Mary Zimmerman’s Lookingglass Theatre Company production, Metamorphoses, moves to the Circle in the Square Theatre following runs in Chicago and Off-Broadway. 10 March: Edward Albee’s play about an unconventional love affair, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, premieres at the John Golden Theatre and wins the Tony Award. 22 October: Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club with the author in the cast. 18 December: Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat begins a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 2003 27 February: Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, concerning the first “out” Major League baseball player, opens at the Walter Kerr Theatre following a successful run at London’s Donmar Warehouse and wins the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award. 25 September: Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s Omnium Gatherum begins a run at the Variety Arts Theatre. 3 December: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, a solo show starring Jefferson Mays (who wins a Tony Award), debuts at the Lyceum Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Drama Desk Award. 16 November: Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics wins the Pulitzer Prize. 2004 17 February: Craig Lucas’s Small Tragedy debuts at Playwrights Horizons and wins an Obie Award. 2 March: Charles Mee’s Wintertime commences a run at the Second Stage Theatre under David Schweizer’s direction. 11 May: Christopher Shinn’s Where Do We Live Now?, which he also directs, opens at the Vineyard Theatre and wins an Obie Award. 13 June: Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine is staged at Playwrights Horizons under Kate Whoriskey’s direction. 17 November: Neil LaBute’s dark comedy, Fat Pig, focused on issues of physical attractiveness, opens at the Manhattan Class Company and wins the Outer Critics Circle Award. 6 December: August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, set in 1904, and, as such, the first in Wilson’s 10-play cycle about African Americans in the twentieth century, premieres at the Walter Kerr Theatre. 2005 31 March: John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt premieres at the Walter Kerr Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize and critical acclaim for its cast,

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including Cherry Jones and Brían F. O’Byrne. 19 September: Rolin Jones’s The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow debuts at the Atlantic Theatre Company and wins an Obie Award. 29 November: Christopher Durang’s Miss Witherspoon opens at Playwrights Horizons directed by Emily Mann. 2006 2 February: David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole opens at the Biltmore Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) production and wins the Pulitzer Prize. 29 February: Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter debuts at the Barrow Street Theatre and wins a special citation Obie Award for Rapp. 19 April: Film star Julia Roberts makes her stage debut in the Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Summer: Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is staged in Central Park in a New York Shakespeare Festival production starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Austin Pendleton. 30 October: Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House opens at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre starring Jill Clayburgh. 13 November: Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed moves to Broadway’s Cort Theatre following an Off-Broadway run. 2007 8 May: The late August Wilson’s Radio Golf, set in the 1990s and the last of his 10-play cycle on African American in the twentieth century, debuts at the Cort Theatre. 30 October: Adam Bock’s The Receptionist premieres at the Manhattan Theatre Club under Joe Mantello’s direction. 10 November: Broadway stagehands go on strike shutting down most shows for 19 days until the strike is settled. 10 December: David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face opens at the Public Theatre following its first production at the Mark Taper Forum in association with the East West Players. 12 December: Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County moves to Broadway’s Imperial Theatre following its initial acclaimed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and wins the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Drama Desk Award. 2008 A major recession begins as several Wall Street financial houses teeter on the brink of collapse. 26 March: Adam Bock’s The Drunken City debuts at Playwrights Horizons. 14 May: Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty premieres at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club production prior to a transfer to Broadway; as with other LaBute works, it deals with present-day obsessions with physical appearance. 4 November: African American Senator Barack Obama becomes the first African American elected United States president. 2009 8 January: Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw is staged at the Second Stage Theatre following a run at Actors Theatre of Louisville, which commissioned the play. 10 February: Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

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premieres at the Manhattan Theatre Club, following a 2007 production at the Goodman Theatre, and wins the Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and Drama Desk Award. 9 March: Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, inspired by Beethoven and starring Jane Fonda, premieres at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. May: Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures is produced at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as part of a festival celebrating Kushner’s work. 1 October: Tracy Letts’s race-themed Superior Donuts moves to the Music Box Theatre following a run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. November: The Signature Theatre stages Horton Foote’s nine-play cycle of life in an early twentieth-century Texas town under the title The Orphan’s Home Cycle. 19 November: Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) opens at the Lyceum Theatre following a first production at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. December: Melissa James Gibson’s This is produced at Playwrights Horizons. 6 December: David Mamet’s Race opens on Broadway to mixed reviews, but has a successful run into the summer of 2010. 2010 Henry Miller’s Theatre is renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in celebration of Sondheim’s 80th birthday. 11 March: Geoffrey Naufft’s Next Fall, concerning two gay lovers divided by religious belief, moves to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre following an Off-Broadway run; it wins the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award. 1 April: John Logan’s Red, starring Alfred Molina as the artist Mark Rothko, moves to the John Golden Theatre following a successful run at London’s Donmar Warehouse; the play wins the Tony Award. 26 April: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis win critical plaudits and Tony Awards in a revival of August Wilson’s Fences at the Cort Theatre. 28 April: Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories opens in a Manhattan Theatre Club revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, winning critical kudos for Linda Lavin and Sarah Paulson. Summer: Al Pacino returns to the stage in a New York Shakespeare Festival revival of The Merchant of Venice at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park; the production moves to Broadway in the fall. 27 June: Kate Burton plays Katharine Cornell in A. R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre under the direction of Mark Lamos. 10 September: A revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is directed by Ivo van Hove at the New York Theatre Workshop. 14 September: A revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America opens at the Signature Theatre, which devotes its 2010–2011 season to Kushner. 21 September: Patrick Stewart and T. R. Knight star in a revival of David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre at the Schoenfeld Theatre. 7 October: James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave win acclaim in a revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy.

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Introduction

“The American theatre occupies five side streets, Forty-fourth to Forty-ninth, between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, with a few additional theatres to the north and south and across Broadway. In these thirty-two buildings every new play in the United States starts its life and ends it,”1 wrote Arthur Miller in 1955, 25 years into the period covered in The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Contemporary. Miller’s statement underscores the fact that for much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Broadway was the epicenter of American theatre and, as such, images and ideas about the turbulent and complicated times of the nation were, at least in dramatic terms, to be seen and heard in the five blocks of New York City Miller describes. This volume aims to present the plays and personages, movements and institutions, and cultural developments of the American stage from 1930 to 2010, a period of vast and almost continuous change from the seeming permanence suggested by Miller’s statement to a wholly national phenomenon with theatres of importance all across the country. What Miller wrote was true in 1955 and it had been true since the nineteenth century; by 1960, this statement could be challenged; and, by the 1970s, it was simply no longer true. “The Golden Age of Broadway,” which stretches from approximately the end of World War I to the 1960s, produced a couple of generations of extraordinary playwrights, designers, performers, producers, and a host of innovations in the way plays are made and the techniques employed to perform them. By the mid-1950s, however, cultural and historical developments, economic forces, and rapid advances in technology remade American society, and along with it, the theatre. Broadway survived in an altered—and diminished—form into the twenty-first century, mainly as a shop window for plays and innovative productions usually created elsewhere, first in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres and, subsequently, in regional theatres that were all major factors in decentralizing American theatre after the 1960s. The roots of these changes are to be found in the history of the American theatre almost from its beginning, but the post-1930 stage in the United States emerged most fully as a result of the triumph of European modernism that had begun as early as the 1860s and influenced the American theatre from the 1890s in small ways and, after World War I, in significant ways. 1

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The international cataclysm of World War I energized changes in all aspects of American life and the arts as the “lost generation” most profoundly influenced by that conflict brought their disillusionments and questioning of traditional values to the fore. The nation emerged as a great world power, and as its society and culture gained new sophistication and seriousness, the American stage came into its own in the 1920s. But the American economy, politics, and theatre were severely shaken by the Great Depression and took some time to emerge—fortunately, stronger than ever.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION Despite the seemingly strict nature of realism in its adherence to the truth of life, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, the form was influenced by more overtly theatrical styles prevalent before (including melodrama) and challenges to its predominance after. Realism ultimately was changed and expanded while existing side-by-side with other, newer forms. As the romantic and melodramatic theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries slowly faded away after World War I, in its place came a fuller realization of what had been inherent in modernism. Modernism, and the realistic theatre born within it, was thoroughly absorbed into American drama by the 1940s with the emergence of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, while dramatic forms and thematic content explored in the 1920s and during the Great Depression, also deepened and enriched the realistic genre. The HDAT: Modernism (2007), coauthored by myself and Felicia Hardison Londré, provides the personages, plays, theatres, movements, and terminology inherent in the modernist period and, as such, is an essential companion to the entries featured here. That volume concluded more or less in 1929 and this one begins with 1930. The stock market crash in late 1929 brought on the Great Depression, an era that had a profound impact on all aspects of American life—including the theatre—in the 1930s. For all intents and purposes, the forces shaping contemporary theatre come into full focus with the stock market crash. The obviously harmful aspects of the nation’s economic woes were seen at once in a decline in new productions on Broadway (although not as steep a decline as one might suppose), but most significantly in undermining experimentation and opportunities for new talents as producers grew wary of taking chances. Le Gallienne’s bold adventure with the Civic Repertory Theatre ended for economic reasons in 1933 when the Depression was deepest, but the CRT’s influence would be felt again in the 1950s as the regional theatre movement

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grew from a few theatres around the country operating much in the repertory style Le Gallienne pioneered. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, and his vast “New Deal” program in response to the Depression, led to the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program aimed at putting a record number of unemployed Americans back to work. The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a wing of the WPA, was created to employ theatrical personnel across the country and to bring a wide variety of theatre experiences to all Americans, but it also set off a divisive social debate regarding the nature of the arts in the United States that continues into the twenty-first century. The perceived social activism of FTP productions in the 1930s reflected the complex, confusing times, but while audiences were often responsive, some resisted art critical of traditional values, big business, gender and racial inequities, and all manner of authority, from religious institutions to the seats of power in the government. Theatre as entertainment and the theatre of social responsibility often overlapped to positive effect, but the division between “pop culture” and “serious art” became more pronounced by the mid-twentieth century. During the 1930s, dramas advancing social concerns came to the fore more fully than ever before. This is vividly evident in The Group Theatre’s production of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935), which espoused the necessity for unions, and FTP’s “Living Newspapers,” journalistic documentarystyle dramas exploring the monopolizing of utilities, oppressive European dictators, the economic plight of farmers, race prejudice, the need for better housing for the poor, etc. While internal strife ended The Group Theatre, the “Living Newspapers” and other productions such as Marc Blitzstein’s musical, The Cradle Will Rock (1937), set off controversy and ultimately led to the demise of the FTP, which was shut down in 1939 by a conservative U.S. Congress. In the late 1940s, some of those involved in creating works for the FTP or The Group Theatre, among others, were caught up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), often with damaging impact on their careers and, in some cases, personal tragedy. Problems resulting from the content of plays were not the only difficulties challenging American theatre artists in the 1930s. The arrival of sound films and, to a lesser extent, commercial radio, led, over time, to a reduced number of new plays and musicals on Broadway, not to mention the diminishment of the road and stock and vaudeville theatres and companies. Audiences in the throes of the Depression had less disposable income—movies were cheap, while live theatre was comparatively expensive—yet a fairly sizable theatregoing public remained engaged throughout the Depression and into the 1940s as a generation of playwrights—Robert E. Sherwood, Clifford Odets, Lillian

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Hellman, Thornton Wilder, and others—followed the inspiration of seriousminded dramatists like Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Susan Glaspell, and others. Plays in the 1930s reflected the personal and societal struggles of the Depression and, increasingly, raised concerns over the gathering storm clouds of another world war taking shape with the energized fascism and Nazism in Europe. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935) set the present moment in a larger historical context, as those profoundly affected by World War I faced, with mounting disillusionment, another worldwide catastrophe and the reality of the human penchant for violence. Even genial comedies vividly reflected the times, as in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It with You (1936), in which a family of lovable and very American eccentrics rises above the era’s deprivations and fears through a deep-seated belief in fundamental and eternal values of family and community. Odets’s dramas produced by The Group Theatre, such as Awake and Sing! in 1935, reflected the moral dilemmas of the middle and lower classes striving to survive the depths of the Depression, and in many respects Odets was the iconic 1930s’ playwright, who, as Harold Clurman wrote decades later, was important to his time (and as a representative of his time) for he “so directly communicates the very ‘smell’ of New York in the first years of the depression.”2 American plays of the 1930s gave the audience experiencing the Depression clarity and context for understanding the seemingly insurmountable dilemmas they were facing—and also provided escapism via comedies and great works of the Broadway musical theatre moving toward its pinnacle. The dramas of the 1930s–1940s acknowledge the triumph of modernism that had begun to shape American theatre in the previous era. Realism in serious drama dominated by 1930—and American plays and acting techniques, not to mention the visual aspects, had fully embraced the tenets and techniques of realism, even as the boundaries of it expanded to accommodate non-realistic elements from expressionism to symbolism. After World War I, this is first evident in the overtly expressionist plays of the 1920s and, later, in such novel productions as Our Town (1938), in which Thornton Wilder’s portrait of a turn-of-the-century New England small town is given universal resonance by the elimination of traditional scenery, with the play’s environment created in its original production by a few chairs, a ladder, and some umbrellas. A stressing of basic humanistic values appear in this play, as in You Can’t Take It with You and other 1930s plays in both dramatic and comic moods. The great moral questions of the times—and the enduring eternal values Kaufman and Hart and Wilder sought to stress—were central to the finest plays of the 1930s which mingled serious concerns with a high quotient of entertainment value.

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O’Neill, who had withdrawn from active production of his new works in the early 1930s after a few works were dismissed by critics and audiences, quietly worked in seclusion during the 1930s, unsuccessfully attempting to complete an ambitious cycle of plays going generation-by-generation through an American family from the Revolution to the present-day. In the 1930s and early 1940s, despite ill health and depression, O’Neill did complete plays that are the crowning achievements of his canon of works, most notably A Touch of the Poet (1935), which was written for his cycle, The Iceman Cometh (1939), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939), widely regarded as his masterwork, the one-act Hughie (1940), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Fine productions of these plays in the 1950s and beyond would reinvigorate interest in O’Neill’s achievement that continues into the twenty-first century. As previously noted, the 1930s were a fertile period for musical theatre, which set the hard times to melodic music by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, the latter duo pioneering the integrated “book musical” with their masterwork, Show Boat (1927), in which music, plot, and character were unified to present a sweeping story of American life and theatre from the 1880s to the 1920s. This volume does not include entries on the musical theatre, but it is clear that Show Boat, like You Can’t Take It with You and Our Town, suited the rapidly changing times and, like those plays, acknowledged life’s eternal forces—birth and death, and the brevity of life, family, and bigotry—while stressing, in totality, an optimism for a brighter future, however narrow and tragic the present might seem. Life’s vicissitudes were not ignored on the 1930s stage, but most dramatists seem convinced of a hopeful future and that the suffering of the present could lead not only to knowledge, but to greater concern for the well-being of others. This theme resonates through all of these plays and others, whether in the disillusionment of The Petrified Forest or the belief in family and community in You Can’t Take It with You and Our Town. Wilder’s play, one of the quintessential American works of the twentieth century, along with new techniques in scene, lighting, and costume design, represent the beginnings of American lyric realism, which would be fully realized in the mid-1940s in the works of the next generation of American dramatists.

WORLD WAR II AND THE COLD WAR The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, followed by the entry of the United States into the escalating conflict in December 1941 as a direct result of the Japanese air attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor, radically

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altered American life once again. As the industrial build-up in support of the war effort began in earnest, the last vestiges of the Great Depression died away, although on the home front American citizens faced new deprivations through rationing as their grown sons and daughters faced the armies of totalitarian dictators in Europe and the South Pacific. Theatre reflected the anxieties of the time to a significant extent—although dramatists continued to seek and find reason for hope. Thornton Wilder’s intellectual absurdist vaudeville, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), acknowledged that natural and human catastrophes are tragically inevitable, but Wilder also underscored the resilience of the human species and what he viewed as their inherent desire to create a better world built on the knowledge of the past with optimistic expectations for the future. A forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd and existentialist plays to come in the 1950s and 1960s, the cartoonish vaudeville style of The Skin of Our Teeth was also a striking departure from the prevalent realism of American drama, underscoring that both the modern and contemporary eras would see challenges to realism through such forms as surrealism, expressionism, epic theatre, and the Theatre of the Absurd, none of which would conquer realism, but all of which would—to a greater or lesser extent—expand the boundaries of the realistic tradition, remaking it in unique ways. During the war years, Broadway experienced an uptick in the production of comedies and musicals, as audiences quite logically sought escape more than ever, with some works taking a nostalgic and rose-colored look at the American past, as in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s remarkably long-running hit comedy, Life with Father (1939), or in the similarly long-running Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma! (1943). Numerous innocuous comedies romanticizing and satirizing life during the war years became a Broadway cottage industry with such plays insisting that “normal” life goes on even in extraordinary times. Given the mounting tragedies of the war, it is not surprising that few plays of these years offered graphic depictions of the horrors of the frontlines. However, a number of serious dramas raised the moral dilemmas of war and assailed the aggression, prejudice, and fascism inherent in the Axis powers. Among these works, Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), in its depiction of an anti-Nazi German citizen torn between remaining with his family in safety in the United States or returning to Germany and the dangerous work of the underground, celebrated the character’s quiet heroism and the sacrifices being made by ordinary people. Other plays and films provided varied images of individual heroism or, more often, escapist fare. Near war’s end, new dramatists emerged with plays acknowledging the troubled times within the context of individual personal lives. Some also looked back to the previous decade without rose-colored glasses and mea-

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sured the toll of the Depression and explored prewar attitudes. Tennessee Williams’s “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie (1944), is such a play, and it elevated stage language to poetry, as made clear in its opening monologue in which the play’s central character, Tom Wingfield, Williams’s alter ego, describes himself to the audience as the opposite of a “stage magician” who “gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”3 In this semi-autobiographical work, Williams brought lyricism to ordinary speech, making use of a fragmented structure of short scenes, projected titles, and a central character able to step out of the play to address the audience directly (Wilder had similarly made use of a context-setting narrator in Our Town). Influenced by Anton Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence, the style and structure of The Glass Menagerie also owes a debt to another European influence, Bertolt Brecht, whose epic theatre called for breaking the fourth wall and the use of the various theatrical devices, along with projections, film, music, etc., to remove the play from the illusion of reality. Brecht’s influence would eventually prove pervasive in American theatre productions and its techniques would inspire some American playwrights after 1960. Moment by moment and scene by scene, The Glass Menagerie is a realistic drama, but it is also something much more. Other dramatists followed suit with the help of directors and designers tuned to this refreshed and elaborated form of realism. For example, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) profited from Miller’s use of flashbacks and imaginary sequences to depict the inner torment of its central character, Willy Loman, a tragically defeated traveling salesman. The original production profited from Jo Mielziner’s evocative impressionistic setting in which ultra-modern high-rise New York City apartments seem to be crushing Loman’s mortgaged little house. The play challenged positivist views of American-style capitalism in the midst of a postwar economic boom and, remarkably, despite its seeming discordance with the national mood, Death of a Salesman became the most talked-about play of its time. The audience for the play remembered the Depression and felt genuine concern for the play’s prophetic notion that there were at least as many losers as winners in a materialistic society—and, more importantly, that the worth of a human being should not be based on economic success. When Loman is summarily fired he loses his grip, but not before frankly stating his plight: “I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!”4 But Loman is discarded like an orange peel and Miller’s play would continue to resonate for the next 60 years and beyond as the growth of corporations and their rising and falling fortunes would seem, at times, to overwhelmingly control American life. Later dramatists, including David

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Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), would advance this topic, as a group of real estate hucksters battled for survival in a company selling fraudulent land parcels and, apparently, the souls of their salesmen. In the late 1940s, Williams brought American lyric realism to a peak with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), while at the same time leading the way in smashing long-standing taboos against the frank exploration of sexuality and gender on the Broadway stage. In calling for an American national theatre years later, Harold Clurman wrote that Streetcar “would unquestionably be among the few worthy of a permanent place there.”5 Clurman was prophetic in one important sense; although no national theatre has yet been created, Streetcar found a permanent and central place in the canon of American drama, becoming an essential play frequently revived and produced in regional and university theatres. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, the previously taboo topics examined in Streetcar—sexual desire, rape, homosexuality—serve to underline Williams’s importance in bringing such subjects into the light. The plays of his contemporaries, and those who came after, expanded on these topics in new ways as audiences became more accepting of bolder content. The plays of Williams and Miller, and their like-minded contemporaries, usually found receptive audiences on Broadway, and as playwrights continued to stretch the boundaries in thematic content, character, and language, American actors rose to meet the challenges posed by these new works. The “Method,” as it came to be known, resulting from The Group Theatre’s experimentation with Constantin Stanislavsky’s theories on acting, emerged from The Actors Studio and its leader Lee Strasberg. Other alumni of The Group, including Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Sanford Meisner, differed in their approaches from Strasberg and taught their own variations on Stanislavsky’s theories, molding several generations of actors, including in the first wave such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean, Kim Hunter, Anne Bancroft, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Karl Malden, Geraldine Page, Eli Wallach, and Sidney Poitier. These actors would dominate Broadway and, ultimately, Off-Broadway, Off-OffBroadway, and regional stages, not to mention postwar film and television. For better or worse, the “method” actor vanquished the romantic star actors of the pre-World War II era, but in truth, many of them became larger-thanlife stars, too. In the 1950s, in the wake of Williams and Miller, playwrights William Inge, Robert Anderson, the team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, and John Patrick, among others, pleased Broadway audiences with worthy dramas while also writing as frequently for movies and/or television. Few dramatists after the 1950s devoted themselves exclusively to the stage, a fact that further diminished the number of notable new plays each year. The most honored

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works of the period tended to be earnest evocations of humanistic values, as in Inge’s Picnic (1953) or Bus Stop (1955), comedy-dramas exploring the longing for love and connection, or Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), with its guardedly hopeful view that the best of human nature may even survive unimaginable horrors represented by the Holocaust. Lawrence and Lee’s Inherit the Wind (1955) dramatized conflicts between faith and science in a fictionalized depiction of the Scopes “Monkey” trial of the 1920s, adding a political and spiritual dimension to arguments over evolution and creationism. O’Neill’s last plays, including his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, were also first seen during the 1950s, and most of O’Neill’s contemporaries offered their final works during the 1950s and 1960s. A generation passed and among younger talents, Lorraine Hansberry became the first African American woman to contribute a critically acclaimed drama to Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun (1959). She and her play brought home for audiences issues of racism, serving as a harbinger of the great social changes roiling within the civil rights movement, and demonstrated, too, the theatre’s growing openness to minorities traditionally closed out of mainstream theatre. Hansberry argued for plays by black writers, stressing that “the theatre is yet saddled with the notion that their [black playwrights] materials are necessarily parochial, and consequently without interest to the general theatergoing public.”6 Other minorities would slowly gain a footing during the 1960s and 1970s, as Asian, Chicano, and gay playwrights made significant inroads. Technology, once again, brought major change during the 1950s. The widespread availability of network television from the late 1940s, like film and radio in the 1930s, dealt a severe blow to the fortunes of the live stage, while also providing lucrative income to theatre workers. Despite a continuing flow of dramas and comedies, not to mention musicals, Broadway, as the center of the American theatre, began a slow, steady decline in the 1950s as a diminished audience drawn away by television and put off by higher ticket prices led to fewer productions and shorter runs (or, perversely, phenomenally long runs for hit musicals and the occasional comedy). This decline contributed significantly to the emergence of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatre. The smaller theatres and more modestly produced plays featured in such theatres siphoned off a portion of the regular Broadway theatregoing audience by offering cheaper tickets, not to mention subject matter Broadway typically eschewed. Populated by small production companies and individual artists with specific cultural or political agendas, and featuring experimental techniques and playwrights from ethnic, racial, or gender minorities, these theatres found niche audiences seeking more adventurous experimental fare

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and attention to specialized and topical subjects. More importantly, these theatres also gave voice to various racial, ethnic, gender, and political activists who would contribute to the titanic social upheavals of the 1960s.

THE 1960s AND 1970s The complacent, conformist attitudes often attributed to the United States during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s masked deep fissures in the national psyche. These surfaced in growing unrest among various subsets of the population. Political divisions between conservative and liberal ideologies deepened in the second half of the twentieth century, and were most obviously exemplified by the controversies surrounding the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and various politicians on both sides of the political divide exploited the fears of the Cold War era and, in the process, persecuted those whose political sentiments in the depths of the Depression had led them to espouse various leftist political causes and organizations. Film and television writers, performers, and creative personnel found themselves blacklisted or compelled to testify and “name names” of those they knew to be Communist sympathizers. Friendships and creative alliances were damaged or destroyed, most notably the close professional and personal relationship between Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan. Miller resisted cooperation with HUAC, while Kazan cooperated. The two men, whose collaboration on Death of a Salesman had provided the postwar American stage with its quintessential play, did not work together again for over a decade. Lesser-known artists saw their careers end in this period, but the theatre tended to be more welcoming to blacklisted talents and by 1960, even in film and television, some blacklisted artists returned to work even though deep-seated resentments remained. After World War II, African Americans increasingly pushed back against segregation and other inequalities represented most obviously by “Jim Crow” laws in the South, and drew together to demand change. The civil rights movement grew in strength in the late 1950s under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who called for non-violent resistance, boycotts, and peaceful demonstrations, while other black leaders like Malcolm X preferred to employ any means necessary to force change. Over time, and despite at times tragic consequences including the assassinations of King and Malcolm X among many violent acts, the movement brought about an end to segregation. The civil rights movement provided a model of resistance for other minorities to follow, including Chicano and Latinos, Asian Americans, and

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Native Americans, as well as women and homosexuals who organized for change with increasing success after 1960. And, as involvement in the quagmire of the Vietnam War deepened, many Americans protested the war’s continuance in much the same way. The culture as a whole began reflecting changes in the 1950s ultimately categorized as part of “The Sixties” in the coming decade. The “Baby Boom” generation, children born in the aftermath of World War II, embraced rock’n’roll music from the mid-1950s, and their revolution in music, dress, and moral attitudes coalesced in the 1960s to symbolize radical changes and to provide either coherence to or escape from the shocking events of that turbulent era. The horrors of the Vietnam War were viewed nightly on television news, and race riots during the long, hot summers of the mid-1960s were simultaneously brought into every home via television. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, King, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy tragically highlighted the uneasy mood of the times. A general loss of faith in “The Establishment,” 1960s’ youth-speak for the government, institutional, and corporate interests, and any form of authority exacerbated a generation gap separating “Baby Boomers” coming of age from their parents. A sexual revolution and the search for alternative beliefs and ways of living that rejected the materialism of the previous generation deepened the gap, as did the younger generation’s experimentation with drugs, participation in antiwar and civil rights demonstrations, women’s liberation, and resistance to the military draft. “The Sixties” as an era extended into the mid-1970s, with cynicism about national leadership culminating in the Watergate scandal, leading to the resignation of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon. His successor, President Gerald R. Ford, expressed a desire to heal the nation’s wounds that had accumulated since the end of World War II, and especially during the 1960s, but the legacy of these divisions continued even after the “Baby Boom” generation had themselves become “The Establishment.” Theatre was as divided as the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Broadway struggled to survive change, not only in the content and style of plays and musicals, but in rapidly evolving economic times. The expense of producing on Broadway skyrocketed in the mid-1960s and producers responded with fewer new productions and less adventurous choices. A “nostalgia craze” brought back vintage plays, musicals, and well-known performers who appealed to the older generation seeking escape from dizzying social changes they instinctively resisted, while producers tentatively introduced topical concerns in what they believed to be palatable form. New playwrights dealing with contemporary topics increasingly found themselves crowded out of Broadway theatres and new comedies and musicals on any topic were few and far

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between. Only Neil Simon seemed to weather the era with an unparalleled number of Broadway hits between 1960 and the late 1980s. Other nonmusical writers found Broadway success increasingly elusive. Some breakthroughs occurred on Broadway, as in the surprise success of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), a comedy-drama offering an examination of the lives of gay men in present-day New York, but little innovation in style or structure was to be found on Broadway. The “counterculture” musical, Hair (1968), featuring the attitudes of 1960s youth and making use of nudity, scored a Broadway hit, but it had moved from Off-Broadway’s Public Theatre to Broadway. Such innovation was only palatable to Broadway producers if it could be proven that such style and content was a sure thing at the box office. New plays—especially those reflecting current trends—found more welcoming venues in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres. Keeping costs low in smaller theatres and other nontraditional spaces, Off-Broadway productions in New York provided venues for new talents, among them such enduringly significant dramatists as Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Arthur Kopit. Many others followed in the 1970s and beyond, but over time the expense of mounting Off-Broadway productions also grew, so Off-Off-Broadway emerged with smaller theatres (under 100 seats), lower costs, and a greater opportunity for experimentation. Mainstream audiences and critics often failed to recognize the best work emanating from these theatres, but the writers themselves were unrepentant, as Albee made clear when he asserted in this era that Broadway theatre only “panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance” and presents “a false picture of ourselves to ourselves, with an occasional very lovely exception,” and that the new wave offered a theatre intended to “make a man face up to the human condition as it really is.”7 Albee’s stinging condemnation of Broadway theatre suggests something of the gulf between the mainstream stage and the Off-Broadway avant-garde of a transitional era for the American stage. Regional theatres functioned somewhat similarly to Off-Broadway in providing a more protected, less costly environment for the development of new plays and the production of classic works. The Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example, emphasized a repertory-style structure and emphasis on classics from its founding in 1959, but other theatres in cities across the country founded in subsequent decades developed varying missions, many aimed at providing opportunities for playwrights, new and old, to experiment with and perfect new work. Even such venerable figures as Tennessee Williams brought new plays to Off-Broadway and regional theatres in the 1970s, and small Off-Broadway-style companies appeared in major cities, also emphasizing new work and emerging artists. David Mamet, one of the major American dramatists of the late twentieth century, produced most

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of his early works in small theatres in Chicago, ultimately bringing plays to Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres from the 1980s and beyond. Mamet and his contemporaries recognized that their plays could take shape in fringe companies and regional theatres where a work could be nurtured without the high-pressure commercialism of Broadway and, when appropriate, a finished and well-received work could move to Broadway or Off-Broadway to reach a wider and more varied audience.

THE 1980s TO THE PRESENT The transition that “The Sixties” represent polarized culture and politics in ways that remain deeply ingrained in the American cultural fabric. To a great extent, the conflicts became permanent as the political pendulum swung away from the liberal era of the 1960s to a more conservative one by the end of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan capitalized on this, and with his election to the U.S. presidency in 1980 he set off what was described as the “Reagan Revolution,” a sweeping reversal of many “New Deal”-era social policies. Reagan stressed the idea of smaller government and deregulation of the corporate world, and the legacy of the Reagan era reverberates into the twenty-first century. Despite Reagan’s enormous personal popularity, widespread mistrust of government and politicians continued. Reagan’s administration, like those immediately preceding his, was tainted by scandal. In Reagan’s case, the Iran-Contra arms deal marred his last years in the White House, as did his long silence on the AIDS pandemic. The slow response of the medical establishment, the government, and the media to this health catastrophe had an almost immediate impact on the American theatre, as openly gay playwrights put the crisis on stage in the 1980s and 1990s in a wide range of works in which the personal circumstances of those affected by AIDS were seen in juxtaposition to societal attitudes, as indicated in William M. Hoffman’s As Is (1985), or in angry assaults on antigay prejudice and the failures of national institutions to manage the crisis as depicted in Larry Kramer’s scathing drama The Normal Heart (1985). Audiences were drawn to the topic, and gay-themed plays were some of the most honored works of the 1990s. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prizewinning two-play epic, Angels in America (1992), won numerous critical awards for its portrait of American life in the Reagan era and its importance in American history. Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) won praise for its humanistic examination of gay life seen through the experiences of a diverse group of friends and was something of an updated The Boys in the Band while Paula Vogel’s plays, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning

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How I Learned to Drive (1997), were among the works of several lesbian playwrights and collectives shaping the feminist agenda at the dawn of the new millennium. The major social changes since the 1960s, and the increased political activism of playwrights and producing organizations, as well as new techniques developed in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres, were increasingly seen in numerous small and large theatre companies across the country as the regional theatre movement transformed American theatre. Companies of all sizes and missions found niche audiences in many cities and towns, often addressing local concerns, regional culture, and the need for revival of American and international classic plays. In a sense, the regional nature of American theatre in recent decades echoes the era of the road and stock theatres spread across the nation in the first half of the twentieth century. While regional theatres have risen and fallen since the movement began in the 1950s, the diversification of the American stage—its movement away from New York—provided the United States with an opportunity to nurture a truly national theatre. The potential existed for every community—small and large—to have high-quality theatre of both national and local significance. In the decades following Reagan’s presidency, the national political pendulum swung back and forth and during President George W. Bush’s first term, the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a period of political divisiveness. These events set the stage for a remarkable 2008 primary and election season in which a woman, Hillary Clinton, and an African American man, Barack Obama, became the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. Obama ultimately became the first African American president. These and other historical and cultural developments of the era between 1980 and 2010 were only some of the American stories told in dramatic form during that period. Despite momentous historic and political changes, theatre often kept its focus on the intimacies of personal lives, families, and values, with an emphasis on the individual’s struggle for coherence, connection, and selfrealization, and aimed to bring clarity to the confusions of changing values faced by families and in those relationships buffeted by moral, economic, and political conflict and uncertainty. America’s prominence in world affairs, which marked the first half of the twentieth century, met with new and daunting challenges as a new millennium dawned. Diversity in the content of American theatre after the 1960s resulted, in part, from geographic diversity supplied, also in part, by regional theatres with individual missions. The numbers of these theatres has fluctuated up and down since 1960, but in 2010 there were as many as 70 regional theatres functioning in the United States, even despite new economic challenges

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resulting from the recession of 2008. Increasingly since the emergence of regional theatres, serious drama, new playwrights, and innovative techniques have not originated on Broadway, but on these regional stages, as they had in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theatres in the 1960s and 1970s and, increasingly, in academic theatre departments since the 1960s. Many of the foremost dramatists after 1980 (some of whom began their careers in the 1960s), including such leading figures as Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Beth Henley, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner, had comparatively fewer Broadway productions than playwrights of previous generations. Some pointedly rejected Broadway, presuming that their themes or theatrical experimentation would be of little or no interest to Broadway audiences or that they would face attempts by producers to dilute the content or style of their works to conform to mainstream sensibilities. By the late twentieth century, the rarity of new nonmusical plays on Broadway was all too obvious. Virtually every significant play produced on Broadway had begun its life elsewhere. The Broadway of the Golden Age was dead and in its place long-running musicals aimed at tourists dominated and non-musical plays were rare and, when they appeared, typically short-lived or unqualified successes from regional or international stages. Millennial drama reflected the discomfitures of the times. Much had changed in the way theatre was made in America after 1960, but the content of plays, despite a greater freedom from taboos and more diverse images of America and American lives, continued to center around the individual, relationships, and family even while responding to topical issues and cultural developments and divisions. Playwrights who had emerged from the 1960s to the 1980s—Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, August Wilson, Horton Foote, Beth Henley, Neil Simon, John Guare, Emily Mann, Christopher Durang, Maria Irene Fornés, Terrence McNally—continued to produce new works into the twenty-first century on a wide range of subjects, while a generation of dramatists who appeared beginning in the late 1980s resulted in the most culturally diverse group of American dramatists in the nation’s history. Chicanos, Asians, Native Americans, women, gays, and physically challenged Americans continued to make inroads through the establishment of niche companies and by gaining a stronger foothold in regional theatres, on Off- and Off-Off-Broadway stages, and even, occasionally, on Broadway. This new and varied generation of playwrights, including such figures as Luis Valdez, David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, Richard Greenberg, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ping Chong, Rebecca Gilman, Jon Robin Baitz, Tracy Letts, Eve Ensler, John Patrick Shanley, Craig Lucas, Charles L. Mee, Anna Deavere Smith, Nicky Silver, Pearl Cleage, Paula Vogel, Donald Margulies, David Auburn, Charles Busch, Neil LaBute, Lynn Nottage, Sarah

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Ruhl, Melissa James Gibson, and John Logan, among many others, are, in all of their diversity, a confirmation of a new order in American theatre at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite greater diversity of racial, ethnic, and gender plays and playwrights, all roads led back to constants of American theatre. For example, Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County (2007) can be said to be little more than a continuation of the brand of tense and deeply personal family dramas typical of O’Neill, Williams, Miller, and other “Golden Age” American playwrights. John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2004) and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) stressed the moral, religious, and political tensions of the time, much as Odets and Miller had done in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively. August Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” chronicling African American life in the twentieth century, focused around family and community, realizing the generation-by-generation approach O’Neill had envisioned but could not complete in the 1930s. Wilson finished the last of his cycle plays, Radio Golf (2005), shortly before his death, and like the next generation’s Suzan-Lori Parks, whose stylistic experiments were more adventurous than Wilson’s, these plays by African American writers looked at the seemingly eternal issues of race conflict. Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001) and her other works serve as reminders of the full emergence of artists from traditional minority groups, of the unique aspects of such works, and of the continued struggles of African Americans, as well as women, gays, and other racial and ethnic groups to achieve equality in the new century, using theatre as one of several means of accomplishing their goal. In this, it seems clear that in the early twenty-first century, at least as far as American theatre is concerned, despite significant changes in the way theatre is made, and the boldness and diversity of the works created for American stages, in subject matter and in the desire of audiences to see their stories told in dramatic form, everything old was new again.

NOTES 1. Arthur Miller, “The American Theatre,” Holiday (January 1955): 90. 2. Harold Clurman, “The Theatre of the Thirties,” Famous American Plays of the 1930s. New York: Dell, 1959, pp. 7–17. 3. Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie, in Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America, 2000, p. 400. 4. Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman, in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944– 1961. Edited by Tony Kushner. New York: Library of America, 2006, p. 213.

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5. Harold Clurman, “Tennessee Williams,” The Divine Pastime: Theatre Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1974, pp. 11–18. 6. Lorraine Hansberry, “Me Tink Me Hear Sounds in De Night,” Theatre Arts (October 1960): 10. 7. Edward Albee, “Which Theatre is the Absurd One?,” New York Times Magazine (25 February 1962): 30.

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A ABBOTT, GEORGE (1887–1995).† Beginning in the 1910s, George Francis Abbott, born in Forestville, New York, became the quintessential all-around theatre man, beginning an acting career in 1913 in The Misleading Lady and working steadily for a decade before making the transition to Broadway’s leading director/producer, particularly in comedies and musicals, and as a playwright. His earliest plays, written with collaborators, include The Fall Guy (1925; with James Gleason*), A Holy Terror (1925; with Winchell Smith*), and Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em (1926; with J. V. A. Weaver) were moderately successful, but in collaboration with Philip Dunning,* Abbott scored his first major hit with Broadway* (1926). At the same time, his directing career took off with Maurine Watkins’s* Chicago* (1926) and by the end of the 1920s, he was a much sought-after director, scoring another major success with ben hecht and charles m acarthur’s Twentieth Century (1932). One of his most enduring plays, the expressionistic farce Three Men on a Horse (1935), coauthored with John Cecil Holm, won critical approval and commercial success, as did virtually everything Abbott staged and/or coauthored during the 1930s, including such popular comedies as Boy Meets Girl (1935), Brother Rat (1936), Room Service (1927), and What a Life! (1938). He shifted to musical comedy in this era, working frequently with composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart on a series of highly popular musicals, including Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Too Many Girls (1939), and Pal Joey (1940). By the beginning of the 1940s, his status as the leading director of generally lighthearted musicals led to numerous hits into the 1960s, including On the Town (1944), High Button Shoes (1947), Where’s Charley? (1948), Call Me Madam (1950), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), Fiorello! (1969), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). The prolific “Mister Abbott,” as he was called by Broadway coworkers, continued his remarkable career well into his nineties, although with diminished success with the exception of a 1983 revival of On Your Toes, which was well-received.

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ABDOH, REZA (1963–1995). Born in Tehran, Iran, Reza Abdoh emigrated to Los Angeles, California, after some time in London, and began directing. Reviewers and audiences were amazed by the quality of his work when, at the age of 22, he staged King Lear and Oedipus Rex with the Dar a Luz Theatre Ensemble. Abdoh wrote many of the pieces he directed, most notably The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990), produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. AIDS cut short his impressive career. ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS. Robert E. Sherwood’s reverent drama on Abraham Lincoln’s rise to the United States Presidency, and his troubled relationship with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, won a Pulitzer Prize following its opening on 15 October 1938 in the first production of the Playwrights’ Company at the Plymouth Theatre for a run of 472 performances. Raymond Massey’s masterful performance as Lincoln won considerable praise and he repeated his performance in the 1940 film version. Massey’s preparation was so meticulous and obsessive that one Broadway wag commented that the actor would not be satisfied until he was assassinated. The play begins at the time of Lincoln’s aborted romance with the doomed Ann Rutledge and continues through his courtship and marriage to the mercurial Mary Todd and his career as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, stressing his reluctance to pursue elected office and Mary’s intense ambitions for him. Concluding with Lincoln’s election and departure for Washington, the play foreshadows Lincoln’s struggles with a deeply divided nation moving toward civil war and his wife’s mental deterioration. Abe Lincoln in Illinois has had two major New York revivals, one in 1963 by the Phoenix Theatre, and another in 1993 produced by the Lincoln Center Theatre with Sam Waterston in a Tony Award-nominated performance. ABEL, WALTER (1898–1987).† Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Abel spent his long career mostly in character roles, moving easily among theatre, film, and television roles. His Broadway debut in Dorothy Donnelly’s* Forbidden (1919) was followed by a supporting role in the first American production of George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922). He played the Sheriff in the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms* (1924) and Orin Mannon in a short-lived 1932 revival of O’Neill’s Mourning becomes Electra. When sound films began, Abel appeared with greater frequency on the screen, but returned to the stage to appear in several plays, including When Ladies Meet (1933), Merrily We Roll Along (1934), The Wingless Victory (1936), and appeared with Helen Hayes in The Wisteria Trees (1950). Abel also appeared in The Pleasure of His Company (1958), Night Life (1962), The Ninety Day Mistress (1967), Saturday Sunday Monday

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(1974), and, in his late seventies, made his last stage appearance in a New York Shakespeare Festival revival of Trelawny of the “Wells” (1975). ABRAHAM, F[AHRID]. MURRAY (1939– ). Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a Syrian American auto mechanic and a housewife, Abraham was raised in El Paso, Texas. He studied with Uta Hagen and debuted in Los Angeles in a production of Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. A versatile actor in a range of character roles and styles, Abraham made his first Broadway appearance in The Man in the Glass Booth (1968), which was followed by a varied series of plays both on Broadway and in OffBroadway venues, including 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), Bad Habits (1974), and Terrence McNally’s farce, The Ritz (1975), in which Abraham scored a success as a flamboyant regular at a gay bathhouse. He repeated his performance in the 1976 screen version. Abraham appeared with regularity in film and television, winning a 1984 Best Actor Academy Award as Antonio Salieri in the screen version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. He returned frequently to the stage, including roles in the 1976 flop Legend, Tiebele, and Her Demon, and he replaced Ron Leibman as Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s two-play epic Angels in America (1993). This was followed by roles in a revival of A Month in the Country (1995), the m usical Triumph of Love (1997), and Mauritius (2007). Other credits include the classics, with acclaimed performances in Oedipus Rex, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, as well as modern classics, including Waiting for Godot. Abraham also teaches acting at Brooklyn College, and in stints at Harvard University and Columbia University. ABUBA, ERNEST (1947– ). Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, with a Filipino heritage, Abuba became involved as dramatist, actor, and director with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. His own plays focus on sociopolitical and cultural conflicts, including The Dowager (1978), An American Story (1979), Cambodia Agonistes (1990), Papa-Boy (1994), Nightstalker (1997), Leir Rex (1998), Spleen (2001), and Kwatz! The Tibetan Project (2004). On Broadway, Abuba appeared in Pacific Overtures (1976), Loose Ends (1979), Zoya’s Apartment (1990), and Shimada (1992). See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. ACADEMIC THEATRE.† From the middle of the nineteenth century there is little evidence that performances of plays were frequent on campuses or that the techniques of acting, directing, design, and playwriting were studied, although dramatic literature, particularly the classics, were studied. William O. Partridge, a Columbia University professor, called for the creation of

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classes and departments in theatre as early as 1886, but the first formalized instruction in theatrical techniques appears to be George Pierce Baker’s* English 47 course at Harvard University which began in 1905. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, the influence of Baker’s course, including on such notable playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, and others, led faculty at various institutions to establish similar courses in theatre practice. In 1914, Carnegie Institute of Technology established the first department of theatre under the guidance of Thomas Wood Stevens* and Ben Iden Payne and in 1925 Baker created the Department of Drama at Yale University. By the end of the 1920s, many colleges and universities had departments of theatre or included theatre courses as part of English or Speech departments. In 1926, Paul Opp established Alpha Psi Omega, a national theatre fraternity for undergraduates working in theatre (and this evolved into an honor society that continues into the twenty-first century, with other similar societies following suit). The American Educational Theatre Association was founded in 1936 and theatre professors met annually to discuss mutual concerns, with its early membership of eighty university faculty expanding rapidly. Later called the American Theatre Association (ATA), the organization disbanded in 1986 at a time it was serving over 1,600 college and university theatre departments. ATA was replaced by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), which thrives into the twenty-first century, encouraging both scholarship and the practice of theatre in university and college settings. According to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), by 1977 2,500 colleges and universities were staging over 3,000 productions for annual audiences of more than nine million people. During the last decades of the twentieth century, academic theatre suffered from a general decline of professional opportunities for its graduates, but colleges and universities also become a venue for new playwrights to produce their works. The bonds between professional and academic theatres have multiplied since the 1960s and many theatre departments have developed major preprofessional university programs with close working relationships with professional repertory theatres in their region. Playwrights, as well as professional actors, directors, designers, and technicians have developed relationships with university theatres, teaching courses and doing short- and long-term residencies, such as Edward Albee’s long relationship with the University of Houston. The economic recession of 2009 threatened the survival of university programs, with many facing enormous budget cutbacks likely, in some cases, to radically alter programs.

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ACCENT ON YOUTH. Samson Raphaelson’s three-act comedy, produced by Crosby Gaige,* opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 25 December 1934 and chalked up 229 performances despite decidedly mixed reviews. The plot centers on playwright Steven Gaye, who has written a play about a middleaged dramatist in love with a much younger woman. The production of the play is troubled, culminating in Gaye’s desire to abandon it, but his young secretary, Linda Brown (played in the original production by Constance Cummings), salvages things by taking on the leading role. She becomes involved with her innocuous leading man and marries him, but later returns to Gaye when she realizes that despite their age difference, they are meant for each other. A longtime romantic staple of summer stock theatres, Accent on Youth was also filmed starring Sylvia Sidney and Herbert Marshall in 1935 and was musicalized for Bing Crosby and Nancy Olson under the title Mr. Music in 1950. Another adaptation, titled But Not for Me, starred Clark Gable and Carroll Baker in 1959. Despite its screen versions, Accent on Youth has had only one major Broadway revival, which opened for a limited run in April 2009, featuring a cast including David Hyde Pierce, Charles Kimbrough, Lisa Banes, Mary Catherine Garrison, and Byron Jennings. ACCONCI, VITO (1940– ). Born Vito Hannibal Acconi in New York to an Italian immigrant family, Acconci began his career as a poet before developing into an architect and performance artist with a narcissistic bent. He includes himself in some of his work, as in Seedbed, an installation/performance work at the Sonnabend Gallery in January 1971 in which he lay hidden under a ramp masturbating while his voices speaking his fantasies was heard as viewers walked across the ramp. The goal of an interchange between artist and audience was established, but later Acconci works tended to feature machinery and architectural elements. ACTING/ACTORS.† Acting has always required a multiplicity of physical and vocal skills, a vibrant stage presence, and usually physical attractiveness, not to mention an intelligence tuned to encompass such practical concerns as memorization and, more importantly, interpretive and emotional acumen. The American stage has tended to be rich in talented actors in all eras, particularly from the early nineteenth century, a period in which the dominant acting style was of a bombastic nature, essentially influenced by the predominance of plays in the tradition of melodrama.* This led to a romantic school of acting, in which the actor built toward a crescendo of passion expressed vocally and physically. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, some actors gradually introduced greater realism into their performances. As early as the

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1850s, Edwin Booth,* perhaps the most respected American actor of the era in Shakespeare’s plays, was turning away from the romantic style, adopting an economy of gesture, a comparatively conversational manner of delivery, and an immersion in character that influenced subsequent generations and pointed toward the future. Between the 1890s and 1910, Minnie Maddern Fiske* was especially noted for the apparent naturalness with which she assumed her characterizations in contemporary works, and she was fortunate in finding roles that allowed her use of subtler effects than many of her contemporaries adopted. The gradual acceptance of psychological realism in acting was powerfully reinforced with the advent of plays by modernist European dramatists Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and, in America, James A. Herne* and actor/playwright William Gillette,*with the latter moving away from elocutionary artifice toward a style of “under-acting” to create a more natural effect. Gillette’s popularity reflected the audience’s growing taste for increased reality, although the plays in which he appeared were more likely to belong to the melodramatic or romantic traditions. Many American actors until well into the mid-twentieth century continued with success in the romantic tradition, most notably stars like John Barrymore* and Katharine Cornell, who may have been the last widely appeared romantic actress in roles in both the classics and contemporary works. By the 1920s, the range of acting styles on Broadway expanded to include “celebrity” or star acting by those who stamped their roles indelibly with their own personalities rather than immersing themselves in the unique details of varied characters. A few examples are Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Burke,* De Wolf Hopper,* Olga Nethersole,* and Mae West, although Bankhead most particularly occasionally rose to the challenge of creating a character unlike her own well-honed flamboyant persona. Other talented and compelling actors of the era, such as Ethel Barrymore and Otis Skinner,* moved steadily toward a more complete immersion in character, although by contemporary standards would surely seem more part of the romantic tradition. The Barrymore name became synonymous with the acting profession. John and Ethel’s brother, Lionel,* was also well-respected and all three succeeded on stage and screen. The threesome had descended from the BarrymoreDrew-Lane* family dynasty of actors first visible in the eighteenth century and continuing beyond them in the person of film star Drew Barrymore, John’s granddaughter. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a proliferation of star actors were seen on Broadway, and although personalities and styles varied, audiences were drawn to the greatest of them even without regard for the quality of the play in which the star appeared. The Barrymores, Bankhead, Cornell, Skinner, and others dominated the productions in which they appeared and the play was often only a means by which they could im-

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press audiences with their acting pyrotechnics. Even on New York’s ethnic stages, star actors were essential in the first half of the twentieth century; for example, in the Yiddish theatre on Second Avenue, Jacob Adler* became a major force and even performed on Broadway occasionally. His children, most notably Stella and Luther Adler, followed him onto the stage, but Stella, especially, was part of a movement that led the next generation away from the “grand manner” exemplified by her father and his contemporaries. From 1920 to 1960, the married duo of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were widely acclaimed, particularly before World War II, and their painstakingly rehearsed on-stage give-and-take with dialogue impressed audiences and critics. Like the Barrymores and Cornell, their names became synonymous with great acting in the romantic tradition prior to the emergence of “method” acting after the mid-1940s. In truth, this revolution in American acting so simply labeled as “the method” had its roots in the 1923–1924 Broadway season (and tour) of the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre (MAT)* under the direction of Constantin Stanislavsky. In a varied repertory featuring, among others, Anton Chekhov’s plays, the MAT impressed American actors and critics with the depth, naturalness, and ensemble acting style they demonstrated. The MAT visit occurred as American plays, led by the dramas of Eugene O’Neill, required a greater reality in the portrayal of characters than had been typical up to that time. As other dramatists followed O’Neill’s model in their individual ways, the demand for more natural acting grew exponentially. In 1931, the founding of The Group Theatre by Harold Clurman, Lee Straberg, and Cheryl Crawford, set off vast changes in American acting. The Group produced plays, including those of Clifford Odets, addressing the social dilemmas of the Great Depression in the Ibsenesque social problem play manner. The Group’s estimable accomplishment in the plays they produced was paralleled by their concerted effort to develop an acting style suitable for such true-to-life plays, basing their central concepts on Stanislavsky’s theories. This also commenced a complex conflict contributing to the breakup of The Group in 1940. A bitter rift among its various members over interpretations of Stanislavsky’s ideas caused several members of The Group, most notably Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Robert Lewis, to establish acting schools all based, to a great extent, on Stanislavsky, but each with unique variations. The result was that several subsequent generations of American actors were trained within these variations on the Stanislavsky system. The Group itself had either created or attracted to its productions a first generation of American actors to rival the predominant romantic acting style typical of the Barrymores, Cornell, and their peers, including Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb,

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Howard da Silva, Frances Farmer, John Garfield, Sam Jaffe, Karl Malden, Sylvia Sidney, and Franchot Tone, most of whom would craft enduring careers on Broadway and in films. The Group also produced a major director, Elia Kazan, who between 1940 and 1960 staged some of the most important American dramas of the time with actors trained by such teachers as Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Lewis. The Actors Studio, under Strasberg’s direction (although it was founded by Kazan and Lewis), dominated in the post-World War II years, rivaled most successfully by Adler, who felt that Strasberg overemphasized Stanislavsky’s ideas on emotional memory and undervalued the nurturing of an actor’s imagination. The most celebrated “method actor” of the 1940s and 1950s, Marlon Brando, studied with both Strasberg and Adler, but seemed to profit most from Adler’s teaching. Brando was fortunate in being cast as the animalistic Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a role which permitted him ample opportunities to demonstrate the potency of the “method” in ways previously unseen. He became a major movie star and never returned to the live theatre after Streetcar. The Actors Studio alumni of Brando’s generation, and the next, included some of the most acclaimed American actors from the 1950s into the twenty-first century, and most did return to the stage from screen success, some more frequently than others. The Studio’s alumni includes Alec Baldwin, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, James Dean, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Lee Grant, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, Kim Hunter, Anne Jackson, Harvey Keitel, Martin Landau, Cloris Leachman, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Estelle Parsons, Sean Penn, Sidney Poitier, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Rip Torn, Christopher Walken, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters, and Joanne Woodward, among scores of others. After its first decade, the Studio established special units for dramatists, directors, and also developed finished productions. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, Terrence McNally, and James Baldwin were among writers involved at various times. Other acting teachers emerged from the same generation. Meisner became associated with The Neighborhood Playhouse, where he taught, and Herbert Berghof, a director, set up the HB Studio in 1945. In 1948, Berghof’s wife, actress Uta Hagen, joined the HB Studio as a teacher. Hagen subsequently wrote two books, Respect for Acting (1976) and A Challenge for the Actor (1991), widely admired and embraced by young actors. She spent the later part of her career teaching and returned to acting only infrequently, although notably in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Adler, Meisner, Lewis, and numerous other acting teachers also wrote books on the

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subject of acting. By the 1980s, acting training had become increasingly sectionalized, with voice, movement, stage combat, and other specialists sought out by aspiring actors. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, American stages from Broadway to regional and academic theatres, were populated with an increasingly multicultural group of actors, although it has often been the case since the 1960s that after actors achieve a major success on Broadway or OffBroadway, they are inclined to trade that success for more lucrative film and television work, rarely if ever returning to the stage. However, some movie and television stars have returned with frequency, including Alan Alda, Joan Allen, Christine Baranski, Kathy Bates, Shirley Booth, Matthew Broderick, Kate Burton, Richard Burton, Hume Cronyn, Billy Crudup, Willem Dafoe, Blythe Danner, Viola Davis, Ruby Dee, Colleen Dewhurst, Olympia Dukakis, Charles Durning, José Ferrer, Henry Fonda, Morgan Freeman, James Gandolfini, Ben Gazzara, Lillian Gish, Ruth Gordon, Rex Harrison, Eileen Heckart, Katharine Hepburn, Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Raúl Juliá, Kevin Kline, Jack Lemmon, John Lithgow, Patti LuPone, John Malkovich, Dorothy McGuire, Alfred Molina, Zero Mostel, Estelle Parsons, Anthony Perkins, Christopher Plummer, Jason Robards, George C. Scott, Gary Sinise, Kevin Spacey, Jean Stapleton, James Stewart, Meryl Streep, Jessica Tandy, Marisa Tomei, Lily Tomlin, Denzel Washington, Dianne Wiest, B. D. Wong, and Jeffrey Wright, among many others. Conversely, some movie and television stars have attempted Broadway roles, including Scarlett Johansson, who won a Tony Award for a 2010 revival of A View from the Bridge on her first try, and Julia Roberts, whose stage debut in a 2006 revival of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain garnered tepid reviews, but filled theatre seats for its limited run. The majority of stage actors are relatively unknown, laboring in Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, regional, and semi-professional theatres, surviving in the twenty-first century by working jobs outside of theatre and/ or combining theatre work with film, television, and radio jobs to supplement their income as the diminished number of productions and theatres in hard times fail to provide ample employment for even the most talented and experienced actors. ACTING COMPANY, THE. Founded in 1972 by John Houseman, the company featured the first graduating class of the Juilliard School’s Drama Division. Currently managed by producing director Margo Harley, the Acting Company continues a long tradition of touring performances of classic and new works to schools (high school and college) with young actors gaining

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ACTORS’ EQUITY ASSOCIATION

significant experience. Many actors in the company at various times have risen to professional prominence, including Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, Jesse L. Martin, Keith David, Lorraine Toussaint, David Ogden Stiers, Jeffrey Wright, Rainn Wilson, Frances Conroy, Lisa Banes, Dennis Boutsikaris, Derek Smith, David Schramm, Mary Lou Rosato, and others. Its stated goals include not only the training of young actors, but also the encouragement of new plays and the educating of a national audience. ACTORS’ EQUITY ASSOCIATION (AEA).† Founded in 1913 by a group of 122 actors in response to poor conditions and unethical practices by producers, this union for actors was preceded by the Actors’ Society, which had formed in 1895 to fight for a minimum wage. Its disbanding in 1912 set the stage for the AEA, which negotiated unsuccessfully with producers until 1919 when a month-long strike by actors closed theatres in eight cities, forced the closing or prevented the opening of numerous productions, finally bringing an agreement with the Producing Managers’ Association for a five-year contract. Over the subsequent decade, additional agreements established a minimum wage, rehearsal pay, and other issues. In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, AEA established its headquarters in New York, with regional branches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, and reached a membership of over 40,000 actors. Despite occasional controversies and difficult financial issues, especially during the AIDS epidemic beginning in the early 1980s, AEA is concerned with the rights of actors and stage managers, in recent decades enhancing efforts in support of minorities, women, and disabled performers. In 2009, Mark Zimmerman served as AEA president, succeeding Burgess Meredith, Frederick O’Neal, Theodore Bikel, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst, Ron Silver, and Patrick Quinn, all of whom had served in AEA leadership over the years. ACTORS’ FUND OF AMERICA.† In 1882, Harrison Grey Fiske* lobbied through the New York Dramatic Mirror* to establish a charitable organization to support the needs of elderly and infirm actors. Leading players and producers were among the founders who managed it beginning with a $500 contribution from distinguished actor Edwin Booth.* In 1902, a retirement home was established on Staten Island, but eventually moved to Englewood, New Jersey. By 2009, its budget had grown to $17 million annually and served over 6,000 individuals and actor Brian Stokes Mitchell served as president. ACTORS STUDIO, THE. Established in 1947 by Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis as a workshop for professional actors, its widespread influence on mid-twentieth century American theatre, film, and

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television is incalculable. Located for decades at 432 West 44th Street in New York, its limited membership was by invitation and within a year of its founding, when Lee Strasberg joined, it became the focus of “method” acting, an approach to acting with an emphasis on actors applying their own feeling and experiences to the content of a play’s text in creating a character. The Studio’s techniques were inspired by The Group Theatre of the 1930s, which based its acting work on the innovations of Constantin Stanislavsky* and the Moscow Art Theatre.* Scripts used were typically contemporary American and European plays in the tradition of realism. Some of the finest mid-twentieth century American actors were members of the Actors Studio, including Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Joanne Woodward, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, Estelle Parsons, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn, Shelley Winters, and many others. After a decade, the Actors Studio established special units for dramatists and directors and to mount productions. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, Terrence McNally, and James Baldwin were among writers involved at various times. Following Strasberg’s 1982 death, Burstyn and Pacino succeeded him as the Studio’s directors. They continue as copresidents, along with Harvey Keitel, and Mark Rydell and Martin Landau directing the west coast Studio in West Hollywood, California. In 1994, the Studio added an M.F.A. program in acting, directing, and playwriting, and with a physical move to Pace University, and the popularity of television’s Inside the Actors Studio, hosted by James Lipton, the Actors Studio continues its influence into the twenty-first century. ACTORS THEATRE OF LOUISVILLE. Founded in 1964 by Richard Block and Ewel Cornett, this professional resident company in Louisville, Kentucky, progressed into one of the major regional theatres after 1969 when Jon Jory took over as producing director. The theatre’s varied play selections and commitment to new works attracted the interest of the profession, particularly playwrights, who found the annual Humana Festival of New Plays (including full-length and short works) a welcoming venue for new work. For audiences, the Humana Festival provided opportunities to see new works by emerging dramatists, including such figures as David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, Naomi Wallace, Craig Lucas, Jane Martin (Jory’s playwriting pseudonym), and numerous others. Actors Theatre has two major performance spaces, the Pamela Brown Auditorium (637 seats) and the Victor Jory Theatre (180 seats). ACTOR’S WORKSHOP. Two San Francisco State College professors, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, founded this regional theatre in San

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ADAIR, JEAN

Francisco in 1952. The goal was to permit actors, as individuals, to pursue their individual goals. Their original performance space was a loft, but within two years after its founding, Blau and Irving took over the Marines’ Memorial Theatre, presenting classics and contemporary works, with particular emphasis on avant-garde movements and overtly political works. In 1965, when Blau and Irving left for posts at Lincoln Center, the workshop essentially ended despite occasional attempts to revive it. ADAIR, JEAN (1873–1953). Born Violet McNaughton in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Adair had a long career in vaudeville and theatre (often billed as Jennet Adair), appearing first on Broadway in It’s a Boy! (1922) and in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal* (1928). In the 1930s, she appeared in many Broadway productions, most notably as Mrs. Fisher in a revival of The Show Off* in 1932, Murder at the Vanities (1933), On Borrowed Time (1938), Morning’s at Seven (1939), and costarred memorably with Josephine Hull as one of the charmingly murderous aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), reprising her role as Aunt Martha in the Frank Capra-directed film version in 1944. Her final appearances were in Detective Story (1949), Bell, Book and Candle (1950), and as Rebecca Nurse in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. ADLER, LUTHER (1903–1984).† Born in New York as Lutha Adler, son of the great Yiddish theatre actor Jacob Adler* and his wife, Sarah Levitzka,* Adler was destined for the stage, where he succeeded as both an actor and a director. He began as a child working in Yiddish theatre, but later moved on to the Provincetown Players* and made his Broadway debut in Humoresque (1923), followed by a series of plays including Elmer Rice’s Street Scene* (1929), in which he played the pivotal role of the idealistic law student, Sam Kaplan. He joined The Group Theatre in 1935 and appeared in important roles for them, including in Success Story (1932), Alien Corn (1933), Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Men in White (1933), Gold Eagle Guy (1934), Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), Johnny Johnson (1936), Thunder Rock (1939), and a series of Clifford Odets’s greatest plays, Awake and Sing! (1935), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Following the demise of The Group Theatre, Adler never truly regained his momentum as an actor. He appeared for a short run in Rice’s Two on an Island (1940), after which he directed They Should Have Stood in Bed (1942), which failed. He appeared in character roles in films, but his periodic returns to the stage were generally unsuccessful, including roles in The Russian People (1942), Common Ground (1945), Beggars Are Coming to Town (1945), A Very Special Baby (1956), The Passion of Josef D. (1964), and

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Three Sisters (1964). He directed Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born (1946) and his final appearance, as one of a long line of actors replacing Zero Mostel as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), brought him back to his Yiddish theatre roots. ADLER, STELLA (1903–1992).† Born in New York as the daughter of Yiddish theatre legend Jacob Adler* and his wife, Sara Levitzka,* Adler made her stage debut as a child with her father. Passionately interested in acting, she studied with Richard Boleslavsky at the American Laboratory Theatre.* She joined The Group Theatre in 1931 at the behest of Harold Clurman, who she married and later divorced. Adler’s tall, formidable presence and powerful personality may have limited her as an actress, but she appeared with distinction in several of the Group’s productions, including Paul Green’s The House of Connelly (1931) and, most notably, Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, both in 1935. She directed two short-lived productions, Manhattan Nocturne (1943) and Sunday Breakfast (1952), and rarely acted after an acrimonious departure from The Group Theatre when she and fellow member Lee Strasberg clashed over her experiences studying with Constantin Stanislavsky in Paris in 1934. She returned to the Group with a differing interpretation of Stanislavsky’s ideas than those promoted by Strasberg. Adler made her final stage appearance in a Tyrone Guthrie-directed revival of Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped (1945). Her lasting contribution was founding the Stella Adler Conservatory, a school for acting, in 1949. She imperiously presided over the conservatory until shortly before her death. Veering from Strasberg’s insistence on Stanislavsky’s idea of emotional memory, Adler encouraged generations of acting students (among them, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Harvey Keitel, and Warren Beatty) to develop their imaginations in order to transcend their own life experiences and to focus on the text as opposed to their own psyches. She wrote several books on acting and modern drama, much of which were drawn from her lectures at the conservatory, including The Technique of Acting (1988), The Art of Acting (2000), and Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov (2001). AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE.† Black playwrights and managers were precious few in the United States prior to 1880, despite the brief triumph of the African Grove Theatre in New York in 1821. In serious drama, the options for black writers and performers were slimmer than in the musical theatre, but Chicago’s Pekin Stock Company* (1906), New York’s Negro Players* (1912), and the influential Lafayette Players (1915) created

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more welcoming venues. On Broadway, the first appearances of blacks in serious drama came in the work of white playwrights, including Ridgely Torrence’s* Three Plays for a Negro Theatre* (1917), Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* (1920), Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize-winning In Abraham’s Bosom* (1926), DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s* Porgy* (1927), and Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures (1930), which also won a Pulitzer Prize. After 1930, change was slow but steady as socially conscious plays by African American writers began to appear, including Hall Johnson’s Run Little Chillun (1933) and Langston Hughes’s Stevedore (1934) and Mulatto (1935). During the 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) provided opportunity to black writers and performers through its Negro Units set up in 22 cities. From these emerged Theodore Browne’s Natural Man (1937), Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938), and Orson Welles’s staging of a “voodoo” version of Macbeth in Harlem. During the 1940s, the American Negro Theatre nurtured black artists and produced white playwright Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta (1944), which was transferred to Broadway in a move ultimately causing dissolution of the company. Among notable African American productions post-1940, Richard Wright’s novel Native Son was dramatized in 1941 under the direction of Orson Welles and starred Canada Lee in an acclaimed performance. Paul Robeson scored a triumph in Othello (1943), which broke records for the length of the run of a Shakespeare play, and Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ (1946), an historical drama about former slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, won critical plaudits. After World War II, the growing civil rights movement encouraged black writers to address contemporary issues, bring forth such works as Louis Peterson’s Take a Giant Step (1953), William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1954), Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955), and Loften Mitchell’s A Land Beyond the River (1957). The seismic appearance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first drama by a black woman to succeed on Broadway, reaped awards and considerable critical praise, not to mention commercial success. It became a major film with much of its original cast in place, and it is frequently revived. The peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as well as the other social upheavals of that era, energized African American theatre, as seen in such works as actor-playwright Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961), LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka) controversial Dutchman (1964), Lonnie Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), and Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody (1969). Mixed-race casting, pioneered at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, opened up opportunities for black performers in a wide range of

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AFTER THE FALL

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previously unavailable roles, from Shakespeare and the classics to musical theatre, as demonstrated by the great success of Pearl Bailey in an all-black version of Hello, Dolly! in 1967. Other all-black musicals appeared frequently, as well as works by white and black dramatists dealing with race. White playwright Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1968) was a major success due, in large part, to actor James Earl Jones’s memorable performance as African American prizefighter Jack Jefferson. From the mid-1970s, African Americans established successful theatre companies for works by black writers, past and present. Among the most important new plays by black dramatists post-1975 are Ntozake Shange’s poetic for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976), Vinnette Carroll’s Your Arm’s Too Short to Box with God (1976), Philip Hayes Dean’s one-man drama Paul Robeson (1978), Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play (1981), and numerous works by Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Ron Milner, Charlie Russell, Joseph Walker, Richard Wesley, and the much-praised Suzan-Lori Parks, among others. Perhaps the most important black playwright to emerge in this period was August Wilson, whose 10-play series of African American life in the twentieth century was completed shortly before his 2005 death, and includes Fences (1983) and The Piano Lesson (1990), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. At the millennium, several important artists emerged, including George C. Wolfe, director and playwright, who became artistic director of New York’s Public Theatre, while young directors, Tisch Jones, Tazewell Thompson, and Ricardo Kahn, asserted themselves. New plays by young African American dramatists also appeared, including Brian Freeman’s Civil Sex (2002) and Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and contributions by Cheryl L. West, Anna Deavere Smith, Carlyle Brown, Kia Corthron, and Pearl Cleage. AFTER THE FALL. This two-act drama by Arthur Miller, opened on 23 January 1964 in a production by the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Washington Square Theatre. With a notable cast including Jason Robards and Barbara Loden, Miller’s partly autobiographical play centers on a middle-aged lawyer reflecting on the women in his past, most notably Maggie, his second wife, a suicidal actress riddled with deep emotional insecurities. Critics assailed what they felt was a betrayal of the late Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s ex-wife, but the production ran for 208 performances as the first production of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. The Roundabout Theatre revived After the Fall in 2004 under Michael Mayer’s direction, featuring Peter Krause, Carla Gugino (Theatre World Award winner), and Jessica Hecht.

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AGENTS

AGENTS.† Increasingly, after 1930, most theatrical personnel, especially actors, were represented by agents and agencies set up to help them locate work, to protect their interests in contract negotiations, and otherwise to promote their careers. As opportunities for stage actors diversified with the coming of motion pictures, radio, and television, agents grew in power, working with studios and networks, as well as theatrical producers, in casting shows and programs. A few agents during the Broadway golden age became wellknown for various reasons. In the case of Audrey Wood, her fame derived from a single client, Tennessee Williams. Wood was the daughter of the first manager of the Palace Theatre and established the Liebling-Wood, Inc. agency with her husband, William Liebling, in 1937, finding Williams as a client shortly thereafter. Aside from Williams, whose career she nurtured from its beginning, Wood also represented William Inge, Robert Anderson, and Arthur Kopit. Leland Hayward, who was also a producer of note, represented a range of stars and literary figures (Ernest Hemingway, for example), many associated with both stage and screen, including at various times Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn (with whom he had a personal relationship), Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, and Margaret Sullavan (one of his five wives). Singular agents like Wood and Hayward were ultimately replaced by major agencies representing working actors for theatre, as well as film, radio, and television. AH, WILDERNESS! The only comedy by America’s foremost dramatic playwright, Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness! opened on 2 October 1933 for an impressive 289 performance run at the Guild Theatre. This Theatre Guild production won kudos from critics for both O’Neill’s play and the performance of the leading actor, the legendary George M. Cohan, who, in Ah, Wilderness!, appeared for the first time in a work he had not written (in a backhanded compliment from critics, some noted that it took O’Neill to show audiences what a truly great actor Cohan was). Set in small-town Connecticut in 1906, this rose-colored depiction of O’Neill’s adolescence portrays the family life O’Neill wished he had and serves as a complement to his later autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939), a tragic portrait of his family set six years after Ah, Wilderness! Neither is accurate autobiography, but both plays reflect the conflict within O’Neill over his family dynamics at the foundation of many of his dramas. Cohan played Nat Miller, an avuncular father figure who, along with his wife Essie, wryly observes the bittersweet coming-of-age of his adolescent son, Richard, a passionate reader of literature whose own passions are inflamed by the revolutionary sentiments expressed in his reading material. The heartaches of Richard’s first romance and an alcoholic misadventure are

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set in counterpoint to his parents’ mellow relationship and the bittersweet struggles of an aunt and uncle who have been unable to work out their relationship, despite deep feelings. Ah, Wilderness! is frequently revived (on Broadway there were revivals in 1941, 1975, 1988, and 1998) and was filmed in 1935 and for television in 1976. It has been adapted into musical form twice, first as Summer Holiday (1948), an elaborate M-G-M musical featuring Walter Huston and Mickey Rooney, and as a Broadway musical, Take Me Along (1959), with the emphasis shifted to the relationship of the uncle and aunt, played by Jackie Gleason and Eileen Herlie, with Walter Pidgeon as Nat and Robert Morse as Richard. The play has become a staple of regional, academic, and community theatres. O’Neill planned a darker sequel to Ah, Wilderness!, set in the aftermath of World War I and featuring an embittered Nat, unable to cope with the rapidly changing society, and Richard, returning from the war with emotional and physical scars. He never completed the play, but left an outline of its plot among his papers. AHERNE, BRIAN (1902–1986). Born William Brian de Lacy Aherne in King’s Norton, England, Aherne spent most of his career on the American stage and in Hollywood films beginning in the silent era. His theatre work was frequently opposite Katharine Cornell following their high successful appearance together as Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1931. Also with Cornell, Aherne appeared as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet in 1934, Warwick in Saint Joan in 1936, and as George Bernard Shaw to Cornell’s Mrs. Patrick Campbell in Dear Liar in 1960, Cornell’s last stage appearance. Aherne also toured as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Among his many film appearances are Sylvia Scarlett (1935), The Great Garrick (1937), Juarez (1939), and My Sister Eileen (1942), and during the 1950s and 1960s, he acted frequently on television. AIDS ON THE AMERICAN STAGE. In 1981, as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was first reported as a “gay cancer,” dramatists have responded to its toll on American life, most particularly the homosexual community. Gay-themed plays were still comparatively rare in mainstream drama—it had only been little more than a decade since Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), presented images of gay life. Stereotypical depictions of homosexuals abounded and gays were usually reduced to peripheral status in Broadway plays, although Off-Broadway and fringe venues had provided a platform for gay-themed works since the 1960s. Between 1960 and the 1980s, however, gay characters were seen in boulevard comedies

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AIDS ON THE AMERICAN STAGE

like Torch Song Trilogy (1981), in occasional musicals, or in broad stereotypes in straight plays. There were exceptions, including Edward Albee’s Everything In the Garden (1967), LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka) The Toilet (1964), and the grotesquerie of Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, but the outset of the AIDS pandemic set off significant changes in dramatic depictions of homosexuality. With the arrival of the AIDS pandemic, gay-themed plays became either scathing indictments of American society’s failures in responding to the AIDS crisis, as seen in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Just Say No (1988), and The Destiny of Me (1992), or in dark depictions of historical oppression of gays, as in Martin Sherman’s Bent (1978), which dramatizes oppressions against homosexuals during the Holocaust. Gay-themed plays espousing tolerance had emerged prior to AIDS, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, but as the pandemic took hold, Fierstein offered Safe Sex (1987), a bill of three one-acts connected by a central theme: the impact of AIDS on both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Ludlam’s death in the mid1980s was only one among many losses of theatre artists early in the crisis and these deaths took on metaphorical significance as the next transition in gay drama fully emerged. Depictions of the personal struggles of gays and divisive social questions inflamed by AIDS became a theatrical cottage industry during the 1980s and into the 1990s. William M. Hoffman’s As Is (1985) plunged into the personal horrors of AIDS before it was recognized by most as the international pandemic it would become, but it was Kramer’s The Normal Heart that inspired considerable controversy in its Broadway and West End productions. Like other AIDS dramas of the 1980s–1990s, The Normal Heart focuses, in part, on personal lives and ordinary individuals caught up in the crisis. The personal circumstances are set into an angry frontal assault on societal failures in response to the epidemic by government, the medical profession, religious and social organizations, and individuals trapped within a tradition of homophobia. The next period of AIDS-related plays emerged in the early 1990s, as playwrights insisted on the centrality of gay individuals to American life. This view is central to Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awardwinning Angels in America (1993) plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, epic works which brushed aside tolerance pleas in depicting a range of gay characters—some “out” and others “in the closet”—grappling with political, moral, religious, and deeply personal issues in a dark social landscape at the height of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The toll of AIDS on the gay community was central to Terrence McNally’s bittersweet Pulitzer Prize-winning play Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), in which a group of gay friends experience love and loss as the specter of AIDS hangs heav-

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ily over their lives. McNally wrote several plays dealing with the impact of AIDS, including Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and a short play, Andre’s Mother (1988), which was expanded into a film for television. McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998) set off a firestorm of controversy in its Manhattan Theatre Club premiere for its depiction of Jesus Christ’s life in the context of the present-day experiences of gay Texans. Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998) similarly connected contemporary gay life, including AIDS, to biblical stories, and Rudnick’s Jeffrey (1995) offered a broadly farcical chronicle of a gay Everyman in contemporary America. Emerging gay dramatists in the late 1990s–early 2000s, including Paula Vogel, Richard Greenberg, and others, were deeply influenced by AIDS, gay rights activism, and the openly gay dramatists who had come before them. AKALAITIS, JOANNE (1937– ). A noted American theatre director and writer born in Chicago, Illinois, Akalaitis founded New York’s Mabou Mines in 1970, running the company for 20 years. For the American Repertory Theatre, she directed productions of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (the author attempted to halt her production), Jean Genet’s The Balcony, and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, in the 1980s, and she directed numerous regional theatre productions and won five Obie Awards, including for her direction of Cassandra (1975), Dressed Like an Egg (1976), and Through the Leaves (1983), and Mabou Mines, under her guidance, won a Sustained Achievement Obie in 1985, as she herself did in 1992. The mother of two children, Juliet and Zachary, from her marriage to composer Philip Glass, she served as artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre and has taught at the Juilliard School and Bard College. AKERLIND, CHRISTOPHER (1962– ). A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Akerlind studied at Boston University and at the Yale School of Drama under lighting designer Jennifer Tipton. He has won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for lighting The Light in the Piazza (2006) and an Obie Award for sustained excellence, as well as numerous nominations. He spent 12 years as resident lighting designer for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and worked consistently Off-Broadway, including with such collaborators as Martha Clarke, Anne Bogart, and Charles Mee. On Broadway, he designed The Piano Lesson (1990), a revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994, Seven Guitars (1996), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000), Reckless (2004), In My Life (2005), a revival of A Touch of the Poet in 2005, Rabbit Hole (2006), Well (2006), a revival of Awake and Sing! in 2006, Shining City (2006), Talk Radio (2007), a revival of 110 in the Shade in 2007, and Top Girls (2008).

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ALABAMA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL, THE (ASF). Established in 1972 as a summer theatre in Anniston, Alabama, the festival moved to a permanent facility in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, becoming one of the largest Shakespeare festivals in the world. Staging more than a dozen productions annually, featuring Shakespeare, but also including new works and international classics, the ASF also operates an M.F.A. training program for actors, designers, and stage managers. In the 1990s, artistic director Kent Thompson set up the Southern Writers’ Project to foster regional work. ALBEE, EDWARD (1928– ). Born in Washington, D.C., Albee was adopted by the son of theatrical entrepreneur E. F. Albee* and named Edward Franklin Albee III. His adoption was not a happy one and he spent much of it in and out of numerous schools, including Trinity College. He gave up on his formal education and supported his interest in writing poetry with odd jobs until he was encouraged by Thornton Wilder to abandon poetry for drama. His first play, a long one-act titled The Zoo Story (1959), was first produced in Germany, but it, as well as several subsequent one-acts written between 1959 and 1961, including The Sandbox, Fam and Yam, The American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith, won Albee a critical following. In 1962, Albee’s first full-length play, the controversial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, catapulted him to the forefront of American dramatists. The play won the New York Drama Critics Award, but was pointedly overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize committee due to the play’s use of strong language, sexual situations, and its scathing view of marriage. Many of Albee’s plays from the 1960s to the 1980s failed to find critical favor or enthusiastic audiences, despite the obvious quality of his work, including his adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), the highly experimental Tiny Alice (1964), and Malcolm (1966). In 1966, Albee’s A Delicate Balance won a Pulitzer Prize, with speculation that it was a consolation prize for the overlooked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Despite critical brickbats, Albee’s playwriting (and also his producing and directing) won him significant respect in the theatrical community—some of the finest actors of the era, including John Gielgud, Irene Worth, Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, and others, welcomed the opportunity of working on an Albee play. Albee’s Everything in the Garden (1967) and All Over (1971), were quick commercial failures, but he received a second Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 play Seascape. For more than a decade, Albee’s new plays were met with critical apathy, including Listening (1975), Counting the Ways (1976), The Lady from Dubuque (1979), Box (1980), his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1981), and Finding the Sun (1982). Returning to themes explored in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee won plaudits for Marriage Play (1987) and

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his 1990 play, Three Tall Women, won him a third Pulitzer Prize. Since the early 1990s, Albee’s output has not slowed, with The Lorca Play (1992), Fragments (1993), The Play about the Baby (1996), The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), Occupant (2001), Knock! Knock! Who’s There!? (2003), and Me, Myself, and I (2007) finding more appreciative critics and audiences that had been typical of Albee’s work in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2004, Albee wrote a one-act, At Home at the Zoo, a prequel of sorts to The Zoo Story, presenting the two plays together under the title Peter & Jerry. In 2005, he published Stretching My Mind, a collection of his essays from 1960–2005, and he was presented with a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement to add to the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letter, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a National Medal of Arts award. ALBERT, EDDIE (1908–2005). Born Edward Albert Heimberger in Rock Island, Illinois, Albert appeared on Broadway with note in the popular comedies Brother Rat (1936) and Room Service (1937), as well as the musical The Boys from Syracuse (1938), before turning to a long and successful career in films and television. He made occasional returns to the New York stage in Irving Berlin’s musical Miss Liberty (1949) and in the flop No Hard Feelings (1973), and he replaced Robert Preston in The Music Man and Jason Robards in a revival of You Can’t Take It With You. ALBERTSON, JACK (1907–1981). Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Albertson labored in small and supporting roles in theatre, film and television for decades, including roles in Meet the People (1940), Strip for Action (1942), Allah Be Praised! (1944), A Lady Says Yes (1945), a revival of The Cradle Will Rock (1947), Tickets, Please! (1950), and Top Banana (1951). Late in his career, he scored major successes in Frank D. Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses (1964) and in Neil Simon’s comedy about two aging vaudevillians,* The Sunshine Boys (1972). ALDA, ALAN (1936– ). Born in New York, the son of actor Robert Alda, Alda was noticed in several Broadway shows, including Only in America (1959), Purlie Victorious (1961), Fair Game for Lovers (1964), and Café Crown (1964), before scoring notable successes in the comedy The Owl and the Pussycat (1964) and the musical The Apple Tree (1966), for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. For nearly three decades, Alda worked in films and television, most notably in the long-running TV series M*A*S*H, but he returned to Broadway in Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women (1992), for which he was nominated for a Tony, with occasional subsequent performances in Art (1998), QED (2001), The Play What I Wrote (2003), and to

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acclaim (and a Tony nomination) in a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2005. ALDREDGE, THEONI V. (1932–2011). Born Theoni Athanasiou Vachlioti in Salonika, Greece, Vachlioti studied at the American School before moving to the United States. Her work for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre won her critical attention, and she married actor Tom Aldredge in 1953, taking his surname as her professional name. Aldredge designed in excess of a hundred Broadway plays and musicals, winning Tony Awards for Best Costume Design for the musicals Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) and Annie (1977), Barnum (1980), and La Cage aux Folles (1983), along with numerous other nominations. She frequently designed costumes for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and among her other credits are such noted productions as Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Best Man (1960), Mary, Mary (1961), Mr. President (1962), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Any Wednesday (1964), Cactus Flower (1965), A Delicate Balance (1966), You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967), Little Murders (1967), I Never Sang for My Father (1968), That Championship Season (1972), Sticks and Bones (1972), A Chorus Line (1975), The Belle of Amherst (1976), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), 42nd Street (1980), Woman of the Year (1981), The Rink (1984), and revivals of Gypsy (1989) and Follies (2001). Aldredge also worked in film, winning an Academy Award for her costumes for The Great Gatsby (1974). Her other film credits included Network (1976), Annie (1982), Moonstruck (1987), The First Wives Club (1996), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). ALDREDGE, TOM (1928– ). A native of Dayton, Ohio, Thomas Ernest Aldredge attended the Goodman Theatre School at Chicago’s DePaul University before embarking on a long career as a respected stage, film, and television actor. He married costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge in 1953 and both began to work in the New York theatre in the late 1950s. Aldredge made his Off-Broadway debut in Electra in 1957, followed by a shift to Broadway in The Nervous Set (1959). Aldredge won particular acclaim as curmudgeonly Norman Thayer, Jr., in On Golden Pond (1979) and he has been nominated for Tony Awards five times for his appearances in Sticks and Bones (1972), a 1975 revival of Where’s Charley?, the Elizabeth Taylor revival of The Little Foxes in 1981, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion (1996), and a 2004 revival of the 1930s comedy Twentieth Century. Aldredge’s other Broadway credits include Everything in the Garden (1967), Indians (1969), a 1973 revival of The Iceman Cometh, Rex (1976), Vieux Carré (1977), Into the Woods (1987), and revivals of 1776 in 1997, The

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Crucible in 2002, and 12 Angry Men in 2004. He also appeared frequently in films, including Other People’s Money (1991), What About Bob? (1991), Cold Mountain (2003), All the King’s Men (2006), and as Carmela Soprano’s father in the acclaimed HBO-TV series The Sopranos. ALDRICH, RICHARD STODDARD (1902–1986). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Aldrich began his producing career as general manager for the American Laboratory Theatre* beginning in 1926. He worked closely with Kenneth Macgowan as a coproducer during the Great Depression, but in 1933, worked with Alfred de Liagre, Jr. He produced a few successful plays, including Margin for Error (1939) and My Dear Children (1940), before marrying legendary English stage star Gertrude Lawrence in 1940. After wartime service, Aldrich produced a successful revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion starring Lawrence. He was managing director of the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, for many years, as well as Washington, D.C.’s National Theatre. His postwar producing includes bringing the Old Vic, Habimah Players, and Dublin’s Gate Theatre for appearances in New York, as well as the productions of new Broadway plays, including Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), The Moon Is Blue (1951), and The Love of Four Colonels (1953), and revivals of Caesar and Cleopatra (1949) and The Devil’s Disciple (1951). Following Lawrence’s death in 1952, Aldrich published Mrs. A, a memoir of their marriage, and produced three unsuccessful plays, A Girl Can Tell (1953), Dear Charles (1954), and Little Glass Clock (1956). ALEXANDER, JANE (1939– ). Born Jane Quigley in Boston, Massachusetts, to parents in the medical profession, Alexander attended Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year studying at the University of Edinburgh, where she became involved in the drama society. She married a young actor, Robert Alexander, and together they sought work in the New York theatre in the early 1960s. Her career was interrupted by the birth of a son, Jace, in 1964, a few years before the marriage ended. In 1975, she married Edwin Sherin, artistic director of Washington’s Arena Stage. By that time, Alexander had won critical acclaim and a Tony Award for her performance as Eleanor Backman in Howard Sackler’s drama The Great White Hope (1967), opposite James Earl Jones as boxer Jack Jefferson. Alexander and Jones repeated their roles in an acclaimed 1971 film version The Great White Hope and she received an Oscar nomination (she received three additional Academy Award nominations for All the President’s Men [1976], Kramer vs. Kramer [1979], and Testament [1983]). Much of Alexander’s later work was in film and television, although she interrupted her career for a stint as director of the National Endowment

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of the Arts (NEA), enduring considerable controversy during the “culture wars” of the period (1993–1997). She later published a memoir of the experience, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theatre of Politics (2000). Her periodic returns to the Broadway stage have often brought her Tony nominations, including 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), Find Your Way Home (1973), First Monday in October (1978), The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), and Honour (1998), and she also appeared in Goodbye Fidel (1980), Monday after the Miracle (1982), and Shadowlands (1990), as well as revivals of Hamlet (1975), The Heiress (1976), The Night of the Iguana (1988), and The Visit (1992), for which she received another Tony nomination. Alexander’s television work garnered her numerous Emmy Award nominations, including for the acclaimed miniseries Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and its sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977). She won Emmy Awards for Playing for Time (1980) and Warm Springs (2005). In 2004, Alexander and Sherin joined the faculty of Florida State University. ALICE, MARY (1941– ). A native of Indianola, Mississippi, Mary Alice Smith dropped her surname when she began a stage, film and television career. Her first Broadway credit was in the 1971 production of No Place to Be Somebody and she won an Obie Award in 1978 for her performances in Nongogo and Julius Caesar. She won considerable praise and a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play for the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences (1987), playing opposite James Earl Jones. Most of her subsequent work was in film and television, but she returned to Broadway in a 1994 revival of The Shadow Box and Having Our Say (1995), which brought her a Tony nomination. She was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for her work on I’ll Fly Away, winning the award in 1993. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. ALIEN CORN. This three-act drama by Sidney Howard opened at the Belasco Theatre on 20 February 1933 starring Katharine Cornell. She played Elsa, a promising German pianist compelled to work as a teacher to support her handicapped father, an embittered musician who had been interred as an alien in America. Two young men vie for Elsa’s affections, a young political radical, played by Luther Adler, and a wealthy married man, portrayed by James Rennie. When she rejects them, the radical commits suicide. Critics admired Cornell’s performance and the subtlety of Howard’s play, but at the height of the Great Depression, it managed to rack up only 98 performances. ALISON’S HOUSE. This three-act drama by Susan Glaspell opened at Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre on 1 December 1930 for

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only 41 performances, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize. The play is set in Iowa, but is clearly based on Emily Dickinson’s life in its portrait of a lonely spinster living on her brother’s charity and writing poetry, although much of the focus is on family members, including Alison’s sister, Elsa (Le Gallienne) and various family secrets revealed after Alison’s death. Despite the fact that her poems expose the family, they ultimately decide to release them for publication. Alison’s House has never had a major revival. ALL MY SONS. This first important drama by Arthur Miller, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a playwriting Tony Award, opened at the Coronet Theatre on 29 January 1947 for a 328 performance run. Directed by Elia Kazan (who won a Tony), who produced the play in association with Harold Clurman, Walter Fried, and Herbert H. Harris, All My Sons featured evocative scenic and lighting design by Mordecai Gorelik and was bolstered by a cast including Ed Begley, Arthur Kennedy, and Karl Malden. A family drama that explodes into a scathing critique of war profiteering and its ramifications centers on Joe Keller, an airplane parts manufacturer, who has sold defective parts to the government during World War II, resulting in the deaths of a number of pilots. Larry, Keller’s son, a pilot in the war, has been reported missing in action, but a letter from him written before his loss arrives condemning his father’s actions, which include allowing his partner to take the blame. Keller’s surviving son, Chris, confronts Keller, who kills himself after finally recognizing his responsibility, noting that the lost pilots were “all my sons.” A film version was released in 1948 starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster, and a PBS television production in 1986, featured James Whitmore and Aidan Quinn. Richard Kiley and Jamey Sheridan appeared in a short-lived 1987 Broadway revival, both garnering Tony Award nominations. John Lithgow and Patrick Wilson appeared in a 2008 Broadway revival that ran 101 performances partly on the strength of the publicity generated by the stage debut of film and television actress Katie Holmes. ALL THE WAY HOME. This Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning drama in three acts, based on James Agee’s A Death in the Family, was written by Tad Mosel and opened at the Belasco Theatre on 30 November 1960 for 334 performances with a strong cast, including Arthur Hill and Colleen Dewhurst. Directed by Arthur Penn, the play is set in 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where questions of religious faith are tested in the marriage of Jay, an ambivalent man, and Mary, a devoutly Catholic woman. Along with their son, Rufus, they fall into conflict when

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Mary resists telling Rufus that she is pregnant. When Jay is killed in a car accident visiting his ailing father, Mary’s beliefs are challenged in carrying for Rufus and her new baby. Robert Preston and Jean Simmons appeared in a well-received 1963 big-screen version, and the play has also been filmed for television twice, in 1971 and 1981, the last a “live” television special starring Sally Field and William Hurt. ALLEN, JAY PRESSON (1922–2006). Born in San Angelo, Texas, as Jacqueline Presson, Allen wrote plays, films and novels, produced for television, and was a stage director. She left home to become an actress, but turned to writing novels in the late 1940s. She married Lewis Allen in 1955 and he and others encouraged her to write, including her first unproduced play, The First Wife, which was filmed as Wives and Lovers (1963). Her next play, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, adapted from Muriel Spark’s novel about an unconventional teacher at a girls’ school, premiered in England in 1966, prior to a successful Broadway production in 1968. Allen scored again with Forty Carats (1968), a popular comedy about a 40-plus year-old woman who has an affair with a 20-something young man. She also wrote A Little Family Business (1982), which was a failure. Much of Allen’s subsequent work was for the movies, including screenplays for Marnie (1964), Cabaret (1972), Travels with My Aunt (1972), Funny Lady (1975), Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Prince of the City (1981), Deathtrap (1982), and others. She returned to theatre writing with Tru (1989) and wrote and directed The Big Love (1991), and was a respected “script doctor.” ALLEN, JOAN (1956– ). A native of Rochelle, Illinois, Allen was educated at Northern Illinois University before beginning an acting career in theatre and film. She won a Drama Desk Award and a Theatre World Award for her Off-Broadway performance in And a Nightingale Sang (1984), and she was Drama Desk-nominated for The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1986). In her debut Broadway role in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (1987), Allen won a Tony Award. She was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award as the title character in Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles (1989), but a burgeoning film career kept her away from Broadway until she returned in Impressionism (2009) and Off-Broadway prior to her appearance in An Oak Tree (2006). Allen became a major movie star and garnered three Academy Award nominations for her performances in Nixon (1995), The Crucible (1996), and The Contender (2000). On television, Allen was nominated for an Emmy Award for The Mists of Avalon (2001) and a Golden Globe Award for the television film Georgia O’Keefe (2009). Allen has been married to actor Peter Friedman since 1990.

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ALLEN, WOODY (1935– ). The personification of a modern-day New Yorker, Allen was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg and began his career as a television writer and stand-up comedian with a passion for American music, particularly jazz. Following several years writing for television, particularly for Sid Caesar (along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and others), Allen wrote the book to the musical revue From A to Z (1960), but found his first stage success with Don’t Drink the Water (1966), followed by a major Broadway triumph with Play It Again, Sam (1969), which he wrote and starred in, essentially creating a version of the persona of the neurotic schlemiel he would perfect in his films which, like his plays, reflect his background (Jewish) and his intellectual curiosities and personal foibles. His Academy Award-winning film career as writer, director, and actor has been one of the most singular in Hollywood history, and New York cultural life, including the theatre, is often featured in his movies, but he returned to playwriting only once with The Floating Light Bulb (1981), produced at Lincoln Center. Allen is also an accomplished essayist and has published a number of short plays in several collections of his writings. ALLEY THEATRE, THE (AT). Founded in 1947 by Nina Vance and her backers, Mrs. and Mrs. Robert Altfeld, the Alley Theatre began in an abandoned factory in Houston, Texas, before becoming fully professional in 1954. The AT grew in prosperity as Vance brought in name actors to attract audiences and won grant support and donations (and ultimately a Tony Award as an outstanding regional theatre). In 1968, the AT moved into a theatre complex containing two performance spaces (one thrust and one arena) and developed a reputation for producing American contemporary plays and developed close relationships with Edward Albee and other major writers. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. ALLIANCE OF RESIDENT THEATRES/NEW YORK (A.R.T). A service organization founded in 1972 by 49 Off-Off Broadway theatres, the A.R.T./New York was established to support the work of small theatres in which an emphasis on the city’s cultural and artistic diversity was paramount. A.R.T. administers cash grants, loans, and can provide office and rehearsal space, as well as technical support, to theatre groups in the five boroughs of New York. As of 2009, the organization boasted membership of 425 not-forprofit theatres. ALLIANCE THEATRE COMPANY. The Atlanta Municipal Theatre morphed into the Alliance Stage in 1968 with a production of King Arthur. By 1970, renamed the Alliance Theatre Company, artistic director Fred

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Chappell and managing director Bernard Havard built a solid organization and garnered critical approval with adventurous work, including the world premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Tiger Tail and drawing major actors, including Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Winfield, Morgan Freeman, and Jane Alexander to its stage. Leadership changed, but the Alliance continued to attract attention with Sandra Deer’s So Long on Lonely Street, which transferred to Broadway, as did Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy, which also toured to China and Russia. Since the 1990s, the theatre has premiered several important works, including Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In 2007, the Alliance was the recipient of the Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre. ALSWANG, RALPH (1916–1979). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Alswang studied design at the Goodman Theatre and the Chicago Art Institute. Under the mentorship of Robert Edmond Jones, Alswang began designing on Broadway with Comes the Revelation (1942), and although he designed all manner of plays and musicals, his signature style was the mode of realism. His numerous scene and/or lighting (and occasionally costume) designs include Winged Victory (1943), Home of the Brave (1945), Strange Bedfellows (1948), King Lear (1950), The Rainmaker (1954), Time Limit! (1956), The Tunnel of Love (1957), Sunrise at Campobello (1958), Epitaph for George Dillon (1958), A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Beyond the Fringe (1962), Judy Garland “At Home at the Palace” (1967), and Piaf: A Remembrance (1977). Alswang also consulted with architects designing New York’s new Uris Theatre in 1970 and New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center. ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. This term refers to Off-Broadway and OffOff-Broadway theatre—and other “fringe” theatres—where experimentation and departures from the Broadway or regional theatre repertory and style is typical. The term was first applied in Great Britain after World War II, but in the United States, it is more likely to be used generically to identify any theatrical work out of the recognized mainstream. The term is also often applied to gender, ethnic and racial, or other “minority” theatre collectives applying experimental techniques to the task of raising consciousness about their chosen concerns. AMBROSONE, JOHN (1961– ). Following studies at SUNY Fredonia and Virginia Tech, Ambrosone began his career as a lighting designer, working in

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regional theatre in the United States, with international companies, and in opera and dance. From 1989 to 2002, Ambrosone was resident lighting designer for the American Repertory Theatre (ART), where he designed lights for nearly 50 ART productions, after which he became head of lighting design at Virginia Tech. On Broadway, his lighting was seen in David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood (1997) and Off-Broadway in Adam Rapp’s Nocturne (2000). AMEN CORNER, THE. This first play by James Baldwin, following the critical success of his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, was written and published in 1954, but not produced on Broadway until 8 April 1965 when it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 84 performances. The play focuses on the importance of religion to African American families in contending with poverty and racial prejudice. The Amen Corner was musicalized by Garry Sherman and Peter Udell (with a book by Udell and Philip Rose) in 1983 as Amen Corner, but had a short run. AMERICA HURRAH. A trilogy of short plays, Interview, TV, and Motel, by Jean-Claude van Itallie began as single entities produced at the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in 1964-65 (with different directors, Peter Feldman, Michael Kahn, and Tom O’Horgan, and Robert Wilson contributing design elements) and a cast including James Coco, Joseph Chaikin, Alvin Epstein, Cynthia Harris, and Joyce Aaron. The three plays together under the title America Hurrah, opened Off-Broadway at the Pocket Theatre on 7 November 1966 and ran for 640 performances. Critics applauded the bill as a witty, observant view of contemporary life. AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ARTS (AADA).† Established in 1884 as the Lyceum Theatre School of Acting by Franklin Haven Sargeant, this first professional actor-training conservatory remains in operation into the twenty-first century. A not-for-profit educational institution, the AADA has provided a broadly practical education in acting to its students who, in their third year, may be selected to become part of a production company. In 1974, AADA established a Los Angeles campus. The AADA’s impressive alumni of stage, film, and television actors includes Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Abel, Jason Robards, Guthrie McClintic, Howard Lindsay, Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Judd Hirsch, Nina Foch, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Gena Rowlands, Rosalind Russell, Hume Cronyn, Colleen Dewhurst, Charles Durning, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, Ron Leibman, Sam Levene, Philip Loeb, Lucille Lortel, and Renee Taylor, among others.

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AMERICAN BUFFALO. Emerging Chicago-based dramatist David Mamet rose to prominence with this two-act drama that premiered in a Goodman Theatre showcase before opening on 16 February 1977 at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 135 performances. The New York Drama Critics Circle Award winner for best play despite strong language offensive to some critics and audiences, American Buffalo, described by New York Times critic Frank Rich as “one of the best American plays of the last decade,” focuses on a junk shop owner, played by J. J. Johnston who, along with two miscreants (played by William H. Macy and Bernard Erhard), plot to steal a valuable coin from a customer. Mamet’s characteristically terse dialogue, stylized phrasing, and street-wise cynicism, and his recurring interest in masculinity, are plainly evident in this play, which was successfully revived Off-Broadway in 1981 with Al Pacino, who also appeared in a wellreceived 1983 Broadway revival. A 2008 Broadway revival, featuring John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer, and Haley Joel Osment, ran a week. A 1996 film version, starring Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson, was not well-received. AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATRE, THE (ACT). Founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by William Ball in 1964 (who remained in the post of artistic director until 1986), ACT opened with a production of Tartuffe staged at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Operations were moved to the campus of Stanford University the following year for a time before becoming permanently established at San Francisco’s Geary Theatre in 1966 (expanding to include a second theatre at the Marines’ Memorial in 1968). Established as a seasonal repertory, ACT typically stages 10 plays annually, including American and European classics and the modern repertoire. In more recent years, ACT, which offers a conservatory program for actor training, has included premieres of contemporary works by Robert Wilson, Eve Ensler, Philip Kan Gotanda, and others. See also REGIONAL THEATRE. AMERICAN DREAM, THE. An early one-act by Edward Albee, first staged on 24 January 1961 at New York’s York Playhouse, it is a satire of American family life and, as Albee noted himself, “a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” Focused on a middle-aged married couple (based on Albee’s adoptive parents)—“Mommy” handily dominates the ineffectual “Daddy,” while a neighbor, Mrs. Barker, explains to “Grandma” that the couple had adopted a son, but had mutilated the child in punishment when his actions did not please them. A virile young man appears seeking employment and Grandma realizes that he is the twin

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of the lost adopted child. This somewhat surreal work is often characterized as related to the Theatre of the Absurd movement and frequently revived by professional, university, and amateur theatres. AMERICAN GUILD OF VARIETY ARTISTS (AGVA). Founded in 1938 as a professional support association, AGVA became a labor union the following year with the goal of advocating for the rights of performers in vaudeville, burlesque, rodeos, and carnivals, but as some of the venues vanished, AGVA emphasized membership from nightclubs and casinos, ice shows, and the concert stage. When actress Penny Singleton became AGVA president in 1969, following her active leadership in a 1967 strike in support of Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes, she became the first women president of an AFL-CIO union in the history of the United States. AMERICAN JEWISH THEATRE (AJT). Stanley Brechner founded this company in 1974 to encourage new plays and musicals expressing Jewish themes. Among plays produced were The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Rags, The Puppetmaster of Lodz, The Yiddish Trojan Women, Yiddle With a Fiddle, and The Cocoanuts* before AJT shut down by the late 1990s. See also YIDDISH THEATRE. AMERICAN NATIONAL THEATRE AND ACADEMY (ANTA). During the Great Depression, the United States Congress chartered ANTA as a “people’s self-supporting national theatre.” From its beginnings in 1935, under the leadership of Cheryl Crawford and Robert Breen as general directors, until after World War II, ANTA found the lack of financial support from the government and apathy from commercial producers a significant handicap. When ANTA purchased the Guild Theatre in 1950—renaming it the ANTA Theatre—it morphed into a producing organization, staging new works, including Robinson Jeffers’s A Tower beyond Tragedy, an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia starring Judith Anderson as Clytemnestra. ANTA also produced well-received revivals of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Twentieth Century starring José Ferrer and Gloria Swanson in 1950 and Mary Chase’s Mrs. McThing starring Helen Hayes in 1952, as well as ANTA Album, an annual benefit beginning in 1950. During the construction of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, ANTA constructed a temporary theatre at Washington Square with the goal of establishing a repertory company for the new theatre. ANTA sold their theatre in 1981, but helped establish the National Theatre Conservatory in Colorado in 1984 and opened an ANTA West office in 1990s, as the New York office moved to Washington, D.C.

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AMERICAN NEGRO THEATRE (ANT). Founded by writer Abram Hill and actor Frederick O’Neal at Harlem’s Schomburg Library on 5 June 1940, ANT produced 19 plays prior to its demise in 1949. Intended as a community theatre, it added a studio training program in 1942, with students including Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. Their most acclaimed production, Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta (1944), had originally depicted a Polish family, but unable to secure a producer, Yordan, a white man, rewrote it depicting a black family. Anna Lucasta transferred to Broadway a few weeks after its opening, but this success provided little financial security for ANT and led to changes in the organization, including an emphasis on production of plays by white authors, with the result that African Americans came to see ANT merely as a means of breaking into show business. AMERICAN PLACE THEATRE (APT). Initially established in New York’s St. Clement’s Church in New York following its founding in 1964 by Wynn Handman and Sidney Lanier, APT staged its first production, Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory, there. Its goal of producing high-quality theatre by diverse American writers (with a board including Tennessee Williams and Myrna Loy) led APT to stage works from established writers including H. L. Mencken,* Joyce Carol Oates, S. J. Perelman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Penn Warren, as well young dramatists including Sam Shepard, Robert Ribman, Steven Tesich, Maria Irene Fornés, Ed Bullins, Philip Hayes Dean, William Hauptman, Jonathan Reynolds, William Alfred, Emily Mann, and Richard Nelson, among others. A 1971 move to a new thrust stage space on the Avenue of the Americas allowed for growth and in recent years, APT has established a program, “Literature to Life,” aimed at promoting literacy through drama and an internship program. AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE (ART). Eva Le Gallienne, Cheryl Crawford, and Margaret Webster established ART in 1946 to create a place that could “be for the drama what a library is for literature or a symphony orchestra for music.” In fact, it was, in many respects, an effort to revive Le Gallienne’s repertory-style Civic Repertory Theatre (CRC), which had closed during the Great Depression. The three directors were able to attract established actors, including Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, and Ernest Truex for its company. The first season included productions of King Henry VIII, What Every Woman Knows, John Gabriel Borkman, Androcles and the Lion, Pound on Demand, Yellow Jack,* and Alice in Wonderland, but critical and commercial apathy led to the closing of ART at the end of its inaugural season.

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AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE (ART). With the lofty goal of seeking to “expand the boundaries of theater, exploring the best texts from across cultures and ages,” ART was founded in 1980 by Robert Brustein, who served as its artistic director until 2002, when Robert Woodruff took over. Emphasizing a commitment to American plays, neglected classics, and fresh interpretations of standard works, ART has also established a training program for young artists in association with Harvard University. ART has staged premieres of plays by Edward Bond, Don DeLillo, Christopher Durang, Rinde Eckert, Jules Feiffer, Dario Fo, Carlos Fuentes, Larry Gelbart, Philip Glass, David Henry Hwang, Milan Kundera, David Mamet, Charles L. Mee, Heiner Müller, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Franca Rame, Adam Rapp, Ronald Ribman, Paula Vogel, Derek Walcott, Naomi Wallace, and Robert Wilson, among many others, and has benefited from the contributions of international directors, designers, and actors who have participated in ART productions. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL THEATRE AND ACADEMY (ASFTA). Producer Lawrence Langner’s idea of establishing this theatre led to the participation of Lincoln Kirstein and Joseph Verner Reed and the state of Connecticut incorporating it up as a not-for-profit organization. A Festival Theatre, modeled on historical evidence of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre but with modern amenities, was built and the company produced a mostly Shakespearean repertory from 1955 until mismanagement led to its demise in the mid-1980s. Distinguished actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Fred Gwynne, Morris Carnovsky, Will Geer, John Houseman, James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Christopher Walken, appeared in festival productions during its existence. AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THEATRE RESEARCH (ASTR). Founded in 1956 with the purpose of supporting theatre historians in researching and disseminating their work on American theatre, the organization publishes the ASTR Newsletter and the journal Theatre Survey, as well as studies of theatre and drama in the United States. AMERICAN THEATRE ASSOCIATION (ATA). Originally named the American Educational Theatre Association at the time of its founding in 1936 as an offshoot of the Speech Association of America, its principal founder, E. C. Mabie, was responding to what was deemed the underrepresentation of academic theatre in professional organizations, leading to a break from SAA in 1950. ATA fostered the development of specialized affiliate groups and

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published the Educational Theatre Journal (later known as Theatre Journal), but mismanagement led to its demise in the 1980s, to be replaced by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. AMERICAN THEATRE COMPANY (ATC). With the mission of producing new and classic American plays, this Chicago, Illinois-based company was founded in 1985 as the American Blues Theatre by Rick Cleveland, William Payne, Ed Blatchford, and Jim Leaming, with a goal of reaching a working-class audience. In 1993, the theatre settled into a permanent home in a warehouse in the Northcenter section of town, moving in 1997 to a full professional company mounting a four-play season. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. AMERICAN THEATRE CRITICS ASSOCIATION (ATCA). Established in 1974 to foster communication among theatre critics across the United States, its stated goals include advancing standards of criticism, supporting freedom of expression, and increasing awareness of theatre as a vital national resource. ATCA votes on an annual Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre. As an advocacy organization, it led a movement to secure release of two South African actors unjustly imprisoned. AMERICAN THEATRE HALL OF FAME. Founded in 1971 by Earl Blackwell, Gerard Oestreicher, James M. Nederlander, and Arnold Weissberger, the annual inductees are chosen from those whose Broadway careers spanned at least 25 years. An annual ceremony is held at New York’s Gershwin Theatre where plaques honoring the inductees are displayed. Inductees include theatre practitioners in all aspects of the field and the annual list features both living and posthumous inductees. AMERICAN THEATRE WING (ATW). Rachel Crothers led several women in the theatrical profession in establishing ATW in 1939 to support the war effort, based on a model established by the Stage Women’s War Relief* organization that had served a similar purpose during World War I. ATW set up New York’s Stage Door Canteen, a club for service personnel where free food and entertainment was offered and served by actors of the Broadway stage. Following the end of the war, ATW set up educational seminars on aspects of theatre work, established scholarships, and most enduringly, created the Antoinette Perry Tony Awards, which, since 1947, annually honor achievement in Broadway theatre. ANANIA, MICHAEL (1951– ). A Broadway scene designer whose credits include a 1980 revival of Canterbury Tales, Run for Your Wife (1989),

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A Change in the Heir (1990), The Gathering (2001), a revival of I’m Not Rappaport (2002), and Jackie Mason’s Laughing Room Only (2003). He designed a revival of The Most Happy Fella (2006) for the New York City Opera and Charles Busch’s Die Mommie Die! (2007) Off-Broadway, and he frequently designs for regional theatres, including the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, where he was resident designer for 20 years. AND MISS REARDON DRINKS A LITTLE. This two-act comedy-drama by Paul Zindel, following his acclaimed Off-Broadway play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, opened on 2 February 1971 at the Morosco Theatre for 108 performances. Featuring a strong cast, including Julie Harris, Estelle Parsons, Nancy Marchand, Rae Allen, Bill Macy, Virginia Payne, and Paul Lieber, the play centers on three middle-aged sisters dealing with the recent death of their difficult mother and their extreme differences: Catherine is an alcoholic, Anna is a hypochondriac teacher accused of an inappropriate relationship with a student, and Ceil is an unhappy social climber. Catherine and Ceil are locked in a battle of wills over committing Anna to a mental facility; Catherine prevails, despite the interference of a neighbor couple, and Ceil abandons her sisters to care for themselves. ANDERS, GLENN (1890–1981).† A native of Los Angeles, California, Anders began as a journeyman actor in a California stock company in 1910, worked in vaudeville,* and had considerable experience touring with E. H. Sothern* and Julia Marlowe* after 1912. In the 1920s, Anders appeared in important roles in several notable Broadway dramas, including Hell-Bent Fer Heaven* (1924), They Knew What They Wanted* (1924), The Constant Nymph (1926), Strange Interlude* (1928), and Dynamo* (1929). After 1930, he appeared in Hotel Universe (1930), Another Language (1932), The Masque of Kings (1936), Skylark (1939), Soldier’s Wife (1944), Light Up the Sky (1948), The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1953), and Time Remembered (1957). He appeared a few times on television and in films, most notably on the big screen in D. W. Griffith’s Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). ANDERSON, JUDITH (1898–1992). Born in Adelaide, Australia, as Frances Margaret Anderson, where she gained her first theatrical experiences, Anderson’s career truly began at New York’s 14th Street Theatre prior to a tour of Dear Brutus (1920), playing opposite William Gillette* and considerable experience in stock. Her Broadway performances included Cobra (1924), Behold the Bridegroom* (1927), and as Lynn Fontanne’s replacement in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude* (1928) and on tour in O’Neill’s

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Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931. She typically won critical plaudits in modern dramas, including As You Desire Me (1931), Come of Age (1934), and The Old Maid (1935), prior to scoring a success as Gertrude to John Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936. Much of her subsequent stage work was in the classics, including as Lady Macbeth opposite Maurice Evans in 1941, and as Olga in The Three Sisters (1942) with Katharine Cornell and Ruth Gordon. Anderson won a Best Actress Tony Award for her most acclaimed performance in the title role Robinson Jeffers’s Medea (1947), freely adapted from Euripides. In 1950, she played Clytemnestra in A Tower beyond Tragedy, Jeffers’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She worked frequently in films and television after 1940, but returned to Broadway for John Brown’s Body (1953), In the Summer House (1953), Comes a Day (1958), and, at age 84, played the nurse opposite Zoe Caldwell’s Medea in a revival of the Jeffers adaptation, winning a Best Supporting Actress Tony nomination. Her distinguished film career included her most memorable screen role as the obsessed housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940), as well as supporting roles in King’s Row (1942), Edge of Darkness (1943), And Then There Were None (1945), The Furies (1950), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and she continued to act in the television soap opera Santa Barbara until she was nearly 90. A theatre space on New York’s Theatre Row was named for her in 1984, but has since been torn down. ANDERSON, LAURIE (1947– ). Born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, as Laura Phillips Anderson, she was trained as a sculptor at Columbia University, but emerged as a performance artist and composer deeply influenced by conceptual art and a range of avant-garde writers and composers. Her performances, which are highly musical, emphasize ordinary street sounds (like car horns) and a range of visual media (video, projections, sculpture) in challenging gender stereotypes, language, and the human voice. Among her major works are Automotive (1972), Duets on Ice (1974), United States (1978), Empty Places (1988), The Nerve Bible (1994), and Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999). ANDERSON, MAXWELL (1888–1959).† Born James Maxwell Anderson in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, he attended college at the University of North Dakota and Stanford University prior to working as a schoolteacher and newspaperman. Enamored of theatre, his first play, The White Desert (1923), flopped, but the following year, in collaboration with Laurence Stallings,* he wrote What Price Glory* (1924), perhaps the finest American play about World War I. Following a few poorly received collaborations with Stallings, Anderson went solo with Saturday’s Children* (1927), a long-running com-

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edy about marriage. An interest in the sensational Sacco and Vanzetti case led Anderson to coauthor (with Harold Hickerson) Gods of the Lightning* (1928), but it failed to find favor. A comedy, Gypsy (1929), won some critical approval, but a short run. His shift to writing in blank verse for Elizabeth the Queen (1930), which starred Lynn Fontanne, led to critical respect and he frequently worked in the form after that time. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1933 political satire, Both Your Houses, prior to two more historical dramas, Mary of Scotland (1933) and Valley Forge (1934). He returned to Sacco and Vanzetti with a daring experiment in applying blank verse to a play with a contemporary setting in Winterset (1935), winning a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1936) took on the then explosive subject of interracial marriage and High Tor (1937) focused on a man’s desire to escape the ordinariness of contemporary life. In a change of pace, Anderson contributed the libretto and lyrics to a musical, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), with music by Kurt Weill; the collaboration produced a classic number from the musical stage, “The September Song.” In 1938, Anderson led his fellow dramatists in forming The Playwrights’ Company, a producing organization aimed at supporting the development of American playwrights. As World War II loomed, Anderson turned his attention to contemporary events, although he frequently retained his blank verse style, with Key Largo (1939), Candle in the Wind (1941), and Storm Operation (1944). Following the end of the war, Anderson’s Truckline Café (1946) focused on the problems of an ex-soldier returning home to an unfaithful wife. He returned to historical subjects with Joan of Lorraine (1946) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) and another musical, Lost in the Stars (1949), again collaborating with Kurt Weill. Anderson’s classically-inspired Barefoot in Athens (1951) failed, but his dramatization of William March’s novel about a psychopathic child, The Bad Seed (1954), was a critical and commercial hit on stage and screen. Critics consistently applauded Anderson’s striving to create a modern equivalent of classical tragedy and his attempts to restore poetry to the stage, but some noted that he fell short of the mark in both goals, despite an admirable output of diverse plays. ANDERSON, ROBERT (1917–2009). Born Robert Woodruff Anderson in New York, Anderson was educated at Harvard University and launched his career by winning the 1944 National Theatre Conference award for his play Come Marching Home. After writing sketches for a failed 1950 musical revue,* Dance Me a Song, Anderson scored a major critical and box office success with Tea and Sympathy (1953), a play about a prep school student accused of homosexuality who sleeps with an unsympathetic teacher’s

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unhappy wife. The play’s success continued with the popular 1956 film version, which featured the original Broadway leads, Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, and Leif Erickson. Anderson wrote comparatively few subsequent plays, including All Summer Long (1954), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959), and Solitaire/Double Solitaire (1971), but only his bill of one-acts, You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967) and I Never Sang for My Father (1968) achieved much critical approval. He wrote a few television dramas and screenplays, including his plays Tea and Sympathy and I Never Sang for My Father, as well as The Nun’s Story (1959) and The Sand Pebbles (1966). ANDERSONVILLE TRIAL, THE. Saul Levitt’s two-act drama of the trial of Henry Wirz, the Confederate commander of the notoriously brutal Andersonville Prison during the Civil War, opened on 29 December 1959 for 179 performances under the direction of José Ferrer. George C. Scott was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as Judge Advocate Chipman, a figure at the center of the trial of Henry Wirz (Herbert Berghof), with Albert Dekker, Ian Keith, and Russell Hardie among the all-male supporting cast. A 1970 PBSTV production starred Richard Basehart, Martin Sheen, William Shatner, and Cameron Mitchell and won an Emmy Award and a Peabody Award. ANGEL STREET. Patrick Hamilton’s three-act psychological thriller opened at the John Golden Theatre on 5 December 1941 for a remarkable 1,295 performances under the direction of Shepard Traube. Set in 1880 London, Manningham (Vincent Price), a cultured sophisticate, is slowly driving his new wife (Judith Evelyn) to madness. The supporting cast featured included Leo G. Carroll. Angel Street was revived on Broadway in 1948 starring José Ferrer, Uta Hagen, and Richard Whorf, and in 1975 with Michael Allinson and Dina Merrill, again under the direction of Traube. A 1940 British film version, renamed Gaslight, and with character name changes, starred Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard. Another film version also called Gaslight (1944), was directed by George Cukor and has become a film classic thanks to the performances of Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and a young Angela Lansbury. Bergman won an Academy Award for her performance, with Oscar nominations going to Boyer and Lansbury. Evelyn recreated her Broadway performance opposite Henry Daniell in a 1946 television adaptation. ANGELS IN AMERICA. Tony Kushner’s epic work is actually two long plays which did not reach Broadway until 1993, although both works had received prior productions at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, where artistic

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director Oskar Eustis had commissioned it; the Mark Taper Forum; and the National Theatre of Great Britain, where it was honored with an Olivier Award as Best Play. When Millennium Approaches, the first part, finally opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway on 4 May 1993, it won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and a Drama Desk Award as Best Play of the year. When the second part, Perestroika, joined Millennium Approaches in repertory on Broadway on 23 November 1993, it won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award as Best Play. The Broadway production, directed by George C. Wolfe, featured a cast of eight—Ron Leibman, Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantello, Jeffrey Wright, Marcia Gay Harden, Kathleen Chalfant, Emily McLaughlin, and David Marshall Grant—with most of them playing multiple and cross-gender roles. Mixing drama and comedy, Angels weaves together diverse strands of late twentieth-century American life. Set in the mid-1980s shortly after Ronald Reagan’s re-election to the U.S. presidency, Angels in America follows two fictional couples and one icon from post-World War II American history, Roy Cohn, the conservative New York lawyer who served as an aide to Wisconsin’s Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s. In and around the personal crises of these characters, Angels in America explores late twentieth-century attitudes about American history, sexuality, race, religion, and the opposing poles of conservative and liberal politics. Kushner was inspired in part by Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which, in turn, was inspired by Paul Klee‘s “Angelus Novus,” a painting depicting the Angel of History being blown into the future by the winds of progress while glancing back at the rubble of history. Using that image as a thematic inspiration, Kushner employs an epic theatre style drawn from his admiration for Erwin Piscator’s epic theatre theories and Bertolt Brecht’s plays, weaving his variation of epic form with American lyric realism in the manner of Tennessee Williams. A majority of critics found Angels to be a one of the most significant dramas of the late twentieth century, and applauded its theatricalized exploration of the perplexing and challenging issues of the last half of the twentieth century, while also offering a model for an overt brand of American political drama. This most-honored play of its time became one of the most honored television films of the era when Angels in America was filmed in 2003 as a six-hour miniseries for HBO-TV by director Mike Nichols, with a cast including Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Patrick Wilson, and Mary-Louise Parker, winning an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe and numerous awards for the actors and director. The Signature Theatre announced plans to revive both parts of Angels in America on Broadway in 2010, its first New York revival to be directed by Michael Grief.

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ANGELOU, MAYA (1928– ). The much-admired poet and autobiographer best known for her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou occasionally acts, receiving a Tony Award nomination for her role in Look Away (1973) and has appeared in several films. Early in her writing career she authored several plays, including Cabaret for Freedom (1960), Best of These (1966), The Clawing Within (1966), Least of These (1966), Adoja Amissah (1967), Ajax (1967), Gettin’ Up Stayed on My Mind (1967), And Still I Rise! (1976), and Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1988). ANIMAL KINGDOM, THE. Philip Barry’s three-act comedy, produced by Gilbert Miller, opened on 12 January 1932 for 183 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre. A personal triumph for British actor Leslie Howard, The Animal Kingdom offered the mildly shocking thesis that Howard’s character, Tom Collier, may have a more honorable relationship with his mistress than with his wife. In typical Barry fashion, the well-drawn characters are revealed through witty dialogue and a well-constructed plot as in his best-remembered plays, Holiday* (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939). Tom marries Cecilia Henry, although he is far more simpatico with a lady friend, Daisy Sage, a fact that his friends and family know better than Tom. When Cecilia proves to be a demanding and possessive wife, Tom finally realizes that he will be better off with Daisy. Howard repeated his performance in the 1932 film version, costarring with Myrna Loy, and Wendell Corey played Tom in a 1952 television adaptation, with Robert Preston doing the same on The Alcoa Hour anthology series in 1957. ANNA IN THE TROPICS. Set in 1929 among cigar-making workers in Ybor City, Florida, this Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Nilo Cruz opened on 16 November 2003 for 113 performances at the Royale Theatre, directed by Emily Mann with a cast including Jimmy Smits, Priscilla Lopez, and Daphne Rubin-Vega. The reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the cigar workers begins to parallel the lives of the children of Santiago and Ofelia, two lifelong workers in the cigar factories. The dreams of one daughter, Marela, and the unhappy marriage of another, Conchita, are set against the fears of progress as machines in the factory change lives. The play had premiered at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, before critical acclaim inspired the Broadway production. ANNA LUCASTA. A three-act drama by Philip Yordan, Anna Lucasta opened on 30 August 1944 for 957 performances at the Mansfield Theatre, following its premiere at the American Negro Theatre (ANT), where it

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ran for a few weeks. Yordan, a white man, had originally written the play about a Polish family, but switched them to African Americans in order to get the play produced by the ANT. Its relatively simple plot concerns the title character, played by Hilda Simms, a Pennsylvania girl banished by her family who goes to New York and becomes a prostitute. A sincere attempt to reform leads her to fall in love with Rudolf (Earle Hyman), a Southerner. When Anna learns that Rudolf knows her past, she flees to Pennsylvania, but he follows and assures her of his love. The cast also included such rising talents as Alice Childress, Rosetta LeNoire, Canada Lee, and Frederick O’Neal. A 1947 revival had only a short run, but a switch to a white cast for a 1949 film version, scripted by Arthur Laurents, provided a starring role for Paulette Goddard, while Yordan restored the African American setting for his 1959 screenplay for a film starring Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other members of the original stage cast. ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS. This blank-verse drama in two acts by Maxwell Anderson was produced by The Playwrights’ Company and Leland Hayward, and opened at the Shubert Theatre on 8 December 1948 for a 288 performance run starring Rex Harrison as Henry VIII. The play focuses on Henry’s break with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his growing relationship with his mistress, Anne Boleyn. He divorces his wife and marries Anne, who gives birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, but cannot provide the son and heir Henry demands. Anne chooses death over exile so that her daughter might one day ascend to the throne. Harrison and scene designer Jo Mielziner won Tony Awards for their contributions. A lavishly produced 1969 film version, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold, was nominated for ten Academy Awards. ANNIVERSARY WALTZ. This surprisingly popular three-act comedy by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields opened on 7 April 1954 at the Broadhurst Theatre for 615 performances. The innocuous plot involves a happy couple, played by Macdonald Carey and Kitty Carlisle, who reveal to their grown children that they had a sexual relationship prior to marriage, setting off all sorts of minor distresses. The play became a perennial for summer stock and community theatres. ANOTHER LANGUAGE. Rose Franken’s three-act play opened at the Booth Theatre on 25 April 1932 for 344 performances and featured Margaret Wycherly as Mrs. Hallam, a domineering mother of four sons, who meets her match in Stella (Dorothy Stickney), the wife of the youngest son, Victor, portrayed by Glenn Anders. Matters come to a head when Stella

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embarks on an affair with Jerry (John Beal), her nephew and Mrs. Hallam’s grandson. The revelation of the affair, and the subsequent family confrontation led by Mrs. Hallam, backfires, with Victor and Jerry realizing the matriarch’s domination. Following its February 1933 closing, it was revived at the Waldorf Theatre for 89 performances with much of the original cast, but with Patricia Collinge taking over the role of Stella. ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST. The critical and commercial success of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in 1939 led Hellman to return to its characters, as well as its indictment of the excesses of capitalism, in Another Part of the Forest (1946), which opened at New York’s Fulton Theatre on 20 November 1946 for 182 performances under Hellman’s direction. A prequel of sorts to The Little Foxes, the play examines the previous generation of the rapacious Hubbard family, with the holdover characters of Regina, Ben, Oscar, and Birdie seen as their youthful selves in 1880. The tone of Another Part of the Forest differs from the melodramatic* The Little Foxes—in this case, Hellman creates what some critics described as a Jonsonian picaresque comedy of villains outsmarting one another. Marcus, the play’s self-made man and patriarch of the Hubbard clan, builds a fortune in the aftermath of the Civil War, clawing his way up from abject backwoods poverty. His children claw at each other to gain the old man’s favor. The Hubbard family background provides something of an explanation for how Regina and her brothers came to so completely lack a moral compass that might temper their drive for financial success in The Little Foxes. The cast included Patricia Neal, Jean Hagen, Leo Genn, Mildred Dunnock, Margaret Phillips, and Paul Ford working in an evocative period scene and lighting design by Jo Mielziner. A 2010 Pecadillo Theatre Company revival Off-Broadway at St. Clement’s Theatre was received with mixed reviews. ANTHONY, JOSEPH (1912–1993). A Milwaukee, Wisconsin, native, Joseph Deuster was educated at the University of Wisconsin before joining the Pasadena Playhouse as an actor, changing his name. He acted in Federal Theatre Project (FTP) productions and on Broadway in, among other productions, Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real (1953), but his career as an “actor’s director” established him beginning in 1948. His productions, which included straight plays and musicals, included The Rainmaker (1954), The Most Happy Fella (1954), The Lark (1955), The Marriage-Go-Round (1958), The Best Man (1960), Mary, Mary (1961), Rhinoceros (1961), 110 in the Shade (1963), Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964), Jimmy (1969), and Finishing Touches (1973). He received six Tony Award nominations as a director, but never won.

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ANTIN, ELEANOR (1935– ). A native New Yorker, Antin is a noted performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist whose subjects are typically historical, including ancient Rome, the Crimean War, and Jewish history. She created an on-stage persona, Eleanora Antinova, a neglected black ballerina of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, appearing as the character in both scripted and improvised performances. She is also a visual artist and photographer, and has been on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, since 1975. ANTOON, A. J. (1944–1992). Born Alfred Joseph Antoon in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he graduated from Boston College and the Yale School of Drama before working closely with Joe Papp at the New York Public Theatre, becoming the first director ever nominated for Best Director Tony Awards for two productions in a single year, Much Ado about Nothing and the Pulitzer Prize-winning That Championship Season, in 1972. For That Championship Season, he also picked up a Drama Desk Award. Subsequent productions include The Good Doctor (1973), Dance of Death (1974), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1975), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1978), The Rink (1984), for which he won a Tony, Sherlock’s Last Case (1987), and Song of Singapore (1991). He died of complications from AIDS. ANY WEDNESDAY. A popular two-act comedy by Muriel Resnik opened on 18 February 1964 for an impressive 982 performance run at the Music Box Theatre. Pampered by a loving wife, pompous, lecherous business tycoon John Cleves secretly spends Wednesdays with his eccentric mistress, Ellen Gordon, played by Sandy Dennis, who won a Best Actress Tony Award for her performance. When one of Cleves’s abused employees finds out that Ellen’s expenses are a tax write-off for Cleves, both wife and mistress find Cleves’s self-justifying reaction appalling. Any Wednesday became a staple of stock and dinner theatres, and was a popular 1966 film starring Jason Robards, Jane Fonda, and Dean Jones. ARCENAS, LOY (1953– ). Born in the Philippines, Arcenas received Drama Desk Award nominations for his scene designs for Off-Broadway productions of Reckless (1989), Simpatico (1994), and Ballad of Yachiyo (1998). On Broadway, he has designed settings for Prelude to a Kiss (1990), Once on This Island (1990), a revival of The Glass Menagerie (1994), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), a revival of The Night of the Iguana (1996), High Society (1998), and Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (2005). Arcenas also designed A Man of No Importance (2002) and Dessa Rose (2005) at

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Lincoln Center and works closely with the Filipino American troupe Ma-Yi Theatre Company and occasionally directs, including Flipzoids (1996), for Theatre for the New City. ARDREY, ROBERT (1908–1980). A native of Chicago, Illinois, Ardrey became a noted playwright and screenwriter, although his training was as an anthropologist. His plays include Star Spangled (1936), Casey Jones (1938), God and Texas (1938), How to Get Tough about It (1938), Thunder Rock (1939), Jeb (1946), Sing Me No Lullaby (1954), and Shadow of Heroes (1958), none of which found much success, but his screenplays fared better, including Song of Love (1947), The Three Musketeers (1958), Madame Bovary (1949), and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962). His books in the area of behavioral science include African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966). ARENA STAGE. Zelda Fichandler and Edward Mangum established this Washington, D.C.-based repertory theatre devoted to a combination of classics and contemporary plays in 1950. Modeled on England’s Old Vic, Arena Stage was the first regional theatre to receive a Tony Award. For several years, the company performed in an abandoned cinema and a brewery converted for theatrical use, but ultimately evolved into a cultural force in the nation’s capital. Funds were raised for a permanent home with three theatre spaces: the Arena, the Kreeger, and the Old Vat. Among its premiere productions, Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1968), Arthur Kopit’s Indians (1969), and Michael Weller’s Moonchildren (1972) all moved to Broadway. In 1973, the company toured the Soviet Union and Hong Kong. ARENT, ARTHUR (1904–1972). Born in Jersey City and educated at New York University, Arent made his mark in theatre with the Federal Theatre Project (FTP)’s Living Newspaper Unit, which he supervised and during the mid-1930s he contributed to the scripts for the unit’s most noted and controversial works, including Ethiopia, Triple-A Plowed Under, 1935, Injunction Granted, Power, and One-Third of a Nation. He also wrote the book for the musical Pins and Needles (1937). Arent went to Europe planning to write an antiwar living newspaper, but conditions there changed his perspective. After the war, he wrote screenplays for films, wrote radio shows, and wrote for television drama anthology shows. ARKIN, ALAN (1934– ). Brooklyn-born Alan Wolf Arkin, son of a teacher and a painter/writer, moved with his family to Los Angeles, California, where his father had hoped to take a scene design job, but a strike of Hollywood

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workers ended his hopes. Arkin’s parents were accused of being Communists during the Red Scare of the early 1950s and encouraged their son’s dramatic aspirations. Arkin studied with Benjamin Zemach, a protégé of Constantin Stanislavsky, and attended Bennington College. Arkin appeared on Broadway in From the Second City (1961), Enter Laughing (1963), and Luv (1964). He also directed for Broadway and Off-Broadway, including Eh? (1966), Hail Scrawdyke! (1966), The Sunshine Boys (1972), Molly (1973), and Taller Than a Dwarf (2000). On stage, he excelled in comic roles, but in films also appeared with distinction in more dramatic characters and became a versatile character actor in films, including The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), Wait Until Dark (1967), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), Catch-22 (1970), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and Little Miss Sunshine (2006), for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, as well as many television shows. ARMSTRONG, WILL STEVEN (1930–1969). In his short life, Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, designed atmospheric scenery for a number of Broadway productions, including a revival of The Great God Brown* in 1959, The Andersonville Trial (1959), Caligula (1960), Kwamina (1961), Subways Are for Sleeping (1961), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1963), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), Ready When You Are, C.B.! (1964), Forty Carats (1968), and he won a Tony Award for his scene design of Carnival! (1962). He also won an Obie Award for Ivanov in 1958 and also designed for the American Shakespeare Festival. ARNONE, JOHN (1949– ). A native of Dallas, Texas, Arnone began his theatrical work as an actor, but became a scene designer in 1976, capturing attention for his designs for Vanities (1976). He was a founding member of New York’s Lion Theatre Company and won an Obie Award for K (1977) and another for sustained excellence in 1991. Among his Broadway credits, Arnone created scene designs for Patio/Porch (1978), Lone Star & Pvt. Wars (1979), a revival of The Homecoming (1991), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), Sacrilege (1995), the revivals of Grease (1994) and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1994), Sex and Longing (1996), Minnelli on Minnelli (1999), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000), The Full Monty (2000), The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), Fortune’s Fool (2002), Lennon (2005), and The Grand Manner (2010). Arnone won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for The Who’s Tommy (1993). He has also done much work with major regional theatres and designed films, including Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (1991), and television productions.

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ARONSON, BORIS (1900–1980).† Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Aronson studied art and design in Moscow and Berlin before moving to New York in 1923. He designed scenery for the Unser Theatre and the Yiddish Art Theatre* before joining Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in 1927, where he designed several productions. For Broadway, he designed more than 75 productions, including many of the most important plays and musicals from the 1930s to the 1970s: Three Men on a Horse (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), The Gentle People (1939), Cabin in the Sky (1940), Clash by Night (1941), Truckline Café (1946), Love Life (1948), Detective Story (1949), I Am a Camera (1951), The Crucible (1953), Bus Stop (1955), A View from the Bridge (1955), The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), J.B. (1958), A Loss of Roses (1959), Do Re Mi (1960), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and The Price (1968). He designed several of Stephen Sondheim’s early musicals. His characteristically evocative, highly imaginative designs owed much to his roots in Russian theatre (and his admiration for painter Marc Chagall), which he effectively merged with American realism and Broadway style. He won Tony Awards for his designs of Season in the Sun (1950), The Country Girl (1950), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cabaret (1966), Zorba (1968), Company (1969), Follies (1971), and Pacific Overtures (1976), and was nominated for several more. Aronson was married to his assistant, Lisa Jalowetz. ARONSTEIN, MARTIN (1936–2002). Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Aronstein moved to New York with his family when he was 12 and studied at Queens College. After attending a performance at the New York Shakespeare Festival, he asked a stage technician if help was needed, beginning his career working as an apprentice there, ultimately becoming lighting designer for the festival. He was also resident lighting designer for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. Subsequently, he was nominated for five Tony Awards for Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), Much Ado about Nothing (1972), In the Boom Boom Room (1973), Medea (1982), and Wild Honey (1986), for which he also received a Drama Desk nomination. His first Broadway production, Arturo Ui (1963) led to nearly 100 productions of plays and musicals for Broadway, including The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1964), Tiny Alice (1964), The Impossible Years (1965), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), Cactus Flower (1965), Slapstick Tragedy (1966), George M! (1968), Play It Again, Sam (1969), The Gingerbread Lady (1970), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Moonchildren (1972), Sugar (1972), Measure for Measure (1973), The Ritz (1975), Kennedy’s Children (1975), The Grand Tour (1979), Division Street (1980), and Noises Off (1983). In the late 1970s, he moved to California and designed

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regularly for the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, winning the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Angstrom Award for lifetime achievement in lighting. ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. The otherwise unknown Joseph Kesselring had his only Broadway success with Arsenic and Old Lace, a macabre farce, but theatrical legend reveals that the play’s producers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, reworked Kesselring’s thriller, Bodies in Our Cellar, into a long-running comedy hit which opened at the Fulton Theatre on 10 January 1941 for a remarkable 1,444 performances. This darkly farcical comedy is about Abby and Martha Brewster (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair), two sweet little old ladies, who spend their days serving poisoned wine to lonely old men as a Christian act. Abby and Martha’s genially deranged brother who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt buries the bodies in the basement of their Victorian mansion, believing the deceased to be yellow fever victims from the Panama Canal. Mortimer Brewster, their sane nephew, marries the girl next door, but his honeymoon is interrupted when he discovers his aunts’ homicidal proclivities. Planning to commit them and Teddy to a friendly insane asylum, Mortimer runs afoul of his brother, Jonathan, an escaped murderer (who uncannily resembles the horror film star Boris Karloff and who conveniently played the role on Broadway) who unexpectedly returns to the family home to hide out. Farcical situations abound before Mortimer learns that he was adopted and, as such, is free of the insanity running (or “galloping,” as he puts it) through the Brewster clan. Critics were at a loss to explain how so much humor could be generated by such murderous goings-on, but the play has had an enduring life on professional and amateur stages, including a 1986 Broadway revival, and in a classic 1944 screen version directed by Frank Capra. ARTEF. The Workers’ Theatre Group (ARTEF is a Yiddish acronym), founded in 1925 as the dramatic wing of Freiheit, the Yiddish-language community daily newspaper. The group produced Yiddish theatre classics and contemporary radical agitprop works on Jewish issues through most of the 1930s before essentially disbanding in 1937, although occasional productions were done after that until about 1940. Their most noted productions included Jacob Mostel’s Strike, Shmuel Godiner’s Jim Kooperkop, Avrum Vevioka’s Diamonds, and several of Maxim Gorky’s plays. AS HUSBANDS GO. Rachel Crothers’s three-act comedy, in a John Golden production, opened on 5 March 1931 at John Golden’s Theatre for 149 performances. A domestic comedy about two Iowa ladies on a toot in

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AS IS

Paris where a romantic fling for Lucile, the married one (Lily Cahill), follows her back to Dubuque. The play was revived in 1933, racking up an additional 148 performances. A 1934 film version, starring Helen Vinson and Warner Baxter, was scripted by S. N. Behrman from Crothers’s play. AS IS. Originally produced by the Circle Repertory Company and the Glines at the Circle Theatre in March 1985, William M. Hoffman’s drama about the AIDS epidemic opened on Broadway on 1 May 1985 at New York’s Lyceum Theatre for a 285 performance run, receiving a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination as Best Play. Directed by Marshall W. Mason, with a cast featuring Jonathan Hadary, it was one of the first mainstream plays to address the issues of AIDS, focusing on a group of New York friends affected by the pandemic in its early days. New York Times critic Frank Rich applauded Hoffman for writing this difficult subject with “charity and humor.” A year after the Broadway production, Hoffman adapted the play for a television film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, again with Hadary in the lead, supported by Robert Carradine and Colleen Dewhurst. ASHLEY, ELIZABETH (1939– ). Born in Ocala, Florida, Ashley made her Broadway debut in the comedy Take Her She’s Mine (1961), winning a Best Featured Actress Tony Award, but scored a more notable success (and a Best Actress Tony nomination) playing newlywed Corie Bratter in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (1963) and although she spent much of her career in films and television, Ashley made frequent returns to the stage, most notably in an acclaimed performance, also Tony-nominated, as “Maggie the Cat” in a 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Her other Broadway appearances include Ring around the Bathtub (1972), a 1975 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, Legend (1976), a 1977 revival of Caesar and Cleopatra, Hide and Seek (1980), Agnes of God (1982), Garden District (1995), a 2000 revival of The Best Man, Enchanted April (2003), and Dividing the Estate (2008). Ashley also took over the role of Mattie Fae in August: Osage County in 2009 and she played the title role in Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in 2010. She was married to two noted actors, George Peppard and James Farentino. ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. Actors with Asian roots and Asian American characters appeared in plays from nearly the beginning of the American theatre, but as with many ethnic minorities, frequently in small and stereotypical roles, or the characters were played by non-Asian actors. By the 1960s, an Asian American theatre movement began with the formation of several companies, most notably East West Players in Los Angeles, Califor-

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nia; Asian American Theatre Workshop in San Francisco, California; Theatrical Ensemble of Asians (subsequently renamed Northwest Asian American Theatre) in Seattle, Washington; and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York. These four troupes, all of whom shared the common goal of elevating the profile of Asian American writers and performers on stage, in films, and television, dominated until the 1980s when a steady growth of Asian American troupes spiked to 40 companies across the country by the mid-1990s. In the 1970s, the first important group of Asian American playwrights began making their mark, including Wakako Yamauchi, Momoko Iko, Edward Sakamoto, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Frank Chin, following by the most acclaimed, David Henry Hwang, whose play M. Butterfly became the first Asian American play produced on Broadway in 1988, winning the Tony Award as Best Play. Hwang has had an enduringly successful career and set the stage for such playwrights as Philip Kan Gotanda, Velina Hasu Houston, Diana Son, Sung Rno, Hn Ong, Chay Yew, Rick Shiomi, and Ralph Peña. The evolution across these three generations of Asian American dramatists saw themes move from cultural identity and family life to works in which Asian American experience formed the background for plays on a range of broader topics. More experimental Asian American artists moving into multimedia and solo performances include Ping Chong, Dan Kwong, Denise Uyehara, Jude Narita, and Lan Nishikawa, as well as improvisation and comedic groups, including Slant Performance Group and 18 Might Mountain Warriors. ASOLO STATE THEATRE. Now known as the Asolo Repertory Theatre, this Sarasota, Florida-based theatre was founded in 1960 by the Florida State University drama department as a summer acting company for students. By 1965, the theatre had become the first State Theatre of Florida, adding an M.F.A. training program in the 1970s and moving from its first home at the Ringling Museum to the newly constructed Asolo Center for the Performing Arts in 1990. The company is a true repertory with a resident company and rotating performances. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. ASSOCIATION FOR THEATRE IN HIGHER EDUCATION. See also AMERICAN THEATRE ASSOCIATION. ASSOCIATION OF PRODUCING ARTISTS (APA). Actor-director Ellis Rabb founded APA in 1960, staging plays in Bermuda, New Jersey, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before settling at the Folksbiene Playhouse in New York, later becoming the resident company of the University of Michigan. In 1964, APA merged with the Phoenix Theatre, achieving acclaim with diverse productions of classics and modern works, including George M. Cohan’s

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The Tavern,* Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are If You Think You Are, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, and Molière’s Scapin. Despite critical success, the troupe was forced to move back to the University of Michigan, but they returned to Broadway with an acclaimed revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You in 1965. The success of this production allowed APA to remain in New York at the Lyceum Theatre where they produced a repertory including noted productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Eva Le Gallienne and starring Uta Hagen, and George Kelly’s* The Show-Off* starring Helen Hayes in 1967. Internal strife and the departure of Rabb’s wife, Rosemary Harris, from the company, ended its tenure by the end of the 1960s. AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN. Founded in 1974, this feminist theatre troupe in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the oldest women-centered theatre company in the United States. The company won critical plaudits for the use of experimental techniques, ritual drama, and strongly articulated feminist politics. ATKINSON, BROOKS (1894–1984).† Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, Justin Brooks Atkinson was the son of a journalist and educated at Harvard University. He worked as a reporter for the Springfield Daily News and as an English instructor at Dartmouth University prior to service in the United States Army during World War I. Following the war, he became assistant drama critic of the Boston Evening Transcript before serving as book review editor for the New York Times in 1922. He ascended to the post of drama critic at the Times in 1925, continuing in that position until 1942 when he became a news correspondent during World War II in China and Russia. In 1946, he returned to the role of New York Times drama critic and continued until 1960, when he became critic-at-large for the Times, continuing until 1965. He authored more than a dozen books on a range of topics, including collections of his Broadway theatre reviews and most notably his aptly named 1970 book Broadway, in which he revisits his encounters with New York theatre between 1925 and 1965. Widely respected by the theatrical community, Atkinson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his writings on the Soviet Union and, subsequently, numerous awards for his drama criticism. In 1960, New York’s Mansfield Theatre was renamed the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. ATKINSON, JAYNE (1959– ). An actress born in Bournemouth, England, Atkinson studied at Northwestern University and the Yale School of Drama. She made her Off-Broadway debut in Bloody Poetry (1986), but won atten-

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tion on Broadway in revivals of All My Sons (1987), Ivanov (1997), The Rainmaker (1999), Our Town (2002), and Blithe Spirit (2009), and Matthew Barber’s Enchanted April (2003), for which she received Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. Other Drama Desk nominations include her OffBroadway performances in The Art of Success (1990) and The Shriker (1997). The Rainmaker brought her another Tony nomination. She replaced MaryLouise Parker as Li’l Bit in How I Learned to Drive (1997), and she toured in Lionheart (2005), a solo piece in which she played Eleanor of Aquitaine. ATLANTIC THEATRE COMPANY. Playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy established this company in 1985 dedicated to ensemble acting, staging over 100 productions, including many of Mamet’s plays and the Tony Award-winning productions of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1998) and Spring Awakening (2006). The company also established the Atlantic Acting School in 1983 as a conservatory and undergraduate program in conjunction with New York University. Neil Pepe serves as artistic director and the ensemble includes such noted actors as Kathryn Erbe, Felicity Huffman, Kristen Johnson, Camryn Manheim, Rebecca Pidgeon, Mary Steenburgen, and director Scott Zigler, as well as Mamet and Macy. AUBURN, DAVID (1969– ). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Auburn spent most of his youth in Ohio and Arkansas before returning to his birthplace to attend the University of Chicago. He also studied on a fellowship from Amblin Entertainment and attended the Juilliard School’s playwriting program where he studied with Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. His earliest play, Skyscraper, was produced Off-Broadway in 1997 and he published a short piece, What Do You Believe about the Future? (1996) in Harper’s magazine. He won critical acclaim, as well as a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Proof (2000) starring Mary-Louise Parker, and he scripted a 2005 screen version starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. Also for film, he wrote The Lake House, released in 2006, and directed and wrote another film, The Girl in the Park (2007). AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. This three-act sardonic comedy-drama by Tracy Letts began its life at the Steppenwolf Theatre in June 2007 before opening at New York’s Music Box Theatre on 29 April 2008 for an impressive 648 performances. The play focuses on an extended and deeply dysfunctional Pawhuska, Oklahoma, family, the Westons, in which issues ranging from the matriarch’s drug abuse, the patriarch’s suicide, and alcoholism, incest, the problems of aging, race, and infidelity prevail, although some members of the family are capable of great love. A British production

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opened at London’s National Theatre in November 2008, with other international productions, a national tour, and a screen version in the works in 2010. The play swept the year’s awards, winning a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, New York Drama Critics Award, Drama Desk Award, and Drama League Award, making it the most honored play in many years. AUNT DAN AND LEMON. Wallace Shawn’s controversial drama had its first production at the Royal Court Theatre in London in a New York Shakespeare Festival production on 27 August 1985, but did not have a New York production until a 2003 Off-Broadway revival at the Acorn Theatre. In the play, Lemon, a reclusive, ailing young woman fascinated by Nazism, is befriended by Dan, a charismatic figure who shares tales of her love affairs with women and her application of Henry Kissinger’s notion of realpolitik (an amoral ruthlessness as Dan sees it) leads to a view of relationships in terms of dominance and submission. Although a subsequent illness, during which she is tended by a compassionate nurse, changes Dan’s attitudes, Lemon comes to embrace Dan’s previous notions, praising not only Kissinger, but also Adolf Hitler, with New York Times critic Ben Brantley warning that the play’s uncomfortably haunting power rested in the “gentle, poisonous voice” of Lemon. AUNTIE MAME. Patrick Dennis’s popular novel was dramatized by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee and won critical approval and a long run at the Broadhurst Theatre, where it opened on 31 October 1956 for 639 performances. Some critics felt that Rosalind Russell’s tour de force performance as the eccentric aunt of an orphaned boy carried the play, but Auntie Mame has proven an enduringly popular vehicle for many leading ladies, including Greer Garson and Beatrice Lillie, both of whom replaced Russell, with Lillie eventually starring in the London production. Russell also appeared in the lavish 1958 film version and composer/lyricist Jerry Herman adapted the play as a musical, Mame (1966), in which Angela Lansbury scored a personal success in the leading role. First set in the 1920s, the play spans several decades of Auntie Mame’s life raising her nephew, Patrick. Through many ups-and-downs, the indefatigable Mame stays true to her mantra of living a full life. Despite her freewheeling and unorthodox ways, Patrick grows up to be a stable young man as Mame takes Patrick’s young son, Michael, on a world tour. AUTUMN GARDEN, THE. Lillian Hellman’s three-act drama opened at New York’s Coronet Theatre on 7 March 1951 for 101 performances,

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directed by Harold Clurman and produced by Kermit Bloomgarden. The cast featured Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Ethel Griffies, Kent Smith, and Jane Wyatt in a Chekhovian-style drama set in a once-grand New Orleans boarding house where the problems of the boarders, and the family running the boarding house, are the central concern of Hellman’s rueful take on family, marriage, and the crossroads of midlife. The play has never been revived on Broadway, but it has had frequent productions in regional and university theatres, including critically acclaimed stagings at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (2007) and Chicago’s Eclipse Theatre (2008). AVNER THE ECCENTRIC (1948– ). Born in Atlanta, Georgia, as Avner Eisenberg, he attended the University of Washington before studying with Jacques Lecoq for two years. When he returned to the United States, he joined the faculty of Carlo Mazzone Clementi’s Dell’Arte School of Physical Comedy in Blue Lake, California. As a performer, Eisenberg, who combines clowning, mime, juggling, and other such skills in solo appearances and plays as diverse as The Comedy of Errors and Waiting for Godot. An exemplar of the “New Vaudeville”* movement, Eisenberg has also appeared on film, most notably playing “The Jewel” in The Jewel of the Nile (1984). AWAKE AND SING! Clifford Odets was catapulted to the forefront of American drama in 1935 with the authorship of several plays for production by The Group Theatre, most particularly this three-act drama that premiered at the Belasco Theatre on 19 February 1935 for 184 performances (after a hiatus of several months, the production returned for 24 additional performances in September). Directed by Harold Clurman, this classic work of the Great Depression is set in 1933 in the Bronx home of the Berger family. Bessie Berger, the matriarch, played memorably by Stella Adler, is domineering and self-centered, aimed on controlling the lives of her family members, particularly her grown children, with her eye firmly fixed on improving the family’s reduced financial situation. The children, Hennie, unwed and pregnant, and Ralph (John Garfield, then billed as Jules), an ambitious dreamer, want to live their own lives out of their mother’s control. Hennie ultimately runs away with Moe Axelrod (Luther Adler), a disabled World War I veteran who can provide financial security. In support of Ralph, his philosophizing grandfather, Jacob (Morris Carnovsky), makes the young man beneficiary of a $3,000 life insurance policy before staging his suicide as an accidental fall from a roof. In response to his grandfather’s sacrifice, Ralph becomes a radical political activist. Sanford Meisner and Phoebe Brand were also in the original cast.

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Awake and Sing! has had Broadway revivals in 1938, 1939, 1984, and 2006, the last winning a Tony Award as Best Revival of a Play. This production spawned a 2007 revival in London’s West End with Stockard Channing as Bessie. Off-Broadway revivals were seen in 1970, 1979, 1993, and 1995, and a 1972 PBS-TV adaptation starred Walter Matthau and Felicia Farr. AWARDS. Acknowledging outstanding work in American theatre has been a long-standing tradition. Since 1917, the Pulitzer Prize committee made up of theatre critics and academics annually named an American play as the year’s best, but other awards, like the Donaldson Award, established by Billboard magazine in 1944, offered awards for best play, musical, performances, stage debuts, costumes, and set designs. After the establishment of the Antoinette Perry Tony Awards, which have been presented annually since 1947, the Donaldson Award came to seem superfluous and was discontinued in 1955. Off-Broadway has acknowledged various categories of theatrical achievement with the annual Obie Awards, established by the Village Voice in 1955. Off-Broadway accomplishments are also celebrated by the Lucille Lortel Awards each year. The Drama League Awards, established in 1935, acknowledge both Broadway and Off-Broadway work. The Theatre World Award, founded in 1945 and chosen by New York-based drama critics, names promising actors making outstanding stage debuts in New York each year, both on Broadway and Off-Broadway. Several awards from drama critics, including the New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk Award, and others also acknowledge the quality of New York theatre, while most major American cities have developed their own awards for outstanding work in their region, such as Chicago’s Sarah Siddons and Joseph Jefferson Awards or Washington, D.C.’s Helen Hayes Award. The theatrical union, Actors’ Equity, presents the annual Paul Robeson Award to a distinguished theatrical personage and other organizations acknowledge achievement of particular racial and ethnic groups, such as New York’s Latin ACE Awards. AXELROD, GEORGE (1922–2003). Born in New York City, Axelrod was the son of a silent movie actress, Beatrice Carpenter, and a father who worked in real estate. Following military service during World War II, Axelrod wrote scripts for radio and television before his first Broadway effort, the book for a musical revue,* Small Wonder (1948). He scored an enormous commercial success with his risqué comedy, The Seven Year Itch (1952), which ran for over 1,100 performances. He collaborated on a screenplay for The Seven Year Itch with legendary director Billy Wilder, whose 1955 film version provided Marilyn Monroe with one of her most iconic performances as a restless mar-

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ried man’s fantasy woman. Axelrod had a second stage hit with Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), followed by a movie version in 1957. Axelrod had a mild Broadway success with Goodbye Charlie (1959), which starred Lauren Bacall, and he produced Gore Vidal’s comedy, A Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Axelrod also directed, including Harry Kurnitz’s Once More with Feeling (1958) and Neil Simon’s The Star-Spangled Girl (1966). He spent much of the remainder of his career writing screenplays, including his Academy Award-nominated script for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). His other films include The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965), and he directed several films. AYERS, LEMUEL (1915–1955). A New York native, Ayers was educated at Princeton University and the University of Iowa prior to designing settings for producer Leonard Sillman’s revivals of Journey’s End and They Knew What They Wanted* in 1939. He designed settings and/or costumes for numerous Broadway productions, including Macbeth, a 1941 production starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, Angel Street (1941), The Pirate (1942), Harriet (1943), Oklahoma! (1943), Song of Norway (1944), Bloomer Girl (1944), Cyrano de Bergerac (1946), St. Louis Woman (1946), Inside U.S.A. (1948), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Out of This World (1950), Camino Real (1953), a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance in 1953, Kismet (1953), and The Pajama Game (1954), among others. He won a Tony Award for his costumes for Kiss Me, Kate, as well as one for producing the show. AZENBERG, EMANUEL (1934– ). The Bronx, New York-born “Manny” Azenberg was won over to a life in the theatre when, in his youth, he saw John Garfield in Jan de Hartog’s Skipper Next to God in 1948. After studying at New York University and a stint in the military, Azenberg first worked as a company manager for a number of productions, beginning with the flop The Legend of Lizzie (1959). He became a close friend of Neil Simon a few years later and, once established as a producer, Azenberg produced all of Simon’s plays beginning in 1972, including The Sunshine Boys (1972), The Good Doctor (1973), God’s Favorite (1974), California Suite (1976), Chapter Two (1977), They’re Playing Our Song (1979), I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980), Fools (1981), a revival of Little Me in 1982, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), Broadway Bound (1986), Rumors (1988), Lost in Yonkers (1991), Jake’s Women (1992), The Goodbye Girl (1993), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), Proposals (1997), 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), and revivals of The Odd Couple in 1985 and 2005. Among the over 60 productions of plays and musicals since the early 1970s, Azenberg has produced Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), Scapino

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(1974), The Wiz (1975), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1979), Children of a Lesser God (1980), “Master Harold”. . . and the Boys (1982), The Real Thing (1984), a revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1984, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George (1984), a 1985 revival of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Rent (1996), a 1999 revival of The Iceman Cometh, The Dinner Party (2000), and revivals of Private Lives in 2002 and Macbeth in 2008.

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B BABE, THOMAS (1941–2000). A playwright and screenwriter, Babe was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale universities, completing a law degree at Yale. Many of his plays were written during a long collaboration with Joe Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, where he scored his first success with Kid Champion (1975), focusing on America’s national myths on the relationships of fathers and daughters. Among his subsequent works are Rebel Women (1976), Prayer for My Daughter (1978), Fathers and Sons (1978), and Taken in Marriage (1979), which starred Meryl Streep, Colleen Dewhurst, Kathleen Quinlan, Elizabeth Wilson, and Dixie Carter. Subsequent works included Salt Lake City Skyline (1980), Buried Inside Extra (1984), Planet Fires (1985), Carrying School Children (1987), and Demon Wine (1987). Babe also directed on occasion, taught playwriting for many years at New York University, and worried about the survival of theatre, explaining, “The startling vanishment of the playwright is not only a fact, but his and her persistence in an era of incivility and social chaos is something of a miracle.” BACALL, LAUREN (1924– ). Born Betty Joan Perske in New York, this sultry beauty studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and debuted in a bit role in Johnny 2 X 4 (1942) and Franklin Street, a show that closed during its tryout that same year. She worked as a model and her fortunes improved as the result of her first screen teaming with her future husband, Humphrey Bogart, in To Have and Have Not (1945). She became a major movie star, often playing opposite Bogart. Following his death, Bacall returned to Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie (1959) and two years later married Jason Robards (they were subsequently divorced in 1969). Bacall appeared in the popular Abe Burrows comedy Cactus Flower (1965) opposite Barry Nelson, but won a Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award for Applause (1970). She appeared in another musical, Woman of the Year (1981), again winning a Tony, and a revival of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings (1999).

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BACK STAGE. Founded in 1960 by Ira Eaker and Allen Zwerdling, this New York-based weekly theatrical trade publication aimed at supplying actors and other show business professionals with casting information, news, feature articles, reviews, and financial information. A Los Angeles version of Back Stage was begun in 1993 and the two papers merged in 2005. See also PERIODICALS. BAINTER, FAY (1891–1968).† Born in Los Angeles, California, where she began acting as a child, Bainter made her first New York stage appearance in The Rose of Panama (1912), a musical. She toured with Minnie Maddern Fiske* in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh* (1914) before achieving her first important successes in Arms and the Girl (1916) and The Willow Tree (1917). She attained stardom in East Is West* (1918), beginning a very active period of contemporary and classical roles, including Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels (1927), Lysistrata (1930), and The Admirable Crichton (1931). After 1930, she appeared frequently in character roles in films, but made periodic returns to the stage, including playing Mimi in the road company of Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorce (1932) and as Fran Dodsworth in Sidney Howard’s Dodsworth (1934). She also appeared on Broadway in The Next Half Hour (1945), but most of her stage work, including a stint as Mary Tyrone in the 1957–1958 national tour of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, was done in stock or on tour. Her memorable films roles include supporting roles in Jezebel (1938), Woman of the Year (1942), and The Children’s Hour (1961). BAITZ, JON ROBIN (1961– ). This socially conscious, politically engaged dramatist was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in South America before returning to California to attend Beverly Hills High School. He worked for theatrical producers who inspired his first play, Mizlansky/Zilinsky (1985), a one-act (in 1997 expanded and revised as Mizlansky/Zilinsky or “Schmucks”). His first full-length play, The Film Society (1989), premiered in Los Angeles before moving to Off-Broadway starring Nathan Lane, where it won a Drama Desk Award. His subsequent plays, which deal with such topics as business ethics, politics, and the Holocaust has inspired critics to compare him to Arthur Miller. His plays also include The Substance of Fire (1991) and The End of the Day (1992), which were also well-received by critics and audiences. In 1991, Baitz wrote Three Hotels, about his parents, for a PBS American Playhouse broadcast and later revised it for the stage, receiving a Drama Desk nomination. Baitz adapted Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1999 and subsequent plays include A Fair Country (1996). He has

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written for television and film and also acts, including a supporting role in One Fine Day (1996). BAKER, PAUL (1911–2009). A native of Hereford, Texas, Baker graduated from Trinity University in 1932 and took a position teaching drama at Baylor University, where he met his wife, Kitty Cardwell, who taught art and children’s theatre. In 1939, he received a Rockefeller grant to allow him to seek a degree at the Yale School of Drama and 1941 he received another Rockefeller to write about a 1936 trip he made to study European theatre design and production. After military service during World War II, Baker returned to teach and in 1959, helped found the Dallas Theatre Center, which was closely tied to the Baylor drama program (serving as its graduate program, where students interacted with a resident company of actors). However, when he produced Long Day’s Journey into Night without cuts in 1962, a patron complained of the language and the Baylor administration insisted he shut down the production. In response, he moved his department to Trinity University and began to work closely with a graduate student, Preston Jones, who later wrote the plays that formed A Texas Trilogy beginning in 1973. They continued to work together until Jones’s untimely death in 1979. Baker staged over 60 new scripts and American premieres at the DTC. He retired from Trinity in 1976 and from the board of the DTC in 1982. In 2009, at the age of 97, Baker was honored by the DTC, along with its other directors, for his contributions to Texas theatre. He died later that year. BALDWIN, JAMES (1924–1987). Born in Harlem, New York, as James Arthur Baldwin, he moved to Greenwich Village at age 17 to pursue a writing career. Being African American and gay, Baldwin chafed at American prejudices and moved to Paris in 1948, winning fame writing novels, short stories, essays, and two plays, The Amen Corner, which was produced at Howard University in 1954 prior to a Broadway production in 1965, and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), both works in which he focused on issues of race. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. BALL, WILLIAM (1931–1991). This prolific director of theatre and opera, and founder of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and studied theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He began his career as an actor and assistant designer for Margaret Webster and started ACT in Pittsburgh in 1965. Disagreements with local financial benefactors led Ball to take ACT on the road before settling in San Francisco. He produced over 300 productions, directing 87, and won particular acclaim

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for revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac (1974) and The Taming of the Shrew (1976), both of which were broadcast on PBS. The ACT received a Tony Award for excellence in regional theatre in 1979. Ball was a flamboyant and provocative artist who ran afoul of Edward Albee when taking liberties the playwright did not appreciate with his Tiny Alice (1964) in 1969. Ball resigned from ACT in 1986 due to financial and artistic disagreements. He won a Drama Desk Award for his Off-Broadway revival of Ivanov and his sole Broadway productions were revivals of Tartuffe in 1965 (for which he was Tony-nominated), Tiny Alice in 1969, and The Three Sisters in 1969. Ball was the author of a 1984 book, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing. BALLARD, LUCINDA (1906–1993). Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Ballard worked as assistant to Norman Bel Geddes and Claude Bragdon* before beginning her much-honored career as a costume designer on stage and screen. She debuted on Broadway with costumes for a 1937 revival of As You Like It, followed by numerous musicals and ballets, including I Remember Mama (1944), for which she won a Donaldson Award, Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and others before winning the first Tony Award for her work for the 1946–1947 season, including Happy Birthday, Street Scene,* Another Part of the Forest, John Loves Mary, and The Chocolate Soldier. She subsequently designed dozens of Broadway productions, including Allegro (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Love Life (1948), The Fourposter (1951), Mrs. McThing (1952), My Three Angels (1953), Silk Stockings (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), J. B. (1958), The Sound of Music (1959), A Loss of Roses (1959), and The Gay Life (1961), for which she won a Tony. She designed costumes for the films Portrait of Jennie (1948) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), as well as numerous ballets. BALSAM, MARTIN (1919–1996). This versatile character actor of stage and film was born Martin Henry Balsam in the Bronx, New York. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School with Erwin Piscator before appearing on Broadway in the flop Ghost for Sale (1941). He joined the Army during World War II, restarting his stage career after the war when he was selected by Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan to appear on The Actors Studio television show in 1947. On Broadway, he appeared in The Wanhope Building (1947), a revival of Macbeth (1948), Sundown Beach (1948), The Liar (1950), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), The Middle of the Night (1956), and Nowhere to Go but Up (1962). Beginning in the 1950s, he appeared more frequently in film and television, but he returned to Broad-

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way twice, winning a Tony Award for Robert Anderson’s You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1968) and garnering a Drama Desk Award nomination in Ronald Ribman’s Cold Storage (1977). He also won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for A Thousand Clowns (1965), and appeared in such notable films as On the Waterfront (1954), 12 Angry Men (1957), Psycho (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Catch-22 (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), as well as dozens of television shows. BALTIMORE WALTZ, THE. Paula Vogel’s connected series of tragicomic scenes centered on a European trip by a brother and sister opened in a Circle Repertory Company production on 29 January 1992 for 55 performances under the direction of Anne Bogart. Vogel won an Obie Award, as did Bogart and Cherry Jones, who played Anna, a terminally ill woman dying of a fictional disease, ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease), an obvious reference to AIDS. Driven to seek casual sex with as many men as possible before her death, Anna travels to Europe with her brother, Carl (Richard Thompson) and a mysterious Third Man (an allusion to the classic film) played by Joe Mantello. The play was produced the following year by the Yale Repertory Theatre and was revived Off-Broadway in a Signature Theatre Company production directed by Mark Brokaw on 5 December 2004 for a month-long run. BANCROFT, ANNE (1931–2005). Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in the Bronx, New York, this versatile stage and film actress studied at the HB Studio, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the Actors Studio, and the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women at the University of California at Los Angeles. She appeared in live television in New York before appearing in films, beginning with Don’t Bother to Knock (1952). After a series of undistinguished movies, she turned her attentions to stage work, winning plaudits and a Tony Award in her first Broadway play, Two for the Seesaw (1958). She won a second Tony for The Miracle Worker (1959), playing Helen Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, a role she repeated on screen, winning an Academy Award. On Broadway, Bancroft also appeared with distinction in a revival of Mother Courage and Her Children in 1963, The Devils (1965), a revival of The Little Foxes in 1967, A Cry of Players (1968), and was again Tony-nominated for Golda (1977). Her final Broadway appearance in Duet for One (1981), was short-lived, but she appeared on screen with frequency until the end of her life, winning four more Academy Award nominations starring in such films as The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), The Turning Point (1977), and Agnes of God (1985), as well as several films written and directed by her husband, Mel Brooks.

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BANKHEAD, TALLULAH (1903–1968).† This deep-voiced, drawling Huntsville, Alabama, native became a symbol of the tempestuous, flamboyant actress, but Bankhead often transcended this stereotype to become a dominant figure of the Broadway theatre. If not the greatest actress of her age, Bankhead was undoubtedly one of its most fascinating, publicized for both her on-stage brilliance and her off-stage antics. She debuted in Squab Farm (1918), but spent much of her early career replacing stars and moved to London and for over a decade dazzled English audiences. Returning to the Broadway stage in the mid-1930s with the cache of her London triumphs, Bankhead created a range of memorable roles, including Mary Clay in Forsaking All Others (1933), Judith Traherne in Dark Victory* (1934), Monica Grey in Something Gay (1935), and Muriel Flood in Reflected Glory (1936). Her definitive characterization of the avaricious Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s drama, The Little Foxes (1939), secured her prominence. Bankhead also had personal triumphs in revivals of Somerset Maugham’s Rain* in 1935 and Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 1946, but she met with resounding failure when she played Cleopatra in a 1937 production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a performance that inspired critic John Mason Brown to write that she “barged down the Nile as Cleopatra and sank.” Bankhead’s off-stage antics, including addressing everyone as “Darling,” were employed effectively by Thornton Wilder in his creation of Sabina Fairweather in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a role that brought Bankhead the Best Actress award from the New York Drama Critics. Bankhead’s raucous sense of humor made her a popular figure in radio and on early television, but audiences, including a vocal gay following, found it increasingly difficult to take Bankhead seriously on stage. When she appeared in a disastrous New York revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, most critics were merciless and portions of the audience hooted at Bankhead’s increasingly campy delivery. Williams publicly rebuked Bankhead (although he subsequently apologized via the press), but this did not stop him from featuring her in his The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1964), a failure and her last Broadway appearance. Other later performances include roles in Foolish Notion (1945), The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947), Dear Charles (1954), and Midgie Purvis (1961), the last winning her critical approval despite the play’s short run. Bankhead occasionally appeared on screen, but scored only one significant film success in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944, for which she received the Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics. BARAKA, AMIRI (1934– ). The son of a postman and a social worker, Everett LeRoi Jones was born in Newark, New Jersey, and, at various times,

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studied philosophy and religion at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and Howard University, never completing a degree. He joined the Air Force, but an anonymous accusation that he was a Communist led to a dishonorable discharge. After some time in Cuba around 1960, he wrote about jazz and became interested in the Beat poets. He won critical acclaim and an Obie Award for Dutchman (1964), followed by other plays including The Slave (1964), A Black Mass (1966), and Slave Ship (1967). The assassination of Malcolm X in 1966 led him declare himself a “black cultural nationalist” and he took a Muslim name, Amiri Baraka. He established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem in 1965 and Spirit House in Newark in 1966. His political views shifted to those of a “revolutionary socialist,” views he depicted in The Motion of History (1975), which he subsequently published with other plays. Baraka has also appeared in films. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. BARANSKI, CHRISTINE (1952– ). A native of Buffalo, New York, Christine Jane Baranski studied at the Juilliard School and began her New York acting career in the Off-Broadway production of Coming Attractions (1980) prior to her Broadway debut in Hide & Seek that same year. She won an Obie Award for a 1984 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and also appeared in Hurlyburly in 1985, The House of Blue Leaves in 1986, and The Loman Family Picnic in 1993. In 1984, she won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. She won another Tony for Rumors (1989) and won a Drama Desk Award for Lips Together, Teeth Apart in 1992. An actress known for her versatility, Baranski also appears in occasional musicals, including a 2006 revival of Mame at the Kennedy Center and in concerts and various benefits. She appears frequently in films and on television, where she won an Emmy Award for the comedy series Cybill in 1995 and The Good Wife, which has brought her additional critical acclaim beginning in 2009. Her subsequent Broadway appearances include Nick & Nora (1991), Short Talks on the Universe (2002), and a hit revival of Boeing-Boeing (2008). BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Neil Simon’s Tony Award-nominated light romantic comedy about the period of adjustment for a newlywed couple in their first apartment in early 1960s New York City opened on 23 October 1963 for an impressive 1,530 performances at the Biltmore Theatre, winning critical approval for director Mike Nichols and stars Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford (who repeated his performance in the 1967 screen adaptation). The cast also included Mildred Natwick, Kurt Kasznar, and Herbert Edelman. An exuberant young bride, Corie Bratter (Ashley), impulsively

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rents a fifth floor walk-up apartment to the frustration of her button-down husband, Paul (Redford), and Corie’s mother, Mrs. Banks (Natwick). Corie reads Paul’s frustration as a lack of adventurousness, leading to several misadventures led by Corie and a flamboyant neighbor, Victor Velasco (Kasznar), all of which end with the newlyweds happily finding common ground. Simon’s play was enduringly popular in stock, community, and university theatres, and was revived on Broadway in 2006 under the direction of Scott Elliott and starred Amanda Peet, Patrick Wilson, Jill Clayburgh, and Tony Roberts for 109 performances at the Cort Theatre. BARNES, CLIVE (1927–2008). Born in London, England, Clive Alexander Barnes studied at Oxford University and began working as a dance and drama critic in 1950 for Dance and Dancers magazine and other publications before becoming drama critic for The Times in 1961. Barnes moved to the United States in 1965 to take a position as dance critic for the New York Times and becoming drama critic in 1967. Barnes tended to prefer new “cutting edge” drama to commercial theatre and found British drama preferable to American theatre, opinions he expressed with a characteristic wit. He left the New York Times in 1977 and became drama and dance critic for the New York Post, a position he kept until his death. BARNES, HOWARD (1904–1968). British-born son of American parents, Barnes attended Yale University, Queen’s College at Oxford, and the Sorbonne prior to taking a position as assistant film critic for the New York World. In 1928, he moved to the New York Herald-Tribune, where he worked under the wing of Percy Hammond.* After Hammond’s retirement, Barnes took over a chief drama critic in 1942, continuing in that post until 1951. BARR, RICHARD (1917–1989). Washington-born producer-director Richard Alphonse Barr attended Princeton University, where he performed in plays and was given his first professional acting opportunity (for no pay) by John Houseman, Orson Welles, and the Mercury Theatre, for whom he acted in the controversial radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938. He also assisted Welles during the filming of Citizen Kane (1941) before serving in the Air Force during World War II. After the war, he directed Broadway revivals, including José Ferrer in Volpone in 1948, Richard Whorf in Richard III in 1949, and Francis Lederer in Arms and the Man in 1950 before turning to producing in partnership first with Clinton Wilder and later with Charles Woodward, as well as serving as president of the League of American Theatres and Producers. As a producer, mostly OffBroadway, Barr was significant in bringing Edward Albee’s plays to the

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stage, not to mention Sam Shepard, William Hanley, Paul Zindel, LeRoi Jones, John Guare, Terrence McNally, A. R. Gurney, and Jean-Claude Van Itallie, and promoted the production of plays by major avant-garde European playwrights, including Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Among his notable Broadway credits are several of Albee’s plays, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Tiny Alice (1964), Malcolm (1966), A Delicate Balance (1966), Everything in the Garden (1967), All Over (1971), Seascape (1975), and The Lady from Dubuque (1980), and a 1969 all-star revival of The Front Page,* The Grass Harp (1971), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), and Sweeney Todd (1979), among others. BARRECA, CHRISTOPHER (1957– ). Born in Massachusetts, Barreca studied at the University of Connecticut and received an M.F.A. in Design from Yale University. He was nominated for a 1998 Drama Desk Award for his Off-Broadway design of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. Barreca’s Broadway credits include Our Country’s Good (1991), Search and Destroy (1992), Stephen Lang’s Hamlet (1992), Marie Christine (1999), and The Violet Hour (2003). Barreca has designed for numerous regional theatres, including the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Dallas Theatre Center, and the American Conservatory Theatre, and in the early 1980s cofounded the American Ibsen Theatre in Pittsburgh, where he worked with Charles Ludlam and Travis Preston. Barreca has also designed opera and is head of design at CalArts. BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET, THE. One of Katharine Cornell’s most notable acting triumphs came in Rudolf Besier’s three-act drama of the life of Elizabeth Barrett, which opened on 9 February 1931 at the Empire Theatre under the direction of Guthrie McClintic with designs by Jo Mielziner. The drama depicts the romance of Barrett and Robert Browning (Brian Aherne) over the objections of her father (McKay Morris). Cornell toured in the play and returned to Broadway twice in revivals of it in 1935 and 1945, all three times appearing opposite Aherne. When the play was filmed in 1934, Norma Shearer, Fredric March, and Charles Laughton played the leads and a remake in 1957 starred Jennifer Jones, Bill Travers, and John Gielgud. BARRY, PHILIP (1896–1949).† Son of prosperous Irish-American parents from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Barry was a sickly child who filled his lonely days with books. He entered Yale University in 1914 and made an impression in the school’s literary activities. Rejected for military service

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at the time of America’s entry into World War I, Barry instead worked for the State Department in London. Barry continued his education at Yale after the war and began to write plays before enrolling in George Pierce Baker’s* playwriting class at Harvard University. Barry had an initial Broadway success with You and I* (1923), originally titled The Jilts, a work that established his style of mixing sophisticated, witty high comedy with social commentary. Barry’s lasting contribution stems from this combination, a formula that permitted him to create a twentieth-century American equivalent of the British comedy of manners. Many of his plays feature the “Barry girl,” seen most vividly in Tracy Lord (played by Katharine Hepburn in its original production) of The Philadelphia Story (1939). The “Barry girl” is typically a pampered, headstrong young woman who both profits from and rejects the social expectations that wealth and privilege provide. The Philadelphia Story has proven the most durable of Barry’s dramatic accomplishment, a work that is frequently revived and provided the source for the 1956 M-G-M film, High Society, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Among his other pre-World War II plays, Holiday* (1928) and The Animal Kingdom (1932), were particularly well-received and became popular films. Barry’s dramatic output also includes White Wings* (1926), Paris Bound* (1927), Cock Robin (1928; coauthored by Elmer Rice), Hotel Universe (1930), Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), The Joyous Season (1934), Bright Star (1935), Here Come the Clowns (1938), Liberty Jones (1941), Without Love (1942), Foolish Notion (1945; adapted from Jean-Pierre Aumont’s play My Name Is Aquilon), Second Threshold (1951; unfinished at the time of Barry’s death, the script was completed by Robert E. Sherwood). The popularity of Barry’s high comedy declined after World War II, but he remains the singular proponent of witty, sophisticated, and socially conscious comedy. BARRYMORE, ETHEL (1879–1959).† Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to actors Maurice Barrymore* and Georgiana Drew,* Barrymore, along with her brothers John* and Lionel,* went on the stage at an early age, appearing with her grandmother, Mrs. John Drew,* in The Rivals, after which she appeared with William Gillette* in Secret Service* and with Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Her 1901 New York debut in Clyde Fitch’s* Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines* made her a star and her career on stage and in films extended over more than 50 years. Over time, she mellowed from a great beauty in ingénue* roles into a versatile character actress capable of moving easily from comedy to drama and from classics to contemporary works. Barrymore’s regal bearing and impressive voice helped to make her a favorite of critics in Alice-Sit-By-the-Fire (1905), Our Mrs. McChesney*

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(1915), The Lady of the Camellias (1917), Déclassé* (1919), The Constant Wife (1926), and The Kingdom of God (1928). When sound films arrived, Barrymore appeared more frequently on screen in such films as Rasputin and the Empress (1932), which was the only time she appeared on film with her brothers Lionel and John, and she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for None but the Lonely Heart (1944). She also received Oscar nominations for The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Paradine Case (1948), and Pinky (1950). Barrymore returned to Broadway in 1938 as a 101-year-old woman in Mazo de la Roche‘s Whiteoaks, but many critics regarded her performance as Miss Moffat, a compassionate Scottish teacher, in Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green (1940), Barrymore’s greatest. Her last New York appearance in Ladislaus Bush-Fekete and Mary Helen Fay‘s Embezzled Heaven (1944) was only a modest success and she appeared in The Joyous Season on tour in 1945 before retiring from the stage. Barrymore continued to make films and also appeared on radio and television in her later years, retiring after her last film role in Johnny Trouble (1957). BARTER THEATRE. This Abingdon, Virginia, theatre was founded by Robert Porterfield in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, getting its name from Porterfield’s idea of allowing audience members to purchase tickets with goods, usually food, which supported the theatre’s company. In 1946, the theatre became the State Theatre of Virginia and was responsible for launching the theatrical careers of such actors as Gregory Peck, Ernest Borgnine, Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty, Hume Cronyn, Frances Fisher, Kevin Spacey, and others. Following Porterfield’s 1971 death, Rex Partington took over as artistic director, followed by Richard Rose in 1992. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. BARTON, JAMES (1890–1962). This versatile comedian and character actor, who began his career in vaudeville* and burlesque, was born in Gloucester, New Jersey, to vaudevillian parents who took him onstage at the age of two. He toured the country for years before making his Broadway debut in the revue* The Passing Show of 1919. He scored a success playing a feckless comedian in the touring production of Burlesque* (1927), but he had two dramatic success, first replacing Henry Hull in Tobacco Road (1933) in 1934, a role he played for over five years, and as Hickey in the original Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946). He occasionally appeared on screen from the early sound era, including in the role of Kit Carson in the film version of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1948), and later in episodic television during the 1950s. Barton continued in

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vaudeville and musical theatre, including Paint Your Wagon (1951), making his last Broadway appearance in The Sin of Pat Muldoon (1957). BARTON, LUCY (1891–1979). A native of Ogden, Utah, Barton graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1917 and completed a master’s degree at New York University in 1943. She began teaching theatre at the University of Texas at Austin in 1947 before becoming Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Alabama. Barton’s lasting achievement is her textbook, Historic Costume for the Stage (1935), along with its complementary volume, Period Patters (1945). BASIC TRAINING OF PAVLO HUMMEL, THE. The first of David Rabe’s trilogy of Vietnam War plays, this drama opened Off-Broadway in a New York Shakespeare Festival production directed by Jeff Bleckner on 19 May 1971 at the Public Theatre with a cast including William Atherton in the title role, Edward Hermann, and Garrett Morris. This Drama Desk Award-winning play depicts an emotionally disturbed soldier, Hummel, who has been drafted in the Army and goes through basic training before being injured several times. The play has a surreal quality in which Hummel interacts with Ardell, who serves as a Greek chorus figure and Hummel’s conscience. Finding determination to be a soldier, Hummel continues in the Army despite his injuries, with fatal results. The play was produced on Broadway, where it opened on 24 April 1977 for 117 performances with Al Pacino in the title role, for which he won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award. BATES, KATHY (1948– ). Born Kathleen Doyle Bates in Memphis, Tennessee, she moved to New York in 1970, following graduation from Southern Methodist University. In regional theatre, she won critical plaudits in the premiere of Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky (1970) at Buffalo’s Arena Theatre. She acted Off-Broadway in Casserole (1975), A Quality of Mercy (1975), and won strong notices as Joanne in Jack Heifner’s Vanities (1976) before scoring a notable success in Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), a play McNally wrote for her. On Broadway, Bates appeared in Goodbye Fidel (1980), stepped in as a replacement in Fifth of July (1980), Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), and ’night, Mother (1983), which brought her a Tony Award nomination. She has spent most of her career working in films, winning an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Misery (1990) and subsequent Oscar nominations for Primary Colors (1998) and About Schmidt (2002). Bates has also appeared on screen in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Titanic (1997), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004), Revolutionary

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Road (2008), and Chéri (2009), as well as numerous television shows, including seven Emmy Award-nominated appearances. BAY, HOWARD (1912–1986). The son of two teachers, Bay was born in Centralia, Washington, and his design work was first noticed in the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) “living newspaper” productions of One Third of a Nation (1937) and Power (1937). Shortly thereafter, he embarked on a long career designing scenery, lighting, and/or costumes for over 100 plays and musicals for Broadway, winning critical acclaim and awards for his inventive solutions to difficult creative problems and the flair with which he adapted his techniques to the needs of each individual work. Bay won Tony Awards for his designs of Toys in the Attic (1960), and Man of La Mancha (1965) and a Tony nomination for Cry for Us All (1970). His design credits include some of the most important plays and musicals produced on Broadway between the 1930s and the late 1970s, including The Little Foxes (1939), The Corn Is Green (1940), Uncle Harry (1942), One Touch of Venus (1943), Carmen Jones (1943), Ten Little Indians (1944), a revival of Show Boat in 1946, The Big Knife (1949), Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), The Autumn Garden (1951), The Shrike (1952), The Desperate Hours (1955), Look Back in Anger (1957), The Music Man (1957), and Milk and Honey (1961). Bay taught for many years at Brandeis University and authored Stage Design (1974). BEATTY, JOHN LEE (1948– ). A native of Palo Alto, California, Beatty attended Brown University and Yale University to train as a scene designer. He began his work Off-Broadway in the 1970s with such companies as the Manhattan Theatre Club and Circle Repertory Company before amassing over 80 Broadway design credits, receiving Drama Desk Award nominations for Knock Knock (1976) and The Innocents (1976). He won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Talley’s Folly (1979), Drama Desk Awards and Tony nominations for Fifth of July (1980) and a revival of Dinner at Eight in 2003, a Drama Desk Award for a revival of Twentieth Century in 2004, and numerous nominations for both awards. Among his many other Broadway designs are Faith Healer (1979), Fools (1981), Crimes of the Heart (1981), Angels Fall (1983), Burn This (1987), A Small Family Business (1992), revivals of Anna Christie* and Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (both in 1993), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), Proof (2000), 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), Doubt (2005), The Color Purple (2005), and revivals of Accent on Youth and Brighton Beach Memoirs in 2009. Beatty received a 1993 Lucille Lortel Award for career achievement and was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2003.

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BEATTY, NED (1937– ). A native Kentuckian born in Louisville, Ned Thomas Beatty was educated at Transylvania University, although he did not complete a degree. He began his career in local theatre, including the newly established Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he appeared in Death of a Salesman in 1966. He made his Broadway debut as an understudy and replacement in The Great White Hope (1968), but spent most of his career in television and films, appearing in over 100 motion pictures, garnering an Oscar nomination for Network (1976). In 2003, he returned to Broadway as Big Daddy in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and won a Drama Desk Award for his performance. BEAUFORT, JOHN DAVID (1912–1992). A Canadian by birth, Beaufort moved to the United States in 1922 and studied at Boston University and Rollins College. He joined the staff of the Christian Science Monitor in 1930 as a copy boy and became an assistant reviewer in 1935 until he served as a war correspondent during World War II. After the war, he became chief of the Monitor’s news bureau, but by the mid-1960s, he served as drama critic and arts and entertainment editor for the remainder of his career. He was also president of the Drama Desk in the late 1960s. BECK, JULIAN (1925–1985). A native New Yorker, Beck studied for a time at Yale University, but dropped out to become a painter. He met Judith Malina in 1943 and, following their marriage they founded the Living Theatre, a group inspired by the Theatre of Cruelty techniques of Antonin Artaud. Beck described that mission as an insistence on “experimentation that was an image for a changing society. If one can experiment in theatre, one can experiment in life.” Among their most notable productions, Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) provided an example of the Living Theatre philosophy, as actors portraying junkies wandered through the audience begging for money to supply their habit. Beck also appeared in films and wrote poetry. BECKY SHAW. Gina Gionfriddo’s play, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, was described by New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as a “comedy of bad manners,” focused on a five psychologically complex thirty-somethings (played by David Wilson Barnes, Emily Bergl, Kelly Bishop, Annie Parisse, and Thomas Sadowski) exploring contemporary attitudes about love, sex, and ethics in present-day New York. It opened at Second Stage Theatre on 8 January 2009 under the direction of Peter DuBois. The play had premiered in 2008 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival of New Plays.

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BEDFORD, BRIAN (1935– ). Born in Morley, West Yorkshire, England, Bedford studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and although he has appeared in film and television, has devoted his career to the stage. He is a much-honored interpreter of the characters of Shakespeare and Molière, winning a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for the latter’s The School for Wives (1971). He has also been nominated for Two Shakespearean Actors (1992), Timon of Athens (1994), The Molière Comedies (1995), London Assurance (1997), and Tartuffe (2003). He made his Broadway debut in Five Finger Exercise (1959) and won a 1965 Obie Award for his performance in The Knack, as well as Drama Desk Awards for The Misanthrope in 1969, Private Lives in 1970, Jumpers in 1974, and Two Shakespearean Actors in 1992. His other Broadway credits include Lord Pengo (1962), The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1963), The Astrakhan Coat (1967), The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), and a revival of The Cocktail Party (1968). Much of his work has been done in regional theatres, including 27 seasons he has spent acting and directing for Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where he played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in 2009, reprising the role on Broadway in 2011. BEGLEY, ED (1901–1970). This character actor of stage, film, and television was born Edward James Begley in Hartford, Connecticut. He began his career in radio and acted on Broadway in a few less-than-successful plays before he won particular critical approval as Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947). He also met with critical plaudits as Matthew Harrison Brady, a character based on William Jennings Bryan, in Inherit the Wind (1955), for which he won a Tony Award. In a display of versatility, Begley later switched to the role of Henry Drummond during the run. His other Broadway appearances include All Summer Long (1954), A Shadow of My Enemy (1957), Semi-Detached (1960), Advise & Consent (1960), Zelda (1969), and his last as Dr. Gibbs in a 1969 revival of Our Town. Begley appeared with distinction in numerous films and won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). He made numerous television appearances as well and was the father of actor Ed Begley, Jr. BEHRMAN, S. N. (1893–1973).† Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker* at Harvard University. Between 1927 and 1964, he had a steady stream of drawing room comedies with an edge of social criticism produced on Broadway, including The Second Man* (1927), Serena Blandish (1929), Meteor* (1929), Brief Moment (1931), Biography (1932), Rain from Heaven (1934), End of Summer (1936), Amphitryon 38 (1937), Wine of Choice

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(1938), No Time for Comedy (1939), The Pirate (1942), Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945), I Know My Love (1949), Jane (1952), The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), Lord Pengo (1962), and But for Whom Charlie (1979). Behrman also contributed the libretto for the musical Fanny (1954) and his Jacobowsky and the Colonel was adapted as a musical by Jerry Herman in 1979. Behrman wrote or contributed to numerous screenplays, including Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Quo Vadis (1951), and several of his own plays. BEL GEDDES, BARBARA. See GEDDES, BARBARA BEL. BEL GEDDES, NORMAN. See GEDDES, NORMAN BEL. BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE. John Van Druten’s comedy/fantasy, which he also directed, concerned the romantic machinations of a young witch living in present-day New York opened on 14 November 1950 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for a 233 performance run. Critics credited much of the play’s success to a bright cast including Rex Harrison, Lili Palmer, and Jean Adair, but Bell, Book, and Candle became a perennial success on stock, community, and university theatre stages and was adapted to the screen in 1958 starring Kim Novak and James Stewart, followed by a 1976 television version and a remake set for release in 2010. BELL FOR ADANO, A. Paul Osborn’s three-act drama, based on a novel by John Hersey, opened on 6 December 1944 at the Cort Theatre for 296 performances, produced by Leland Hayward. Fredric March appeared as an Italian American serving in the United States military during the Second World War who helps the villagers of Adano, which he has helped liberate from the fascists, get a new bell for their church. The play’s idealism and sentimentality appealed to audiences as World War II drew to a close. BELLAMY, RALPH (1904–1991). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Ralph Rexford Bellamy toured in a stock Shakespeare company immediately following graduation from high school. He worked in stock and tours for five years before his earliest performances on Broadway in Town Boy (1929) and Roadside (1930), which preceded a switch to film work, where he became a reliable leading man and character actor. He appeared in such screen classics as The Awful Truth (1937), Carefree (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Wolf Man (1941), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), subsequently being awarded

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an honorary Academy Award in 1987. Bellamy made periodic returns to Broadway, including in Tomorrow the World (1943), Pretty Little Parlor (1944), which he also produced and directed, State of the Union (1945), Detective Story (1949), and he won a Tony Award playing Franklin D. Roosevelt in his final Broadway appearance in Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello (1958), repeating his performance in a 1960 film version. He also appeared in over 100 television shows. BENNETT, RICHARD (1873–1944).† A native of Deacon’s Mills, Indiana, Bennett began his long acting career in The Limited Mail (1891). After a decade of stock and touring productions, Bennett costarred with Maude Adams* in What Every Woman Knows (1908). His greatest stage successes in the 1920s included Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon* (1920), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted* (1924). Bennett, who fathered screen actresses Joan and Constance Bennett, was praised for his intellectual, graceful performances. He appeared in films and made his last stage appearances in Solid South (1930) and as the insane Judge Gaunt in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset (1935), a role he repeated on screen. Bennett also appeared on film in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). BENT. Martin Sherman’s Tony Award-nominated play about the historical persecution of homosexuals starred Ian McKellen when it premiered in 1979 in London prior to a Broadway production starring Richard Gere (who won a Theatre World Award), which opened at the New Apollo Theatre on 2 December 1979 for 241 performances under the direction of Robert Allan Ackerman, with scene design by Santo Loquasto. Gere played Max, a wealthy, apolitical Berliner ostracized by his family because of his homosexuality. He brings home a young man who, it turns out, is hunted by the Nazis. When the SS arrives and kills the man, Max and his boyfriend, Rudy, are forced to flee. They are eventually arrested by the Gestapo and in the process of being separated, Rudy calls to Max, who is forced to either beat Rudy to death or acknowledge his own homosexuality. The Gestapo force Max to prove his heterosexuality by having intercourse with the corpse of a young female. To prevent the harshest treatment, which he has determined is reserved for gays (who are forced to wear pink triangles), Max claims to be a Jew. Max becomes acquainted with Horst, played by Tony-nominated David Dukes, who teaches Max dignity. Resisting his captors, Horst is shot and Max responds by putting on Horst’s pink triangle and commits suicide by grabbing an electrified fence. Bent was filmed in 1997.

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BENTLEY, ERIC (1916– ). A native of Bolton, Lancashire, England, Eric Russell Bentley became an American citizen in 1948 and worked as drama critic for the New Republic from 1952 to 1956 and taught at Columbia University beginning in 1953. Also a playwright, his docudrama Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1979), chronicled the anti-Communist “witchhunt” of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children received a Tony Award nomination in 1963. Bentley also directed his own translation of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1956 on Broadway. Bentley notably translated the works of Brecht and Luigi Pirandello, and authored several books on modern theatre, including The Playwright as Thinker (1946), The Life of the Drama (1964), The Brecht Commentaries 1943–1980 (1981), and Thinking About the Playwright (1987). Following two marriages, Bentley declared his homosexuality in 1969 and wrote a play Lord Alfred’s Lover (1979) about Oscar Wilde. In 2006, Bentley was presented with a lifetime achievement Obie Award. BERG, GERTRUDE (1898–1966). Born Gertrude Edelstein in New York, this actress and writer attended Columbia University and wrote skits for her father’s resort in the Catskill Mountains before becoming a radio pioneer depicting a present-day Jewish family in a 15-minute episodic comedy, The Rise of the Goldbergs, beginning in 1929. The show expanded in length and Berg herself played the family matriarch, Molly Goldberg, a warm-hearted, wise mentor for not only her own family, but her richly ethnic neighborhood. The show, which Berg also scripted, moved to television in 1949 and a stage version, Me and Molly (1948), ran a season on Broadway. Berg won the first Best Actress Emmy Award in 1951. When the show ended, Berg returned to the stage, winning a Tony Award and a Sarah Siddons Award for her performance in A Majority of One (1961). Her final stage appearance in Dear Me, The Sky is Falling, which was based on one of her stories, ran for 145 performances. A musical, Molly, based on her characters from The Goldbergs, appeared on Broadway in 1973. BERGHOF, HERBERT (1909–1990). This influential director, actor, and teacher was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied at the Vienna State Academy of Dramatic Arts and under Max Reinhardt. He moved to the United States in 1941 and appeared in a number of Broadway productions including The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), revivals of Little Women* in 1944, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler in 1948, Miss Liberty (1949), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), The Andersonville Trial (1959), and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969). Berghof directed Waiting for Godot (1956), Protective

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Custody (1957), The Infernal Machine (1958), Do You Know the Milky Way! (1961), Poor Murder (1976), and Charlotte (1980) on Broadway. Aside from his work as an actor director, in 1945 Berghof founded his own acting school, the HB Studio, and when he married actress/teacher Uta Hagen in 1957, she taught there as well. BERGMAN, INGRID (1915–1982). This luminous and legendary screen actress, born in Stockholm, Sweden, also made occasional stage appearances, including her first in a revival of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom in 1940. She won a Tony Award for Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine (1946) and her periodic returns to Broadway included the American premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions (1967) and revivals of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1972) and The Constant Wife (1975). In films, Bergman won three Academy Awards for Gaslight (1945), Anastasia (1957), and Murder on the Orient Express (1975), and was nominated four other times. Her other notable performances on film include Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Joan of Arc (1948), The Visit (1964), and Cactus Flower (1969). BERGNER, ELISABETH (1897–1986). Born Elisabeth Ettel in Drohobycz, Austro-Hungary, she worked as a model and film actress before fleeing the rise of the Nazis in 1933. In London and on Broadway, she scored a success playing an unwed mother in Escape Me Never (1935), followed by work in film, including playing Rosalind to Laurence Olivier’s Orlando in As You Like It in 1936. Between film roles and London appearances, Bergner appeared on Broadway in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1944), a revival of The Duchess of Malfi in 1946, and The Cup of Trembling (1948), and she directed The Overtons (1945). She is believed to be the model for the character of flamboyant actress Margo Channing in All about Eve (1951). BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE (BRT). A not-for-profit theatre founded in 1968 by Michael Leibert in Berkeley, California, this respected organization started in a small storefront space, but won critical acclaim for the high quality of its productions and its permanent acting ensemble. In 1980, the BRT moved to a 400-seat facility prior to Leibert’s departure in 1983. His successor, Sharon Ott, dropped the permanent acting company while shifting the focus to edgier contemporary plays and reinterpretations of classics. Ott left in 1997 as the BRT won a Tony Award as outstanding regional theatre. Tony Taccone, who had been associate artistic director since 1988, took over and the theatre added a new space, the Theatre Next Door

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in 2001. New plays by such writers as Philip Kan Gotanda, José Rivera, Tony Kushner, and Han Ong premiered at the BRT. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. BERKSHIRE THEATRE FESTIVAL (BTF). Founded in 1928, the BTF is among the oldest regional theatres functioning in the United States. A stated mission of supplying a home for the next generation of American theatre artists began when Eva Le Gallienne appeared in The Cradle Song as the opening production. Producing work by American and European dramatists continued as the BTF became a not-for-profit theatre in 1967 under artistic director George Tabori, who was subsequently followed by Peter Cookson and Arthur Penn. In 2010, artistic director Kate Maguire led the growing operation. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. BERLIN, PAMELA (1952– ). Born in Newport News, Virginia, Berlin attended Radcliffe College planning a career in medicine, but was drawn into the arts. She continued her education at Southern Methodist University, completing an M.F.A. in directing in 1977. She moved to New York in 1979 and worked as a stage manager prior to joining the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) where she rose to literary manager. For EST and Off-Broadway, she directed The Self-Begotten (1982), Ordway Ames-gay (1982), To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday (1984), Elm Circle (1984), Crossing Delancey (1985), Mama Drama (1987), Steel Magnolias (1987), Peacetime (1992), Snowing at Delphi (1993), and Endpapers (2002). On Broadway, Berlin directed The Cemetery Club (1990). She served as president of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers from 2001–2007 and directs many regional theatre productions. BERLIND, ROGER S. (1930– ). This notable theatrical producer graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and was among the founders of the investment firm Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill in 1960. He began producing for the stage in 1976, and his shows have won numerous Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. His productions include many major musicals between 1976 and 2009 and such non-musical works as The Merchant (1977), Amadeus (1980), The Real Thing (1984), revivals of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1985 and Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1986, Artist Descending a Staircase (1989), Lettice and Lovage (1990), Death and the Maiden (1992), a revival of Hamlet in 1995, Skylight (1996), a revival of A View from the Bridge in 1997, The Judas Kiss (1998), The Blue Room (1998), Closer (1999), Amy’s View (1999), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000), Copenhagen (2000), Proof (2000), revivals of Dance of Death in 2001 and Medea in 2002,

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Anna in the Tropics (2003), a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2005, Doubt (2005), Well (2006), The History Boys (2006), revivals of Faith Healer in 2006 and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in 2006, Shining City (2006), The Vertical Hour (2006), The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), Deuce (2007) Rock ‘n’ Roll (2007), Is He Dead? (2007), a revival of Equus in 2008, and To Be or Not to Be (2008). BERN, MINA (1911–2010). Born Mina Bernholtz in Lodz, Poland, Bern was relocated to a displaced persons camp in Uganda by the Nazis during World War II. After the war, she performed in Israel before moving to New York in 1949. Despite the fact that the Yiddish theatre on Second Avenue was in steep decline in that era, Bern became a popular performer over the subsequent decades, appearing on Broadway, often with her husband Ben Bonus, in Let’s Sing Yiddish (1966), Sing, Israel, Sing (1967), Light, Lively, and Yiddish (1970), and Those Were the Days (1990). Bern was presented with a sustained excellence Obie Award in 1999, and she appeared in small roles in several films, including Crossing Delancey (1988), Avalon (1990), I’m Not Rappaport (1996), Celebrity (1998), and Flawless (1999). BERNSTEIN, ALINE (1880–1955). Born Aline Frankau in New York, where her father was an actor, Bernstein began her career as a founding member of the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1915 prior to costume designing for the Theatre Guild. In 1926, Eva Le Gallienne asked her to design for the Civic Repertory Company (CRC). After 1930, she worked frequently with production Herman Shumlin, beginning with Grand Hotel (1930). Their association continued through the 1930s and included her work on Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), Days to Come (1936), The Little Foxes (1939), and The Searching Wind (1944). In all, Bernstein designed costumes (and, on occasion, settings) for 50 Broadway productions. She won a Tony Award for Regina (1950), the musical version of The Little Foxes, and her other Broadway designs include Reunion in Vienna (1931), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), a revival of Camille in 1935, The Male Animal (1940), Harriet (1943), The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947), The Happy Time (1950), and Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1950). BERRY, GABRIEL (1951– ). Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Berry worked as a designer with numerous experimental theatre artists after she began her career in 1979, including Meredith Monk, JoAnne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Peter Sellars, Maria Irene Fornés, and Andrei Serban, and was the first American to win an individual medal at the International Design

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Quadrennial in Prague in 1995. She is resident costume designer for La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and is an associate at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the New York Theatre Workshop, and designs frequently for the American Repertory Theatre, among other regional theatres and Off-Broadway, where her design of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination. She also received an Obie Award for sustained excellence. Berry’s only Broadway costume designs were for Cuba & Teddy Bear (1986). BEST MAN, THE. Gore Vidal’s three-act drama set backstage at a political party’s convention opened on 31 March 1960 at the Morosco Theatre for a 520 performance run under the direction of Joseph Anthony with scene design by Jo Mielziner. This Tony Award-nominated play featured a strong cast, including Melvyn Douglas, Lee Tracy, Frank Lovejoy, and Leora Dana. The play focuses on the unsavory machinations of two rival candidates for the presidential nomination, William Russell and Joseph Cantwell, overseen by the outgoing President, Arthur Hockstader. The play was filmed in 1964 starring Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, and Tracy reprising his role as Hockstader, and it was revived on Broadway in 2000 with an all-star cast, including Chris Noth, Spalding Gray, Charles Durning, Christine Ebersole, Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Learned, and Jonathan Hadary. BIG APPLE CIRCUS. This unique not-for-profit one-ring circus, founded by Michael Christensen and Paul Binder, constructs its performance around a theme (“Grandma Goes West,” “Carnevale in Venice,” etc.) and was honored in 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by New York City’s Landmark Conservancy. BIG WHITE FOG. The Chicago Unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) staged Theodore Ward’s probing drama on African American politics for 10 weeks in 1938. The family-centered play examines the involvement of the father in Marcus Garvey’s nationalist movement and his son’s interest in Communism. As the Great Depression deepens and Garvey’s movement collapses, the family’s struggles intensify. Following the FTP production, the Negro Playwrights Company presented the play in New York at the Lincoln Square Theatre, where it opened on 22 October 1940, as its premiere production. The cast featured Canada Lee, Hilda Offley, and Frank Silvera, and it was performed until December 1940. Powell Lindsay directed and Perry Watkins, the first black member of the Union of Scenic Artists, created the scene designs.

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BIKEL, THEODORE (1924– ). This versatile performer at home in both dramas and musicals was born Theodore Meir Bikel in Vienna, Austria. His family fled Vienna at the rise of the Nazis, and Bikel eventually studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, after which Laurence Olivier hired him as understudy for Stanley and Mitch in the West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948. After working in several films, including his debut in The African Queen (1951), and plays in Europe, Bikel moved to the United States in 1954, where he appeared in movies and occasional Broadway productions, including playing Captain von Trapp in the musical The Sound of Music (1959) opposite Mary Martin, garnering his second Tony Award nomination (his first was for The Rope Dancers in 1957). He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Defiant Ones (1958) and appeared on Broadway in Tonight in Samarkand (1955), The Lark (1955), Café Crown (1964), Pousse-Café (1966), and a revival of The Inspector General (1978). He appeared Off-Broadway in Arje Shaw’s The Gathering (1999) and served as President of Actors’ Equity Association from 1973–1982. BILLINGTON, KEN (1946– ). This prolific lighting designer was born in White Plains, New York, and has designed over 70 Broadway shows, as well as many Off-Broadway and regional theatre productions. Billington also served as principal lighting designer for Radio City Music Hall from 1979 to 2004 and won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his lighting for the revival of Chicago in 1997. He has also been nominated for Tonys seven additional times for a revival of The Visit (1974), Working (1978), Sweeney Todd (1979), Foxfire (1983), The End of the World (1984), The Drowsy Chaperone (2006), and a 2008 revival of Sunday in the Park with George. His Off-Broadway credits include Diamonds (1984), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Absent Friends (1991), Sylvia (1995), and London Suite (1995), among others. He also works in television. BILOXI BLUES. The second of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach” trilogy won a Best Play Tony Award. This comedy/drama about the experience of Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, during basic training during World War II, opened on 28 March 1985 at the Neil Simon Theatre, where it ran for 524 performances. Matthew Broderick won critical approval as Eugene, with Barry Miller as his Jewish radical bunkmate, and Penelope Ann Miller as Eugene’s first love, Daisy Hannigan. Simon explores the seriocomic aspects of military life, including the enlisted men’s battle of wills with a disturbed sergeant and the ethnic and sexual prejudices of the time. Broderick

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and Miller repeated their Broadway performances in a 1988 screen adaptation directed by Mike Nichols. BIOGRAPHY. S. N. Behrman’s witty three-act comedy of a woman confused by the opposing poles of conservative and liberal politics of the 1930s opened on 12 December 1932 at the Guild Theatre for 267 performances. This Theatre Guild production directed by Philip Moeller and designed by Jo Mielziner starred Ina Claire as Marion Froude, an egotistical woman composing her biography for a radical publication edited by Richard Kurt, with whom she falls in love. When Marion’s ex-lover Leander Nolan, a political conservative, fears that her writings might undermine his run for the U.S. Senate, Marion is persuaded to destroy her biography and end her relationship with Kurt. A film adaptation, under the title Biography of a Bachelor Girl, was released in 1935 BISHOP, ANDRÉ (1948– ). André Bishop Smolianinoff was born in New York, the son of an investment banker. He attended Harvard University prior to beginning his career as artistic director and literary manager of Playwrights Horizons in 1978, leading the organization to produce new works by emerging contemporary playwrights as artistic director from 1981 to 1991, including the Pulitzer Prize-winners Driving Miss Daisy (1987) and The Heidi Chronicles (1989). In 1991, Bishop became artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theatre. Among the works premiered at Lincoln Center during Bishop’s tenure are The Light in the Piazza (2005), Contact (2000), The Coast of Utopia (2006), Rock ’n’ Roll (2007), and Dividing the Estate (2008), as well as revivals of Carousel in 1994, The Heiress in 1995, A Delicate Balance in 1996, Henry IV in 2004, South Pacific in 2008, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 2009. BLACK THEATRE NETWORK (BNT). This not-for-profit organization emerged from the Afro-Asian Theatre Project of the American Theatre Association in 1965, which was followed by the African Theatre Project and the Black Theatre Project before becoming the BTN in 1986. The BTN mission is the preservation of black theatre as a unique art form and offers student design and writing competitions and recognition awards for theatre professionals. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE; ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. BLACKMER, SIDNEY (1895–1973). A native of Salisbury, North Carolina, Blackmer left home in his youth to work in theatre and film in New York, including playing a bit part in the silent screen serial The Peril of Pau-

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line in 1914. He debuted on Broadway in The Morris Dance (1917), before joining the military during World War I, resuming his career after the war in such plays as The Mountain Man (1921), The Love Child (1922), Scaramouche (1923), Love in a Mist (1926), Mima (1928), Round Trip (1945), and Portrait in Black (1947). He won a Tony Award for the role of Doc in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). On Broadway, his subsequent appearances were in The Brass Ring (1952), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and A Case of Libel (1963), and he replaced Walter Pidgeon in the musical Take Me Along (1959). Among his films were roles in Heidi (1937), In Old Chicago (1937), Duel in the Sun (1946), The High and the Mighty (1954), High Society (1956), and Rosemary’s Baby (1973). His first wife was actress Lenore Ulric.* BLAU, HERBERT (1926– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Blau graduated from New York University and emerged as a director, theorist, critic, author, and teacher who led in the evolution of postmodern theatre. Blau and Jules Irving founded the San Francisco Actors Workshop in 1952 where they produced works by Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. In 1965, Blau and Irving became coartistic directors of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, but Blau resigned in 1967 to found the California Institute of the Arts in 1968. He ultimately joined the faculty of the University of Washington and wrote numerous books on contemporary theatre and postmodern concepts, including The Impossible Theatre: A Manifesto (1964), Take Up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point (1982), Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (1982), The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (1987), The Audience (1990), To All Appearances (1992), Nothing in Itself (1999), The Dubious Spectacle (2002), and Sails of the Herring Fleet (2003), the last focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett. BLECKNER, JEFF (1943– ). This much-honored director of stage and television was born in Brooklyn, New York, and began his directing career Off-Broadway with The Unseen Hand/Forensic (1970), two one-acts by Sam Shepard. Bleckner won a Drama Desk Award and an Obie Award for his direction of David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971). The next year, his direction of Rabe’s Sticks and Bones (1972) brought him another Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination. On Broadway, he has also directed The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1972) and a revival of The Goodbye People in 1979. He has directed in numerous regional theatres, but has devoted much energy to television drama, which brought him Emmy Awards for an episode of Hill Street Blues in 1981 and Concealed Enemies (1984).

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BLESSING, LEE (1949– ). Born Lee Knowlton Blessing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Blessing studied at the Graduate Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa before writing numerous plays, including the best known, A Walk in the Woods (1987), which was nominated for a Tony Award. His more than 30 plays include Independence (1984), Eleemosynary (1988), Cobb (1989), Fortinbras (1991), Lake Street Extension (1992), Patient A (1993), Down the Road (1993), The Rights (1994), Going to St. Ives (1996), The Winning Streak (2000), Snapshot (2002), Whores (2002) Flag Day (2004), A Body of Water (2005), The Scottish Play (2005), Lonesome Hollow (2006), Moderation (2007), Great Falls (2008), Perilous Nights (2008), Into You (2009), Heaven’s My Destination (2009), and When We Go Upon the Sea (2010), most produced Off-Broadway or in regional theatres. He was playwright-in-residence with the Signature Theatre in 1992 and heads the graduate playwriting program at Rutgers University. BLOOM, CLAIRE (1931– ). Born in Finchley, England, Patricia Claire Blume was trained for the stage at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Central School of Speech and Drama. She worked with the Oxford Stage Company and made her London debut in The Lady’s Not for Burning (1947) prior to playing Ophelia in Hamlet in 1948, the year she began her film career, including playing opposite Charlie Chaplin in Limelight (1952). She has appeared in numerous film roles and on stage in England and the United States, touring America with the Old Vic in 1956. On Broadway, she made notable appearances in Rashomon (1959), revivals of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler in 1971, winning Drama Desk Awards for both, Vivat! Vivat! Regina (1972), and revivals of The Innocents in 1976 and Electra in 1998, the last bringing her a Tony Award nomination. Bloom’s other notable movie roles include playing Lady Anne opposite Laurence Olivier in Richard III (1955), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Clash of the Titans (1981), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Bloom married three times, to actor Rod Steiger, producer Hillard Elkins, and novelist Philip Roth. BLOOMGARDEN, KERMIT (1904–1976). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Bloomgarden began his distinguished producing career with a flop, Heavenly Express (1940). Between 1940 and the mid-1970s, Bloomgarden produced many notable American plays of the time, including Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest (1946), beginning a long association including productions of Hellman’s The Autumn Garden (1951), a revival of The Children’s Hour in 1952, The Lark (1955), Toys in the Attic (1960), and My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963). Bloomgarden also produced the Broadway productions of Deep Are the Roots (1945), Command Decision (1947),

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Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View From the Bridge (1955), The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), The Most Happy Fella (1956), Look Homeward, Angel (1957), The Music Man (1957), The Gang’s All Here (1959), The Gay Life (1961), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Illya Darling (1967), Hot L Baltimore (1973), and Equus (1974). BLUE MAN GROUP. An act that evolved over time in the late 1980s, this unique entertainment involving three bright blue performers interacting with a variety of media, props, music, and art is a multisensory experience that has led from the Astor Place Theatre, where it began a long run in 1991, to inspire multiple companies performing throughout the world. See also PERFORMANCE ART. BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY. Pearl Cleage’s two-act drama set in Harlem in 1930 opened at the Alliance Theatre in Georgia in July 1995 under the direction of Kenny Leon, with scene design by Rochelle Barker, costumes by Susan E. Mickey, and lighting design by Judy Zanotti. Phylicia Rashad played Angel, a singer at Harlem’s fabled Cotton Club who is struggling with issues of race, displacement, abandonment, politics, and sexuality. Taking a skeptical view of the era of the Harlem Renaissance, Cleage underscores the struggles of artists and discrimination facing gays. Commenting on the play and her work, Cleage said, “I will always write about Black people and our efforts to build a community where we can live safely. . . . These will always be my themes, regardless of the forum.” See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE. James Baldwin’s drama written to honor murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers was dedicated by the author to the four little African American girls murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Produced by the Actors Studio and directed by Burgess Meredith, it opened on Broadway at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Playhouse on 14 April 1964, where it ran for 148 performances. A searing view of racial attitudes and emotions, incidents in the play were taken from the real-life murder of Emmett Till, with the plot focusing on a preacher’s son who is murdered for an innocent conversation with a white woman in Blacktown and Whitetown, USA, two fictional hamlets through which Baldwin depicts racial conflict. The large cast included Diana Sands, who was nominated for a Tony Award, Joe Don Baker, Pat Hingle, Rip Torn, Ralph Waite, Ann Wedgeworth, and Al Freeman, Jr. BLYDEN, LARRY (1925–1975). Born Ivan Lawrence Blieden in Houston, Texas, Blyden began his Broadway acting career as a replacement, taking

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over the role of Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1948). He was a versatile performer and appeared regularly in both musical and non-musical works, including Wish You Were Here (1952), Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), Flower Drum Song (1962), for which he garnered a Tony Award nomination, Foxy (1964), Luv (1964), The Apple Tree (1966), and Absurd Person Singular (1974), the last bringing him another Tony nomination. Blyden also appeared as a replacement in You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967). He directed Harold (1962) and The Mother Lover (1969) on Broadway and produced and acted in a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1972, winning a Tony. He was married to dancer Carol Haney. BOESING, MARTHA (1936– ). A native of Exeter, New Hampshire, Boesing graduated from Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, before beginning her work with the Firehouse Theatre in the 1960s, which raised her political engagement in feminist issues. She rose to prominence as founder and artistic director of At the Foot of the Mountain (AFOM), a women’s theatre collective, beginning in 1974, a group she led for a decade and for whom she wrote plays dealing with women’s issues, including River Journal (1975), Raped (1976), The Moontree (1976), The Story of a Mother (1977), and The Web (1982), which she developed collaboratively with the AFOM group. She has directed and written plays for numerous regional theatre companies and her post-AFOM plays include Standing on Fishes (1991), My Other Heart (1993), Hard Times Come Again No More (1994), These Are My Sisters (1996), After Long Silence (1999), and A Place of Her Own (2007). BOGART, ANNE (1951– ). This acclaimed and controversial director, author, and educator was born in Newport, Rhode Island, to a Navy family. She studied at Bard College and received an M.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1977. As a choreographer and director, Bogart gained notoriety radically rethinking the staging of canonical dramatic works, receiving a 1984 Bessie Award for her production of South Pacific set in a veterans’ mental hospital. She was artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Theatre in 1989–1990 and cofounded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) with Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. In 1995, Bogart was named the first “Modern Master” at the Actors Theatre of Louisville “Classics in Context” Festival. She won Best Director Obie Awards for No Plays No Poetry but Philosophical Reflections Practical Instructions Provocative Opinions and Pointers from a Note Critic and Playwright (1988) and Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz (1990). Among her productions of note are her staging of Eduardo Machado’s In the Eye of

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the Hurricane at the 1991 Humana Festival and the premiere of Vogel’s Hot ’N’ Throbbing (1994) at the American Repertory Theatre. Bogart heads the Graduate Directing Program at Columbia University and her books include A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (2001), The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (2005), and And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World (2007). Thinking about the nature of theatre, Bogart wrote on her blog in 2009, “In our present moment of economic and cultural upheaval, theatre is probably the most important activity one can imagine doing or coming into contact with. Why? The answer is simple: Theatre provides innovative and alternate models for how people might function together. We need this now. The theatre is the only art form that concerns itself predominantly with social issues. Can we get along? Can we get along in this room? Can we get along as a society? How might we get along better?” BOGOSIAN, ERIC (1953– ). The son of a hairdresser and an accountant of Armenian heritage, Bogosian was born in Woburn, Massachusetts. He attended Oberlin College prior to beginning his theatrical career in New York as a playwright and actor. After writing several plays and one-person shows, Bogosian won a Drama Desk Award for Drinking in America (1986), followed in 1987 by the work that raised him to prominence, Talk Radio, which was filmed by Oliver Stone a year later, a work typical of Bogosian’s themes of the contradictions and discordances of millennial American life. Talk Radio was produced on Broadway in 2006, garnering a Tony Award nomination as Best Play. Subsequent works, including three Obie Award winners, include Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll (1990), Notes from the Underground (1993), Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead (1994), and the much-produced subUrbia (1994), which was adapted to the screen in 1996. He continued to write for the theatre, but increasingly acted in film and television after the late 1990s, including as a regular on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent from 2006–2009. Among his more recent plays are Griller (1998), Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2000), Humpty Dumpty (2004), Wasted Beauty (2005), and 1+1 (2008). He also writes novels, including Perforated Heart (2009). BOLAND, MARY (1880–1965). Born Marie Ann Boland in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Boland became one of the most durable comic actresses of the Broadway stage in the first half of the twentieth century. She made her first New York appearance in Strongheart* (1905), before producer Charles Frohman* selected her as John Drew’s* leading lady in a series of plays, most notably Jack Straw (1908) and Much Ado About Nothing (1913). Bo-

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land later appeared in Clarence* (1919), in which she played the first of a long line of dizzy society matrons she would play for the next 30 years on stage and screen. During the 1920s, she appeared in The Torch-Bearers* (1922) and when sound films began, Boland spent much of her time in movies returning to the stage in Ada Beats the Drum (1930), The Vinegar Tree (1930), Face the Music (1932), Jubilee (1935), as a replacement in Hellzapoppin’ (1938), and Open House (1947). She was particularly wellreceived as Mrs. Malaprop in a 1942 revival of The Rivals and in her last appearance, as a domineering mother in Lullaby (1954), although both were short-lived productions. BOOTH, SHIRLEY (1898–1992). A native New Yorker born as Thelma Booth Ford, Booth began her acting career in stock with the Poli Stock Company in 1919 prior to her Broadway debut in Hell’s Bells (1925). Between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s, she worked consistently on Broadway in both successes and failures, including such plays as Laff That Off (1925), The War Song (1928), Coastwise (1931), a revival of The Mask and the Face in 1933, Three Men on a Horse (1935), Excursion (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), Tomorrow the World (1943), and Hollywood Pinafore (1945). Booth’s performance as Grace Woods in Goodbye, My Fancy (1948) won her a Tony Award, but her most notable stage success came as the slatternly housewife Lola in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), for which she won another Tony. She repeated the role in the 1952 screen version and won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a New York Film Critics Award, and a Special Mention Award from the Cannes Film Festival. Following a well-received performance as the floozy Aunt Cissy in the musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1952), Booth won another Tony as the lonely spinster Leona Samish in The Time of the Cuckoo (1952). Booth appeared in several films during the 1950s, including the screen version of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1958), but returned to the Broadway stage in By the Beautiful Sea (1954), The Desk Set (1955), Miss Isobel (1957), Juno (1959), and A Second String (1960). In the early 1960s, Booth won two Emmy Awards for her performance in the title role of the long-running television situation comedy, Hazel, but returned to the Broadway stage twice, in the failed musical Look to the Lilies (1970) and a revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever in 1970. BOOTHE, CLARE (1903–1987). Born in New York, Boothe, later known as Clare Boothe Luce following her marriage to publisher Henry Luce, was a playwright, political figure, and journalist whose plays include Abide with

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Me (1935), Kiss the Boys Good-bye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939), although she is most remembered for her scathing satire of New York society women in the aptly titled The Women (1936), which had a long run on Broadway, was revived in 1973 and 2001, and which became a classic allstar film directed by George Cukor in 1939 (remade in 2008). BORN YESTERDAY. Garson Kanin directed his three-act comedy, which was produced by Max Gordon, with scene designs by Donald Oenslager. It opened on 4 February 1946 at the Lyceum Theatre for 1,642 performances and made a star of Judy Holliday as the irrepressible Billie Dawn, mistress of Harry Brock, a wealthy, politically powerful, and cruelly vulgar junkman. Brock sees Billie as “dumb” and hires Paul Verrall, a writer, to educate her. Paul does such a good job with the naturally bright Billie that she begins to see through Brock’s bullying and misdeeds (including using her as a cosigner on some shady deals) and, with Paul’s assistance, stifles Brock’s ruthless excesses. Screen star Jean Arthur was originally set to play Billie, but withdrew during the play’s tryouts, clearing the way for Holliday, who repeated her performance in the 1950 film version, winning a Best Actress Academy Award. Born Yesterday was revived on Broadway in 1989 starring Madeline Kahn, who was nominated for a Tony Award, and a movie remake starring Melanie Griffith was released in 1993. Another Broadway revival was announced for 2011. BORSCHT BELT. This term refers to resort hotels and camps in the Catskill and Adirondack mountains enjoyed by predominantly Jewish New Yorkers escaping the heat of the city during the summer months. From around 1900 to the 1960s, these resorts served as a circuit for comedians, vaudevillians,* burlesque performers, and actors who learned their craft providing entertainment, described by their audience as tummlers (funmakers). Many stage performers, including Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and others, began their careers working the Borscht Belt. See also YIDDISH THEATRE. BOSCO, PHILIP (1930– ). Born Philip Michael Bosco in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of a carnival worker and a policewoman, Bosco studied at the Catholic University before embarking on a distinguished acting career mostly on stage beginning in 1954, although he has made infrequent appearances in film and television. He made his first Broadway appearance in a flop, Rape of the Belt (1960), but despite the play’s fate, Bosco received a Tony Award nomination. He demonstrated his versatility in an impressive array of classic and contemporary plays, including the musical Donnybrook! (1961) and revivals of plays by Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Giraudoux,

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Bertolt Brecht, Edmond Rostand, Molière, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams during the 1960s and 1970s. Bosco also made notable appearances in new plays, including In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969), Enemies (1972), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1979), Eminent Domain (1982), and The Loves of Anatol (1985). Despite several Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations, Bosco did not win either until 1989 for his performance in the farce Lend Me a Tenor, when he won both. He appeared in highly successful revivals of The Inspector Calls in 1994 and The Heiress in 1995 and played opposite Carol Burnett in the hit comedy Moon Over Buffalo (1995). Bosco also won critical approval for his performances in Copenhagen (2000), a revival of 12 Angry Men in 2004, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2005), and a revival of Heartbreak House in 2006. Despite his frequent appearances on Broadway, Bosco also acted with distinction in numerous regional theatres. BOTH YOUR HOUSES. This three-act satiric drama by Maxwell Anderson, produced by the Theatre Guild, won a Pulitzer Prize. It assailed Congressional corruption and pork barrel politics at the height of the Great Depression. It opened at the Royale Theatre on 5 March 1933 for 120 performances under the direction of Worthington Miner. Alan McClean (Shepperd Strudwick) is expelled from college for exposing financial misdeeds, so his journalist father backs the young man for a Congressional run and garners support from some industrialists. When Alan is elected, he exposes corrupt practices of his backers. Embittered by his attempt to stop a pork barrel bill, he proposes an ironic bill in which all of the Congressmen are awarded money for their pork projects. Instead of embarrassment, Alan’s colleagues pass the bill and applaud his political acumen. The cast also included Morris Carnovsky, Russell Collins, J. Edward Bromberg, and Jerome Cowan. BOVASSO, JULIE (1930–1991). Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Italian American family, Bovasso studied at the High School of Music and Art and City College. She founded the Tempo Playhouse at St. Mark’s Place in 1953 and won the first Obie Award for acting in 1956 for her performance in Jean Genet’s The Maids at the outset of a long career in which she emphasized experimental work on the stage while appearing in more conventional material in films and television. She also won a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award in Genet’s The Screens in 1972. Bovasso was an admired teacher of acting in New York at the New School for Social Research, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and Sarah Lawrence College. Bovasso also wrote plays, including The Moon Dreamers (1967), Schubert’s Last Serenade (1971), The Nothing Kid (1974), Super Lover

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(1975), and Angelo’s Wedding (1985), and often directed as well, working frequently at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. In 1969, she won triple Obies as playwright, director, and actress for Gloria and Esperanza. In films, she appeared notably in Saturday Night Fever (1977), Staying Alive (1983), Wise Guys (1986), and Moonstruck (1987). BOY MEETS GIRL. Sam and Bella Spewack’s farce in three acts was produced and directed by George Abbott at the Cort Theatre, where it opened on 27 November 1935 for 669 performances. Set in Hollywood, the play centers on two wisecracking screenwriters, Robert Law (Allyn Joslyn) and J. Carlyle Benson (Jerome Cowan), who resist writing a film script for a cowboy star. When a pregnant waitress at the studio needs help, Law and Benson write her baby into the script, which leads to a hit movie and a romantic outcome for the waitress. When Warner Bros. filmed the play in 1938, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien gave memorable performances as Law and Benson. Boy Meets Girl was revived on Broadway in 1943 and 1976, but both revivals were failures despite the fact that the play was popular for many years in stock, community, and university theatre productions. BOYER, CHARLES (1897–1978). The quintessential Frenchman, Boyer was born in Figeac, Lot, Midi-Pyrenees, France who worked in a hospital during World War I, where he performed for the soldiers. Boyer studied for a time at the Sorbonne before beginning a stage career in the 1920s. He also appeared in several silent films and made the transition to sound which, ultimately, led from France to Hollywood. In the mid-1930s, Boyer became a major screen star, often in suave, sophisticated roles, in such films as The Garden of Allah (1936), Conquest (1937), Algiers (1938), Love Affair (1939), Gaslight (1944), Arch of Triumph (1948), and many others. After a decade of film work, Boyer, who endeavored to move beyond the romantic roles he typically played on screen, debuted on Broadway in Red Gloves (1948), followed by an acclaimed performance in Don Juan in Hell (1951), for which he and the rest of the cast were presented with a special Tony Award. He was also nominated for a Tony in the title role of Lord Pengo (1963) and appeared in Kind Sir (1953) with Mary Martin, The Marriage-Go-Round (1958) opposite Claudette Colbert, and Man and Boy (1963). Late in his career, he appeared in the 1967 film version of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. BOYS IN THE BAND, THE. Mart Crowley’s two-act comedy-drama won praise for depicting more realistic images of homosexuals and criticism for indulging in outmoded stereotypes when it opened on 14 April 1968 at Off-Broadway’s Theatre Four for 1,000 performances following a brief

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Playwrights Unit staging the previous January. A gay tolerance play in which all characters on stage are homosexual men from various backgrounds and with diverse attitudes about their lives, the lasting value of The Boys in the Band may be its warning against a life lived in the closet—or in the attempts of gay men to hide their secret homosexual lives behind a “straight” public façade—and in comparatively progressive views of the gay lifestyle and the particular dilemmas facing effeminate gays unable to hide their sexual orientation. The original cast featured Kenneth Nelson as Michael, who is hosting a birthday party for Harold, played by Leonard Frey, leading to a confrontation is which Harold bluntly assesses Michael’s internal conflict between his sexuality and his desire to be straight. Clive Barnes, writing at the time of the play’s premiere, found it to be “by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on the stage,” noting that it “is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human experience.” A 1970 film version directed by William Friedkin retained members of the original cast and the play was revived at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1996, but has had numerous productions in regional, amateur, and university theatres, including a 2010 Off-Broadway revival by the Transport Group in a site-specific production in a penthouse apartment. Crowley wrote a sequel, The Men from the Boys (2002), which revisited the characters later in life. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. BRADY, ALICE (1892–1939).† Born in New York, the daughter of theatrical producer William A. Brady* and a French dancer, Rose Marie Rene, Brady attended the Convent of St. Elizabeth in Madison, New Jersey before studying opera at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her father disapproved of her desire to be an actress and she made her debut without his knowledge with Robert Mantell* in a New Jersey production of As You Like It. She subsequently won plaudits as Meg in Little Women* (1912) and acted in silent films. Her father, who finally acquiesced to her stage career, produced Owen Davis’s* Forever After* (1918) for her and she appeared successfully in Zander the Great (1923), Bride of the Lamb (1926), Bless You Sister (1927), A Most Immoral Lady (1928), The Game of Love and Death (1929), Karl and Anna (1929), and Love, Honor, and Betray (1930). She joined the Theatre Guild in 1928 and won the opportunity of playing her most significant stage role, Lavinia Mannon in Eugene O’Neill’s tragic trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). She made her final Broadway appearance in Mademoiselle (1932), written by her stepmother, Grace George,* and in the Los Angeles production of S. N. Behrman’s Biography (1934). She was otherwise occupied with an impressive array of character roles in

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Hollywood films, including The Gay Divorcee (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), and Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). She won a Best Supporting Oscar for her performance in In Old Chicago (1937) before cancer prematurely ended her career. BRANCH, WILLIAM (1927– ). The son of an A.M.E. Zion minister, Branch was born in New York, but spent his teen years in Charlotte, North Carolina, and started to write plays. He studied at Northwestern University and Columbia University prior to working as an actor, appearing in the national tour of Anna Lucasta (1944) and other productions. Branch became a writer and educator, teaching at various times at the University of MarylandBaltimore County and Cornell University, and his plays, which protest the status of African Americans in mid-twentieth-century America, including A Medal for Willie (1951), In Splendid Error (1945), A Wreath for Udomo (1960), adapted from Peter Abraham’s novel, and Baccalaureate (1975). Branch won a 1992 American Book Award for his editorship of Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama. In a 2004 interview, Branch commented on issues of race and racism in America and the theatre: “racism, which is endemic to the whole of American society, certainly was not absent from theatre anymore than from any other institution of American life. And that goes for today as well as in the past. Even though things are somewhat better than the past, racism is not dead—certainly not dead in the theatre either. There is a long, long way to go before there is anything like equality of opportunity in the theatre.” BRANDO, MARLON (1924–2004). Born Marlon Brando, Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, to a pesticide manufacturer and an actress who were divorced in his adolescence, Brando had a turbulent time in his teens due, in part, to his mother’s alcoholism. He attended the Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, where he won approval in theatre productions, but he was expelled in his last year. After some odd jobs, Brando attended the American Theatre Wing Professional School, the Dramatic Workshop of The New School, and The Actors’ Studio prior to his Broadway debut as Nels in I Remember Mama (1944). He won critical approval in Truckline Café, revivals of Antigone and Candida with Katharine Cornell, and A Flag Is Born, all in 1946, winning a Theatre World Award that year. He became a major star playing the intensely brutish, overtly sexual Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). His highly praised performance, which brought “method acting” to the forefront of American acting techniques, led to Hollywood, where he debuted in The Men (1950), followed by his Academy Award-nominated

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performance in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. He subsequently won two Academy Awards, for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Godfather (1972), famously refusing to accept the award for the latter in protest of the nation’s treatment of Native Americans. He acted in, and occasionally directed, films, but never returned to the Broadway stage. A tumultuous and ultimately tragic personal life may have prevented a full realization of his significant talents, but Brando’s name became synonymous with the finest American acting of the second half of the twentieth century. BRANTLEY, BEN (1954– ). Born in Durham, North Carolina, Brantley attended Swarthmore College and began a journalistic career with the WinstonSalem Sentinel in 1976 before becoming an editorial assistant at the Village Voice in 1975, followed by an editorship at Women’s Wear Daily in 1978. He became their European editor in 1983 and, after 1985 worked as a freelance writer, contributing to such publications as ELLE, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. He became a drama critic for the New York Times in 1993, rising to chief theatre critic in 1996 following Frank Rich’s move to the editorial pages. Brantley edited The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century (2001) and he received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 1996. BREAD & PUPPET THEATRE. Peter Schumann, who had run the New Dance Group in Germany, founded the Bread & Puppet Theatre in 1961 in New York with the assistance of his wife, Elka Schumann, and numerous volunteers (including Paul Zaloom, Grace Palley, and others) from American and international politically inspired theatres. Radically leftwing in its content, the Bread & Puppet’s name refers to the offering of fresh bread with garlic butter distributed free at performances, public demonstrations and parades, and in the annual circus presented (until 1998) on a remote farm in Glover, Vermont, which became the theatre’s base of operations. The Bread & Puppet was particularly prominent in its engagement in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, with its papier-mâché, larger-than-life big-headed puppets (including Schumann himself as Uncle Sam on enormous stilts), a visual icon not only of antiwar sentiments, but also the theatre’s poor theatre, communal approach in their creative techniques. Bread & Puppet volunteers were arrested during the 2000 Republican National Convention as the result of unfounded rumors of terrorist plots. In December 2001, the theatre presented The Insurrection Mass with Funeral March for a Rotten Idea: A Special Mass for the Aftermath of the Events of September 11th, a protest of American policies following 9/11.

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BRECHT ON THE AMERICAN STAGE. In the decade following World War II, the plays and theatrical techniques of Bertolt Brecht, the influential German dramatist, director, and dramatic theorist, began to have a profound impact on practices in American theatre, particularly in antirealism staging techniques, acting styles, and political theatre. Prior to World War II, Brecht’s plays had not been particularly well-known in the United States; his Threepenny Opera had its American premiere at the Empire Theatre in 1933, but failed to find an audience. Brecht, who had fled Germany at the rise of the Nazis, first visited New York in 1935 when the Theatre Union presented his play Mother at the Civic Repertory Theatre, but this production was also short-lived. Brecht settled in the United States for a time, returning to Berlin following the end of World War II. No other Broadway productions of Brecht appeared until 1947, when Charles Laughton, playing the title role, brought his staging of Brecht’s Galileo to Broadway, where it folded after a mere six performances, although the production generated some approval from critics. A well-received production of Threepenny Opera appeared on Broadway in 1954 following a successful Off-Broadway run. Following this production, Brecht’s works were seen with somewhat greater frequency, especially Off-Broadway and in university theatres where, by the mid-1960s, Brecht’s political viewpoints seemed in sync with the turbulent times. Critic and playwright Eric Bentley, who had become acquainted with Brecht prior to the playwright’s death in 1956, wrote about Brecht’s work and translated and published many of Brecht’s plays in the United States. While Brecht’s plays beyond Threepenny Opera, which was revived successfully in 1976, 1989, and 2006, have never found great popularity on Broadway stages, a few productions of note appeared, including a 1956 Bentley-directed production of The Good Woman of Setzuan featuring Uta Hagen in the title role, a 1963 production of Mother Courage and Her Children starring Anne Bancroft and directed by Jerome Robbins, the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center productions of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (which Brecht had written with a Broadway production in mind) in 1966, Galileo in 1967, and The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1970, and a Jujamcyn production of Happy End in 1977. Off-Broadway and regional theatre, not to mention academic theatres, have provided more fertile fields for Brechtian productions, with some notable productions, including a critically lambasted 2002 production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui starring Al Pacino, with Billy Crudup, Steve Buscemi, Chazz Palminteri, Charles Durning, Linda Emond, and John Goodman. Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Austin Pendleton, fared

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better in 2006 in a New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre production. Kushner, a vocal proponent of Brecht’s theatre, had earlier adapted The Good Woman of Setzuan, which premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse and, in New York, at the tiny Wings Theatre Off-Broadway in 1999. BREUER, LEE (1937– ). This noted director, filmmaker, educator, and writer was born in Los Angeles, California, and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles before initiating his career with the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop in the early 1960s. In 1965, he traveled to Europe to work with the Berliner Ensemble and the Polish Theatre Lab. Back in the United States, Breuer found a base for his life’s work as founding artistic director of New York’s Mabou Mines in 1970, with founding members Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Frederick Neuman. He first won note for his staging of the plays of Samuel Beckett, including productions of Play in 1970 and Come and Go in 1971, prior to writing, directing, and occasionally acting in his own plays, which include The Red Horse Animation (1970), The B-Beaver Animation (1974), The Saint and the Football Players (1976), The Lost Ones (1977), The Shaggy Dog Animation (1978), Animations (1979), A Prologue to A Death in Venice (1980), Sister Susie Cinema (1980), The Gospel at Colonus (1982), Hajj (1983), The Warrior Ant (1988), Lear (1990), MahabharANTa (1992), Red Beads (2005), Ecco Porco (2009), and Summa Dramatica (2009). His controversial Dollhouse, adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Peter and Wendy (2007) each won two Obie Awards, and Breuer has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants in support of his work. BRIG, THE. Kenneth H. Brown’s play, produced by the Living Theatre and directed by Judith Malina, opened on 15 May 1963 for 239 performances. Set in 1957, it depicts a day in the hellish existence for inmates of a Marine prison in Japan. Ostensibly because Malina and her husband, Julian Beck, who had designed the production, had not paid their taxes, the United States government and the theatre’s landlord, locked the company out of their performance space. Despite this impairment (not to mention critical resistance to the play’s content), the cast and audience members climbed over the barred entrance to see the final performance. The production moved briefly to the Midway Theatre before a tour of Europe. This controversial play was filmed in 1964 and a Living Theatre revival with Malina directing appeared in 2007. BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY, A. Tony Kushner’s three-act drama, written as a response to Bertolt Brecht’s The Private Life of the Master Race, premiered in a workshop production by Theatre 22 in April 1985 under Kush-

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ner’s direction. Staged by Oskar Eustis, it had a fully realized premiere at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre in October 1987 and returned to New York in January 1991 for a New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre production directed by Michael Greif. The play centers on a group of filmmakers and artists in Berlin in 1932–1933 observing the rise of the Nazis—all react differently to the mounting evil, some fleeing the country, others joining the underground, and one, Agnes Eggling (Frances Conroy), becoming immobile as darkness descends. Agnes is observed from another time by a 1980s’ political radical, Zillah Katz, who equates Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which she angrily resists, with Hitler’s Germany. Many critics condemned the play, finding this comparison extreme and the play’s scope pretentious, but a few recognized Kushner as a writer of promise, a promise fulfilled in little more than a year as Kushner’s epic Angels in America (1993) caused many of these same critics to reverse their estimation of his abilities. BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS. The first of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical trilogy of “Brighton Beach” plays, this two-act comedy-drama opened on 27 March 1983 at the Alvin Theatre for 1,299 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Matthew Broderick won a Tony Award and a Theatre World Award as Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, an adolescent aspiring to become a writer, but contending with an extended family caught up in the economic struggles of the Great Depression in 1937. The show’s director, Gene Saks, also won a Tony and during the run of the production, Broadway’s Alvin Theatre was renamed the Neil Simon Theatre. The play was filmed in 1986 with Jonathan Silverman as Eugene. A 2009 revival received good reviews, but folded in a week. BRISSON, FREDERICK (1912–1984). The son of Danish performer Carl Brisson born in Copenhagen, Denmark, Brisson was educated in England. In the United States from the 1930s, Brisson became a Broadway producer. Among the diverse plays and musicals he produced himself or with partners were The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), New Girl in Town (1957), The Pleasure of His Company (1958), The Gazebo (1958), Five Finger Exercise (1959), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1960), The Caretaker (1961), First Love (1961), Alfie! (1964), Generation (1965), The Flip Side (1968), Coco (1969), Twigs (1971), Jumpers (1974), So Long, 174th Street (1976), Mixed Couples (1980), and Dance a Little Closer (1983). Brisson also produced several films, mostly screen adaptations of the plays and musicals he produced on Broadway. He married actress Rosalind Russell in 1941, earning him the unflattering nickname “The Lizard of Roz.”

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BROADWAY. Labels ostensibly describing groupings of theatres in New York City offer a means of determining the type of theatre experience available in each. Broadway is a collection of mostly large playhouses surrounding the Times Square area of Manhattan exceeding 300 seats. Broadway was the center of American theatre from the late nineteenth century to at least the 1960s—and has remained a showcase for musicals, comedies, dramas, solo performers, international stars and companies, and revivals, although since the late 1960s, fewer and fewer new works are created directly for Broadway. Increasingly, most productions in Broadway theatres have been nurtured in Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, regional, and academic theatres, as opposed to the period between World War I and the late 1950s, when many new musicals and plays were prepared directly for Broadway. BROADWAY ALLIANCE, THE. This producing organization established in 1991 to provide a means on Broadway for producing new non-musical works, nurtured productions of Steven Tesich’s The Speed of Darkness (1991), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1991), Abraham Tetenbaum’s Crazy He Calls Me (1992), and Richard Baer’s Mixed Emotions (1993) before its demise. The organization intended to make use of the less desirable Broadway houses, keeping rents and ticket prices low for the new plays. BROADWAY BOUND. Neil Simon’s Tony Award-nominated play, the third of his “Brighton Beach” trilogy, opened on 4 December 1986 at the Broadhurst Theatre for 756 performances. As with the two prior plays in the trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) and Biloxi Blues (1985), Simon centers the action on his alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, played by Jonathan Silverman, an aspiring writer who has returned home from military service during World War II as his parents’ and grandparents’ marriages break apart. With his brother, Stanley, Eugene aspires to success as a radio comedy writer. Linda Lavin won Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Eugene’s weary mother and John Randolph did the same as Eugene’s grandfather. The play was filmed for television in 1992 starring Silverman, Anne Bancroft, and Hume Cronyn. A Broadway revival was planned in 2009, but when Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, with which it was to run in repertory, closed a week after opening, Broadway Bound was cancelled. BROADWAY LEAGUE, THE. See LEAGUE OF AMERICAN THEATRES AND PRODUCERS.

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BRODERICK, JAMES (1927–1982). An admired character actor and father of Matthew Broderick, James Wilke Broderick was born in Charleston, New Hampshire. He was educated at the University of New Hampshire, where he was a pre-med student. When he acted in a university production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, his teacher recommended him to the Neighborhood Playhouse, where began his professional career in theatre, television, and film. On Broadway, Broderick appeared in Maggie (1953), Johnny No-Trump (1967), a revival of The Time of Your Life in 1969, and Let Me Hear You Smile (1973), none particularly successful. He had better luck appearing in numerous early television dramas during the 1950s and 1960s and he was nominated for an Emmy Award for the television series Family in 1978. In films, he appeared in The Group (1966), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), among others. BRODERICK, MATTHEW (1962– ). The son of actor James Broderick and writer Patricia Biow Broderick, this versatile actor was born in New York, and studied acting at the HB Studio prior to winning a role in the original Off-Broadway production of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1978), which launched a career that has encompassed theatre, film, and television. He was cast as Eugene Morris Jerome, Neil Simon’s alter ego, in Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), winning a Tony Award, and appeared again as Eugene in the second of Simon’s “Brighton Beach” trilogy, Biloxi Blues (1985), repeating the role on screen in 1988. As film work absorbed much of his time, Broderick managed to return to Broadway in revivals of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1995, which won him a second Tony, Night Must Fall in 1999, The Foreigner in 2004, The Odd Couple in 2005, and The Philanthropist in 2009, but scored a notable success as Leo Bloom in the musical version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers (2001), which brought him a Tony nomination. He repeated his performance in the 2005 screen version. Broderick married actress Sarah Jessica Parker in 1997 and he has appeared in nearly 50 films, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Glory (1989), The Cable Guy (1996), Election (1999), and a television remake of The Music Man in 2003. BROKAW, MARK (1959– ). Born in Aledo, Illinois, he worked in theatre at the Celebration Company, a small group in Urbana, Illinois, before training at the Yale School of Drama as a director. Brokaw, who specializes in minimal scenery in the productions he directs, began his career at Second Stage directing The Good Times Are Killing Me (1991). Off-Broadway, Brokaw

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has also directed As Bees in Honey Drown (1997) and revivals of Out of This World in 1995 and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in 2000, and he was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive (1997) and Lobby Hero (2001). On Broadway, he staged Reckless (2004), a revival of The Constant Wife with Lynn Redgrave and Kate Burton in 2005, Cry-Baby (2008), and After Miss Julie (2009). BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC (BAM). A theatre by this name was built in 1861 on Montague Street in Brooklyn, New York, but burned in 1903. Replaced in 1908, the facility with four theatres was considered the first such multistage complex in America. Despite its name, BAM has also presented a wide range of performing arts events encompassing American theatre, dance, and music, as well as foreign troupes and performers. During the management of Harvey Lichtenstein in the 1960s and 1970s, BAM adopted a progressive approach to performances given there, stressing alternative theatre groups and artists. Following Lichtenstein’s departure in 1999, BAM generally continued as a venue for major groups and artists with an innovative bent. BROTHER RAT. John Monks, Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe’s three-act comedy produced and directed by George Abbott opened on 16 December 1936 for 577 performances at the Biltmore Theatre. This slight piece concerned a Virginia Military Institute student, played by Eddie Albert, who is secretly married. As the school’s best pitcher, he hopes to win $200 for winning a ballgame to help support his wife when he finds out she is expecting a baby. However, the imminent birth and the interference of friends, played by Frank Albertson and José Ferrer, unnerve him and he loses the game, although the birth of the baby wins him a $300 prize as the first father at school. Albert, Albertson, and Ferrer, all newcomers, gave bright performances and despite the play’s slim plot, a film version appeared in 1938 with Albert repeating his role with a young Ronald Reagan taking over Ferrer’s part. The film proved so popular that it inspired two sequels. BROTHER/SISTER PLAYS, THE. The New York Public Theatre presented Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays in November 2009 under the direction of Tina Landau. The bill of three plays (all of which had premiered individually in various theatres), In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus or the Secret of Sweet, were described by Village Voice critic Michael Feingold as concerning “the Jungian notion that community is destiny: The collective unconscious is always at work, making the same types recur in each generation.” Focused on the impact of

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poverty on African Americans in present-day Louisiana, the work won critical approval for McCraney’s language and use of diverse influences including West African Yoruban mythology, the plays of Federico García Lorca, and the music of Motown. BROTHERS. Kathleen Collins’s memory drama on racial issues, produced by the Women’s Project, opened at the American Place Theatre in April 1982. The two brothers of the title are black men that “should have been born white,” as the author contends, because they “spent their entire lives trying to jump out of their skins.” One brother, who became a politician during the Kennedy era, and the other an Olympic athlete, do not appear in the play, but they are present through the recollections of the women in their lives, who in a series of monologues explore a range of issues facing African Americans in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Billie Allen directed a cast including Trazana Beverly. BROWN, ARVIN (1940– ). Born in Los Angeles, California, Brown spent most of his career as a director on the other coast as artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre (LWT) in New Haven, Connecticut. His first production at LWT, a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, was presented in 1966 and an Off-Broadway remounting won him a Drama Desk Award in 1971 (he was nominated again for a double bill, A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1976). Many of Brown’s LWT productions have moved to Broadway or Off-Broadway, including The National Health, which brought him a Tony Award nomination in 1975, as did a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1976. Brown’s other Broadway productions include The Shadow Box (1977), The Gin Game (1977), revivals of Watch on the Rhine in 1980, A View from the Bridge in 1983, American Buffalo in 1983, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1985, All My Sons in 1987, Private Lives in 1992, Chinese Coffee in 1992, and Hughie in 1996, as well as new works, including Open Admissions (1984), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1985), Love Letters (1989), The Twilight of the Golds (1993), and Broken Glass (1994). Brown was married to actress Joyce Ebert until her death in 1997. Following his departure from the LWT, Brown has directed television and film. BROWN, BLAIR (1947– ). Daughter of a U.S. Intelligence agent and a teacher, Bonnie Blair Brown was born in Washington, D.C. She attended the National Theatre School of Canada and acted at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and in numerous regional theatres. In 1976, she appeared as Lucy Brown in the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre revival of Threepenny Opera and made her first significant Broadway appearance in

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David Hare’s Secret Rapture (1989). Despite frequent film and television roles, Brown has appeared in regional theatre and as a Broadway replacement in two musicals, a revival of Cabaret in 1998 and James Joyce’s The Dead in 2000 and won a Tony Award for her performance in Copenhagen (2000). Her other New York appearances include Arcadia (1995), and The Clean House (2004) and she directed A Feminine Ending (2007). She was nominated five times for an Emmy Award for the television series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards for the film Continental Divide (1981) and the television movie Kennedy (1983). BROWN, JOHN MASON (1900–1969).† Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown attended Harvard University, after which he worked as a reporter on the Louisville Courier-Journal beginning in 1917. He became associate editor and drama critic for Theatre Arts Monthly in 1924, a post he kept for four years. In 1929, he took a position with the New York Evening Post and wrote a column, “Two on the Aisle,” during the 1930s. In 1941, Brown moved to the New York World-Telegram, but America’s entry into World War II interrupted his career when he joined the United States Navy. After leaving the navy, Brown became associate editor and drama critic for the Saturday Review, contributing a regular column, “Seeing Things.” He resigned from the Pulitzer Prize Committee in protest for its refusal to award the prize to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1963 and authored several books, including The Modern Theatre in Revolt (1929), Two on the Aisle (1938), Seeing Things (1946), Dramatis Personae (1963), and The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood (1965). BROWN, TONY (1951– ) and KARI MARGOLIS (1955– ). As coartistic directors of Margolis/Brown Adaptors, subsequently known as the Margolis Brown Theatre Company, these two met in Paris in 1975 where they were studying mime with Etienne Decroux. They established their multimedia movement-based theatre and school, which has received numerous grants and honors, in 1983 in New York, but moved to Minneapolis between 1993 and 2005, when they moved again to the Catskill Mountains. Among their thirteen large-scale productions, created with their students, are Autobahn (1984), Deco Dance (1986), Bed Experiment One (1987), Decodanz: The Dilemma of Desmodes and Diphylla (1991), Kopplevision and Other Digital Dieties (1991), Vanishing Point (1995), Bed Experiment II (1997), Vidpires! (1998), American Safari (2001), and Sleepwalkers (2002), BROWNE, ROSCOE LEE (1925–2007). The son of a Baptist minister, Browne was born in Woodbury, New Jersey, and attended Lincoln University

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as an undergraduate, followed by graduate studies at Middlebury College, Columbia University, and the University of Florence. After a period of working for the Schenley Import Corporation, Browne quit to become an actor, landing a role in Julius Caesar with the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1961, the same year he appeared in his first film, The Connection (1961). From that time until his death, Browne appeared with regularity in the theatre, film, and television, often in roles requiring dignity and his sonorous voice. He won a 1965 Obie Award in Robert Lowell’s Benito Cereno and two Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for Derek Walcott’s The Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970 and August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1989). Off-Broadway, he appeared in Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1961). On Broadway, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1992), and also appeared in The Cool World (1960), General Seeger (1962), Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), a revival of Danton’s Death in 1965, A Hand is on the Gate (1966), which he also directed, and the musical My One and Only (1983). He won an Emmy Award in 1986 as a guest star on The Cosby Show. BRUSTEIN, ROBERT (1927– ). Born Robert Sanford Brustein in New York, this critic, producer, educator, and occasional playwright attended Amherst College and Columbia University, completing his Ph.D. in 1957. He became drama critic for the New Republic in 1959 and founded the Yale Repertory Theatre during his long tenure as Dean of the Yale Drama School from 1965 to 1979. That year, Brustein moved from Yale to Harvard University, where he founded the American Repertory Theatre (ART). At ART, Brustein adapted 11 plays, including works by Aristophanes, Thomas Middleton, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, and Luigi Pirandello. He also wrote Shleimel the First (1994), adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, which he directed at ART. He has written 15 books, including The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama (1964), Revolution as Theatre: Notes on the New Radical Style (1971), Making Scenes: A Personal History of the Turbulent Years at Yale, 1966–1979 (1981), Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987–1994 (1994), Cultural Calisthenics: Writing on Race, Politics, and Theatre (1998), Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance (2005), and The Tainted Muse: Prejudices and Preconceptions in Shakespeare’s Works and Times (2008), as well as multiple collections of his theatre reviews. BRYGGMAN, LARRY (1938– ). Born Arvid Laurence Bryggman to Swedish American parents in Concord, California, Bryggman attended the City College of San Francisco and studied at the American Theatre Wing.

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He made his Off-Broadway stage debut in A Summer Ghost (1962) and first appeared on Broadway as a replacement in Ulysses in Nighttown (1974). He has acted in productions at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center Theatre, Second Stage, the Atlantic Theatre Company, and the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, and on Broadway in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1988), Al Pacino’s King Richard III (1979), Prelude to a Kiss (1990), a revival of Picnic in 1994, Proof (2000), and a revival of 12 Angry Men in 2004. Picnic and Proof brought him Tony Award nominations and he won a 2005 Drama Desk Award in an Atlantic Theatre Company production of David Mamet’s Romance. Bryggman appeared on the television soap opera As the World Turns from 1969 to 2004, winning two Daytime Emmy Awards. BUFMAN, ZEV (1930– ). Born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Bufman began his career as a cabaret performer in Israel in 1950, before acting in productions in California. He ultimately became a producer in the late 1950s in California, moving to Off-Broadway and Broadway in the 1960s, where he produced Your Own Thing (1968). As a Broadway producer or coproducer, he has presented Vintage ’60 (1960), revivals of Pajama Tops in 1963 and Marat/ Sade in 1967, Spofford (1967), Jimmy Shine (1968), Paul Sills’ Story Theatre (1970), revivals of Peter Pan* in 1979, Oklahoma! in 1979, West Side Story in 1980, and Brigadoon in 1980. Much publicity surrounded his production of a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in 1981, since it marked the Broadway debut of movie star Elizabeth Taylor. Most of Bufman’s subsequent productions were also revivals, including Private Lives in 1983, which starred Taylor and her ex-husband Richard Burton, A View from the Bridge in 1983, The Corn is Green in 1983, and Blithe Spirit in 2009, garnering multiple Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations for outstanding revivals. New works produced by Bufman after 1980 include Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1982), Peg (1983), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1985), The News (1985), and Jerry’s Girls (1985). BUG. Tracy Letts’s black comedy premiered at the Gate Theatre in London on 20 September 1996 prior to production at Chicago’s Red Orchid Theatre, where it opened on 20 August 2001 and a 2004 production Off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre. The play deals with the relationship of Agnes, a disaffected waitress, and Peter, who may be an AWOL Gulf War veteran. Agnes is in hiding from her abusive ex-husband and Peter assails the war in Iraq and other areas in which he believes the American government conspires. His conspiracy theories and paranoia exacerbate Agnes’s descent into insanity. A film version was released in 2006.

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BULLINS, ED (1935– ). A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bullins served in the U.S. Navy from 1952 to 1955 before completing B.A. at Antioch College and an M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. His debut as a playwright in 1965 came Off-Broadway with a bill of three one-acts, How Do You Do?, Clara’s Ole Man, and Dialect Determinism, or The Rally. After some time as a member of the Black Panther Party, Bullins, who followed the principles of the black aesthetic movement, joined the New Lafayette Theatre and continued his playwriting career with Goin’ a Buffalo (1966), In the Wine Time (1968), The Corner (1968), In New England Winter (1969), The Duplex (1970), The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971), The Taking of Miss Janie (1975), Home Boy (1976), and Daddy (1977), most of his works focusing on merging his black nationalist politics and lyrical language to explore racial tensions in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. He won two Obie Awards in the early 1970s and a 1975 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie. The Negro Ensemble Company staged Bullins’s Boy X Man (1997). Bullins moved to San Francisco in 1982 and worked with the Northeastern University Center for the Arts in Boston in the 2000s. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. BULOFF, JOSEPH (1900–1985). This theatre and film actor and director was born in Wilno, Lithuania, and began his theatrical career with the Vilna Troupe. In the United States after 1928, Buloff acted in Yiddish theatre in New York and Chicago and was a founding member of the New York Art Theatre. He began performing in English on Broadway in Don’t Look Now (1936), followed by performances in Call Me Ziggy (1937), To Quito and Back (1937), The Man from Cairo (1938), Morning Star (1940), was a replacement in My Sister Eileen (1940), and Spring Again (1941), prior to his memorable performance as peddler Ali Hakim in the original production of the groundbreaking musical Oklahoma! (1943). Later roles included The Whole World Over (1947), Once More with Feeling (1958), Moonbirds (1959), The Wall (1960), and The Fifth Season (1975), which he also directed. Buloff also directed Helen Hayes in Mrs. McThing (1952) and appeared Off-Broadway in A Chekhov Sketchbook (1962) and Hard to Be a Jew (1974), for which he won a Drama Desk Award. He also played Gregory Solomon in the 1979 and 1982 revivals of Arthur Miller’s The Price. During the 1950s and 1960s, Buloff worked frequently acting and directing in Israel. BURDEN, CHRIS (1946– ). This avant-garde performance artist was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated at Pomona College and the University of California at Irvine. His most famous performance art piece, Shoot (1971), involved Burden being shot in his left arm by an assistant.

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Burden was compelled to see a psychiatrist after this performance and it inspired considerable controversy, with various views suggesting that it was either a pro or con statement about the right to bear arms and the Vietnam War. During the 1970s, Burden’s performance pieces, which combined his central conceit of personal danger as part of the performance and aspects of sculpture, video, assemblage, and language, included Trans-Fixed (1974), in which Burden reclined on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into his hands as though he was being crucified. Other pieces in that era included Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), TV Hijack (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), White Light/White Heat (1974), Doomed (1975), and Honest Labor (1979). He joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1978, but resigned in 2005 when a student performance piece modeled on Burden’s involved the firing of a loaded gun. That same year, Burden’s Ghost Ship, a self-navigating yacht, took a 300mile journey without a crew thanks to onboard computers, and was funded by the Arts Council of England. BURIED CHILD. Sam Shepard’s three-act drama was first performed in San Francisco at the Magic Theatre on 27 June 1978 prior to performances at New York’s Theatre for the New City on 19 October 1978 before transferring to the Theatre de Lys. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was followed by numerous major revivals, including at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Circle Repertory Theatre in 1979, in London in 1980, and in a Steppenwolf Theatre revival directed by Gary Sinise that moved to Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 1996 where it garnered five Tony Award nominations for a cast including James Gammon, Terry Kinney, and Lois Smith. Buried Child depicts a nuclear American family in disintegration, reflecting the demise of national myths of family values and economic opportunity presented in a postmodern modified realistic style including elements of surrealism and symbolism. BURLESQUE.† Most commonly thought today to refer to bump-and-grind shows featuring strippers and comics, burlesque in the nineteenth century derived from eighteenth-century travesties, or satires, of well-known works. Two burlesque circuits formed at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Empire and the Columbia Wheel, both of which came to feature the suggestive dress (or undress to the point of nudity) and the bawdy, low comedy that differentiated burlesque from vaudeville. After 1930, striptease artists were particularly appreciated, with the Minsky Theatre’s “ecdysiast” Gypsy Rose Lee translating her burlesque fame into legitimate stage and film opportunities. Other strip women remained in burlesque for long, lucrative careers, including Ann

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Corio, who later created This Was Burlesque, an entertainment mythologizing the form. Other performers rose from burlesque, most particularly comedians, including Bobby Clark, Willie Howard, Fanny Brice, Phil Silvers, Abbott and Costello, and Jackie Gleason, while many other performers were not able to leap the chasm separating legitimate stages and burlesque houses. The world of burlesque at its height in the 1930s was captured in the classic Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, and Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy (1959), based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. Choreographer Bob Fosse also created a short-lived musical about burlesque, Grind (1985), but it paled in comparison to the popularity of Sugar Babies (1979), a revue pastiche created out of burlesque sketches and popular music of the 1920s–1930s. BURN THIS. Lanford Wilson’s play commissioned by the Circle Repertory Company and directed by Marshall W. Mason, opened on 19 February 1987 at Theatre 890 before moving to Broadway on 14 October 1987 at the Plymouth Theatre where it ran for 437 performances with a cast featuring John Malkovich, Joan Allen (who won a Tony Award), Jonathan Hogan, and Lou Liberatore. The play begins in the aftermath of the funeral of Robbie, a gay dancer, who drowned in a boating incident. His friends, some of whom were present, gather to attempt to deal with their shared tragedy and measure their own varied lives against Robbie’s. Malkovich and Liberatore appeared in the 1990 West End production with Juliet Stevenson and Michael Simkins. In 2002, a Signature Theatre revival featured Edward Norton, Catherine Keener, Ty Burrell, and Dallas Roberts, with Norton winning an Obie Award for his performance. BURROWS, ABE (1910–1985). This Broadway writer, play doctor, and humorist was born Abram Solman Borowitz in New York City. Burrows attended City College and New York University before working for a Wall Street accounting firm. When he met an aspiring writer, Frank Galen, in 1938, the two partnered to write comedy for radio personalities, including Ed Gardner of the popular Duffy’s Tavern show, Danny Kaye, and Joan Davis. He turned to the Broadway stage with the triumph of Guys and Dolls (1950), which won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. During the 1950s, he wrote the libretto and/or lyrics for a series of musicals, including Cole Porter’s Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955), among others. He won a Pulitzer Prize and Tonys as writer and director for How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1962). Although his work was mostly in musicals, he also wrote comedies, including Reclining Figure (1954), Cactus Flower (1965), and Four on a Garden (1971), all of which he also directed, as well as some film and television scripts. He also directed

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Golden Fleecing (1959), Forty Carats (1968), and No Hard Feelings (1973), the last of which only ran for one performance. Burrows’s son became the television writer James Burrows. BURSTYN, ELLEN (1932– ). This Oscar and Tony Award-winning actress was born Edna Rae Gillooly in Detroit, Michigan, and began her career under the name Ellen McRae as a showgirl on Jackie Gleason’s variety show on television and made her Broadway debut in the comedy Fair Game (1957). Burstyn joined the Actors Studio in 1967 and spent much of the next decade working in television and, eventually, feature films, winning a Best Actress Academy Award in the title role of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), having previously received nominations for The Last Picture Show (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The following year, she returned to Broadway in Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year (1975), winning a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her performance in this two-person comedydrama. She repeated her performance in the 1978 film version, receiving an Oscar nomination (she received two more Academy Award nominations for Resurrection [1980] and Requiem for a Dream [2000]). Burstyn was the first woman elected president of Actors’ Equity Association (1982–1985) and in 2000 she became coartistic director (with Al Pacino and Havey Keitel) of the Actors Studio following Lee Strasberg’s death. Her other Broadway appearances include 84 Charing Cross Road (1982), as a replacement in Shirley Valentine (1989), Shimada (1992), Sacrilege (1995), and Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All (2003). BURTON, KATE (1957– ). The daughter of celebrated Welsh actor Richard Burton and producer Sybil Christopher, Katherine Burton was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. Beginning her acting career following her graduation from Yale, she won a Theatre World Award in 1983 for three performances, in Winners Off-Broadway and in revivals of Present Laughter with George C. Scott and Alice in Wonderland with Eva Le Gallienne on Broadway. She was subsequently nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Some Americans Abroad (1990) and for Tony Awards for three revivals: The Elephant Man in 2002, Hedda Gabler in 2002, and The Constant Wife in 2006. Her other Broadway appearances include Doonesbury (1983), Wild Honey (1986), Jake’s Women (1992), a revival of Company in 1995, and she was a replacement in several productions, including An American Daughter in 1997, The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998, and Spring Awakening in 2007. She has worked frequently Off-Broadway and in regional theatres, recently appearing at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in

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The Cherry Orchard in 2007 and The Corn Is Green in 2009, among many others. In 2010, she played Katharine Cornell at Lincoln Center in A. R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner. BURTON, RICHARD (1925–1984). Born Richard Walter Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, Wales, 12th of 13 children of a working-class household. His father was an alcoholic mine worker and his mother died when Burton was two years old. An ability in literature and memorization in school led to his acting in school productions, including George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart, which led his teacher, Philip Burton, to encourage him and eventually adopt him as his ward (and who provided him with a stage name). With Burton’s assistance, he was able to attend Exeter College before serving in the RAF between 1944 and 1947 as a navigator. Beginning in the late 1940s, Burton began acting with some regularity in England, including radio roles for the BBC and in Emlyn Williams’s Druid’s Rest in 1944. In 1949, he was cast by John Gielgud in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning, which he acted in to critical approval in London and New York. He also began to work in films, establishing himself as a major film actor during the 1950s. In 1951, he won stage stardom as Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 at Stratford and the next year became a Hollywood star opposite Olivia de Havilland in My Cousin Rachel. He played Hamlet and Coriolanus at the Old Vic in 1953, but films roles took an increasing amount of his time. He was a hard drinker off-stage and although he married producer Sybil Christopher in 1949, he had several publicized affairs, including his Hamlet costar Claire Bloom and, with much greater scandal, movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who he subsequently married twice (both marriages ended in divorce). Burton appeared infrequently on Broadway, but usually with distinction. In 1958, he received a Tony Award nomination for Time Remembered, appearing with a strong cast including Helen Hayes, Glenn Anders, and Susan Strasberg. Burton won a Tony in 1961 for the musical Camelot, in which he played the legendary King Arthur (Burton also appeared in the 1980 revival). Burton was nominated for a Tony again in 1964 for Hamlet, in a unique rehearsalstyle production (which was subsequently filmed for television) and with a notable cast, including Hume Cronyn, Alfred Drake, George Rose, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Barnard Hughes, and John Cullum. Burton took over the role of Dysart from Anthony Hopkins in the Broadway production of Equus (1974), a role he repeated on film in 1977, and in 1976 he was awarded a special Tony for his career achievements. He made his final Broadway appearance in a revival of Private Lives in 1983, appearing with his exwife Elizabeth Taylor. Burton’s nearly 70 film and television roles include his

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seven Oscar-nominated roles in My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), Becket (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), and Equus (1977). He also appeared in the films Look Back in Anger (1958), Cleopatra (1963), The Night of the Iguana (1964), and The Taming of the Shrew (1967). He was the father of actress Kate Burton. BURY THE DEAD. Irwin Shaw’s harrowing one-act antiwar drama was performed on a double bill at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 18 April 1936, where it subsequently ran for 97 performances. The play’s relatively short run is explained, in part, by Shaw’s outspoken pacificism and leftist politics, and the play’s grim portrayal of soldiers killed in battle who, in the surreal drama, refuse to be buried. Bury the Dead did not name its particular war, choosing instead to implicate all wars, but Shaw seems inspired to a great extent by the carnage of World War I in the immediate past, and the current news of the Spanish Civil War. On a war-torn field where graves are being prepared for soldiers killed during the “Second Year of War That Is to Begin Tomorrow,” six of the dead arise to argue against the horror and waste of war. Shocked officers insist that “Wars can be fought and won only when the dead are buried and forgotten,” but these six dead soldiers refuse to be forgotten and the burial detail, persuaded by the arguments they make, break ranks and refuses to bury the dead. When the wives and lovers of the dead soldiers appear to support their position, frightened officers demand that the dead be machine-gunned into oblivion. Bullets prove ineffective as the dead soldiers go forth into the world to argue against the folly of war. This play, and a few other Shaw dramas, Siege (1937), The Gentle People (1939), and Sons and Soldiers (1943), won various degrees of critical approval, but his other theatrical works were less appreciated, and Shaw abandoned drama for a successful career as a novelist. BUS STOP. William Inge’s three-act comedy-drama opened on 2 March 1955 at the Music Box Theatre for 478 performances under Harold Clurman’s direction. The Tony Award-nominated play is set in a blizzard in Grace’s roadside café where passengers on a bus are trapped for the night. Kim Stanley won acclaim as small-time “chanteuse” Cherie who improbably finds love with Bo Decker (Albert Salmi), a rowdy cowboy, who must learn to put aside his pride to win her heart. Other characters, including the café owner (Elaine Stritch), a teenaged waitress (Phyllis Love), the local sheriff (Lou Polan), an alcoholic ex-professor on the run from his past (Anthony Ross), the randy bus driver (Patrick McVey), and the cowboy’s understanding buddy (Crahan Denton) share thoughts on life and love over the course of

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their long night together. The play became a perennial of stock, community, and university theatres, and was revived at the Circle in the Square starring Billy Crudup and Mary-Louise Parker in 1996. The 1956 film version retained most of the characters but changed many elements of the play. It was directed by Joshua Logan and featured Marilyn Monroe in her most memorable dramatic performance as Cherie. BUSCH, CHARLES (1954– ). Charles Louis Busch was born in New York City and attended Northwestern University. A playwright and stage and film actor, Busch’s drag persona combines elements of vintage movie goddesses and characters from melodramas,* which served him well in the play that brought him to prominence, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1984), in which he also appeared. Busch’s other plays include Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium (1984), Sleeping Beauty, or Coma (1984), Times Square Angel (1984), Pardon My Inquisition, or Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets (1986), Psycho Beach Party (1987), The Lady in Question (1989), Red Scare on Sunset (1991), You Should Be So Lucky (1994), Flipping My Wig (1996), Queen Amarantha (1997), Shanghai Moon (1999), Die, Mommie, Die! (1999), Our Leading Lady (2006), The Third Story (2009), and The Divine Sister (2010). These plays were all produced Off-Broadway, but Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000) scored on Broadway, racking up 777 performances and a Tony Award nomination as Best Play, and he collaborated on the libretto for the Boy George musical, Taboo (2003). His Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! were filmed in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and Busch has appeared in movies and television programs written and directed by others. He appeared in a 1993 revival of Jean Genet’s The Maids and has appeared in three productions of Auntie Mame in 1998, 2003, and 2004, playing the title character. His most recent film, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, A Very Serious Person, was released in 2006 and a documentary about his life and work, The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch, was released in 2005. BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. Leonard Gershe’s popular two-act comedy opened at the Booth Theatre on 21 October 1969 for 1,128 performances under the direction of Milton Katselas. The play centers on Don Baker (Keir Dullea), a young blind man attempting to strike out on his own despite the challenges, which include not only his lack of sight but the overprotectiveness of his domineering mother (Eileen Heckart). She is a successful author who writes children’s books about a blind hero, “Little Donny Dark,” and she is upset that Don has found himself an apartment and intends to live on his own. Making matters worse is Don’s flower-child neighbor, Jill Tanner,

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played by Blythe Danner, who won a Tony Award. Jill provides Don his first romantic (and sexual) experience, and she helps him find the strength to defy his mother’s wishes and live an independent life. Steven Schwartz contributed a song “Butterflies Are Free,” which Don sang during the play, and silent screen legend Gloria Swanson took over the role of Mrs. Baker during the play’s long Broadway run. A 1972 film version featured Eddie Albert, Jr., Goldie Hawn, and Heckart reprising her Broadway role. BUTTON, JEANNE (1930– ). A pioneering Broadway costume designer, Button studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Yale School of Drama prior to her first New York design for Langston Hughes’s Tambourines to Glory (1963). Her credits include The Watering Place (1969), a revival of King Henry V in 1969, The Robber Bridegroom (1975), Wings (1979), a revival of King Richard III in 1979, Home (1980), The Dresser (1981), revivals of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986 and Broadway* in 1987, and The Twilight of the Golds (1993). Off-Broadway Button designed numerous productions, winning a Hewes Design Award for MacBird (1967), and she also designed for numerous regional theatres. Button taught at Yale, New York University, and Tulane University prior to her retirement in 2000.

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C CACTUS FLOWER. Abe Burrows’s genial comedy, a typical example of a genre of lightly romantic, topical situation comedies with a small cast that proliferated on Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s, prior to long lucrative lives in summer stock and dinner theatres, opened on 8 December 1965 at the Royale Theatre for 1,234 performances in a David Merrick production directed by Burrows. To be sure, Cactus Flower was a better-than-average example of its genre, thanks to the wit of Burrows’s script and a bright cast, including Lauren Bacall, Brenda Vaccaro, and Barry Nelson in a romantic triangle, with Nelson, as a randy dentist, chasing the too-young-for-him hippie Vaccaro while his loyal assistant, Bacall, patiently waits for him to recover from his infatuation. The actors won critical praise and the play was filmed in 1969 starring Ingrid Bergman, Walter Matthau, and Goldie Hawn in an Academy Award-winning performance. CAESAR, ADOLPH (1933–1986). Born in Harlem, New York, Caesar studied theatre at New York University, joined the navy, and worked as an announcer before becoming involved with the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1970, working as a director, actor, and choreographer. He appeared in the NEC’s production as Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger (1972), his own play, Square Root of Soul (1976), and Charles Fuller’s The Brownsville Raid (1976). Caesar also acted with various repertory theatres, including the American Shakespeare Company and the Minnesota Theatre Company. He took roles in a few films, including Che! (1969) and The Hitter (1979), and acted in a recurring role on the soap opera General Hospital for a time. His only Broadway appearance, in a short-lived revival of Mary Stuart in 1971, was little noted, but when Caesar won a Drama Desk Award as the tough-asleather Sergeant Waters in the NEC’s production of Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play (1982), repeating his performance in the film version, retitled A Soldier’s Story, in 1984, for which he received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. He followed this with a fine performance as Old Mister in the Steven Spielberg-directed film The Color Purple (1985), prior to his sudden death from a heart attack. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE.

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CAFFE CINO. This coffeehouse in Greenwich Village (31 Cornelia Street) is regarded as a seminal space in the evolution of Off-Off Broadway beginning in late 1958. The owner, a retired dancer, Joseph Cino, encouraged poets and actors to offer readings and performances and, over time, plays were performed, beginning with an abridged version of The Importance of Being Earnest. During the early 1960s, a significant number of ultimately influential writers saw their earliest works done on the small Cino stage, including Lanford Wilson, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornés, Robert Patrick, Tom Eyen, William M. Hoffman, Megan Terry, Leonard Melfi, Jean-Claude Van Itallie, and others. Its liberal production policies permitted experimentation and for a few years it was a highly energized environment, especially for writers and actors. A fire destroyed Caffe Cino in 1965, but it was rebuilt. Cino committed suicide in 1967, but Caffe Cino continued for a time with Michael Smith, a critic for the Village Voice, attempting to keep it going, but its moment had passed. CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL, THE. Herman Wouk adapted his own novel about a naval court-martial, which opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 20 January 1954 for 415 performances in a Shubert production under the direction of Charles Laughton. Henry Fonda, John Hodiak, and Lloyd Nolan starred in the drama of Lt. Barney Greenwald’s (Fonda) court-martial for leading a mutiny on the USS Caine, commanded by erratic Captain Queeg (Nolan). Broadway revivals were seen in 1983 and 2006 and a 1954 film version, with the title shortened to The Caine Mutiny, provided Humphrey Bogart, as Queeg, with one of his best roles. A 1988 television adaptation was directed by Robert Altman. CALDWELL, ZOE (1934– ). This much-honored stage actress and sometime director was born Ada Zoe Caldwell in Melbourne, Australia, and began her career in England with the Union Theatre Company in 1958, prior to her 1960 London debut with the Royal Court Theatre. She performed in her native Australia and Canada, playing Bianca in Othello with Paul Robeson in 1959. She joined the Guthrie Theatre’s company in 1963. Caldwell made her Broadway debut in John Whiting’s The Devils (1965), but won a Tony Award and a Theatre World Award the next year for Tennessee Williams’s Slapstick Tragedy (1966). She won a Tony again two years later for the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), the same year she married producer Robert Whitehead. In the 1970s, Caldwell also appeared in Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), a revival of Dance of Death in 1974, and An Almost Perfect Person (1977), which she also directed.

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In the 1980s, Caldwell won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for a revival of the Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Medea (1982) and played Lillian Hellman in a one-woman play, Lillian (1986). The 1990s brought Caldwell another Tony and Drama Desk Award for Terrence McNally’s Master Class (1996). Off-Broadway, Caldwell won a Drama Desk Award for Colette (1970) and appeared in McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh (1993). Her directing credits include Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1991) and several Shakespeare productions, including stepping in during the rehearsal period to direct Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer in a 1988 revival of Macbeth. In England, Caldwell directed Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins in Vita & Virginia (1994) at the Union Square Theatre and she was awarded an OBE in 1970. She has appeared on television and in films, including Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and a 1983 television film of Medea. CALHERN, LOUIS (1895–1956). Born Carl Henry Vogt in Brooklyn, New York, Calhern was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and joined a touring stock company prior to World War I. He moved to New York and worked as a prop man and extra in stock and burlesque, but the war interrupted his work. After the war, he appeared in a few silent films, but acted steadily on Broadway in Roger Bloomer* (1923), The Song and Dance Man (1923), Cobra (1924), a revival of Hedda Gabler in 1926, The Woman Disputed (1926), Gypsy (1929), The Love Duel (1929), and others. With the dawn of sound on film, Calhern began to work frequently in films, while returning to Broadway on occasion for such plays as Brief Moment (1931), Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), and in his most notable success, The Magnificent Yankee (1946), in which he played Oliver Wendell Holmes. Calhern repeated his performance in the 1950 film version. His subsequent Broadway roles included The Survivors (1948), a revival of The Play’s the Thing in 1948, and he played the title role in King Lear in 1950. He appeared in over 70 films during his long career, several of which are classics, including Duck Soup (1933), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Notorious (1946), The Red Pony (1949), Annie Get Your Gun (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Executive Suite (1954), and High Society (1956). Calhern married three actresses, Ilka Chase, Julia Hoyt, and Natalie Schafer, but all ended in divorce. CALL, EDWARD PAYSON (1928– ). Born in Connecticut, Call attended the University of Maryland and began his career as production manager at the Circle in the Square in 1958. He moved to the Guthrie Theatre from 1963 to 1970, directing a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1968 that played briefly on Broadway. Call became the first

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artistic director of the Denver Theatre Center from 1979 to 1983, which he structured much like the Guthrie. He later became an artistic associate at the Arizona Theatre Company from 1987 to 1989 and he has directed for numerous regional theatres and staged Little Black Sheep (1975) for the New York Shakespeare Festival; the production had a brief run on Broadway. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. CAMINO REAL. At the height of his career, following triumphs with The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams indulged himself in this most experimental of his early plays. Even admiring critics and audiences found it a strange and disturbing oddity when it opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on 19 March 1953 under Elia Kazan’s direction. Set against a stream of historical and cultural landmarks, and drawing on the classics of literature for many of its characters, Camino Real appropriated elements from Spanish folklore, Christian tradition, and classic Hollywood films to impressionistically illuminate the lives of the defeated and discarded beings found along the camino real. Kilroy (Eli Wallach), the play’s protagonist and an embodiment of the mythical All-American G.I., arrives in a fantastic plaza where the privileged and powerful mingle with the poor and weak. In this imaginary netherworld populated with humanity’s castoffs, Williams’s characters reveal his fascination with the perilous struggle of the sensitive, the artistic, and the damaged to survive in a harsh and godless world. “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks,” exclaims Cervantes’s Don Quixote, as Williams’s literary misfits (also including Casanova, Marguerite Gautier, Lord Byron, and Proust’s Baron de Charlus), discover that a romantic outlook is necessary to survive life’s brutal realities. Part epic theatre, part absurdist carnival, Camino Real profits from Williams’s mastery of poetic imagery, language, and symbols, all set in bold relief against the play’s otherworldly landscape. He had originally written the play in one-act form in 1948 as Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. Following the performance of scenes at The Actors Studio, director Kazan encouraged Williams to expand the play into a full-length work. Most critics found the play obscure, and audiences generally seemed to share their confusion. Williams challenged the negative critical response in a New York Times essay and was deeply disappointed by the play’s cold reception. Since 1953, however, Camino Real’s theatricality, lyricism, and literary underpinnings have won for it a growing critical appreciation and occasional productions. Following its New York run, Camino Real was produced in London in 1957 prior to a New York revival directed by José Quintero in 1960. In 1966, an NET television adaptation starring Lotte Lenya and a young Martin

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Sheen won critical plaudits. Camino Real was revived again at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum in 1968 and at Lincoln Center in 1970, with a strong cast led by Al Pacino, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Jessica Tandy. England’s Royal Shakespeare Company produced Camino Real in 1998 as its first-ever production of a Williams play. And in 2010, Target Margin Theatre produced The Really Big One, a play about the making of the original production of Camino Real. Numerous regional theatres across the United States continue to perform the play, and a major movie version was under consideration in the first years of the new millennium. CANBY, VINCENT (1924–2000). Chicago, Illinois-born Canby was known mostly as a film critic for the New York Times, beginning in 1969, but he also wrote theatre criticism for the Times Sunday paper beginning in 1993, Variety, and other publications. He became chief theatre critic at the Times in 1994. New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre produced one of his plays, End of War (1978). CANTOR, ARTHUR (1920–2001). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Cantor began as a press agent for such Broadway plays as Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), Miss Liberty (1949, Darkness at Noon (1951), The Most Happy Fella (1956), Auntie Mame (1956), and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), among many others, before branching out as a producer responsible for presenting over 100 plays and musicals in New York and London between the late 1950s and a few years before his death. He was also a theatre owner (Coconut Grove Playhouse, Tappanzee Playhouse) and he headed the theatre division of Mercury Records and was joint managing director of H. M. Tennent, Ltd. in London. Among his numerous Broadway productions are The Tenth Man (1959), Toys in the Attic (1960), All the Way Home (1960), Gideon (1961), A Thousand Clowns (1962), In Praise of Love (1974), a revival of Private Lives in 1975, On Golden Pond (1979), A Little Family Business (1982), Pack of Lies (1985), Starlight Express (1987), and a revival of The Three Sisters in 1996. CAPALBO, CARMEN (1925–2010). A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Capalbo began his career running Off-Broadway theatres, including the Cherry Lane Theatre, where he staged productions of Juno and the Paycock, Awake and Sing!, and Shadow and Substance in 1946. At the Theatre de Lys he produced a hit revival of Threepenny Opera in 1954, which moved to Broadway and won a special Tony Award, and from then until the early 1970s, he staged and/or produced Broadway productions of The Potting Shed (1957), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957), The Cave Dwellers (1957), and

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Seidman and Son (1962), and others, as well as production sat the Paper Mill Playhouse, Paramus Playhouse, and others. He also worked in television and directed touring productions. CARICATURES. In the United States, caricatures and their makers emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, mostly as political cartoonists like Thomas Nast. Early theatre caricatures appear in the 1850s, when Edwin Forrest and P. T. Barnum were caricatured in The Comic History of the Human Race (1851). W. J. Gladding published caricatures of a dozen leading American actors in 1868, but were not published widely until much later. James Montgomery Flagg published caricatures of theatre personages in a range of newspapers and magazines, while Alfred J. Frueh did the same and collected his work in Stage Folk (1922). The major newspapers in New York covering theatrical activity frequently made use of artists to capture stage performances and performers, including William Auerbach-Levy and Reginald March, and several women caricatured for magazines, including Peggy Bacon and Irma Selz. After the 1930s, the leading theatre caricaturists included Sam Norkin, who worked for the New York News beginning in 1940, and Miguel Covarrubias, but Al Hirschfeld became the unofficial Dean of American Caricaturists. He began his career with the New York Herald-Tribune in 1926 with a caricature of French actor/playwright Sacha Guitry, then appearing on Broadway. By 1928, he began providing regular theatre caricatures to the New York Times and remained with the paper for over 70 years. During that long era, Hirschfeld created unforgettable images of virtually every major figure and play presented in New York, as well as films and movie personalities as well. For an actor to be caricatured by Hirschfeld was tantamount to immortality. In the same era, Sardi’s Restaurant on W. 44th Street became a mecca for theatre folks who awaited opening night reviews until the wee hours of the morning. The restaurant began hanging caricatures of noted actors on the restaurant walls, which remain covered with images of the greats and near-greats of mid-twentieth-century Broadway. In the latter part of the twentieth century, designers of posters for Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre productions moved from using photographs to caricatures, with a few artists, such as Paul Davis and James McMullan, developing highly recognizable styles. CARIOU, LEN (1939– ). This Canadian actor was born Leonard Joseph Cariou in St. Boniface, Manitoba, where he began acting and directing in plays in school before he attended St. Paul’s College. He began his professional career with the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. On Broadway, Cariou is best known for appearing in musicals, including Applause (1970), for which he won a

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Theatre World Award, A Little Night Music (1973), for which he received a Tony Award nomination, Sweeney Todd (1979), for which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and Dance a Little Closer (1983), but he also appeared in a range of non-musical plays. These include a 1969 revival of King Henry V, Night Watch (1972), Don’t Call Back (1975), Cold Storage (1977), The Speed of Darkness (1991), The Dinner Party (2000), and he stepped in as a replacement in Proof (2000). Cariou has also appeared with frequency on television and in films, including as a regular on Blue Bloods beginning in 2010. CARNOVSKY, MORRIS (1897–1992). The long, varied career of Carnovsky, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, began even before he attended college, when he worked for a time in Yiddish theatre. He attended Washington University in his hometown before making his Broadway debut in The God of Vengeance (1922). For several years in the 1920s, he acted for The Theatre Guild in Saint Joan (1923), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), The Brothers Karamazov (1927), Right You Are If You Think You Are (1927), Marco Millions* (1928), Uncle Vanya (1929), The Apple Cart (1930), Hotel Universe (1930), Elizabeth the Queen (1930), and Both Your Houses (1933), among others, prior to joining The Group Theatre in 1931. He appeared in key roles, usually characters older than himself, in most of the Group’s most noted productions, including The House of Connelly (1931), Men in White (1933), Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Johnny Johnson (1936), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and Night Music (1940), among others. He married Group Theatre actress Phoebe Brand in 1941 and developed his own approach to method acting, digressing from Lee Strasberg’s approach and instead merged realism with techniques permitting greater effectiveness in poetic and more theatrical roles. After The Group Theatre disbanded, Carnovsky appeared on Broadway and in films, as well as with the American Shakespeare Festival, tackling the leads in such major Shakespearean plays as King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest, playing these and other roles at the festival and in other Shakespeare festivals and in academic theatres. On Broadway after 1940, he appeared in My Sister Eileen (1940), Café Crown (1942), Counterattack (1943), the Arthur Miller adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1950, Tiger at the Gates (1955), The Lovers (1956), Nude with Violin (1957), The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), Rhinoceros (1961), and A Family Affair (1962). CAROLINA PLAYMAKERS. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Frederick Henry Koch founded this group in 1918 modeled on

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a similar one, the Dakota Playmakers, he had founded at the University of North Dakota in 1910. Koch’s goal was a company focused on writing and performing works native to the region. Success led to the publication of some of these works in a series, Carolina Folk-Plays, and writers Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green were among the contributors. In the 1970s, the Playmakers abandoned the original mission (although they occasionally produce regional work) and evolved as a repertory theatre in association with UNC-Chapel Hill. See also PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY; REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. CARROLL, LEO G. (1892–1972). This dignified character actor, familiar to audiences for his many film and television appearances, was born in Weedon, England. Despite his long career on screen, Carroll frequently worked on Broadway, where he debuted in Rutherford & Son (1912), and was seen in such plays as The Vortex (1925), The Constant Nymph (1926), Speak Easy (1927), The Perfect Alibi (1928), Too True to Be Good (1932), a revival of The Mask and the Face in 1933, The Green Bay Tree (1933), The Masque of Kings (1936), Save Me the Waltz (1938), Angel Street (1941), The Late George Apley (1944), and revivals of You Never Can Tell in 1948, and On Borrowed Time in 1953. Carroll’s numerous film appearances include A Christmas Carol (1938), Wuthering Heights (1939), Father of the Bride (1950), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and several directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), The Paradine Case (1947), Strangers on a Train (1951), and North by Northwest (1959). He also played the title role in the popular television comedy Topper from 1953 to 1955 and received two Emmy Award nominations for the series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the 1960s. CARROLL, VINNETTE (1922–2002). The first African American woman to direct on Broadway was born in New York. She studied at Long Island University, New York University, and Columbia University prior to more specialized theatrical training under Erwin Piscator, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler in the late 1940s. Deeply involved in the life of the black community, she taught high school, worked at the Harlem Y.M.C.A., directed the Ghetto Arts Program, and served as artistic director of the Urban Arts Corps in Greenwich Village, where the first of her own plays were performed. She scored a particular success with her musical adaptation of seven sermons, Trumpets of the Lord, in 1964. It moved to Broadway in 1969, but failed to find an audience. Also an actor, Carroll appeared on Broadway in the 1956 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, Small War on Murray Hill (1957), Jolly’s Progress (1959), and a revival of The Octoroon in 1961. She

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won an Obie Award Off-Broadway for Moon in a Rainbow Shawl (1962), but her directing skills led back to Broadway with Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1972), which brought her a Tony Award nomination. Her next production, Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976), brought her Tony nominations for directing and her libretto. Carroll’s final Broadway production, But Never Jam Today (1979), had a short run. Late in her life, she established a repertory company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CASSIDY, CLAUDIA (1900–1996). Born in Shawneetown, Illinois, Cassidy studied at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and in 1925 became music and theatre critic for the Chicago Journal of Commerce, where she worked until 1941 when she was given the opportunity to set up the music and drama departments of the Chicago Daily Sun, a new daily newspaper. She wrote a daily column, “On the Aisle,” and although her music reviews was frequently challenged, she championed theatre talents, most particularly praising the Chicago tryout of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in late 1944. Cassidy became Chicago’s most powerful critic from the 1940s to her retirement in 1965, and a theatre in the Chicago Cultural Center was ultimately named in her honor. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Tennessee Williams received his second Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for this intense family drama, a characteristic Williams play in which his mastery with language, character, symbol, and dramatic form are in full evidence. In its original production directed by Elia Kazan, scene designer Jo Mielziner heightened Cat’s pared-down realism and intensity by choosing only a few carefully selected furnishings (particularly an ornate bed and a bar) to create its Southern gothic environment. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened for a long and critically applauded run at New York’s Morosco Theatre on March 24, 1955. Under Kazan’s direction, the cast featured Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, Mildred Dunnock, and Burl Ives in a memorable performance as Big Daddy. A significant disagreement between Williams and Kazan inspired a rewriting of the play’s third act. In Williams’s original, Big Daddy does not reappear after dominating Cat’s second act. Kazan persuaded Williams to find a way to bring Big Daddy back in the third act fearing that his omission would disappoint the audience. This rewritten version was used for the original production, but in the subsequently published script Williams included both versions of the third act, inviting readers to decide on the most effective approach. The play owes much to Freud’s theories and the works of two of Williams’s favorite writers, Anton Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is set on the vast Pollitt plantation on the Mississippi Delta where family patriarch, Big Daddy, is celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday with his wife, Big Mama, and their two adult sons, Gooper and Brick. The joyful mood of the party is heightened by news that Big Daddy’s recent ailments are not, as feared, stomach cancer, but merely a “spastic colon.” The party’s merriment is set against an undercurrent of marital strife, greed, and lingering fears about Big Daddy’s health. Earlier, Brick, a former star athlete, attempted to jump hurdles in a drunken state. The resultant broken ankle has made him a captive in his bedroom where Maggie, Brick’s wife and a former beauty queen, exploits his immobility in an attempt to end their estrangement. Describing herself as a “cat on a hot tin roof,” Maggie fears that Brick, the favored son of Big Daddy, will be disinherited should he fail to produce an heir. In fact, Brick, who displays no interest in Big Daddy’s fortune or the feverish family machinations surrounding the battle for the estate, refuses to touch Maggie. Brick seeks only the “click” that comes when he has imbibed enough alcohol to render him senseless to the endless squabbles around him. His alcohol consumption is also an attempt to blot out the disturbing revelation that Skipper, his now deceased team roommate, harbored homosexual desires for him. Questioning his own sexuality, Brick is mired in an alcohol-induced melancholic haze from which Maggie has been struggling to release him. The play’s homosexual element was removed entirely from Cat’s 1958 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, and Ives recreating his stage role, but it was critically well-received and popular. Two television films have also appeared: a 1976 version with Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, and Laurence Olivier (as Big Daddy) and a 1985 production with Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones, Rip Torn, and Kim Stanley. Cat has often been revived on stage, most notably three times on Broadway. The first New York revival in 1974 starred Elizabeth Ashley, Keir Dullea, and Fred Gwynne; the next, in 1990, featured an acclaimed performance by Kathleen Turner, supported by Daniel Hugh Kelly and Charles Durning; and, in 2003, Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, and Ned Beatty again returned Cat to the New York stage. CENSORSHIP.† The censoring of various aspects of theatrical endeavor has existed from the theatre’s beginnings and in the United States it began with the Puritans, who were likely to view the stage as a den of idleness and iniquity. Over time, the censorious focused on particular thematic content, certain forms of human behavior (particularly sexuality), politics, and language. In the mid-nineteenth century, performances featuring scantily clad women both titillated and outraged audiences, but after 1880 the focus shifted to the content of realistic social problem plays, with frequent closings (and arrests) as-

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sociated with the earliest American productions of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and others. James A. Herne’s* Margaret Fleming* (1890), written in the Ibsenite mode, was not permitted performances in New York and Boston, and New York productions of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1905, Clyde Fitch’s* Sapho (1900), and George Scarborough’s* The Lure (1913) also ran afoul of local authorities. While musicals, revues,* and burlesque were able to employ certain degrees of nudity and risqué subject matter, the serious stage met with frequent difficulty. The most important American playwright post-World War I, Eugene O’Neill, caused controversy with several of his plays, including Desire under the Elms* (1924), All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1924), and Strange Interlude* (1928). As late as 1947, the pre-Broadway production of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten was challenged by out-of-town critics on moral grounds and in Detroit, for example, several words had to be deleted before a performance could be permitted. The antiwar sentiments of Laurence Stallings* and Maxwell Anderson’s What Price Glory* (1924) led to calls for censorship, as did the plays of Mae West,* whose sexually liberated Sex* (1926), in which she also played the lead, led to her arrest for indecency, and her play The Drag (1927), depicting a homosexual “drag” party, was closed by authorities before it reached Broadway. West’s exploits led to the enactment of the Wales Padlock Law* of 1927, which permitted the authorities to arrest personnel, lock theatres, and ban productions viewed as indecent. This law was rarely enforced, but it remained on the books until the 1960s and was significant in forcing producers to tread carefully in sensitive areas. Out of New York, local tastes and standards have frequently led to attempts to censor dramatic works, while in New York in the middle of the twentieth century, playwrights as diverse as Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller, among others, pushed at the boundaries of acceptability in everything from sexuality to politics. From the late 1950s, as civil rights, feminism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and other social upheavals changed American society and playwrights challenged spoken and unspoken taboos. Edward Albee broke the language barrier with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which was denied the Pulitzer Prize due to its use of various expletives and the sexual indiscretions of its characters. Curiously, Albee indulged in a kind of censorship when he halted a 1972 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and sued the American Conservatory Theatre over its interpretation of Tiny Alice (1964). Living playwrights have since occasionally objected to cross-gender casting and other “radical” interpretations of their work. Hair, the “tribal rock musical” of 1967, broke the nudity barrier in New York and when attempts were made to ban it in Boston, the Supreme Court overturned the ban.

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Since 1980, fundamentalist Christians and political conservatives have pressured the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), as well as theatre companies and producers of plays over a range of issues, including nudity, sexuality, strong language, and political themes. As gay and lesbian writers moved to the fore after 1980, and especially in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, conservatives focused their penchant for censorship on homosexual themes, assailing such plays as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), and others, while Terrence McNally, whose Corpus Christi (1998), which relates to Jesus Christ’s life and the lives of gay men in Texas, was scheduled for performances at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). When a furor erupted over the play’s subject matter, the MTC withdrew the play, inspiring a second uproar against censorship that resulted in the reinstatement of the production, which played despite demonstrations and bomb threats. The regional theatre movement that began in the late 1950s shifted the center of American theatre away from New York and, as such, many censorship battles are played out regionally. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, such conflicts arise with some frequency, often resulting from the deep political divisions in the United States. CENTER STAGE. Founded in 1963 by a group of theatre-interested local citizens, Baltimore’s Center Stage is the state theatre of Maryland. Emphasizing modern American and European plays, including premieres of Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge (1985), David Felshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys (1992), Elizabeth Egloff’s The Lover (1996), and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel (2002), the theatre was structured on the repertory model of the Guthrie Theatre. Despite a catastrophic fire in 1974 and occasional controversy, including over its production of Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in 1971, Center Stage has thrived, first under the longtime leadership of Peter Culman (1977–1991) and, more recently, Stan Wojewodski, Jr. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. CENTER THEATRE GROUP. Founded in 1966, this not-for-profit theatre company guides the programs of the Ahmanson Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum, theatre spaces constructed in 1957 as part of the Music Center of Los Angeles. Both spaces have been venues for encouraging new and classic American plays and musicals. The Ahmanson has premiered six Neil Simon plays, as well as works by Edward Albee, August Wilson, John Guare, Wendy Wasserstein, A. R. Gurney, and Terrence McNally, among others, while the Mark Taper Forum, which has presented nearly 200 productions, has offered premieres of works (including three Pulitzer Prize-winners) by Lanford Wilson, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Luis Valdéz, Anna

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Deavere Smith, Eduardo Machado, and Jon Robin Baitz. The Forum received a 1977 Tony Award as an outstanding regional theatre. A third theatre space, the Kirk Douglas Theatre, opened in 2004 and has presented premieres by Baitz and Charles L. Mee. CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN. Lonne Elder III’s tragic-comic play set in a Harlem barbershop where bootleg alcohol is secretly sold, was produced in 1969 by the Negro Ensemble Company and won its author a Drama Desk Award. Directed by Douglas Turner Ward, who also appeared in the cast (and in a 1985 revival), the play is set in the 1950s and explores problems facing a splintered African American family as some members attempt to free themselves of the psychological and societal constraints on their lives. Reviewing a 1985 revival, critic Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times that “Though the play has its digressionary moments and a few questionable motivations, it is marked by the breadth of its vision of interdependent, mutually harmful lives, and it is written with humor and a depth of understanding.” CERVERIS, MICHAEL (1960– ). Born in Bethesda, Maryland, but raised in Huntington, West Virginia, Cerveris attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. He has appeared successfully in musicals, The Who’s Tommy (1993), which brought him a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination, Titanic: The Musical (1997), revivals of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins in 2004, for which he won a Tony, and Sweeney Todd in 2005, which brought him a Tony nomination, and Lovemusik (2007), for which he received nominations for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. He has also appeared notably in non-musical theatre, including Signature Theatre’s revival of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July in 2003, Cymbeline in 2007, and Hedda Gabler in 2009. He has also appeared frequently in films and on television. CHAIKEN, JOSEPH (1935–2003). This Brooklyn, New York-born director, playwright, and teacher became ill with rheumatic fever in childhood, involving isolated care and lifelong health issues. He began study at Drake University, but decided to study with various New York acting teachers and to begin a career in theatre as an actor, working in small roles at the Metropolitan Opera, on Broadway, where he debuted in Dark of the Moon (1958), and with The Living Theatre. In 1963, he founded The Open Theatre, which began as an experimental laboratory aimed at developing a postmethod, post-Theatre of the Absurd approach and subsequently evolved into a performance ensemble. The Open Theatre won particular acclaim for its

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productions of Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s America Hurrah (1966) and The Serpent (1970), emphasizing sound and movement and improvisation techniques drawn from the theories of Viola Spolin and Nola Chilton. Chaikin played Hamm in The Open Theatre’s production of Endgame in 1969, and the company performed Susan Yankowitz’s Terminal (1970) and toured in Europe and America. During the 1970s, Chaikin founded The Winter Project with some members of The Open Theatre and others, and began to work closely with Sam Shepard, collaborating with him on Tongues and Savage/ Love in 1978, with both plays premiering at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Chaikin and Shepard were commissioned to write When the World Was Green (1996) for the Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. Chaikin suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1984 and despite some impairment, he continued to direct with an emphasis on disability-themed works at such varied regional theatres as the Mark Taper Forum, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the Trinity Repertory Theatre. Chaikin won six Obie Awards and two Drama Desk Awards. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. CHALFANT, KATHLEEN (1945– ). Born Kathleen Ann Bishop in San Francisco, California, Chalfant studied acting with Wynn Handman and had a long acting career in regional theatre and Off-Broadway prior to her involvement in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), in which she played multiple, cross-gender roles, garnering nominations for Tony Awards (for each of the two Angels plays) and a Drama Desk Award nomination. She also appeared on Broadway in Racing Demon (1995), but Off-Broadway she received another Drama Desk nomination for Nine Armenians (1997) and won an Obie Award, Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999). She also won an Obie for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (2003) and appeared in Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2008) at Playwrights Horizons. In 2009, Chalfant acted a major role in the premiere of Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures at the Guthrie Theatre and Off-Broadway in Beth Henley’s Family Week (2010). Chalfant also appears frequently in television drama and films. CHANEY, STEWART (1910–1969). Kansas City, Missouri-born scene designer Chaney studied at Yale University under George Pierce Baker.* During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of Broadway’s most prolific designers (occasionally designing lights and costumes as well as scenery). Between 1934 and 1964, Chaney, who excelled at stylish, highly detailed realistic designs, was responsible for designing nearly 80 productions, including The Old Maid (1935), Parnell (1935), Life With Father (1939), Blithe Spirit

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(1941), The Voice of the Turtle (1943), Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), The Late George Apley (1944), An Inspector Calls (1947), Life with Mother (1948), I Know My Love (1949), The House of Bernarda Alba (1951), The Moon Is Blue (1951), and numerous revivals. CHANG, TISA (1941– ). Born in Chungking, China, Chang graduated from Barnard College and studied acting with Uta Hagen, emerging as an actor and director. She debuted in a production of The World of Susie Wong in Buffalo, New York, in 1962 and on Broadway in Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen (1970). She also appeared in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1972) and a few tours. Chang began her directing work at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, but is most known for founding the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre (PART) as a means of creating more opportunities for Asian American performers, directors, and writers. The PART has premiered new works by R. A. Shiomi and Ernest Abuba and has also staged numerous cross-cultural productions of classic works. Chang has also appeared in a few films and television shows. See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CHANNING, CAROL (1921– ). A legendary performer in American musical theatre, Channing was born in Seattle, Washington, and studied at Bennington College prior to her Broadway debut in No for an Answer (1941). She won critical notice in Lend an Ear (1948), but found stardom in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1949). She appeared in other musicals during the 1950s, including succeeding Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town (1954), The Vamp (1955), and Show Girl (1961), but she occasionally moved away from musicals, as in a tour of George Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess in 1963. Channing scored another notable hit, and won a Tony Award, in the title role of Hello, Dolly! (1964), a musical based on Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a show she has returned to in tours and revivals for decades. In non-musicals, Channing appeared opposite Sid Caesar in Abe Burrows’s Four on a Garden (1971) and toured with Mary Martin in Legends (1986), although the production never opened in New York. She was presented with a special Tony in 1968 and a lifetime achievement Tony in 1995. CHANNING, STOCKARD (1944– ). Born Susan Antonia Williams Stockard in New York, she attended the Madeira School and Radcliffe College and following the end of her marriage to Walter Channing, she kept the name. She began acting with the Theatre Company of Boston and appeared in that troupe’s Off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next (1969) prior to her Broadway debut in Two Gentlemen of Verona—The Musical (1971). In this same period, she appeared in films and television, but returned to Broadway

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with some frequency and demonstrating versatility in her ability to stand out in drama, comedy, and musicals. During the 1970s and 1980s, she appeared on Broadway in No Hard Feelings (1973), replaced Lucie Arnaz in They’re Playing Our Song (1979) and Liza Minnelli in The Rink (1984), The Golden Age (1984), and won a Tony Award in a revival of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1985). She was nominated again the next year for The House of Blue Leaves (1986). Channing won a Drama Desk Award Off-Broadway for her performance in Woman in Mind (1988). Film and television work occupied Channing for a time, but she returned to Broadway, notably in Six Degrees of Separation (1990), which brought her Tony and Drama Desk nominations, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), garnering a Tony nomination. Off-Broadway, she was Drama Desk-nominated for Hapgood (1995) and she returned to Broadway in three revivals, The Little Foxes in 1997, The Lion in Winter in 1999, and Pal Joey in 2008, the last two bringing her Tony nominations. She appeared in the hit film Grease (1978) and garnered an Academy Award nomination for the film version of Six Degrees of Separation in 1993. Her numerous television appearances include a long-running stint as Abbey Bartlet, the First Lady, in The West Wing (1999–2006), which brought her six Emmy Award nominations, and she won an Emmy for The Matthew Shepard Story (2002). CHAPMAN, JOHN (1900–1972). Born John Arthur Chapman in Denver, Colorado, he worked for the Denver Times (1917–1919) prior to joining the staff of the New York Daily News in 1920, becoming drama editor in 1929 and replacing Burns Mantle* as theatre critic in 1943, continuing in that post until shortly before his death. For the Daily News, he wrote a column, “Mainly about Broadway,” and edited the Best Play series of books from 1947 to 1953 started by Mantle. CHAPTER TWO. Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical two-act comedydrama, produced by Emanuel Azenberg and directed by Herbert Ross, premiered in October 1977 at Los Angeles’s Ahmanson Theatre prior to opening on Broadway on 4 December 1977 at the Imperial Theatre for 857 performances. Based in part on Simon’s own experiences following the early death of his first wife, Joan, and his remarriage to actress Marsha Mason (who played Jennie Malone, the character based on herself), the play was among Simon’s first attempts to go beyond the successful formula he had used for nearly two decades writing New York-based witty and light domestic comedies depicting an optimistic view of life. In the play, novelist George Schneider, played by Judd Hirsch, is in deep mourning for the

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death of his wife, Barbara. His brother, Leo, attempts to introduce him to other women, finally succeeding with Jennie, a recently divorced actress being pushed into new relationships by her friend, Faye. Leo and Faye flirt with an extramarital affair, while George and Jennie fall in love. They are married, but George has serious difficulties fully accepting a new relationship, although with Jennie’s support, he is finally able to move forward with his life. Simon’s formula remained unchanged with Chapter Two with the exception that he probed more deeply into the experiences of loss and psychological problems than had been typical of his work. Critics were mostly approving, but a subsequent film version in 1979 made little impact despite the presence of the Broadway production’s star, Mason (who was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award), along with the addition of film star James Caan. CHASE, ILKA (1900–1978). New York-born actress who moved easily from sophisticated comedy to drama and sometime novelist, Chase attended boarding schools in England, France, and the United States prior to her Broadway debut in The Red Falcon (1923). Chase’s subsequent notable roles included The Animal Kingdom (1932), Forsaking All Others (1933), Days without End (1934), Small Miracle (1934), Revenge with Music (1934), as the venal Sylvia Fowler in The Women (1936), Keep Off the Grass (1940), In Bed We Cry (1944), and in 1963 she returned to Broadway to replace Mildred Natwick as Mrs. Banks in Barefoot in the Park (1963). She appeared in several films, including reprising her role in The Animal Kingdom (1932) and in Now, Voyager (1942), Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948), and Ocean’s Eleven (1960), and in many television programs. She was briefly married to Louis Calhern in 1926. CHASE, MARY (1907–1981). A Denver, Colorado, native, Mary Ellen McDonough Coyle lived in her hometown all of her life, despite writing 14 plays and a screenplay, as well as children’s stories. She worked for the Rocky Mountain News for several years beginning in 1924, but left when she married reporter Robert L. Chase. Her first Broadway play, Now You’ve Done It (1937), was short-lived, but she won a Pulitzer Prize and a remarkably long run with her winsome comedy, Harvey (1944), which was frequently revived on Broadway, stock, and in community and university theatres, and became a classic 1950 film. Of Chase’s remaining plays, only Mrs. McThing (1952), which profited from the presence of Helen Hayes in the cast, found success, although The Next Half Hour (1945), Bernardine (1952) and Midgie Purvis (1961), which starred Tallulah Bankhead, appeared on Broadway for a short run.

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CHAYEFSKY, PADDY (1923–1981). Playwright, screenwriter, and novelist Sidney Aaron Chayefski was born in the Bronx, New York, to Ukranian Jewish parents. He attended Fordham University, where he studied languages, and picked up the nickname Paddy while serving in the United States Army during World War II. Injured in the war, he spent some time in an English hospital and wrote the libretto and lyrics for a musical No T.O. for Love (1945), which was produced by Army Special Services, but moved to London’s West End. Back in the United States after the war, Chayefsky wrote successfully for radio and television, becoming known as an overtly socially conscious writer. Chayefsky adapted his 1953 television drama, Marty, for the big screen in 1955, and it won several Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay. Encouraged by this success, he adapted several of his teleplays either for Broadway or the movies (or both). On Broadway, The Middle of the Night (1956) scored a hit with Edward G. Robinson in the lead and was filmed with Fredric March in 1959. This was followed by another hit with The Tenth Man (1959), for which Chayefsky received a Tony Award nomination, as he did for Gideon (1961) the following year. Chayefsky’s The Passion of Josef D. (1964), which he also directed, failed and he spent the remainder of his career writing for films, including two that brought him Best Screenplay Academy Awards, The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976), and he was nominated for an Oscar for The Goddess (1958). Chayefsky’s television drama, The Catered Affair (1951), became a 1956 film and, ultimately, a Broadway musical, A Catered Affair (2008). CHEKHOV ON THE U.S. STAGE. Among the titans of modern drama, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) profoundly influenced American drama if, for nothing else, through the strong influence he exerted on playwrights, most particularly one of America’s greatest, Tennessee Williams, who frequently spoke of his admiration for Chekhov’s work and, in his last years, freely adapted Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), a play he had long admired, as The Notebook of Trigorin (1981). Other American playwrights, including Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Lanford Wilson, Beth Henley, and Tony Kushner, have been influenced by Chekhov. Although the earliest U.S. production of Chekhov dates to 1908, his works did not attract much attention until the 1923–1924 visit of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT)* to New York, where their Broadway season repertory included Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1900), and Ivanov (1887). Many American theatre artists were deeply moved by the plays and the quality of the MAT’s acting company, which ultimately influenced American acting mostly through The Group Theatre which, between 1931 and 1940, developed a “method” for acting based on the concepts of the MAT’s direc-

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tor Constantin Stanislavsky as seen through Chekhov’s plays. The Group attempted to produce Three Sisters in 1939, but the production did not come off due to internal problems with the company. Eva Le Gallienne was another strong proponent of Chekhov’s plays, including Chekhovian dramas in the seasons of her Civic Repertory Theatre between 1926 and 1933, staging the first American productions of Three Sisters in 1926, The Cherry Orchard in 1928, and The Seagull in 1929. After 1930, productions of Chekhov’s plays increased in frequency, with leading actresses appreciating the uncommonly good female roles in his plays. Jed Harris produced Uncle Vanya starring Lillian Gish and Osgood Perkins in 1930 and three great actresses, Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, and Katharine Cornell, appeared in Guthrie McClintic’s production of Three Sisters 1942, which resonated with audiences during World War II. After the war, Joshua Logan adapted The Cherry Orchard and reset it in the American South as The Wisteria Trees (1950) starring Helen Hayes. A notable Circle in the Square production of Uncle Vanya in 1973 featured a powerhouse cast, including George C. Scott, Nicol Williamson, Julie Christie, Elizabeth Wilson, Gish, and Cathleen Nesbitt under Mike Nichols’s direction. Nichols also directed Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a 2001 production of The Seagull for the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre. During the 1960s and 1970s, Chekhov’s plays were often adapted or featured bold interpretations, with modern dress or multi-racial casting, as in the Public Theatre’s all-black production of The Cherry Orchard in 1973. Radical staging experimentation was also applied, as in Andrei Serban’s production of The Cherry Orchard in 1977, which abandoned realistic scenery for isolated elements designed by Santo Loquasto and extremely physical acting from its stars, Irene Worth, Streep, and Raúl Juliá. Serban’s approach was adopted and adapted by others, but by the late 1980s, a trend toward fragmented realism toned down more radical approaches for a time. Experimentation continued into the new millennium, as in The Wooster Group’s Brace Up! (1990), a multimedia production influenced by Japanese cinema taken from Chekhov’s plays. Chekhov as source material emerged in Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor (1973), an adaptation of several Chekhov short stories which also served several contemporary dramatists in Orchards (1985), a collection of original one-acts based on Chekhov’s stories by such distinguished American playwrights as David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornés, Wendy Wasserstein, John Guare, and others. Mamet adapted Chekhov’s plays with distinction, as have several other American dramatists. By the 1990s, Chekhov’s plays and adaptations of his work were fully assimilated into American theatre. Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional, and academic

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theatres frequently present Chekhov. Most recently on Broadway, Derek Jacobi and Laura Linney appeared in a revival of Uncle Vanya in 2000, and Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard won critical acclaim for a 2008 revival of The Seagull. CHEKHOV, MICHAEL (1891–1955). Born Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov in St. Petersburg, Russia, he gained fame in the United States for his development of acting techniques and his work as an actor, director, and writer. Nephew of Anton Chekhov, he was a student of Constantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre.* After a break with Stanislavsky, Chekhov moved to England where his work, including the establishment of a school, was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He moved his operations to Connecticut and worked on developing his acting techniques. By the 1950s, his students included Elia Kazan, Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Mala Powers, Yul Brynner, Patricia Neal, Jack Palance, and others. Chekhov’s book, To the Actor (1953), was widely influential. Aside from teaching, Chekhov acted in several films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), which brought him an Academy Award nomination, and directed Broadway productions of Revisor (1935), The Possessed (1939), and a revival of Twelfth Night in 1941. CHICANO THEATRE. Terms like Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, etc., are variant in meaning, but ultimately, in relation to theatre, all intersect and share mutual concerns. Spanish-speaking theatre in America dates back to 1598 when Juan de Oñate’s explorers performed a religious drama near what is now El Paso, Texas. Along the border between the United States and Mexico, Spanish and mestizo culture incorporated theatrical performances for centuries. In the twentieth century, musical performances, zarzuela, and serious dramas were seen in Chicano communities from the border to Chicago. As with all theatre, the Great Depression diminished much activity, but renewed energy emerged by the 1960s in response to vast social changes. Luis Valdéz joined with César Chávez, who led the farmworkers’ strike in California. Valdéz created what he called actos, short propaganda plays aimed at expressing the issues of unionizing and other problems facing the workers. Valdéz ultimately established El Teatro Campesino (Farm Workers’ Theatre) on the model he had observed from his time performing with The San Francisco Mime Troupe, merging many styles of theatre, from commedia dell’arte and other forms of broad comedy with drama and agitprop techniques. El Teatro Campesino inspired other such groups to spring up around the country during the 1960s and 1970s, including two other California troupes, Teatro de la Gente (People’s Theatre) founded in 1970, and

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Teatro de la Esperanza (Theatre of Hope) founded by Jorge Huerta in 1971. The following year, Teatro Bilingüe (Bilingual Theatre) was founded by Joe Rosenberg in Kingsville, Texas, and as many as 100 Chicano theatres may have been in operation at the height of this period. Many festivals included theatrical performances and a national organization, El Teatro Nacional de Aztlá (TENAZ), was established in 1971 to aid the interaction of this disparate, geographically separated theatre. Chicano theatres sprang up in response to issues in a given community and the difficulty of actors, directors, designers, and writers of Hispanic heritage to find opportunities. These troupes were initially handicapped by a lack of playwrights, but during the 1980s and 1990s young playwrights began to emerge, including Josefina Lopéz, Lalo Cervantes, Rodrigo Duarte-Clark, Estela Portillo Trambley, Cherrie Moraga, Milch Sánchez-Scott, Oliver Mayer, Carlos Morton, Octavio Solis, and Nilo Cruz, whose Anna in the Tropics (2001) won a Pulitzer Prize. CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. Exploring the relationship between a deaf woman and a hearing man, this two-act drama by Mark Medoff was written in response to Medoff’s acquaintance with Phyllis Frelich, a deaf woman, who inspired the play while he was teaching at New Mexico State University. The Mark Taper Forum premiered the play in 1979 prior to its move to Broadway, where it opened on 30 March 1980 at the Longacre Theatre for 887 performances. Starring Frelich as Sarah Norman and John Rubinstein as James Leeds in Tony Award-winning performances under Gordon Davidson’s direction, the play won a Tony, a Drama Desk Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Critics applauded the play’s attention to the challenges of disability, emphasizing Sarah’s refusal to allow her deafness to prevent her from a full life, as Leeds learns over the course of the play. A 1986 film version brought star Marlee Matlin an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award as Best Actress. CHILDREN’S HOUR, THE. Lillian Hellman’s first play was produced by Herman Shumlin and was both condemned and acclaimed for its story of two women teachers, who are accused of having a lesbian relationship by a schoolgirl. The play opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on 20 November 1934 for 691 performances. Blackmailing a weak-willed fellow student into supporting her accusations, a misbehaving student tells her grandmother the two teachers have a sexual relationship. As this news spreads, the lives of the two teachers are destroyed, leading to the suicide of one. Hellman, writing in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, believed the stage had a moral purpose and could serve as a political platform. In recogniz-

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ing that a play for the commercial Broadway stage must provide entertainment, she leaned toward the well-made problem play style, enriching it with bold, multidimensional characterizations and what some critics have labeled as melodramatic* embellishments. The Children’s Hour results from these inspirations and concerns, leading Hellman to make use of the idea that even a child could wield the destructive power of a lie and that this notion could serve as the catalyst for a play. Neither the 1936 or 1961 screen versions of the play are completely successful in capturing Hellman’s play, as both shy away from the lesbian accusation, but a 1952 Broadway revival starring Kim Hunter and Patricia Neal had a successful run. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. CHILDREN’S THEATRE. Plays for children in the United States date back to the nation’s founding, but as an articulated movement, its true birth is closer to the end of the nineteenth century when such plays as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s* Little Lord Fauntleroy (1889) drew large audiences of children and pantomimes, musical entertainments, circus, and Wild West shows also attracted their attention. In 1903, Alice Minnie Herts founded the Children’s Educational Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side, catering to immigrant children as an aid to learning English and the ways of American culture. Other cities established similar programs during the first decades of the twentieth century. Various service clubs and women’s groups, most particularly Junior League chapters, also contributed by offering drama classes aimed at children. The Chicago chapter of the Junior League created a Play Bureau to encourage the growth of children’s theatre. On Broadway by the 1920s, plays for children appeared with greater regularity, encouraged by the earlier popularity of the Burnett’s plays, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Little Princess (1903) and Maude Adams’s* triumph in J. M. Barrie’s frequently revived Peter Pan* (1905). Constance D’Arcy Mackay* published How to Produce Children’s Theatre in 1915, which provided concepts for children’s theatre with educational goals. In 1923, Clare Tree Major founded a touring company with the mission of performing plays for children and teenagers that continued operations into the mid-1950s. Eva Le Gallienne’s adaption of Alice in Wonderland (1932), written by Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus, for her Civic Repertory Theatre, revived on Broadway in 1947 and 1982, also encouraged stock companies and, ultimately, regional theatres to include family-oriented fare in their theatre seasons, as did the Federal Theatre Project, which offered numerous children’s plays during its all-too-brief existence (1935–1939). In this same period, a seminal figure in American children’s theatre, Winifred Ward, who, among other accomplishments, developed guidelines for

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educators and professionals in the making of children’s theatre (theatre for child spectators), which she specifically distinguished from creative drama (theatre in which children participate). Ward, a professor at Northwestern University and noted for her work in speech therapy with World War I shell shock victims, was central in the founding of a professional organization, the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, which guided the development of professionals and educators in the broad field of children’s theatre and creative dramatics. By 1935, Sara Spencer founded the Children’s Theatre Press, the first to specialize in plays for children, and during the 1930s and 1940s, Charlotte Chorpenning, a prolific dramatist in this field working with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, articulated rules for writing children’s plays, with an emphasis on a well-made play structure and source material drawn from fairy tales. Her concepts predominated for many years. Vast cultural changes after World War II, and particularly in the 1960s, opened up great experimentation in children’s theatre, beginning with the popularity of The Paper Bag Players, founded in 1958, utilizing an improvisatory, poor theatre approach that encouraged audience participation. TheatreworksUSA, established in 1962, similarly broke away from the formalized approach articulated by Chorpenning. In more recent decades, particularly since the late 1970s, previously taboo subjects moved to the forefront in theatre for youth, with a range of dramatists, including Aurand Harris, Suzan L. Zeder, Laurie Brooks, and James Still, among others, dealing with such topics as racial prejudice, divorce, sexuality, and death. In this period, professional companies performing exclusively theatre for young people (the preferred description by the late twentieth century) works emerged, including The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis in the 1960s, Metro Theatre of St. Louis, and the Seattle (Washington) Children’s Theatre in the 1970s, and others, all part of a growing movement in which varied productions, new plays and publications, and professional organizations proliferated, with degree programs in theatre for youth becoming part of the curriculums of many universities and conservatories. CHILDREN’S THEATRE COMPANY, THE (CTC). Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this theatre for youth company was founded in 1965 by John Clark Donahue, and by the mid-1970s it had its own facility. Along with productions, the CTC offers classes in various aspects of theatre training, and its overall mission is to create high-quality and varied theatre for young audiences. Their repertoire combines adaptation of classic fairy tales, children’s stories, and folklore, but original scripts are performed as well. Their production of the musical A Year with Frog and Toad (2003), moved to Broadway,

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and the company won the regional theatre Tony Award, the first children’s company so honored. CHILDRESS, ALICE (1920–1994). A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Childress moved to Harlem as a child. After high school, she studied with the American Negro Theatre (ANT), where she acted in productions, including ANT’s Anna Lucasta (1944) when it moved to Broadway. She turned to playwriting in 1949 when her first play, Florence, was produced Off-Broadway in 1950. Her play Trouble in Mind (1955) won an Obie Award. Childress’s other plays include Just a Little Simple (1950), Gold through the Trees (1952), Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966), String (1969), Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Mojo: A Black Love Story (1980), Sea Island Song (1977), and Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (1987). She also wrote several novels, including A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973), which she adapted as a film aimed at young adults. She viewed her work as portraying the have-nots of society and wrote, the “gift of understanding is often given to those who constantly battle against the negatives of life with determination.” See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CHODOROV, EDWARD (1904–1988). Born in New York, and elder brother of Jerome Chodorov, who was also a playwright and screenwriter, Chodorov studied at Brown University, after which he worked as an assistant stage manager. He began writing plays in 1931 with Wonder Boy, but it flopped on Broadway. His next play, Kind Lady (1935), which starred Grace George* and won approval, and subsequent works, which he also directed, included Those Endearing Young Charms (1943), Decision (1944), Common Ground (1945), and his most successful comedy, Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953). That same year, he was blacklisted for failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which ended his work in films. He had produced or scripted several, including adaptations of his own plays, as well as such films as The Mayor of Hell (1933), Undercurrent (1946), and The Hucksters (1947). See also CENSORSHIP. CHODOROV, JEROME (1911–2004). A New York-born playwright and screenwriter, Chodorov was the younger brother of Edward Chodorov. He partnered with Joseph Fields to write films and they also collaborated on Broadway plays, including Schoolhouse on the Lot (1938), which flopped, and My Sister Eileen (1940), which was a major hit. Chodorov and Fields scored again with Junior Miss (1941) prior to service in World War II. Following the war, Chodorov reteamed with Fields for The French Touch

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(1945) and Pretty Penny (1949), both of which failed (the latter closed on the road). Their fortunes improved with the musical Wonderful Town (1953), for which they provided a Tony Award-winning libretto based on their play, My Sister Eileen. They also contributed the libretto for The Girl in Pink Tights (1954) and their comedy Anniversary Waltz (1954) was a long-running hit comedy that had a long life in stock and community theatres. Chodorov and Field’s The Ponder Heart (1956) was less successful, and Chodorov spent more of his time directing works by others, including Make a Million (1958), The Gazebo (1958), Christine (1960), and Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole (1961). Without Fields, Chodorov also wrote the libretto for I Had a Ball (1964) and the comedy 3 Bags Full (1966), which failed, as did his collaboration with Norman Panama on A Talent for Murder (1981). Like his brother, Chodorov was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, essentially ending screenwriting opportunities, which had previously included several films, including screenplays for Junior Miss and My Sister Eileen. CHONG, PING (1946– ). Born in Toronto, Canada, of Chinese heritage, he was raised in New York’s Chinatown and studied art and film at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute, after which he joined Meredith Monk’s the House Foundation. His own work focuses on collisions of East and West culture and matters of diversity, as in his first production, Lazarus (1972). Merging his thematic concerns with techniques involving multidisciplinary elements, he has created most of his productions with Ping Chong & Company (originally known as the Fiji Theatre Company), which he founded in 1975 to “explore the meaning of contemporary theatre and art on a national and international level” through the creation of innovations in the collaboration of theatre and art to explore “the intersections of history, race, art and technology” in contemporary society. Beginning in 1992, Chong and his company began creating 30 pieces as part of a project called Undesirable Elements, a series of oral history theatre works examining issues of culture and identity. Among his works are three puppet theatre productions: Kwaidan (1998), Cathay: Three Tales of China (2005), and Obon: Tales of Rain and Moonlight (2002). Chong is the recipient of two Obie Awards, one of which acknowledged sustained achievement. See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CHORPENNING, CHARLOTTE (1873–1955). A pioneer in children’s theatre in the United States born Charlotte Barrows in Eldora, Iowa, Chorpenning studied at Radcliffe College and between 1915 and 1919 she was playwright-in-residence for several organizations in Winona, Minnesota prior to writing and directing for the Children’s Theatre of Chicago’s Goodman

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Theatre from 1932 to 1951. Among her works, most of which were based on popular fairy tales, are The Emperor’s New Clothes (1932), Jack and the Beanstalk (1935), The Prince and the Pauper (1938), Rip Van Winkle* (1938), Cinderella (1940), Little Red Riding Hood, or Grandmother Slyboots (1943), Rumpelstiltskin (1944), and Alice in Wonderland (1946), among others. Her children’s plays were widely considered superior to others available prior to the 1950s, particularly in her emphasis on the universal truths inherent in fairy tales, and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education established an annual award in her name to acknowledge outstanding writers of children’s plays. CHRISTIANS, MADY (1900–1951). Marguerita Maria Christians was born in Vienna, Austria, and performed in German-language theatre in New York as a child, but returned to Austria. Back in the United States after 1931, she appeared in over a dozen Broadway productions, scoring a memorable success as the title character in John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama (1944). She played Gertrude to Maurice Evans’s Hamlet in 1939 and played the loyal wife Sara Muller in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941). Her other Broadway appearances include A Divine Drudge (1933), Alice Takat (1936), Save Me the Waltz (1938), revivals of Heartbreak House in 1938 and King Henry IV, Part I in 1939, Return Engagement (1940), The Lady Who Came to Stay (1941), Message for Margaret (1947), and a revival of August Strindberg’s The Father in 1949. Christians also appeared in European silent films beginning in 1916 and in Hollywood movies, including Come and Get It (1936), Heidi (1937), Tender Comrade (1943), and All My Sons (1948). CHRISTIANSEN, RICHARD (1931– ). This future drama critic was introduced to theatregoing in his childhood, and he performed in high school plays. He began his journalistic career writing obituaries and reviews of community theatre for the Chicago Daily News in 1963. When the Daily News folded in 1978, Christiansen moved over to the Chicago Tribune and beginning in the 1960s he tracked the evolution of Chicago theatre, noting the superior work of the Steppenwolf and Goodman Theatres and the playwrights and actors nurtured within the Chicago fringe theatres. At the time of Christiansen’s 2002 retirement, David Mamet wrote that his monument “is the current health and world reputation of Chicago Theatre.” In 2004, Christiansen published A Theatre of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1001 Nights in Chicago, recounting the evolution of Chicago theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. A Chicago theatre named for him, the old Biograph at Victory Gardens Theatre, was dedicated in 2010.

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CHRISTIE, AUDREY (1911–1989). Born in Chicago, Illinois, where she studied dance, Christie developed a long career as a character actress. She began in vaudeville,* but made her Broadway debut in Shady Lady (1933) and for the next three decades moved easily between comedies and musicals, including Sailor, Beware! (1933), The Women (1936), I Married an Angel (1938), Return Engagement (1940), Banjo Eyes (1941), Without Love (1942), The Voice of the Turtle (1943), and Light Up the Sky (1948). Later in her career, she replaced original cast members in The Desk Set (1955), Come Blow Your Horn (1961), and Mame (1966). Christie also occasionally appeared in films, including Keeper of the Flame (1942), Carousel (1956), Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), and Mame (1974), and numerous television programs. CINCINNATI PLAYHOUSE IN THE PARK. One of America’s first regional theatres, this not-for-profit organization opened in 1960. The previous year, Gerald Covell, a college student, organized local business and political figures to establish a professional theatre in Cincinnati. The original space, the Eden Park Shelterhouse, offered fewer than 200 seats and the first production, directed by David Marlin Jones, was Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. An additional 12 plays were produced that season. Numerous noted actors have appeared during the Playhouse’s 50 years, including Sam Waterston, Henry Winkler, Lynn Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, Raúl Esparza, Swoosie Kurtz, Mercedes Ruehl, Estelle Parsons, Patty Duke, and others. In 1968, the Robert S. Marx Theatre was opened with a production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. The Playhouse has grown in scope and ambition, premiering new works, moving productions to Broadway, touring, offering acting classes, and children’s theatre. CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE. Founded in 1950 under the direction of José Quintero in association with Theodore Mann (who remains artistic director), the Circle in the Square was initially a wing of the Loft Players of Woodstock, New York. The theatre opened in a tiny arena space at 5 Sheridan Square with Dark of the Moon (1951). Firmly established the following year with a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke with Geraldine Page, the theatre grew in stature again in 1956 with a revival of The Iceman Cometh, a production significant in renewed interest in Eugene O’Neill’s work. The production featured Jason Robards as Hickey at the start of a long association with the plays of O’Neill and in collaboration with Quintero. George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Bosco, Dustin Hoffman, and other noted actors were among young talents who began their careers in Circle productions.

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When the Sheridan Square theatre was torn down in 1960, Circle in the Square operations moved to a space on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village until 1972, when a theatre facility was constructed for the organization in the Paramount Plaza office tower. Circle in the Square has retained its commitment to the plays of O’Neill and Williams, but has revived many great American plays, as well as musicals, modern European plays, and occasional classics. The Circle in the Square Theatre School, established in 1961, is the only accredited conservatory associated with a Broadway theatre, and offers a two-year training program in acting. CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. Annie Baker’s comedy produced by Playwrights Horizons in December 2009, featured a strong cast, including Reed Birney, Tracee Chimo, Peter Friedman, Deirdre O’Connell, and Heidi Schreck under David Zinn’s direction. The play centers on a New England community center drama class where the class experiments and games unleash passions among the participants. New York Times critic Charles Isherwood described it as “rich, unforgettable theatre . . . [an] unheralded gem.” CIRCLE REPERTORY COMPANY (CRC). Originally named the Circle Theatre Company, the CRC was founded in 1969 by playwright Lanford Wilson, directors Marshall W. Mason and Rob Thirkield, and actress Tanya Berezin with the idea of establishing a company of actors, writers, and designers who could regularly collaborate to create new plays. The CRC performed in a second-floor loft at Broadway and 83rd Street (prior to an early 1970s move to the Sheridan Square Playhouse, followed by a new facility in 1982 at 99 7th Avenue South. Most of Wilson’s major plays were produced by the CRC, including The Hot L Baltimore (1972), The Mound Builders (1974), Fifth of July (1977), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly (1979), A Tale Told (1980), Angels Fall (1983), Burn This (1987), and Redwood Curtain (1992). Among the work of other dramatists, Mark Medoff’s When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1973), Edward J. Moore’s The Sea Horse (1974), Jules Feiffer’s Knock Knock (1976), Albert Innaurato’s Gemini (1977), Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (1982), Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me (1992), William M. Hoffman’s As Is (1984), Craig Lucas’s Reckless (1987) and Prelude to a Kiss (1989), William Mastrosimone’s Sunshine (1989), and Jon Robin Baitz’s Three Hotels (1992), among others, also premiered there. Plays produced initially at CRC won numerous Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards, but it closed down operations in 1996. CIRCUS.† The modern American circus has its roots in the eighteenth century when Philip Astley, an Englishman, established one that emphasized

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equestrians and other animal entertainments. By the 1780s, clowns became a familiar element in such performances and with the opening of equestrian John Bill Ricketts’s show in Philadelphia, which he billed as a “circus,” the form grew in popularity and evolved in content. European managers brought performances to the United States in the early nineteenth century, with an American lion tamer, Isaac A. Van Amburgh, gaining worldwide repute, appearing in European theatres. By the mid-nineteenth century, circus was a major aspect of American show business, with such entertainments seen on wagons, in theatres, showboats,* and tents. Several extended families spent generations in the circus business and they, along with such managers as William W. Cole and Adam Forepaugh, established increasingly elaborate circuses. After the Civil War, the legendary showman P. T. Barnum expanded his interests to include circuses beginning in 1871. With various partners, most particularly James A. Bailey, his innovations included the use of three “rings” for simultaneous acts and the Barnum & Bailey Circus, billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” toured the world in the 1890s. Challenged by the Ringling Brothers, who had begun a small circus in the 1880s, after Bailey’s 1906 death, the Ringlings purchased the Barnum & Bailey circus and, after 1918, merged it with their show to create the enduring Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Over time, circuses increasingly modernized, moving from wagons to trucks and railroad transportation. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus established a model emulated, usually on a significantly smaller scale, by other circuses. After a catastrophic fire in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1944, which killed 168 people, the Ringling circus faced various problems until the mid-1950s, when owner John Ringling North decided to abandon traditional circus tents for large civic and sports arenas. Even in such different venues, the show itself largely remained the same until the 1980s, when managers and performers influenced by various postmodern concepts, developed new styles, including the Pickle Family Circus and most particularly Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, both influenced by France’s Big Apple Circus in which street performers and spectacular effects revitalized the form, although the increased spectacle brought ticket prices to a level matching Broadway musicals. See also BIG APPLE CIRCUS; CLARK, BOBBY. CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. Established in 1984 in Quebec City, Canada, by Guy Laliberté, the Cirque du Soleil, inspired in part by France’s Big Apple Circus, revitalized interest in circus, although it bears little resemblance to the traditional circus in the style of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Abandoning the circus tent and the use of animals, Cirque du Soleil performances mix a variety of theatrical devices, with emphasis on

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acrobatics, mime, music, dance, masks and makeup, high-tech lighting and multimedia devices structured around a theme. By the early 2000s, Cirque du Soleil boasted no less than five resident shows playing in Las Vegas venues and touring productions. One Cirque du Soleil production making use of the music of the Beatles beginning in 2006 was particularly well-received. CIULEI, LIVIU (1923– ). Born in Bucharest, Romania, Ciulei studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music and Theatre, beginning his career as an actor. In 1948, and continuing in the 1970s, he evolved as an actor and director (of theatre and film), a scene and costume designer, and a teacher at the Lucia Sturza Bulandra Theatre in his birthplace, but increasingly after the mid-1970s, he directed in Europe and Canada prior to accepting the artistic directorship of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1980. Ciulei staged a range of plays by Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, and others, with particular acclaim for a 1987 production of Euripides’ The Bacchae. After leaving the Guthrie in 1986, Ciulei freelanced in regional theatres, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, where his production of Hamlet brought him a Drama Desk Award, the Circle in the Square for whom he directed a revival of The Inspector General, and the Arena Stage, and he taught at Columbia University and New York University prior to retiring in 2003. CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE (CRT). One of several attempts to establish a repertory theatre in New York City patterned on the English repertory system, the CRT was a signal forerunner of the American repertory movement that flourished after the late 1950s. Established by Eva Le Gallienne, who directed and/or acted in most of its productions, the CRT articulated a mission of bringing important world drama to American audiences at reasonable prices, while also addressing the need for American actors to develop their craft playing diverse classical and contemporary roles in a repertory structure. Financially troubled from its start, but sustained by Otto Kahn’s* philanthropy, the CRT suffered from its original location at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, situated away from most Broadway theatres. The CRT survived for 10 tumultuous, financially strained seasons, producing 37 plays in all, including much-admired productions of The Good Hope, Peter Pan,* Hedda Gabler, Romeo and Juliet, and Camille. Emphasis was placed on modernist classics, especially works by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen (five Ibsen dramas were produced during CRT’s tenure), but also premieres of three new American plays, notably Susan Glaspell’s Pulitzer Prize play, Alison’s House* (1931). The CRT company included Alla

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Nazimova, Burgess Meredith, and Jacob Ben-Ami,* but Le Gallienne proved the dominant attraction. The CRT’s emphasis on women professionals provided important early opportunities to designers Aline Bernstein* and Irene Sharaff, among others. Le Gallienne’s desire to keep ticket prices low consigned the CRT to persistent budget strains exacerbated by the Great Depression. A surprise hit with Le Gallienne’s 1932 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland provided a temporary reprieve when it transferred to a Broadway for an extended run. Unable to keep the company afloat despite this success, Le Gallienne disbanded the CRT in 1933, but not before inspiring The Theatre Guild and The Group Theatre, among other serious-minded producing organizations. Along with Cheryl Crawford and Margaret Webster, Le Gallienne attempted to resuscitate the CRT model as the American Repertory Theatre in 1946, but it lasted only one season. CLAIRE, INA (1893–1985). Born Ina Fagan in Washington, D.C., this stylish, charming actress with a flair for comedy first performed in silent films, vaudeville,* The Ziegfeld Follies (the 1915 and 1916 editions) and musicals, prior to her debut in the non-musical hit comedy Polly With a Past* (1917). She followed this with a series of light comedies including The Gold Diggers* (1919) and Our Betters (1928) before her most notable success in S. N. Behrman’s Biography (1932) in which her particular talents were most effectively utilized. Her subsequent Broadway appearances include End of Summer (1936), Barchester Towers (1937), Once Is Enough (1938), The Talley Method (1941), The Fatal Weakness (1946), and The Confidential Clerk (1954). She appeared in a dozen films, including some of her stage vehicles, along with The Royal Family* of Broadway (1930), The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), Ninotchka (1939), and Claudia (1943). CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE COMPANY. Established in 1939 as the Loft Theatre as part of the theatre department at the University of Tennessee, the Clarence Brown Company, named for the noted film director and UT alumnus whose family supported it, emerged as a professional repertory theatre in 1972 run by Ralph Allen and British actor Anthony Quayle. Quayle appeared in several productions for the theatre, including a 1976 revival of Rip Van Winkle* that transferred to the Kennedy Center and opposite Mary Martin in Do You Turn Somersaults? (1978), which transferred to Broadway, as did Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s A Meeting by the River (1979) and, most successfully, Allen’s tribute to burlesque, Sugar Babies (1979), which starred Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller and racked up 1,208 performances and 8 Tony Award nominations. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT.

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CLARK, BOBBY (1888–1960). This Springfield, Ohio-born comedian and vaudevillian partnered with Paul McCullough (1883–1936), to perform in circus, vaudeville,* and musicals on Broadway and in London. McCullough was straight man to Clark, who memorably wore painted-on eyeglasses, smoked a cigar, and carried a cane. Following McCullough’s suicide in 1936, Clark continued as a single and, improbably starred in revivals of William Congreve’s Love for Love in 1940, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals in 1942, and Molière’s The Would-Be Gentlemen in 1946, as well as Vernon Sylvaine’s farce, All Men Are Alike (1941). Clark and McCullough also appeared in numerous films from the dawn of the sound era and, on his own, Clark continued in character roles and appeared on television. CLARK, PEGGY (1915–1996). Born Margaret Brownson in Baltimore, Maryland, Clark was attracted to theatre in childhood and was educated at Smith College and Yale University prior to beginning a career as a lighting designer (although she occasionally designed settings and costumes). Ultimately, she became a seminal figure in establishing lighting as an independent area of design and was the first woman to serve as president of the United Scenic Artists. She designed over 150 Broadway productions, including many of the major musicals of the era, as well as the Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Medea (1947), The Trip to Bountiful (1953), In the Summer House (1953), No Time for Sergeants (1955), Auntie Mame (1956), Nude with Violin (1957), Mary, Mary (1961), Romulus (1962), a revival of The Rose Tattoo in 1966, Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), and How the Other Half Loves (1971). CLARKE, MARTHA (1944– ). A Baltimore, Maryland, native who studied dance in childhood, Clarke attended the Juilliard School where she was taught by Anthony Tudor, Louis Horst, and Anna Sokolow. Clarke cofounded Pilobolus in 1972 and Crowsnest in 1978 where she blended dance and theatre influenced by Martha Graham’s modern dance and the theatrical techniques used by The Living Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski. After some early small projects, Clark moved toward greater spectacle in The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), Vienna Lusthaus (1986), Endangered Species (1990), Dämmerung (1993), and An Uncertain Hour (1995), works that alternately dealt with forbidden pleasures and the catastrophes of war. Clarke choreographed Lee Breuer’s DollHouse (2003) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2004 at the American Repertory Theatre, and worked closely with such playwrights as Richard Greenberg, Charles L. Mee, and Alfred Uhry. In 2006, her adaptation of stories by Luigi Pirandello, Kaos, was staged at the

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New York Theatre Workshop and Clarke received the first Tony Randall Foundation Award. Clarke is also the recipient of a Drama Desk Award, two Obie Awards, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, as well as the MacArthur Fellowship. CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY, THE. See CSC REPERTORY THEATRE. CLASSICAL THEATRE OF HARLEM (CTH). Founded in 1999 as a not-for-profit theatre by two white men, Alfred Preisser and Christopher McElroen, at the Harlem School of the Arts. Emphasizing the Harlem community, the theatre presents a wide range of plays performed by mostly black actors. Its productions include their first, Macbeth (2000), as well as works by Bertolt Brecht, August Wilson, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Adrienne Kennedy, Derek Walcott, and Jean Genet, whose play The Blacks brought four Obie Awards to the CTH in 2003 and the CTH has also been acknowledged with a 2004 Drama Desk Award for Artistic Excellence, a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award, and a 2008 American Theatre Wing Award. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CLAUDIA. Rose Franken’s three-act comedy opened at the Booth Theatre on 12 February 1941 for 722 performances in a John Golden production directed by Franken with scene design by Donald Oenslager. A bright cast led by Dorothy McGuire, Donald Cook, Frances Starr, and Olga Baklanova enacted Franken’s examination of an immature young woman, Claudia, whose impetuous actions frustrate her architect husband, David. When Claudia discovers that her mother is dying, she is transformed by the news. McGuire and Baklanova played their roles again in a 1943 film version and it was popular enough to inspire a sequel, Claudia and David (1946), again starring McGuire. CLAYBURGH, JIM (1949– ). This postmodernist designer who stresses environmental design schemes studied at New York University and joined The Performance Group in 1972, where he designed several productions. Clayburgh was also a founding member of The Wooster Group, becoming their resident designer and technical director in 1976 and continuing to 1995 when he moved to Brussels. With The Wooster Group, he worked in close collaboration with director Elizabeth LeCompte, using simplified, flexible elements, reconsidering the intersection of the spaces for audience and actors. Among his Wooster Group designs were the acclaimed production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape* (1997).

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CLEAGE, PEARL (1948– ). Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, daughter of a pastor prominently involved in the civil rights movement, Cleage was raised in Detroit, Michigan, and attended Howard University and Spelman College prior to beginning a writing career. She has written several collections of essays and novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997), I Wish I Had a Red Dress (2002), and Baby Brother’s Blues (2007), and her plays include Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995), Flyin’ West (1992), and Bourbon at the Border (1997). Of the experience of being a black writer, Cleage has said, “The pull of what the audience wants is always a danger. I have to answer the questions that I have and not reassure the audience about the questions they have. There’s always a temptation to lean toward what people want, and a black audience always wants the black person to win.” See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. CLEAN HOUSE, THE. Sarah Ruhl’s first play of note premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004 and won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Subsequent productions at the South Coast Repertory in early 2005, the Goodman Theatre in 2006, and at Lincoln Center, also in 2006, generated critical interest in Ruhl’s whimsical comedy-drama of a Brazilian cleaning woman who would rather be a stand-up comedian. The Clean House deals with death, but ultimately emphasizes forgiveness and the notion that human beings are not inherently selfish, despite appearances. CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE. Founded in 1915, this theatre opened in 1916 with The Garden of Semiramis under the leadership of Raymond O’Neill. The amateur group produced 16 plays—all foreign classics by authors that included Kalidasa, Claudel, Andreyev, Molière, and Goldoni—in the few years before it turned professional in 1921. The story of those early years is the subject of a book titled The Cleveland Play House: How It Began (1965) by Julia M. Flory, one of the founders. In 1921, the Board of Trustees recognized the need for a professional operation and chose Frederic McConnell as director. In a converted church, he produced seasons of as many as 20 plays, though the repertoire remained predominantly European. Working with Play House president Charles S. Brooks, McConnell opened two theatres (one seating 160, the other 500) in the gardens of the Francis Drury estate. An additional, larger complex opened in 1949. McConnell was succeeded as director by K. Elmo Lowe, who guided the Play House through financial challenges prior to his retirement in 1969. After a difficult transition period, Richard Oberlin was named director in 1972. Oberlin modernized many aspects of the business operation, launched innovative community

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programs, and in 1983 oversaw the opening of a new Play House complex. Cleveland Play House today holds the record as the longest continuously operating regional theatre in the United States. CLOSE, GLENN (1947– ). Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, this celebrated stage and film actress began her Broadway career in the Phoenix Theatre revivals of Love for Love, The Rules of the Game, and The Member of the Wedding (1974–1975), followed by the musical Rex (1976), establishing a pattern of alternating musical and non-musical projects. After appearing in The Crucifer of Blood (1978), she received her first Tony Award nomination for Barnum (1980). She won a Tony in 1984 for Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols. She increasingly worked in films after 1980, but returned to the Broadway stage periodically in Benefactors (1985) and Death and the Maiden (1992), winning another Tony for the latter. In 1995, she won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award as Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical Sunset Boulevard. She also appeared in several Off-Broadway plays, including Uncommon Women and Others (1977), and she won an Obie Award for The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1982). Close’s film work has brought her five Academy Award nominations for The World According to Garp (1982), The Big Chill (1983), The Natural (1984), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Close has also worked frequently in television, winning Emmy Awards for Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) and for the dramatic series Damages, which also brought her a Golden Globe Award in 2008. CLURMAN, HAROLD (1901–1980). One of the three original founders of The Group Theatre, Harold Edgar Clurman was born in New York to a Jewish American family. Inspired by the Yiddish theatre, he began a long and distinguished career as a director and critic. After some time in Paris in his early twenties, where he roomed with Aaron Copland and was further inspired by Jacques Copeau, who he assisted on and translated The Brothers Karamazov, and performances of the Moscow Art Theatre,* Clurman returned to New York in 1924 and began a theatrical career in bit parts and as a stage manager and play reader for The Theatre Guild while studying the Constantin Stanislavsky system for acting with Richard Boleslavsky. Discussing his ideas of theatre with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg led Clurman to a long series of midnight talks for actors and directors which culminated in the founding of The Group Theatre in 1931. In encouraging the playwriting of Clifford Odets, Clurman found the dramatic voice of The Group and he directed five of Odets’s plays, Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and

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Night Music (1940). In 1940, he married a member of The Group, Stella Adler, daughter of his Yiddish theatre idol Jacob Adler.* After the demise of The Group in 1940, he chronicled their history in The Fervent Years (1945). While continuing his directing work, Clurman became drama critic for the New Republic from 1948–1952 and, later, the Nation from 1953–1980. His Broadway credits include Truckline Café (1947), The Member of the Wedding (1950), The Autumn Garden (1951), The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), Bus Stop (1955), Tiger at the Gates (1955), Pipe Dream (1955), The Waltz of the Toreadors (1957), Orpheus Descending (1957), A Touch of the Poet (1958), The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), A Shot in the Dark (1961), and Incident at Vichy (1964). He taught at Hunter College from 1964 to 1980 and wrote several books, most notably On Directing (1968) and Ibsen (1977), as well as collections of his criticism. COATES, GEORGE (1952– ). Born in Rhode Island, Coates moved to California and worked for a time as an actor with the National Shakespeare Company. In 1977, he founded George Coates Performance Works as a notfor-profit theatre in Berkeley, California, where he aimed to develop new and original forms of theatre stressing multimedia technology and merging music and theatre with movement. At a variety of American and European theatres and music centers, Coates and his collaborators have created music-theatre spectacles, including 2019 Blake (1977), The Way of How (1981), Are/Are (1982), Seehear (1983), RARE AREA (1985), Actual Sho (1987), Right Mind (1989), The Architecture of Catastrophic Change (1990), Invisible Site: A Virtual Show (1991), The Desert Music: A Live Show (1992), Box Conspiracy (1993), Nowhere NowHere (1994), The Bandwidth Addict (1995), Twisted Pairs (1997), Wittgenstein: On Mars (1998), Blind Messengers (1998), Triangulated Nation (1999), Valerie Solanas’ Lost Play: Up Your Ass (2000), and Crazy Wisdom (2001). Coates says, “My art form is synthesis and live art. My job is to disorganize thinking. I think one job of the artist is multimedia is to ‘get lost.’ If we don’t know where we are going, we will find things that we didn’t know we needed when we began looking.” COBB, LEE J. (1911–1976). This versatile, bearlike actor—the first to play the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)— was born Leon Jacob in New York. He studied at New York University. He joined The Group Theatre in 1935, appearing in their productions of Waiting for Lefty (1935), Till the Day I Die (1935), Johnny Johnson (1936), Golden Boy (1937), The Gentle People (1939), and Thunder Rock (1939). He also appeared in productions for the Theatre Union, including Mother (1935) and Bitter Stream (1936), and in The Theatre Guild’s failed pro-

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duction of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column (1940). Lee Strasberg directed Cobb in Clifford Odets’s Clash by Night (1941) prior to World War II. While in the service, Cobb appeared in Winged Victory (1943). After the war, Cobb returned to films. On Broadway, Death of a Salesman was Cobb’s greatest success, although the demands of this tragic role took a toll, and after several months he left the production. He later appeared in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, The Emperor’s Clothes (1953), and as King Lear in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center production in 1968, his last Broadway appearance. Cobb appeared in films and received Academy Award nominations for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958). His other film appearances include Golden Boy (1939), The Song of Bernadette (1943), Call Northside 777 (1948), 12 Angry Men (1957), Come Blow Your Horn (1963), In Like Flint (1967), and The Exorcist (1973), and Cobb appeared in numerous television shows, most notably a 1966 TV production of Death of a Salesman. COBURN, CHARLES (1877–1961). Charles Douville Coburn was born in Macon, Georgia. Coburn and his wife, Ivah Wills Coburn* (1882?–1937), founded the Coburn Shakespearean Players in 1906, a troupe that toured performing Shakespeare and the classics. With his wife’s assistance, he also established the Mohawk Drama Festival (1934) at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Coburn appeared notably on Broadway in The Yellow Jacket* (1916), The Imaginary Invalid (1917), The Better ’Ole (1918), The Farmer’s Wife (1924), Trelawny of the “Wells” (1925), Ghosts (1927), Diplomacy (1928), The Plutocrat (1930), Kultur (1933), The First Legion (1934), Three Wise Fools (1936), a revival of The County Chairman* in 1936, Around the Corner (1936), and Sun Kissed (1937). From the beginning of sound films, Coburn emerged as one of the screen’s most beloved character actors playing befuddled fathers (and grandfathers) and benign or corrupt businessmen, including Idiot’s Delight (1939), The Lady Eve (1941), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), Kings Row (1942), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944), The Paradine Case (1947), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1953). He played Falstaff in his last Broadway role for The Theatre Guild in The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1946, but continued in stock for several seasons playing Grandpa in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You. COCKTAIL PARTY, THE. Inspired by Euripides’ Alcestis, T. S. Eliot’s allegorical comedy of manners was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, followed by runs in London and on Broadway, where it won the Tony Award as Best Play when it opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 21

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January 1950 for 409 performances. What appears to be a drawing room comedy in the English comic theatre tradition becomes a darker existentialist meditation on human interaction as seen through a married couple and a mysterious stranger who is revealed to be a psychiatrist (Rex Harrison). A 1968 Broadway revival starred Brian Bedford, Frances Sternhagen, and Sydney Walker and a 2010 revival was staged Off-Broadway by The Actors Company Theatre. COCONUT GROVE PLAYHOUSE. Advertised as “Broadway by the Bay” in Miami, Florida, this theatre was constructed in 1926 as a movie theatre, but eventually converted to live theatre and played host to the January 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with a cast including Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell. Retired Floridians resisted Beckett’s play, but otherwise welcomed a variety of theatre including appearances by such leading players as George C. Scott, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Tallulah Bankhead, Maureen Stapleton, Colleen Dewhurst, Ethel Merman, Liza Minnelli, Beatrice Arthur, Linda Lavin, and others. In 1964, the theatre was used by The Miami Actors Company and in 1982 José Ferrer took over artistic management and succeeded in making the theatre one of the leading regional stages. In more recent years, artistic director Arnold Mittleman resigned under a cloud following accusations of misappropriating funds, and the theatre was shut down in 2007. COE, RICHARD (1914–1995). A native of New York, where he was born Richard Livingston Coe, he became a leading theatre and film critic for the Washington Post. He started with the paper in 1936, ascending to the rank of drama critic in 1946, continuing until his retirement in 1980. A critic known for his constructive reviews, Coe is credited with advising critics on possible improvements to a number of plays and musicals that had tryouts in Washington, D.C. during his tenure. He was also vocal in support of ending segregation at Washington’s National Theatre, and in 1963 the Directors Guild of America named him critic of the year. Marian Seldes described Coe “as one of the most admired critics in America.” COHAN, GEORGE M. (1878–1942).† Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to vaudevillian* parents, George Michael Cohan went on the stage as a toddler and continued to perform to the end of his life. He gained his first success as part of the Four Cohans, his family’s variety act, but by the late 1890s he became a major figure of the burgeoning Broadway theatre as composer, lyricist, librettist, producer (often with his longtime partner, Sam H. Harris), director, and star of a series of popular musicals and revues.* In 1911, he

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opened the George M. Cohan Theatre, and he occasionally veered from the musical form to write straight plays, including two durable hits, The Tavern* (1921) and Seven Keys to Baldpate* (1923). When his own plays and musicals declined in popularity in the mid-1920s, Cohan notably acted in two works written by others. The first, Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), starred Cohan as Nat Miller, the avuncular father of a turn-of-the-century middle-class Connecticut family dealing with the growing pains of its 16-year-old son. Cohan won rhapsodic reviews for the comic richness of his performance. He followed this with another personal triumph in a musical satire of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, I’d Rather Be Right, with a book by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. As FDR, the 60-year-old Cohan delighted audiences with his spry dancing and comic shenanigans. Despite the spoof, Roosevelt presented Cohan with the Congressional Medal of Honor for his World War I anthem, “Over There,” and he was also the subject of a lavish film biography, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), produced by Warner Bros. and starring James Cagney in an Academy Award-winning performance, released shortly before Cohan died of cancer. COHEN, ALEXANDER H. (1920–2000). A theatrical producer whose productions appeared with regularity in New York and London, Cohen was born in New York. He had an inauspicious start after investing in a failure, Ghost for Sale (1941), prior to scoring a success with Angel Street (1941), a longrunning hit. He produced all manner of theatre, from dramas to musicals, as well as solo artists and European theatre productions. Among his most successful productions were King Lear in 1950, Make a Wish (1951), My Three Angels (1953), At the Drop of a Hat (1959), Beyond the Fringe (1962), a revival of The School for Scandal in 1963, John Gielgud’s Ages of Man (1963), the Richard Burton Hamlet in 1964, a revival of Ivanov in 1966, The Homecoming (1967), Little Murders (1967), The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967), Dear World (1969), Home (1970), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), Ulysses in Nighttown (1974), Comedians (1976), Richard Rodgers’s musical version of I Remember Mama (1979), A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980), 84 Charing Cross Road (1982), Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1984), and Waiting in the Wings (1999). He also produced solo Broadway appearances of such international performers as Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Yves Montand, Marcel Marceau, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In addition, with his second wife and coproducer Hildy Parks, he conceived the television broadcast of the annual Tony Awards in 1967 and produced many telecasts, and he produced the first and third editions of Night of 100 Stars as a benefit for the Actors’ Fund of America from Radio City Music Hall.

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COLLECTIVES. The history of collective theatre groups in America depends to a great extent on how the term is defined. Most theatre companies are essentially collectives, a group of theatre artists held together by an articulated mission. Stock companies were essentially collectives, but the term generally refers to a situation in which all members of the creative body of a group participate with equality in decision making and the creative process. A number of such groups formed during the post-World War II era Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway. Collective theatre thus came to mean experimental or alternative theatre and, as such, the postwar notion of collectives springs from the founding of The Living Theatre in 1948, with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, its founders, clearly expressing a desire to work collectively to experiment with theatrical techniques and to commit to a sociopolitical mission. Other such groups followed suit, including The Performance Group, The Manhattan Project, The Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, etc., all of which could be described as collectives. Outside of New York, a range of collectives appeared in the late 1950s, including such enduring groups as The San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by R. G. Davis; The Bread & Puppet Theatre, established by Peter Schumann in the 1960s; El Teatro Campesino, a Chicano farmworkers theatre established by Luis Valdéz in 1965; and the all-black troupe, Free Southern Theatre, which came to the fore during the civil rights movement. After the 1970s, some feminist writers, directors, and actors adopted the collective approach, including At the Foot of the Mountain, Women’s Experimental Theatre, Spiderwoman Theatre, and Split Britches, among others. By the late twentieth century, collective theatre could be defined as an approach through which artists wishing to experiment in techniques and present challenging themes could work outside of the constraints of mainstream theatres; such groups necessarily developed distinct styles and despite the “collective” aspect, groups that survived were typically founded and guided by one or two dominant members of the group with a strong vision of its goals. COLLINGE, PATRICIA (1892–1974).† Born in Dublin, Ireland, Collinge made her stage debut in London before moving to the United States in 1908. Her varied and long career on stage and screen spanned playing ingénues* in The Show Shop* (1914) and the title role in Pollyanna* (1915), a major popular success that she played for three years in New York and on tour. During the 1920s, she appeared with distinction in several important revivals. Also a writer, Collinge’s play Dame Nature (1938), in which she also appeared, had a short Broadway run. After 1930, she appeared on stage in a few failures, including The Lady with a Lamp (1931) and To See Ourselves (1935), but had

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successes with C. L. Anthony’s Autumn Crocus (1932) and Rose Franken’s Another Language (1932). Collinge won critical approval for her performance as the abused Birdie in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939), a role she repeated in the 1941 film version. She also appeared on screen in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and The Nun’s Story (1959), and on television dramas. Her later stage work included playing one of the murderous old ladies of Arsenic and Old Lace (1941) as a replacement during the show’s long run. Her last important stage appearance as the duplicitous Aunt Lavinia in Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s long-running stage adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square titled The Heiress (1947) was well-received, but she had short runs in a revival of J. M. Barrie’s* Mary Rose in 1951 and John Van Druten’s I’ve Got Sixpence (1952). COLLINS, PAT (1932– ). For Broadway, Collins designed lighting for numerous productions since her first, a revival of Threepenny Opera in 1976, which brought her a Tony Award nomination. She won a Drama Desk Award for Execution of Justice (1986) and a Tony for I’m Not Rappaport (1986) on Broadway, and picked up another Tony nomination for Doubt (2005) and Drama Desk nominations for Off-Broadway productions of Penguin Touquet (1981) and Woman in Mind (1988). Among her other Broadway credits are the legendary flop Moose Murders (1983), The Boys of Winter (1985), Death and the King’s Horseman (1987), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1988), The Heidi Chronicles (1989), The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), revivals of A Delicate Balance in 1996 and A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000, Proof (2000), Sight Unseen (2004), and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2006). Collins has also designed lighting for over 100 international opera productions, and her work has been seen regularly in major regional theatres. COLORADO SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. Considered one of the finest Shakespeare Festivals in the United States, it was founded at the University of Colorado in their outdoor Mary Rippon Theatre where, beginning in 1944 an annual summer Shakespeare production was offered. From this beginning, the festival began in 1958 with three productions, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and The Taming of the Shrew. By 1975, the festival achieved the rare distinction of having produced the entire Shakespearean canon. COLORED MUSEUM, THE. The Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, provided the 1986 premiere of director/playwright George C. Wolfe’s satire of racial attitudes and African American culture under the direction of Lee Richardson. Wolfe received the Dramatists Guild Award for

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the play, and it moved to New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre for a successful run. Wolfe’s satiric voice ranges across African American history, from slave ships to Josephine Baker and a comically ruthless deconstruction of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in a sketch called “The Mama-on-the-Couch Play.” The Colored Museum was also produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre and by many repertory and university theatres in the United States. COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA. William Inge’s first play, a drama in two acts, opened in a Theatre Guild production at the Booth Theatre on 15 February 1950 for 190 performances. Its stars, Sidney Blackmer and Shirley Booth, both won Tony Awards for their performances, although critics were divided on the play’s merits. Focused on the relationship of Doc, an alcoholic who, despite his name, never completed his medical training, and his slovenly wife, Lola, a dreamer who is obsessed with her lost dog, Little Sheba. Doc resents the boyfriend of their boarder, Marie, a college coed, without realizing his sexual feelings for her. Marie’s impending marriage causes Doc to go on a bender, but he returns to Lola without any resolution of their unhappy relationship. Booth repeated her performance in a 1952 film version, winning an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award playing opposite Burt Lancaster as Doc. A 2008 Manhattan Theatre Club revival starred Kevin Anderson and S. Epatha Merkerson, who received a Tony nomination for her performance. COME BLOW YOUR HORN. Neil Simon, one of the most prolific and popular American playwrights of the 1960s to 1980s, scored his first Broadway success with this three-act comedy, which opened on 22 February 1961 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for 677 performances. Alan Baker (Hal March) is a happy-go-lucky playboy at odds with his parents, who disapprove of his lifestyle, and Connie, a girlfriend who intends a more serious commitment from him than a casual sexual encounter. When Alan’s younger brother, Buddy (Warren Berlinger), runs away from home and into Alan’s bachelor pad, Alan comes to a reckoning with his parents (Lou Jacobi and Pert Kelton) and Connie. A 1963 screen version starred Frank Sinatra, Tony Bill, Barbara Rush, Lee J. Cobb, and Molly Picon. COMMAND DECISION. William Wister Haines’s three-act drama, which he had first written in the form of a novel, opened 1 October 1947 at the Fulton Theatre for 409 performances in a Kermit Bloomgarden production directed by John O’Shaughnessy with scene design by Jo Mielziner. Set in the headquarters of the Fifth American Bombardment Division in England

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during World War II, Brigadier General Dennis, played by Paul Kelly in a Tony Award-nominated performance, has a tense relationship with his officers, including one, played by James Whitmore (who won a Tony and a Theatre World Award), who sees Dennis as power hungry and recklessly sending too many men on what amount to suicide missions. Dennis also resists orders when he believes more important targets can be taken out. When Dennis leaves for a new assignment in the South Pacific, he admits the constant stress of his job nearly drove him to suicide, the fate of his predecessor. COMMUNITY THEATRE.† Community theatre, which might generally be defined as theatre created by and for a given community, came to mean amateur theatre in the post-World War II era. However, the small, often experimental operations that emerged in the Little Theatre movement* of the early twentieth century were often essentially professional operations. Typically intended to promote new playwrights and experimental theatre techniques without commercial pressure, little theatres proliferated, although few were long-lived. The designation as a movement came after the 1915 openings of the most important of these theatres, including the Washington Square Players,* Provincetown Players,* and Neighborhood Playhouse. Percy MacKaye* may be the first American theatre artist to promote the notion of such theatres in his book, The Playhouse and the Play (1909), but earlier initiatives, notably Jane Addams’s Hull House Players* in Chicago, Illinois, in 1897 established a model. Chicago became a hotbed of little theatres between 1900 and 1925, with many—for example, Maurice Browne’s* Chicago Little Theatre (1919)—operating only briefly. Others, like Detroit’s Arts and Crafts Theatre run by Samuel J. Hume,* did significant work in introducing modernist European trends to the U.S. Some little theatres focused on producing new plays, as in the case of the Provincetown Players, who gave early opportunities to Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. Others, like the Detroit Arts and Crafts Theatre, stressed European plays and techniques, particularly those in the social problem play style perfected of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Still others devoted attention to the cultures of immigrant groups in their community, while some, like New York’s Lafayette Players and Cleveland’s Karamu House,* elevated the quality of theatrical opportunities for African Americans. The Little Theatre Movement laid the foundation for the rise of community theatres in the 1930s and after, which in turn prepared audiences for the great network of professional regional resident non-profit theatres that developed in the 1960s. In most cases, after the 1960s, most community theatres were wholly amateur, with perhaps the exception of a professional artistic director and/or designer. Community theatres range in quality and, un-

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fortunately, have often been stigmatized, as in the screen comedy Waiting for Guffman (1996), which depicts a hapless community theatre group and their backstage shenanigans. However, most community theatres deliver highquality performances and, in many cases, provide the only theatre available in smaller towns. CONDUCT OF LIFE, THE. Maria Irene Fornés’s 19-scene play opened at the Theatre for the New City on 21 February 1985 under her direction. In the play, an ambitious officer in a Latin American army under a repressive regime creates a power structure in his own home, in which he has a wife and a young mistress he has abducted. As a male, the officer is seen as a dictator in his bedroom, easily able to dominate both women though sex and violence in a metaphor of the unchanging nature of power structures in a male-dominated society. Critics resisted the play, with Herbert Mitgang writing in the New York Times, describing it as a “numbing” experience, although feminist groups and Hispanic theatre companies gave the play life after its initial run. See also CHICANO THEATRE. CONGDON, CONSTANCE (1944– ). Born in Rock Rapids, Iowa, but raised in Colorado, Congdon completed an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts in 1982 and embarked on a playwriting career that has reaped more than 30 plays. She is best known for Tales of the Lost Formicans (1988), for which she won an Oppenheimer Award for its satire of a troubled family in suburbia observed by aliens. Congdon’s other plays include Gilgamesh (1977), Fourteen Brilliant Colors (1977), The Bride (1980), Native American (1984), No Mercy (1985), an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age (1986), A Conversation with Georgia O’Keefe (1987), Casanova (1989), Time Out of Time (1990), Losing Father’s Body (1992), and several children’s plays, including Automata Pieta (2000). Congdon teaches at Amherst College and Tony Kushner describes her as “one of the best playwrights this language has produced.” CONKLE, E. P. (1899–1994). Ellsworth Prouty Conkle was born in Peru, Nebraska, and studied under George Pierce Baker* at Yale University, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, and, as a teacher of playwriting there, counted Tennessee Williams among his students. From 1939 to 1973, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of over 50 plays, he excelled at capturing the folksy humor of small-town Midwestern life of a generation earlier. Sparkin’ was his best-known one-act in that vein. The full-length Prologue to Glory (1938) concerning the early life of Abraham

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Lincoln was produced on Broadway by the Federal Theatre Project and became the basis for a later CBS radio series titled Honest Abe. CONKLIN, JOHN (1937– ). Scene and sometime costume designer on Broadway, in regional theatres, and in opera, Conklin was educated at Yale University and did his earliest work at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He worked with the Hartford Stage Company and in other regional theatres, as well as on Broadway, where he was nominated for a Tony Award for The Au Pair Man in 1974 and a Drama Desk Award for a 1974 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Off-Broadway, Conklin was Drama Desk-nominated for a revival of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore in 1992. He began to teach design at New York University in 1980 while continuing his own work as a designer. On Broadway, his other productions include Tchin-Tchin (1962), Tambourines to Glory (1963), Scratch (1971), Lorelei (1974), The Leaf People (1975), Rex (1976), a revival of Romeo and Juliet in 1977, Bully (1988), and revivals of The Bacchae in 1980, The Philadelphia Story in 1980, Awake and Sing! in 1984, and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1988. After 1990, he more exclusively worked on operas with major U.S. and European companies and other regional theatres. In 1992, he wrote, directed, and designed The Carving of Mount Rushmore for Actors Theatre of Louisville, a work demonstrating his interest in history, art, and architectural structures. CONKLIN, PEGGY (1906–2003). Born Margaret Eleanor Conklin in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in impoverished circumstances, she graduated from high school and set out for New York City to be an actress. Her first Broadway opportunities were in the choruses of the musicals Treasure Girl (1928) and The Little Show (1929). Within a short time, she appeared in roles in comedies and dramas, usually in ingénue roles, including Old Man Murphy (1931), Mademoiselle (1932), and The Pursuit of Happiness (1933) before scoring a notable success as the yearning heroine Gabby Maple in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935), playing opposite Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. Conklin continued to act on Broadway in such plays as Co-respondent Unknown (1936), Yes, My Darling Daughter (1937), Casey Jones (1938), Miss Swan Expects (1939), Mr. and Mrs. North (1941), Feather in a Gale (1943), Alice in Arms (1945), The Wisteria Trees (1950), Picnic (1953), and Howie (1958). Conklin also appeared in films and television dramas during the 1950s. CONNECTION, THE. Realistically depicting the down-and-out lives of drug addicts, Jack Gelber’s two-act play opened on 15 July 1959 for 722

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performances in a production of The Living Theatre. The simple plot involves an addict, Leach, awaiting the return of his supplier, Cowboy. Cowboy returns instead with the idealistic Sister Salvation, who hopes to reform the addicts, but she realizes there is nothing she can do. The play made use of a framing device in which characters are able to step out of the play to provide some context and a jazz score by Freddie Redd enhanced the environment. The Connection won a Best Play Obie Award despite audience puzzlement, both in New York and in London. The production was filmed in 1961 and raised censorship issues over its content and language. The play was revived in 1980 at New York’s Henry Street Settlement and The Living Theatre revived it in 2008 under the direction of Judith Malina, who also played Sister Salvation. CONNELLY, MARC (1890–1981).† Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Marcus Cook Connelly’s long career as a playwright, occasional actor, producer, and director began with amateur theatricals in his hometown. His first Broadway contribution was as librettist of a failed musical, but his career truly began in collaboration with George S. Kaufman for Dulcy* (1921), To the Ladies* (1922), Merton of the Movies* (1922), and Beggar on Horseback* (1924), among others. Working solo, Connelly won the Pulitzer Prize for The Green Pastures (1930), which he also directed, a long-running adaptation of Roark Bradford’s folk tales of African American life that ran for well over 600 performances. In 1934, Connelly collaborated with Frank B. Elser on The Farmer Takes a Wife, which provided Henry Fonda with his first important Broadway role. Connelly’s forays into acting included playing the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for a 1944 revival and in Tall Story (1959). As a director (and producer), Having Wonderful Time (1937) was the peak, although most of his subsequent solo and collaborative writing projects were unsuccessful, including his last play, The Stitch in Time (1981), which folded before opening shortly after Connelly’s death. CONROY, FRANCES (1953– ). A respected actress in theatre, film, and television, Frances Conroy was born in Monroe, Georgia, and studied at Dickinson University, The Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Juilliard School. She began her career with the Juilliard’s touring organization, The Acting Company, and worked steadily in regional theatre. Off-Broadway she appeared in Othello with Richard Dreyfuss and Raúl Juliá in 1980, receiving a Drama Desk Award nomination prior to her Broadway debut in Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque (1980). She appeared OffBroadway in Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day (1991) and on Broadway in a 1988 revival of Our Town and received another Drama Desk

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nomination for The Secret Rapture (1989). She also received Drama Desk nominations for In the Summer House (1994) and The Rehearsal (1997) and Tony Award and Drama Desk nominations for The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000). Conroy’s other Broadway appearances include Some Americans Abroad (1990), Two Shakespearean Actors (1992), Broken Glass (1994), and revivals of The Little Foxes in 1997 and Ring Round the Moon in 1999. Her work on television includes her acclaimed work on the HBO-TV series Six Feet Under (2001–2005) which brought her a Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and four Emmy Award nominations, and she has appeared in many films. CONTEMPORARY THEATRE, INC., A. This Seattle, Washington-based theatre was founded in 1965 by University of Washington School of Drama director Gregory Arthur Falls with the goal of providing the Seattle-area theatrical community with quality contemporary theatre. It has staged over 100 productions and although it struggled with significant financial problems in the early 2000s, the theatre has survived and produced premieres or New York transfers of plays by Martin McDonagh, Philip Glass, Pamela Gien, Alan Arkin, and Elaine May, and others. CONWAY, KEVIN (1942– ). New York-born actor and director trained by Uta Hagen, Conway has appeared in numerous film and television roles, often as a menacing figure, as well as making frequent stage appearances. OffBroadway, Conway has appeared in Muzeeka (1968), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1973), When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1973), which brought him a Drama Desk Award, and Other People’s Money (1989). Conway won another Drama Desk Award, as a director, for Mecca (1980). On Broadway, he debuted in Arthur Kopit’s Indians (1969), followed by Moonchildren (1972), revivals of The Plough and the Stars in 1973 and Of Mice and Men in 1974, The Elephant Man (1979), On the Waterfront (1995), and in a revival of Dinner at Eight in 2002. His film appearances include Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), Paradise Alley (1978), Rambling Rose (1991), and The Quick and the Dead (1995), and he has appeared frequently on television. COOK, DONALD (1901–1961). A native of Portland, Oregon, Cook debuted on Broadway in Seed of the Brute (1926), with numerous subsequent appearances, including New York Exchange (1927), Paris Bound* (1927), Rebound (1930), Skylark (1939), Claudia (1941), Foolish Notion (1945), Made in Heaven (1946), Portrait in Black (1947), a revival of Private Lives costarring with Tallulah Bankhead in 1948, The Moon Is Blue (1951),

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King of Hearts (1954), Champagne Complex (1955), and Goodbye Again (1956), among others. Cook appeared in over 50 films, most notably as the upright brother of James Cagney’s hoodlum in The Public Enemy (1931) and as Helen Morgan’s husband in Show Boat (1936), as well as Baby Face (1933), Viva Villa! (1934), and in the role of Ellery Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935), as well as television dramas in the 1950s. COPPERFIELD, DAVID (1956– ). David Seth Kotkin was born in Metuchen, New Jersey, to Jewish parents prior to attending Fordham University. A fan of Broadway musicals, and interested in magic since childhood, he renamed himself David Copperfield and began to appear on stages and television as an illusionist in increasingly elaborate productions. He won an Emmy Award for specials in which he made everything from a jet to the Statue of Liberty disappear. His act merges music, magic, dance, and often a story. He brought a stage show to Broadway titled David Copperfield: Dreams and Nightmares (1996), but most frequently appears in Las Vegas and on tour. CORIO, ANN (1909–1999). Born Anna Corea in Hartford, Connecticut, to an Italian immigrant family of 14 children, Corio worked as a showgirl beginning as a voluptuous teenager. Within a few years, she became one of the leading striptease artists working in burlesque, including Minsky’s Burlesque in New York and the Howard Theatre in Boston. When crusading New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia clamped down on burlesque theatres, Corio moved to Los Angeles and worked in small roles in B-films, including Jungle Siren (1941). As she aged and the era of burlesque became nostalgia, Corio directed, wrote, and appeared in a Broadway production, This Was Burlesque (1965), a rose-colored memoir of her career. A revised version of the show returned to Broadway in 1981, and Corio appeared again, despite being in her 70s. CORNELL, KATHARINE (1893–1974).† Among the most versatile, respected stage actresses of the first half of the twentieth century, Cornell moved with ease from comedy to drama, from the classics to contemporary plays. Her father had been a theatre manager, but Cornell was born in Berlin, Germany, where her father had moved to study medicine. Her first significant stage appearance was with the prestigious Washington Square Players* in 1916, but she spent a lengthy apprenticeship in stock before scoring a personal success on Broadway in Nice People* (1921). Cornell’s performance in the title role of the 1924 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida elevated her stature (and she frequently appeared in revivals and tours in it)

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and was followed by a series of roles that gained her the reputation of one of the era’s finest actresses with leading roles in The Green Hat (1925), The Letter* (1927), The Age of Innocence (1928), Dishonored Lady (1930), and her greatest triumph, the role of Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), with which she became a manager in partnership with her husband, director Guthrie McClintic, whom she had married in 1921. McClintic enhanced Cornell’s stature as a leading lady in the romantic tradition—and she dominated the Broadway stage (and on tour) prior to World War II. She continued with success afterward, although her style was less favored after the rise of “method acting.” Although ironically she worked with and encouraged the careers of several of the new wave actors, including Marlon Brando. Like her contemporaries Helen Hayes and Tallulah Bankhead, Cornell committed herself to lengthy, arduous tours with her successes—in 1934 she played The Barretts of Wimpole Street in nearly 80 cities in little more than half a year, demonstrating that the road still had viability despite the damage done by the popularity of sound films. Cornell frequently claimed not to enjoy acting, but she was widely admired for her graceful, impassioned performances. Her career continued without abatement through roles in Shaw’s Saint Joan (1936) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1941), S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy (1939) with a young Laurence Olivier in support, and a critically admired 1942 revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in which she played Masha opposite Ruth Gordon (Natalya) and Judith Anderson (Olga). During the war years, Cornell performed her most celebrated roles for American military personnel during long, arduous, and dangerous tours before returning to Broadway in Antigone (1946), Antony and Cleopatra (1947), The Constant Wife (1951), The Prescott Proposals (1953), The Dark Is Light Enough (1955), and Dear Liar (1960), her final role playing Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Cornell lost interest in performing after McClintic’s 1961 death and spent her final years in retirement. Little-known today because she eschewed film roles, Cornell appeared only once—and briefly—on screen, playing herself in an all-star wartime film, Stage Door Canteen (1943), in which she touchingly obliges an admiring young soldier by delivering a speech from Romeo and Juliet. In 2010, Cornell was the central character (played by Kate Burton) in A. R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner at Lincoln Center. CORPUS CHRISTI. Terrence McNally’s Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics Award, and Outer Critics Critics Circle Award-winning modernday passion play opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) on 13

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October 1998 under the direction of Joe Mantello. The mere announcement of a play depicting Jesus Christ and his apostles as a group of gay men in presentday Texas set off a storm of controversy led by the Catholic League. Death threats directed at McNally and bomb threats at the MTC caused the theatre to withdraw the play, which set off another controversy from artists demanding that it proceed as a matter of artistic freedom. The MTC relented and the play was performed despite protesting picketers. See also CENSORSHIP. COSTUME DESIGN. See DESIGN/DESIGNERS. COTTEN, JOSEPH (1905–1994). Born Joseph Cheshire Cotton in a wellto-do family in Petersburg, Virginia, Cotten attended the Hickman School of Speech and Expression in Washington, D.C. He worked in advertising and as a theatre critic, which led him toward work as an actor. He appeared on Broadway in Absent Father (1932), Jezebel (1933), and Loose Moments (1935), but he rose to prominence in 1937 as a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, appearing in their revivals of Julius Caesar in 1937, Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1938, and Danton’s Death in 1938. When Welles went to Hollywood to film Citizen Kane (1941), Cotten was a central member of the cast and played the lead in Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and they occasionally worked together over subsequent decades. As a result of these films, Cotten became a major film star, appearing in such classics as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Gaslight (1944), Since You Went Away (1944), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Third Man (1949), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and A Delicate Balance (1973). He also returned with some frequency to Broadway, starring opposite Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1939), and appearing in Sabrina Fair (1953), Once More with Feeling (1958), and Calculated Risk (1962). COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW. Elmer Rice’s three-act drama of a day in the life of a personally and professionally embattled lawyer opened on 6 November 1931 for 292 performances at the Plymouth Theatre under the direction of Rice. Paul Muni scored a personal success as George Simon, a successful New York society lawyer who has risen from poverty as the child of Jewish American immigrants. His marriage crumbles as he struggles with his conscience over whether he wants to work for his spoiled clients or to help the disenfranchised in his old neighborhood. The play won critical approval and it was revived successfully in 1942 with Muni again heading the cast for 258 performances. John Barrymore,* in one of his finest screen performances, appeared as Simon in the 1933 film version directed by William Wyler.

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COUNTRY GIRL, THE. Clifford Odets’s drama of an alcoholic actor, his wife, and a young idealistic director opened on 10 November 1950 for 235 performances at the Lyceum Theatre under Odets’s direction, with scenery by Boris Aronson, who won a Tony Award. Uta Hagen also won a Tony as Georgie, the loyal wife of the self-destructive actor Frank Elgin (Paul Kelly), who has been given one last chance to redeem his career and self-respect by director Bernie Dodd (Steven Hill). Bernie becomes enamored of Georgie while struggling to hold Elgin together for the sake of the play and his life. Despite feelings for Bernie, Georgie stands by Elgin. A 1954 film version starred Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly (in an Academy Award-winning performance), and William Holden, and the play has been revived on Broadway twice, in 1972 starring Jason Robards (in a Tony-nominated performance), Maureen Stapleton, and George Grizzard, and in 2008 with Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand (in a Drama Desk Award-nominated performance), and Peter Gallagher. COWARD, NOËL (1899–1973). English-born playwright, actor, composer, librettist, and producer, Coward was one of the signal figures of London and New York stages from the 1920s to the 1960s. Most of his works, which included high comedies, dramas, operettas,* and musicals, were first performed in England, but most appeared on Broadway, occasionally with Coward appearing in them as well, most memorably partnered with Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives in 1931 and Tonight at 8:30 in 1936. Coward also appeared on Broadway in The Vortex (1925), This Year of Grace (1928), Design for Living (1933), costarring with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Nude with Violin (1957), and Present Laughter (1958). He was nominated for a Tony Award for his direction of High Spirits (1964), a musical based on his play Blithe Spirit, which had appeared on Broadway in 1941, for his libretto for The Girl Who Came to Supper (1964), and he was given a special Tony in 1970 for “his multiple and immortal contributions to the theatre.” Coward was knighted in 1970. His plays and musicals are frequently revived on Broadway and in regional and university theatres. COWL, JANE (1884–1950).† Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Cowl made her Broadway debut in David Belasco’s* Sweet Kitty Bellairs* (1903), after which she appeared in several Belasco productions. She attained stardom in the long-running thriller Within the Law* (1912), beginning a long and admired stage career. Also a dramatist, Cowl acted in plays she wrote or cowrote, including Lilac Time (1917) and Smilin’ Through (1920). She scored a major success in a revival of Romeo and Juliet (1923) and won critical approval in Noël Coward’s Easy Virtue (1925) and Robert E. Sherwood’s

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The Road to Rome* (1927). After 1930, her notable appearances were in Katherine Dayton and George S. Kaufman’s First Lady (1935), Thornton Wilder’s failed The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), and John Van Druten’s Old Acquaintance (1940). Her final Broadway appearances, in Ring around Elizabeth (1941) and The First Mrs. Fraser (1947), were failures. Cowl appeared in two silent films and late in her career five sound films, including Payment on Demand (1951), released after her death. CRADLE WILL ROCK, THE. This musical allegory by Marc Blitzstein, produced by John Houseman for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) with Orson Welles directing, has taken on legendary status due to its openingnight battle between government authorities attempting to shut it down (ostensibly on the grounds of “budget cuts”) and Welles, Houseman, and company who were determined to open the production. On opening night, 16 June 1937, when the Maxine Elliott Theatre was padlocked, preventing access to scenery and costumes, Welles and Houseman rented the vacant Venice Theatre and, despite threats from Actors’ Equity that the cast could not perform onstage, the actors delivered their performances from the audience and all over the theatre, with the result that it became one of the most talked-about productions in FTP’s history (it reopened on 3 January 1938 for 108 performances at the Windsor Theatre) although it also contributed to a mounting desire on the part of conservative political forces to close down this Works Progress Administration program of the New Deal. Subsequently revived on Broadway in 1947, on television in 1960, Off-Broadway in 1964, and in a 1983 tour of The Acting Company (which played in London in 1985, winning leading lady Patti LuPone an Olivier Award), the original production and its off-stage battles were dramatized in Tim Robbins’s 1999 all-star film, Cradle Will Rock. See also CENSORSHIP. CRAVEN, FRANK (1875–1945).† Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Craven acted from childhood and toured widely prior to branching out as a playwright. From the 1910s, he wrote many of his own vehicles: Too Many Cooks* (1914), This Way Out (1917), The First Year* (1920), Money From Home (1927), and The Nineteenth Hole (1927). With the dawn of sound films, Craven went into motion pictures, appearing in State Fair (1933), City for Conquest (1940), In This Our Life (1942), and Keeper of the Flame (1942). He returned to Broadway occasionally, most notably to originate the role of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), an acclaimed performance he repeated in the 1940 film version. His other later Broadway appearances include Village Green (1951), The Flowers of Virtue (1942), and Mrs. January and Mr. X (1944).

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CRAWFORD, CHERYL (1902–1986). An Akron, Ohio, native, Crawford studied drama at Smith College and moved to New York, becoming a major American producer and director after appearing as an actress in two Broadway productions, Juarez and Maximilian (1926) and The Brothers Karamazov (1927). Her initial fame came in collaboration with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg when they founded The Group Theatre (1931–1940) and although she directed, including Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, Men in White (1933), she decided to focus on producing, scoring a notable success with The Group’s Golden Boy (1937). She partnered with Eva Le Gallienne in 1946 to found the American Repertory Theatre, which only lasted a season, and in 1947, with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, she established The Actors Studio, which subsequently trained some of the most important American actors after Lee Strasberg became artistic director in 1951. Among Crawford’s more notable Broadway productions are a revival of Porgy and Bess in 1942, One Touch of Venus (1943), Brigadoon (1947), Love Life (1948), The Tower Beyond Tragedy (1950), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Paint Your Wagon (1951), Camino Real (1953), Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), Marathon ’33 (1963), Jennie (1963), Celebration (1969), Yentl (1975), The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (1972), and So Long on Lonely Street (1986). Crawford’s autobiography, One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (1977), chronicled her work in theatre and her extraordinary coworkers. CRIMES OF THE HEART. Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama opened on 8 December 1980 at the Manhattan Theatre Club following a production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1979. The play reopened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre on 4 November 1981 for 535 performances under the direction of Melvin Bernhardt, receiving a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Best Play Tony Award nomination. Set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, the play focuses on three very different troubled sisters, all of whom are facing various problems and repressions, but come together in support of one who has shot and wounded her philandering, abusive husband. Despite their troubles, the sisters remain closely bonded. The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in 2001 and at the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2008, a production directed by Kathleen Turner that had begun at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2007. A film version in 1986 starred Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, and Sam Shepard. CRISTOFER, MICHAEL (1945– ). Born Michael Ivan Procaccino in Trenton, New Jersey, this playwright, screenwriter and sometime actor

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worked in films and television from 1974 before serving for nearly a decade as the coartistic director of River Arts Repertory in Woodstock, New York, where he participated in productions of new works by American playwrights and adapted movies into stage plays. He also directed Joanne Woodward in an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Cristofer rose to prominence in 1977 when his play, The Shadow Box, about three terminally ill people, won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award. The television film version, directed by Paul Newman, won a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nomination. He also directed a 1980 television film of The Shadow Box and Gia (1998), for which he won a Directors Guild of America Award and an Emmy Award nomination, Body Shots (1999), and Original Sin (2001) and wrote screenplays for Falling in Love (1984), The Witches of Eastwick (1992), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), and Breaking Up (1997), based on his play of the same name written in 1993. His other plays include Americomedia (1973), Ice (1976), Black Angel (1978), C. C. Pyle and the Bunyon Derby (1978), The Lady and the Clarinet (1980), Execution of the Caregiver (1993), Amazing Grace (1995), and Tabarjaby (2006). Cristofer returned to the stage as an actor in 2009, appearing in the premiere of Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures at the Guthrie Theatre, and in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2010. CRITICS, CRITICISM.† Dramatic criticism in the United States dates to before the American Revolution when reviews of plays, often anonymous, appeared in various publications before and after the war. Washington Irving is often identified as the first true critic for reviews he wrote on New York theatre for the Salmagundi (1807) and Select Reviews (1815). A slang term calling theatre critics “aisle sitters” emerged sometime in the nineteenth century since critics were typically given aisle seats so that they could rush from the theatre to their newspaper office in time to bang out a review that could appear in the morning edition. A critic might be barred from a particular theatre for publishing some comment at which the theatre manager or producer might take offense. Augustin Daly* attempted to have the San Francisco Evening Post critic ejected from the theatre where his company was performing, because a prior review had failed to mention the star, Ada Rehan,* and in the 1960s, Broadway producer David Merrick invited several ordinary citizens with the same names as the New York critics to see a performance of one of his productions, after which he published their glowing comments in newspaper advertisements to make it appear the real critics were unanimous in their praise.

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Reputations of critics are usually based on their ability to respond to developing trends and this was certainly true of the leading American critics of the later half of the nineteenth century, including William Dean Howells,* Edward Dithmar,* and James Hunecker, who both admired the emergence of realism in European drama and lauded U.S. playwrights moving in that direction. In the twentieth century, the major American critics in the first decades were greatly influenced by Howells, Dithmar, and Hunecker, most particularly George Jean Nathan, Alexander Woollcott, Percy Hammond,* all of whom began their careers—in some cases very long careers—in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The next generation, Burns Mantle,* Brooks Atkinson, John Anderson,* Gilbert Gabriel, John Mason Brown, Richard Watts, Jr. wrote for the many New York newspapers. In periodicals, leading critics included Stark Young, Joseph Wood Krutch, Robert Benchley, Rosamond Gilder, Kenneth Macgowan, and Edith J. R. Isaacs, and others led the charge prior to 1930. After 1930, some reviewers, most particularly Atkinson, writing in the New York Times, continued, although he was increasingly inclined to resist changing social mores reflected in the drama and new techniques, particularly after World War II. Critics in other major cities exerted more than regional influences after 1930, among them Henry Taylor Parker, Claudia Cassidy, Elliot Norton, and Richard Coe were admired, and later in the twentieth century they were succeeded by such critics as Kevin Kelly, Richard Christiansen, Dan Sullivan, Sylvie Drake, and Peter Marks. In the postwar era, Walter Kerr, a learned theatre historian, brought a stronger contextualizing voice to the New York Times, while the impact of modern European theatre and vast social changes were more fully acknowledged by critics like Harold Clurman, Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, Stanley Kauffmann, Henry Hewes, Wolcott Gibbs, Brendan Gill, Edith Oliver, Louis Kronenberger, T. E. Kalem, Jack Kroll, and others. John Simon, perhaps the most controversial critic since the 1960s, is admired for the quality of his writing, but he has frequently met with outrage for nasty attacks on the personal appearance of performers whose features fail to please him. After the 1980s, critics focused on new developments in theatre continued to attract a readership, including Michael Feingold, Julius Novick, Michael Kuchwara, Alisa Solomon, Charles McNulty, although the seriously diminished number of newspapers and, ultimately, magazines in the late twentieth century made it challenging for theatergoers to find criticism. For Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway, the New York Times critic still held considerable power over the fortunes of productions.

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Frank Rich, the Times critic from 1980–1993, was much admired for the erudition of his writing, and he was succeeded by Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood. In periodicals, John Lahr excels as critic for the New Yorker, also writing occasional profiles of major theatrical and film figures, but Lahr is one of the few remaining magazine critics provided ample space for an indepth review. Academic periodicals often feature theatre reviews by scholars; however, many are quarterly publications and by the time a review appears, the production has usually long since closed. Media criticism dates to the early days of commercial radio after World War I—and television news programs, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, featured short theatre reviews, although these are now rare and most media reviewers cover only film. Internet sites offer criticism and bloggers write about theatre, but with no discernible impact on the development of contemporary theatre. CROMER, DAVID (1965– ). Born in Skokie, Illinois, Cromer studied at Columbia College in Chicago, although he did not complete a degree, after which he made a name for himself as an actor and director in Chicago-area theatre in the 1990s. He directed a scaled-down production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in which he also played the Stage Manager, for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and it moved Off-Broadway in 2009 to critical kudos. Cromer has numerous credits in regional theatre and in Chicago, including Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow (2005). His 2008 Off-Broadway revivals of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine* brought him Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards and a Drama Desk Award nomination. In 2009, Cromer’s critically praised Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs folded after only a week of performances, and he directed When the Rain Stops Falling (2009) at Lincoln Center. Of Cromer’s work, André Bishop has said, “To me, he has all the skills of an old-time Broadway director with all the emotion and inner life of the new breed.” CRONYN, HUME (1911–2003). Born in London, Ontario, Canada, as Hume Blake Cronyn, he attended Ridley College and McGill University in Montreal. His family intended him to follow a law career, but he chose to study acting with Max Reinhardt and at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his Broadway debut in the flop Hipper’s Holiday (1934), after which he replaced an actor in the hit Boy Meets Girl (1935). From 1935 to 1941, Cronyn appeared in High Tor (1937), There’s Always a Breeze (1938), Escape This Night (1938), Off to Buffalo (1938), a revival of The Three Sisters in 1939, The Weak Link (1940), Retreat to Pleasure (1940), and Mr. Big (1941). Cronyn spent time in Hollywood as a character

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actor for much of the 1940s, appearing in character roles in such notable films as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Phantom of the Opera (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and he received a Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for The Seventh Cross (1944). Cronyn married British-born actress Jessica Tandy in 1942, after which they frequently acted together on stage and screen. He returned to Broadway in 1948 for a flop, The Survivors (1948), and two other failures, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (1950) and Hilda Crane (1950), but he and Tandy won critical praise and a long run in The Fourposter (1951). Throughout the 1950s, he remained busy, including acting in such plays as Madam, Will You Walk (1953), which he also directed, The Honeys (1955), A Day By the Sea (1955), The Man in the Dog Suit (1958), and Triple Play (1959), which he also directed. Cronyn and Tandy were part of the Guthrie Theatre company for a time and, after 1960, his Broadway appearances were in increasingly distinguished plays and productions. Cronyn was nominated for a Tony Award for Big Fish, Little Fish (1961) and won a Tony for his performance as Polonius in the Richard Burton Hamlet (1964). He was nominated again for Tonys for A Delicate Balance (1967) and The Gin Game (1978). Other Broadway appearances included The Physicists (1964), Promenade All (1972), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), Foxfire (1982), which he cowrote with Susan Cooper, and The Petition (1986). Cronyn’s later film appearances include Sunrise at Campobello (1960), Cleopatra (1963), The World According to Garp (1982), Cocoon (1985), and Marvin’s Room (1996). Cronyn also appeared in numerous television dramas beginning at the dawn of the medium in virtually all of the important “anthology” series from the earliest days of television. Cronyn won three Emmy Awards for the television movies Age-Old Friends (1989), Broadway Bound (1992), and To Dance with the White Dog (1993) and he shared a Writer’s Guild Award with Susan Cooper for the TV film The Dollmaker (1984). Cronyn and Tandy were presented with a special Drama Desk Award in 1986 and a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 1994, shortly before her death. Cronyn continued working as an actor until shortly before his death at age 91. CROSSROADS THEATRE, THE. Established by cofounders Ricardo Khan and L. Kenneth Richardson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1978 with a commitment to plays examining the African American experience, Crossroads received the 1999 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. Among the plays premiered at Crossroads, standouts include George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) and Spunk (1989), and other

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productions include works by August Wilson, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, Mbongeni Ngema, Ruby Dee, Rita Dove, and others. CROTHERS, RACHEL (1878–1958).† Born in Bloomington, Illinois, Crothers attended Illinois State Normal School and studied drama in New York and Boston before beginning a theatrical career that made her the most renowned American female playwright (and director) prior to Lillian Hellman. Between 1903 and 1937, she had 28 plays produced on Broadway. Her early experience acting in a tour with Hortense Rhéa’s* company in Hall Craine’s* 1898 play The Christian* contributed to her understanding of stagecraft. Most of her comedy-dramas depict the difficulties faced by women, particularly those trying to earn their way as artists. Her plays reflect the influence of Freud and cover such topics as marriage, divorce, prostitution, women in the workplace, and the gender double standard of her time. Noteworthy among Crothers’s plays, many of which she directed, are Nora (1903), The Three of Us* (1906), A Man’s World* (1910), The Herfords (1911; revised in 1920 as He and She), Ourselves (1913), Nice People* (1921), Everyday (1921), Mary the Third (1923), Expressing Willie* (1924), A Lady’s Virtue (1925), The Book of Charm (1925), What They Think (1925), Venus (1927), Exceeding Small (1928), Let Us Be Gay* (1929), As Husbands Go (1931), Caught Wet (1931), When Ladies Meet (1932), and Susan and God (1937), the last her most acclaimed and commercially successful play. Crothers often lectured on the drama and she also directed Paul Vincent Carroll’s The Old Foolishness (1940) on Broadway, but it flopped. Crothers was a significant force in several philanthropic theatrical organizations during both world wars, including the United Theatre Relief Committee, the Stage Relief Fund,* the Stage Women’s War Relief Fund,* and the American Theatre Wing for War Relief. A number of Crothers’s plays were filmed in both the silent and sound eras, most notably Susan and God in 1940, which starred Joan Crawford and Fredric March. Of Crothers’s achievement, Ethan Mordden writes that she “may have been the first famous American to be called a ‘radical feminist’ decades before the term became current.” CROUSE, RUSSEL (1893–1966). Born in Findlay, Ohio, where he began his working life as a journalist, Crouse turned to acting in the 1920s and did public relations work for The Theatre Guild. After coauthoring two modestly successful musicals, The Gang’s All Here (1931) and Hold Your Horses (1934), he entered a career-long collaboration with Howard Lindsay with Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes (1934). They followed this hit with librettos for the musicals Red, Hot and Blue! (1936) and Hooray for What! (1937). The Crouse-Lindsay team was acknowledged for their craftsmanship

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and unerring instincts for what mainstream Broadway audiences sought in entertainment. Crouse and Lindsay scored their greatest and most enduring success with the nostalgic comedy Life with Father (1939), which ran for years (with Lindsay in the lead) and became the longest-running Broadway play of the time. Crouse and Lindsay also produced several plays, including Joseph Kesselring’s hit Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), which they were rumored to have rewritten. In 1945, Crouse and Lindsay received the Pulitzer Prize for the comedydrama State of the Union, and they contributed librettos for several musicals, including Call Me Madam (1950), Happy Hunting (1956), The Sound of Music (1959), and Mr. President (1962), as well as Life with Mother (1948), a short-lived sequel to Life with Father, and The Great Sebastians (1956), which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Crouse acted in the Crouse-Lindsay comedy Tall Story (1959) and served as president of the Authors’ League of America. Crouse was the father of actress Lindsay Crouse. CROWLEY, MART (1935– ). Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Crowley was educated at Catholic University, after which he worked in television production. Actress Natalie Wood hired him as her personal assistant, which provided time during which he wrote his first play, the groundbreaking comedy-drama The Boys in the Band (1968), the first homosexual-themed play to succeed on Broadway, where it ran for over 1,000 performances and was made into a 1970 film. Crowley’s next play, Remote Asylum (1970), was not well-received, but his next, A Breeze from the Gulf (1973), received a nomination for the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. In 1979–1980, Crowley was a script editor and producer of the television series Hart to Hart and he wrote the television films Pony (1986), Bluegrass (1988), People Like Us (1990), and a Hart to Hart reunion movie (1996). Thirty-five years after the premiere of The Boys in the Band, Crowley completed a sequel, The Men from the Boys (2002). See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. CRUCIBLE, THE. Arthur Miller’s grim drama of the 1692–1693 Salem witch trials in Massachusetts written as a metaphor for the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) “witch hunt” opened on 22 January 1953 for 197 performances at the Martin Beck* Theatre in a Kermit Bloomgarden production. Critical reaction acknowledged the contemporary parallels with HUAC and the blacklisting of the era in this seeming historical drama. Miller researched the actual Salem trials and his characters names are taken from the surviving records, including John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy),

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Miller’s protagonist, a forthright, independent-minded farmer living with his sin of briefly straying from his marriage with a servant girl, Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood), who is displeased when John terminates their affair. Proctor’s wife Elizabeth (Beatrice Straight) has forgiven him this transgression, but coldness has descended on their relationship. When Abigail and some local girls are caught dancing at night in the woods, they defend themselves by making accusations of witchcraft. When authorities (Walter Hampden, E. G. Marshall, Phillip Coolidge, Fred Stewart) believe their story, Abigail realizes the power that the lie can wield. Ultimately, trials convict innocent individuals of witchcraft, a circumstance manipulated by landowners who are able to profit from the removal of their neighbors from their property, by the local minister who would otherwise have lost his post, and by government officials seeking political gain. Some of the accused refuse to admit their supposed crimes even when faced with torture or execution. When Abigail and an easily manipulated servant girl in the Proctor home manage to implicate John and Elizabeth, Proctor refuses to surrender his good name by signing a confession. Despite the fact that the authorities have considerable evidence to discredit Abigail, the situation continues to spin out of control. Proctor goes to his death refusing to lie to save his skin. The Crucible, which was only a moderate success in its original production directed by Jed Harris, has been revived on Broadway four times, in 1964 featuring Farley Granger and Denholm Elliott in a short-lived American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) production; in a 1972 Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center production with Robert Foxworth, Philip Bosco, Martha Henry, and Pamela Payton-Wright; in a 1991 National Actors Theatre production starring Martin Sheen, Maryann Plunkett, Fritz Weaver, Michael York, and Martha Scott; and in a 2002 Jujamcyn production directed by Richard Eyre with a cast including Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Tom Aldredge, Brian Murray, and John Benjamin Hickey. In 1957, the play was also adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre for the film Les Sorcières de Salem, and Miller wrote an Academy Award-nominated screenplay for a 1996 movie adaptation starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Joan Allen, and Paul Scofield. A 1967 television production starred George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Tuesday Weld. Composer Robert Ward adapted the play as a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera. CRUDUP, BILLY (1968– ). William Gaither Crudup was born in Manhasset, New York, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He made his Broadway debut as Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1995) at Lincoln Center, winning a Theatre World Award and an Outer Critics

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Circle Award, followed by revivals of Bus Stop in 1996, playing Bo Decker opposite the Cherie of Mary-Louise Parker, The Three Sisters in 1997, and The Elephant Man in 2002, which brought him a Tony Award nomination. He received another Tony nomination for Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2005) and won a Tony as Belinsky in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia (2006). He has appeared consistently in films, most notably in Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Inventing the Abbotts (1997), Almost Famous (2000), Big Fish (2003), Stage Beauty (2004), The Good Shepherd (2006), and Public Enemies (2009). CRUZ, NILO (1960– ). Born in Matanzas, Cuba, Cruz moved with his family to the “Little Havana” area of Miami, Florida, when he was 10 years old. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States and attended MiamiDade Community College before moving to New York City. While studying with Maria Irene Fornés she recommended him to Paula Vogel, who was teaching on the Brown University faculty. Cruz entered Brown and completed an M.F.A. in 1994. In 2001, while working as playwright-in-residence at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, he completed his play Anna in the Tropics, which was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (making him the first Cuban American so honored) and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. Anna in the Tropics moved to Broadway in 2003 under Emily Mann’s direction and starring Jimmy Smits and Daphne Rubin-Vega, garnering a Best Play Tony Award nomination. Cruz’s other plays, which all deal with the history and culture of Latinos, include Dancing on Her Knees (1994), Night Train to Bolina (1995), A Park in Our House (1995), Two Sisters and a Piano (1998), A Bicycle Country (1999), Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (2001), Lorca in a Green Dress (2003), Ybor City (2003), Capriccio (2003), Beauty of the Father (2004), and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (2005). See also CHICANO THEATRE. CSC REPERTORY THEATRE. With a commitment to re-imagining classic plays for a contemporary American audience, Christopher Martin founded the Classic Stage Company, ultimately known as the CSC Repertory, in 1967. The company performed in several small spaces until 1974 when it found a permanent home on 13th Street. Martin left the CSC in 1985 and the late 1980s proved a transition period during which the theatre repertoire expanded to include modern classics and occasional new plays. Carey Perloff became artistic director in 1987, succeeded in 1992 by David Esbjornson. Barry Edelstein became artistic director in 1998, followed in 2003 by Brian Kulick, under whose leadership the CSC reemphasized its roots in classical theatre and expanded to add a Young Company with family-oriented productions.

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CULLUM, JOHN (1930– ). A Knoxville, Tennessee, native who was educated at the University of Tennessee, Cullum won recognition in Broadway musicals beginning with Camelot (1960), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), for which he received a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination, 1776 (1969), Shenandoah (1975), and On the Twentieth Century (1978), winning Tonys for the last two, but he also appeared with regularity in non-musical theatre, including in supporting roles for the New York Shakespeare Festival in the early 1960s. He appeared as Laertes in the 1964 Richard Burton Hamlet, and he stepped into the lead in Deathtrap (1979) during its run. Cullum also appeared in The Rehearsal (1963), Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1972), The Trip Back Down (1977), a 1983 revival of Private Lives, Doubles (1985), The Boys in Autumn (1986), a 1986 revival of You Never Can Tell, and he played Joe Keller in a Roundabout Theatre revival of All My Sons in 1997. Other Off-Broadway appearances include Whistler (1982), for which he won a Drama Desk Award, Sin: A Cardinal Deposed (2004), for which he was Drama Desk-nominated, The Other Side (2005), Cymbeline (2008), and The Conscientious Objector (2008), for which he was again Drama Desknominated. Cullum stepped into the Broadway cast of August: Osage County (2009) during its run. His other musical appearances include taking over the title role in Man of La Mancha (1966) during its run, Aspects of Love (1994), a 1994 revival of Show Boat, Urinetown (2001), Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (2006), and a revival of 110 in the Shade in 2007, for which he was nominated for a Tony. Cullum has also appeared in numerous film and television roles, including his Emmy Award-nominated role in the TV series Northern Exposure (1990–1995). CULTURE CLASH. Founded on Cinco de Mayo 1984 for Ric Montoya, Richardo Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza, this Latino comedy sketch troupe with a strong political voice has performed in many regional and university theatres. Their sketch material is taken from interviews with Latino Americans with the goal of expressing cultural changes and frictions through bold satire and impersonations. Typically, they focus on the community in which they are performing to express local concerns as well as more universal issues of significance in what they label their “performance collage.” See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE; CHICANO THEATRE. CUMMINGS, CONSTANCE (1910–2005). Born Constance Halverstadt in Seattle, Washington, she debuted on Broadway in her late teens, prior to accepting a film contract. In Hollywood, although she appeared with such

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leading men as Paul Muni, Spencer Tracy, Harold Lloyd, and Walter Huston, her roles were limited to ingénues and a few years after she married British playwright and screenwriter Benn W. Levy in 1933, Cummings gave up her Hollywood career and, after a few more roles on Broadway, including Accent on Youth (1934), Young Madame Conti (1937), a revival of Madame Bovary (1937), and If I Were You (1938), she moved to England and began working in British films and theatre, including the classic 1945 film version of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit and a wide range of stage roles from Shakespeare to Bertolt Brecht, most notably her acclaimed 1971 stage performance as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night costarring with Laurence Olivier. Cummings made only occasional returns to Broadway for One-Man Show (1945), Rape of the Belt (1960), as Gertrude in a 1969 revival of Hamlet starring Nicol Williamson and Francesca Annis, and she won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for her acclaimed portrayal of an ex-aviatrix suffering from a stroke in Wings (1979), a role she repeated in a 1983 television film. Off-Broadway, she appeared in a revival of The Chalk Garden in 1982, reaping a Drama Desk nomination. CURCHACK, FRED (1948– ). New York-born Curchack received a B.A. and an M.A. from Queens College before moving to Texas, where he emerged as a performance artist who has created many original theatre pieces, including over 20 solo works involving multimedia elements. His major works, for which he received a 1991 Guggenheim Fellowship, are inspired by a wide range of sources, from Shakespeare, the source for two of his most effective works, Stuff as Dreams Are Made On (1990) and What Fools These Mortals Be (1992), as well as Asian theatre, dance, and Jerzy Grotowski’s techniques. Curchack is on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas and continues his solo performing with the recent Gauguin’s Paradise (2004) and Milarepa (2009). See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS. Sam Shepard’s family tragicomedy was commissioned by Joe Papp for the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, but opened first at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 21 April 1977. In a rare and controversial decision, an Obie Award was given to Shepard before the play opened in New York, which it ultimately did on 2 March 1978. A bizarre assault on a consumerist society, the play depicts the deeply dysfunctional Tate family struggling to hold their farm together. The Public Theatre cast, under the direction of Robert Woodruff, included Olympia Dukakis, Pamela Reed, Kenneth Welsh, James Gammon, and Michael J. Pollard. The play was revived at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1980, followed by another with Kathy Bates and Bill Pullman at

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International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR) in 1985, and a film version, starring Bates and James Woods, was released in 1995. In 2008, the play was revived by the American Conservatory Theatre with original cast member Pamela Reed, who had played Emma, the Tate’s daughter, in the original production moving into the role of Ella, the burned-out matriarch of the family. CURTIS, PAUL J. (1927– ). Born Paul James Curtis in Boston, Massachusetts, he studied with Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research before establishing the first mime theatre and school in America with the American Mime Theatre in 1952. He has explained its mission through his students, noting, “Most of the people who study with us have no intention of being American mimes. It’s too limited. You couldn’t possibly get enough work. But all kinds of performers study with us. For example, we’ve had a great many magicians study here simply to improve their performing skills. We’ve also had clowns and circus performers. We’ve even had singers.” Curtis also established International Mimes and Pantomimists, an organization for performers in the field.

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D DA COSTA, MORTON (1914–1989). Born Morton Tecosky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began his career as an actor in the ensemble of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). He switched to directing in 1948 with a revival of The Alchemist at New York’s City Center and subsequently directed both musicals and straight plays, including such notable productions as a revival of Dream Girl in 1951, Plain and Fancy (1955), No Time for Sergeants (1955), Auntie Mame (1956), The Music Man (1957), for which he received a Tony Award nomination, The Wall (1960), Sherry! (1967), an all-star revival of The Women (1973), A Musical Jubilee (1975), and Doubles (1985). He directed Saratoga (1959) and Maggie Flynn (1968), for which he also contributed librettos. Da Costa also directed films, including Auntie Mame (1958) and The Music Man (1962), the latter earning him an Academy Award nomination. DA SILVA, HOWARD (1909–1986). This versatile Jewish American actor was born Howard Silverblatt in Cleveland, Ohio, and labored as a steelworker prior to changing his name and beginning a theatre and film career. His earliest appearances for Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre included secondary roles in such productions as Alison’s House (1931) and Alice in Wonderland (1932), after which he appeared in The Group Theatre’s production of Golden Boy (1937), the Federal Theatre Project’s controversial The Cradle Will Rock (1937), as Jack Armstrong in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), a role he repeated in the 1940 film version, and as the murderous Jud Fry in Oklahoma! (1943). Alternating between theatre and film (and later television) roles, Da Silva also appeared on Broadway in Diary of a Scoundrel (1956), Compulsion (1957), Fiorello! (1959), for which he received a Tony Award nomination, Romulus (1962), In the Counting House (1962), Dear Me, The Sky Is Falling (1963), The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967), and 1776 (1969). Da Silva directed Sandhog (1954), Purlie Victorious (1961), The Advocate (1963), My Sweet Charlie (1966), and he wrote the libretto for The Zulu and the Zayda (1965) and with Arnold Perl conceived The World of Sholom Aleichem

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(1982). On screen, Da Silva’s many films include The Sea Wolf (1941), Sergeant York (1941), Reunion in France (1942), Keeper of the Flame (1942), The Lost Weekend (1945), They Live by Night (1948), David and Lisa (1962), 1776 (1972), The Great Gatsby (1974), and Mommie Dearest (1981), and he won an Emmy Award in 1978 for the television film Verna: USO Girl. DAFOE, WILLEM (1955– ). The sixth of eight children, Dafoe was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the son of a doctor and a nurse. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but never graduated. Instead, he joined an experimental group, Theatre X, and toured the United States and Europe in their productions of Offending the Audience, Phaedre, and Razor Blades before moving to New York, where he joined The Performance Group, appearing in their productions of Cop (1978) and The Balcony (1979). Dafoe met and began a personal relationship with Elizabeth LeCompte and both became founding members of the experimental theatre collective, The Wooster Group. He has appeared in many Wooster productions, most notably a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape* in 1996. Also for Wooster, he appeared in North Atlantic (1985), Miss Universal Happiness (1985), and To You, The Birdie (2002), among others. He was nominated for Academy Awards for Platoon (1987) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Dafoe’s other notable films include To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Mississippi Burning (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Wild at Heart (1990), Tom and Viv (1994), The English Patient (1996), American Psycho (2000), Spider-Man (2002), and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), and he has also appeared on television. DALE, JIM (1935– ). Born James Smith in Northamptonshire, England, Dale served in the Royal Air Force and trained as a dancer prior to beginning a stage, film, and television career in London with the National Theatre at the Old Vic. Since touring to the United States with the Young Vic with his acclaimed adaptation (with Frank Dunlop) of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin, retitled Scapino! (1974), for which he won a Drama Desk Award and Tony Award nomination, Dale has mostly worked in the United States, appearing on Broadway in the title role of the musical Barnum (1980), for which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. He also received nominations for both in revivals of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1985 and Candide in 1997. Dale replaced Robert Lindsey in Me and My Girl (1986) and won a Drama Desk Award for Threepenny Opera in 2006, which also brought him a Tony nomination and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Off-Broadway, Dale appeared in Privates on Parade (1989), Travels with My Aunt (1995),

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for which he won a Lucille Lortel Award, and Comedians (2003), garnering yet another Drama Desk nomination. Dale has appeared in movies, including numerous entries in England’s famous Carry On film series, television, won two Grammy Awards for his audio book reading of the Harry Potter book series, and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for coauthoring the title song of the film Georgy Girl (1966). DALLAS THEATRE CENTER. Baylor University professor Paul Baker founded the Center in 1959 with the support of several Dallas, Texas, citizens who supplied the Kalita Humphreys Theatre designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Baker established a permanent acting company dedicated to staging both classics and contemporary plays and a graduate program. Other theatres spaces were added and although Baker’s original model for the theatre evolved over time, the center has thrived as a major regional theatre with the expectation of moving to a new five-theatre complex in 2009. See also REPERTORY THEATRE. DALRYMPLE, JEAN (1902–1998). Producer, manager, and writer, Dalrymple was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and began her theatre career performing on the vaudeville* circuit with a partner, Dan Jarrett. Giving up performing, she took a job working as a press agent for producer John Golden and married drama critic Ward Morehouse. In 1940, Dalrymple set up her own publicity firm and in 1945 she produced her first Broadway play, Hope for the Best, followed by Brighten the Corner (1945) and a hit revival of Burlesque* in 1946. As executive director of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), she oversaw production of numerous productions, mostly revivals of American and European classics. She became director of the New York City Center Light Opera Company and the City Center Drama Company in 1953 (although she had been centrally involved with both since 1943) and produced a range of musicals and plays. She also wrote a few plays, including The Quiet Room (1958). DANIELS, JEFF (1955– ). A native of Athens, Georgia, Jeffrey Warren Daniels grew up in Chelsea, Michigan, and attended Central Michigan University where he studied theatre prior to dropping out to move to New York City. He debuted there in The Shortchanged Review (1979) at the Second Stage. On Broadway, he understudied several roles in Gemini (1977) and was seen in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1980), for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, A. R. Gurney’s The Golden Age (1984), Wilson’s Redwood Curtain (1993), and God of Carnage (2009), which brought him a Tony Award nomination. Off-Broadway, Daniels won

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an Obie Award for the Circle Repertory Theatre production of Johnny Got His Gun (1983) and garnered a Drama Desk nomination for Lemon Sky (1986). That same year, Daniels moved back to his hometown and started the Purple Rose Theatre, a not-for-profit organization, and he wrote original plays for this regional company. He has appeared in numerous films, receiving Golden Globe Award nominations for The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Something Wild (1986), and The Squid and the Whale (2005), and he also appeared in Terms of Endearment (1983), Gettysburg (1993), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and State of Play (2009). Daniels has also frequently appeared on television. DANIELS, WILLIAM (1927– ). Born William Davis Daniels in Brooklyn, New York, he studied at Northwestern University and married Bonnie Bartlett, with whom he frequently acts. He became a member of The Actors Studio and appeared in the Off-Broadway premiere of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1960), winning an Obie Award. On Broadway, Daniels appeared in The Legend of Lizzie (1959), A Thousand Clowns (1962), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1963), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1963), Daphne in Cottage D (1967), and, most notably, as founding father John Adams in the musical 1776 (1969), a role he repeated in the 1972 film version (the Tony Award committee ruled Daniels ineligible for a Best Actor nomination because his name was not billed above the title; he refused to accept a Best Featured Actor nomination). Daniels has appeared in many films, most memorably playing Dustin Hoffman’s father in The Graduate (1967), and he starred on the long-running drama series, St. Elsewhere (1982–1988), for which he won two Emmy Awards. Daniels also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1999 to 2001. DANNER, BLYTHE (1943– ). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-born Blythe Katharine Danner graduated from Bard College in 1965 before beginning her acting career with the Theatre Company of Boston and the Trinity Square Theatre. She won a Theatre World Award in 1969 in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center revival of Molière’s The Miser. Within months, she won a Tony Award playing a free-spirited hippie in Leonard Gershe’s hit comedy Butterflies Are Free (1969). On Broadway, she also received Tony nominations for Betrayal (1980) and revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1988 and Follies in 2001, and appeared in revivals of Twelfth Night in 1972, The Philadelphia Story in 1980, Blithe Spirit in 1987, and The Deep Blue Sea in 1998. Off-Broadway, Danner received Drama Desk Award nominations for revivals of The New York Idea in 1977 and Suddenly Last

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Summer in 2007, and also appeared in Much Ado about Nothing in 1989 and Sylvia (1995), and several productions with the Williamstown Theatre Festival. She has appeared in numerous films, including 1776 (1972), The Great Santini (1979), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), Another Woman (1988), Prince of Tides (1991), and Meet the Fockers (2004), and on television she has won two Emmy Awards for her appearances on Huff (2004). Danner is the mother of Academy Award-winning film star Gwyneth Paltrow and director Jake Paltrow. DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, THE. William Inge’s three-act drama opened on 5 December 1957 at the Music Box Theatre for 468 performances in a production directed by Elia Kazan, garnering a Best Play Tony Award nomination. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, the Flood family is struggling financially as Rubin (Pat Hingle), a harness salesman, is losing income due to the growing popularity of automobiles. Among the children of Rubin and his wife Cora (Teresa Wright) is Reenie, whose date for a school dance, a young Jewish boy, is harassed by anti-Semitic students and commits suicide. This and family problems, including Rubin’s job loss and problems for Cora’s sister Lottie, played by Eileen Heckart, come to a head, with bittersweet results. A film version, starring Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire, and Academy Award-nominated Shirley Knight as Reenie, was released in 1960. DARK OF THE MOON. This two-act “legend with music” by Howard Richardson and William Berney, opened on 14 March 1945 at the 46th Street Theatre for 318 performances. Adapted from the old song about Barbara Allen (Carol Stone), this atmospheric fantasy focuses on John, a witch boy, who lives in the Smoky Mountains away from mortals, but when he falls in love with Barbara he pleads with a Conjur Woman to make him human. The Conjur Woman agrees with the proviso that Barbara must remain true to him for a year or her spell will be broken. When Barbara gives birth to a witch child the midwives kill it. When her relatives compel her to sleep with another man, the spell ends, Barbara dies, and John returns to the mountains as a witch boy. Dark of the Moon had a long stage life in stock, community, and university theatres. DARKNESS AT NOON. Sidney Kingsley’s drama, which he also directed, was adapted from a 1941 novel by Arthur Koestler and brought a Tony Award to veteran film actor Claude Rains and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award to Kingsley. The play opened on 13 January 1951 for 186 performances at the Alvin Theatre in a Playwright’s Company production. Set in a Russian prison in 1937, this propagandistic anti-Communist play

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centers on Rubashov, an old Bolshevik guard and revolutionary, who is tried for treason by the totalitarian Stalin government and repudiates his Marxist beliefs. Rains was supported by a strong cast including Kim Hunter, Walter J. Palance (soon to be known as Jack), who won a Theatre World Award, Lois Nettleton, Alexander Scourby, and Philip Coolidge. DAVIDSON, GORDON (1933– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Davidson was educated at Cornell University and Case Western Reserve University and began his directing career in regional theatres, including New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, Virginia’s Barter Theatre, and others, as well as stage managing for Martha Graham. He eventually worked with John Houseman at the American Shakespeare Festival and became producing director of Los Angeles’s Ahmanson Theatre from 1989–2005 and artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum (MTP) from 1967–2005, directing numerous productions. On Broadway, he won a Drama Desk Award for In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969) and a Tony Award for The Shadow Box (1977), garnering Tony nominations for The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972) and Children of a Lesser God (1980), and MTP productions under his supervision won numerous awards. Davidson retired in 2005. DAVIS, BETTE (1908–1989). Screen legend Davis was born in Lowell, Masschusetts, where she dreamed of a theatrical career after seeing actress Peg Entwhistle play Hedda Gabler. She made her Broadway debut in a flop, The Earth Between (1929), but fared better in Broken Dishes (1929) and Solid South (1930), after which she left the stage for Hollywood. After several undistinguished films, Davis made her first mark costarring with George Arliss* prior to winning two Best Actress Academy Awards (and nine nominations) during her long career under contract to Warner Bros., where many of her most successful movies, including Dark Victory (1939), The Letter* (1940), and The Little Foxes (1941), were screen versions of stage successes. When her contract with Warner Bros. ended in 1949, Davis scored another screen triumph playing theatre actress Margo Channing in All about Eve (1950) in a characterization many viewed as inspired by Tallulah Bankhead. Davis made a few Broadway appearances while continuing her film work, including singing and clowning in the musical revue* Two’s Company (1952), on Broadway and on tour with her then-husband Garry Merrill in the two-hander The World of Carl Sandburg (1960), and playing Maxine Faulk in the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1961). Her final stage appearance in Miss Moffat (1974), a musical adaptation of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green, closed in Philadelphia during its out-of-town tryout.

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DAVIS, OSSIE (1917–2005). Born Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Georgia, this acclaimed African American actor and playwright studied at Howard University, but quit to pursue acting in New York. He found work with the Rose McClendon* Players in Harlem in 1939 and debuted on Broadway in Jeb (1946). He toured in the company of Anna Lucasta in 1947 and returned to Broadway in The Leading Lady (1948), The Smile of the World (1949), The Wisteria Trees (1950), revivals of The Royal Family* and The Green Pastures in 1951, Remains to Be Seen (1951), Touchstone (1953), and Jamaica (1957), the last bringing him a Tony Award nomination. He succeeded Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), playing opposite his wife, Ruby Dee, whom he had married in 1948. In 1961, Davis appeared in his own hit play, Purlie Victorious (1961), and later acted in The Zulu and the Zayda (1965) and replaced Cleavon Little in I’m Not Rappaport (1985). Davis’s Purlie Victorious was adapted as the musical Purlie (1970) and garnered a Tony nomination. He appeared in many films, including No Way Out (1950), The Hill (1965), The Scalphunters (1968), School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), and I’m Not Rappaport (1996). Davis also appeared frequently on television, receiving four Emmy Award nominations for Teacher, Teacher (1969), King (1978), Miss Evers’ Boys (1997), and The L Word (2004). DAVIS, VIOLA (1965– ). Raised in Central Falls, Rhode Island, Davis had been born in St. Matthews, South Carolina. She was a drama student at Rhode Island College prior to attending the Juilliard School. Mixing stage and screen work, Davis has emerged as a much-admired actor in both realms. Her first Broadway appearance in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1996) brought her a Theatre World Award and Drama Desk and Tony Award nominations. She was also Drama Desk-nominated for Everybody’s Ruby (1999). She won a Tony as Best Supporting Actress for Wilson’s King Hedley II (2001) and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel (2004). Despite appearing in numerous television dramas and such films as The Substance of Fire (1996), Out of Sight (1998), Traffic (2000), Antwone Fisher (2002), and Solaris (2002), Davis did not have a true breakthrough until she played the distressed mother of a molested child in Doubt (2008), which brought her an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actress. In 2010, Davis returned to Broadway opposite Denzel Washington in a revival of Wilson’s Fences, garnering Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for her performance. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. DAYS WITHOUT END. Eugene O’Neill’s “modern miracle play” in four acts produced by The Theatre Guild, opened at the Henry Miller Theatre

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on 8 January 1934 for 57 performances. O’Neill, who had previously experimented with masks and spoken asides to reveal the inner natures of his characters, divided his protagonist, John Loving, into two separate characters, John (Earle Larimore*) representing his better self and Loving (Stanley Ridges) as his darker side. Giving up God for love, the embittered, isolated Loving reveals his true nature to his wife Elsa and their priest, causing Elsa to become seriously ill from the shock of his revelations. Realizing the sins of Loving, and to save Elsa, John renews his faith in Catholicism and thus destroys Loving. Most critics rejected this play and O’Neill, disheartened by their response and the production’s short run, resolved not to produce further new works on Broadway and he kept his resolution until the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh. See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. DE LIAGRE, ALFRED, JR. (1904–1987). Born Alfred Gustav Etienne de Liagre, Jr. in Passaic, New Jersey, he studied with Monty Woolley at Yale University. In 1930, he began his career as a stage manager at the Woodstock Playhouse before becoming a producer in 1933 with a Broadway production of Three-Cornered Moon, after which he mounted over 30 productions in New York and England, sometimes with coproducers. De Liagre’s other Broadway productions, some of which he also directed, include Yes, My Darling Daughter (1937), Mr. and Mrs. North (1941), The Voice of the Turtle (1943), Galileo (1947), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948), The House of Bernarda Alba (1951), The Golden Apple (1954), a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth in 1955, Janus (1955), J.B. (1958), Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), Tiny Alice (1969), and revivals of Our Town in 1969, Harvey in 1970, and On Your Toes in 1983, and Breaking the Code (1987). Katharine Hepburn called De Liagre “the last of the great gentlemen producers.” DEAD END. Sidney Kingsley’s naturalistic drama depicting the hardships of contemporary urban life is set on a New York street dead-ending into the Hudson River. Dead End shocked some critics with its frank depiction of the human and economic realities of the Great Depression when it opened on 28 October 1935 at the Belasco* Theatre for a 684 performance run. Dead End’s producer, Norman Bel Geddes, also designed the acclaimed realistic setting of a divided city street with a new luxurious apartment house for the rich butted up against a tenement. The theatre’s orchestra pit served as the East River, with tenement children leaping into the water throughout the play. Dead End opens with Gimpty, a handicapped architect unable to find employment who sits all day sketching ideas and observing the goings on at the end of the street.

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Tommy (Billy Halop), a young tough, is torn between his sister Drina (Elspeth Eric), who strives to keep him out of trouble, and the gang of wayward boys he leads. The future of the gang members is embodied in Baby Face Martin (Joseph Downing), once a resident of the street and now a notorious gangster wanted for murder. The desperate Martin is on the lam from the law and returns secretly to visit his long-suffering mother (Marjorie Main), who will have nothing to do with him. At the same time, Tommy and his gang (Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, David Gorcey) plan and execute the theft of a watch from a pampered boy living in the apartment house. The boy’s father attempts to retrieve the watch, but is stabbed by Tommy who, to Drina’s great distress, is arrested as the police corner Martin and kill him in a shootout. Gimpty, who is attracted to the sensitive Drina, comforts her as the rapid pace of the city continues oblivious to the lives at the dead end. Dead End bears some resemblance to Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Street Scene* (1929), a naturalistic melodrama* set on the steps of a tenement exploring the varied lives intersecting in the New York melting pot. Dead End was filmed in 1937 by director William Wyler and provided a vehicle for emerging film star Humphrey Bogart as Baby Face Martin and introduced several of the stage cast members to film success, including Marjorie Main, who played Martin’s mother in both the stage and screen versions, and the Dead End Kids. They appeared again in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), which, like Dead End, proved popular with audiences and inspired a series of Dead End comedies (also referred to as East Side comedies) that were made into the late 1940s. DEAD END KIDS: A HISTORY OF NUCLEAR POWER. Mabou Mines won an Obie Award for this cautionary play, conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, on nuclear energy. Using techniques of vaudeville,* nightclub performance, stand-up comedy, magic, and the classroom, it opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre on 11 November 1980. Akalaitis culled material from scientists, government documents, media, visual images, and other sources to create a collage on the benefits and fears of nuclear power. Jeremy Gerard, writing in the New York Times, called it a “provocative, haunted tour through the history of nuclear power.” DEAR RUTH. Norman Krasna’s two-act comedy opened on 13 December 1944 at Henry Miller’s Theatre for 680 performances under the direction of Moss Hart. A judge’s 15-year-old daughter, Miriam (Lenore Lonergan) endeavors to aid the war effort by writing letters to a soldier overseas, but uses her older sister’s name, Ruth (Virginia Gilmore), and sends the very attractive

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Ruth’s photo as well. When the soldier (John Dall) turns up unexpectedly on leave, he arrives just after Ruth has accepted a marriage proposal. Ruth, however, falls in love with the soldier, dumps her new fiancé, and her judge father performs a hasty marriage ceremony so that the couple can have a honeymoon before he returns to duty. A popular 1947 screen version starred Joan Caulfield, Mona Freeman, and William Holden. DEATH OF A SALESMAN. Arthur Miller’s two-act drama—or modern tragedy, as he described it—opened on 10 February 1949 at the Morosco Theatre for 742 performances under Elia Kazan’s direction and with a memorable scene design by Jo Mielziner. Both play and production were widely acclaimed, winning both a Tony Award as Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, among other kudos, and sold in excess of 200,000 copies when published by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Lee J. Cobb played Miller’s iconic American character, Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman unraveling emotionally, although his supportive wife Linda (Mildred Dunnock) attempts to offer comfort and protect him. Willy’s illusions of the economic success he had spent his life striving for are crumbling before him. In desperation, he turns to his boss, Howard, in hopes that he can get off the road and have a desk job. Instead, this young son of his original employer unsympathetically fires Willy, setting off a series of illusory flashbacks (although Kazan referred to these as “daydreams” in which “Willy is justifying himself”) in which Willy drifts away lost in significant moments in his past that are muddled with intrusions from the present. Some of Willy’s illusions provide comforting happy moments from the past, but most are critical transitional encounters, including visions of his financially successful older brother, Ben, who has carved a fortune out of some far-off adventure. The imaginary Ben ultimately gives Willy his approval to commit suicide as Willy concocts the misguided notion that his insurance money would provide his favored son Biff, played by Tony Award-winning Arthur Kennedy, a chance to succeed. The triumph of Death of a Salesman was remarkable on several counts, not least in its depiction of the dark side of capitalism—or, at least, the illusions it can create in those who view material success (the vaunted “American dream”) as fulfillment. The play’s grim view of capitalism was in stark contrast to America’s post-World War II economic boom; in every respect, Death of a Salesman seemed to counter contemporary currents of American life—on the surface, more a play about the Great Depression of the 1930s, Death of a Salesman still managed to speak to its audience in 1949, perhaps as a cautionary tale. In the subsequent 60 years since its premiere, Death of a Salesman has had numerous revivals, film and television productions, and a healthy life

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in print frequently taught in high school and colleges. It has had three major Broadway revivals: in 1975 at the Circle in the Square, directed and starring George C. Scott; in 1984 starring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich in a Drama Desk Award-winning performance; and in 1999 featuring Brian Dennehy in a Tony-winning performance. A 1951 film version starring Frederic March was nominated for several Academy Awards. Cobb and Dunnock appeared in a 1966 television production and a 1985 television film version was based on the 1984 Hoffman-Malkovich revivals. In 2000, Dennehy also appeared in another television film version. DEATHTRAP. Ira Levin’s two-act mystery-drama-comedy, directed by Robert Moore, opened on 26 February 1978 for an impressive 1,793 performances, garnering a Tony Award nomination as Best Play. John Wood starred as a celebrated, but burned-out mystery writer who hatches a plan to steal a promising manuscript from a young writer (Victor Garber) and pass it off as his own. Marian Seldes, Marian Winters, and Richard Woods provided able support—and various red herrings—in Levin’s well-plotted thriller laced with elements of comedy and drama. Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve starred in a 1982 film version directed by Sidney Lumet. DEE, RUBY (1924– ). This versatile actress and pioneer in African American theatre was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied at Hunter College. In 1948, she married Ossie Davis and often acted with him. On Broadway, Dee took over the title role in the American Negro Theatre’s production of Anna Lucasta (1944) and toured with the production, and appeared in Jeb (1946), A Long Way from Home (1948), and The Smile of the World (1949) before originating the role of Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), repeating her performance in the 1961 screen version. She also appeared with her husband in his play, Purlie Victorious (1961), and in Checkmates (1988). She received an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award for Boesman and Lena (1971) and a Drama Desk Award for Wedding Band (1973), and her other Off-Broadway and regional theatre credits include playing Cordelia in King Lear (1965) opposite Morris Carnovsky (as well as other Shakespearean roles), and has appeared in all-black versions of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1982) and The Glass Menagerie (1989). Also a playwright, Dee’s plays include Twin Bit Gardens (1976), Take It from the Top (1979), Zora Is My Name (1983), The Disappearance (1993), and Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy (1995). In 1998, she performed her own solo play, My One Good Nerve, and was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1988. In movies, she has appeared in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950),

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St. Louis Blues (1958), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991, and American Gangster (2008), which brought her an Academy Award nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award. For her work in television, Dee received a 1991 Emmy Award for the TV film Decoration Day and five other nominations. Dee received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. DEEP ARE THE ROOTS. Arnaud D’Usseau and James Gow’s melodrama* of the oppressions experienced by a black war hero’s return to his Southern hometown opened on 26 September 1945 in a Kermit Bloomgarden and George Heller production at the Fulton Theatre for 477 performances under the direction of Elia Kazan with settings by Howard Bay. Gordon Heath played Brett Charles, the soldier, and the race-themed play caused some controversy over not only its condemnation of Southern racism, but also the depiction of an underlying sexual tension between Brett and the white daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes) of a senator. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. DELICATE BALANCE, A. Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama opened on 22 September 1966 at the Martin Beck Theatre for 132 performances under the direction of Alan Schneider. The impressive cast for Albee’s assault on the complacency of well-heeled and materialistic suburbanites included Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Rosemary Murphy, and Marian Seldes. The play chronicles the hollow, anxious lives of Agnes and Tobias, and Agnes’s alcoholic sister Claire, who lives with them. Harry and Edna, another couple, arrive unexpectedly, as does the bitter daughter of Agnes and Tobias, whose marriage has just ended in divorce. The characters express a desire to escape an unknown terror, although none can quite name the source of their fear. A film version, directed by Tony Richardson, produced as part of the American Film Theatre starred Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Joseph Cotten, Kate Reid, and Lee Remick, and a stellar 1996 revival offered George Grizzard, Rosemary Harris, Elizabeth Wilson, Mary Beth Hurt, and Elaine Stritch in a production that ran longer than the original. DELL, GABRIEL (1919–1988). Born Gabriel Marcel Dell Vecchio in New York, Dell is best remember as a key member of the Dead End Kids, beginning with his Broadway debut in Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End (1935). Dell, as part of the Dead End Kids, appeared in the screen version of Dead End in 1937 and a long series of nominal sequels (sometimes called the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys) stressing broad comedy. Dell also studied

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at The Actors Studio and appeared in several Broadway productions, including Tickets Please (1950), Ankles Away (1955), Marathon ’33 (1963), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), Something Different (1967), Fun City (1972), and Lamppost Reunion (1975), garnering a Tony Award nomination for the last. He also replaced Alan Arkin in Luv (1964) and Peter Falk in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) and appeared in Off-Broadway productions, including Fortuna (1962), The Rogue’s Trial (1966), Adaptation (1969), and Where Do We Go from Here? (1974). On television, he was a member of the stock company of The Steve Allen Show, where he proved adept at sketch comedy, and he appeared in television and feature films as well, including Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Crime School (1938), They Made Me a Criminal (1939), and others. DELL’ARTE PLAYERS COMPANY. Founded in 1971 by Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and Jane Hill in Berkeley, California, the company was based in Blue Lake, California, where workshops in physical theatre were first offered in 1972. Techniques based on commedia dell’arte, mime, and other movement systems predominate in their actor training, but the company also began producing plays, including nearly 40 original pieces, in 1977 under the guidance of artistic directors Joan Schirle, Michael Fields, and Donald Forrest. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. DENHAM, REGINALD (1894–1983). Born in London, England, this theatre and film director and writer was, at one time, married to Moyna Macgill, the mother of Angela Lansbury. He spent much of his career directing on Broadway, beginning in 1929 with Rope’s End, and spanning nearly 40 years, including such productions as Ladies in Retirement (1940), which he also wrote with Edward Percy, The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1944), Wallflower (1944), which he cowrote with Mary Orr, Portrait in Black (1947), Dial “M” for Murder (1952), The Bad Seed (1954), Janus (1955), and Hostile Witness (1966), among many others. DENNEHY, BRIAN (1938– ). A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Brian Mannion Dennehy joined the Marine Corps. He studied at Columbia University and Yale University prior to beginning an acting career in theatre, film, and television. On Broadway, he has appeared in Translations (1995) and revivals of Inherit the Wind in 2007 and Desire under the Elms* in 2009. Dennehy won Best Actor Tony Awards for two other revivals, Death of a Salesman in 1999 (he also won an Olivier Award when the production moved to London) and Long Day’s Journey into Night in 2003. In regional theatre, Dennehy has frequently appeared in Chicago, most notably with the

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Goodman Theatre, and he has appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene O’Neill. In 2010, Dennehy appeared on Broadway in a double-bill of O’Neill’s Hughie and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. He has been nominated for six Emmy Awards and won a Golden Globe Award for the television production of Death of a Salesman in 2000. DENNIS, SANDY (1937–1992). Born in Hastings, Nebraska, Sandra Dale Dennis studied at Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska prior to moving to New York. She began her career on the soap opera The Guiding Light in 1956, but preferred theatre work as a committed method actress and recipient of a 1961 Theatre World Award. Dennis understudied and went on as a replacement in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) prior to appearing in Face of a Hero (1960) and Complaisant Lover (1961). She won consecutive Tony Awards for her performances in A Thousand Clowns (1962) and Any Wednesday (1964), and her subsequent performances include Daphne in Cottage D (1967), How the Other Half Loves (1971), Let Me Hear You Smile (1973), Absurd Person Singular (1974), The Supporting Cast (1981), and Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). Dennis also replaced Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year (1975). On screen, she won a Supporting Actress Academy Award for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) for her second film and also appeared in Sweet November (1968), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award, The Out-of-Towners (1970), Nasty Habits (1977), The Four Seasons (1981), Another Woman (1988), and The Indian Runner (1991). DENVER THEATRE CENTER (DTC). Begun by Helen G. Bonfils, Broadway producer Donald R. Seawell, and others in the early 1950s as a community theatre, their work ultimately involved a partnership to produce plays on Broadway and in London. Their success led to expanding beyond community theatre for Denver and plans were made to build a new space, with guidance from Tyrone Guthrie and observance of the model provided by the Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Housed in the Helen G. Bonfils Theatre Complex in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, DTC truly began operations as a professional company in the Complex’s three theatre spaces in 1979, with concurrent productions of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Moby Dick Rehearsed, and The Learned Ladies. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. DERWENT, CLARENCE (1884–1959). Born in London, England, Derwent acted in Great Britain for 13 years before making his New York debut in 1915 opposite Grace George* in the American premiere of George Ber-

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nard Shaw’s Major Barbara. He enjoyed a long distinguished career in both countries, playing perhaps as many as 500 roles. Having performed in all but three of Shakespeare’s plays, he claimed Shylock in The Merchant of Venice as his favorite. On Broadway, among his many appearances, Derwent acted in The Three Musketeers (1928), Serena Blandish (1929), Topaze (1930), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1937), Kind Lady (1940), The Pirate (1942), Lute Song (1946), The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947), Laura (1947), and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948). He served two terms as president of the Actors’ Equity Association and was president of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) from 1952 until his death. DESIGN/DESIGNERS. For present-day theatre productions, whether on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, regional, and academic theatre, the visual elements—scenery, costumes, lighting, properties, special effects, etc.—are typically each created by individual designers supported by assistants and crews carrying out the realization of the design. In the early nineteenth century, following the rise of antiquarianism, a movement leading to the creation of an historically accurate mise-en-scène for a play (as opposed to the generic settings often employed), scene painters concerned themselves mostly with a visually appealing scene not unlike a life-sized picture postcard of a genuine location. The earliest American publication on scene painting was A Practical Guide to Scene Painting and Painting in Distemper (ca. 1883) by F. Lloyds, who described techniques, equipment, and scenic elements, but with improvements in technology, particularly in lighting with the arrival of electric lights, and greater attention to costuming, the necessity for specialized designers increased by 1900. Scene, costume, and lighting design emerged as individual areas of concern, each requiring a designer during the early twentieth century, with other areas, including sound, props, and special effects, ultimately also requiring specialized designers. As the visual aspects of theatre diversified in such a way, the director emerged as an essential figure responsible for, among other things, collaborating with the designers to achieve a unified production. Ironically, by the 1930s, many scene designers also chose to provide costume and/ or lighting designs as well (often in a desire to more easily achieve a holistic visual scheme), but only a few designed multiple areas with any regularity. Evolving from new theories and the experimentation of European designers, most notably Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, a New Stagecraft* developed with an emphasis on departures from the prevailing “painted realism” typical of the nineteenth-century stage. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the concepts of Appia and Craig, and others, which had

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been developing since the 1880s, increasingly won widespread acceptance in European productions, but did not reach America until shortly before World War I, first and most decisively in the work of Robert Edmond Jones. In general terms, the New Stagecraft, as practiced by Jones, involved a freer, more impressionistic use of color and line, with the unifying element of lighting, all with the goal of creating a visual environment in which everything seen contributed to a revelation of the text’s themes, characters, and mood, and were thoroughly unified with the contributions of the actor and director, as well as the playwright. The seminal production featuring the New Stagecraft in the United States was Jones’s 1915 design for an English translation of Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, staged by British director Harley Granville Barker. It was a simple design, selective in its use of central elements of structure and furnishing, and like the work of Appia and Craig in Europe, Jones’s designs provided a path away from what Craig derisively described as the limitations of “photographic realism” in the miseen-scène. Jones’s style, inspired by European design, was otherwise singular and his prolific designing career, which stretched from the 1910s to the 1950s, encompassed every conceivable genre, from Shakespearean productions of Richard III in 1920 and Hamlet in 1922 starring John Barrymore* to most of Eugene O’Neill’s plays of the 1920s and 1930s and even an occasional musical. Other like-minded designers followed in Jones’s path, including most notably Lee Simonson, Donald Oenslager, Mordecai Gorelik, and Jo Mielziner. By the 1940s, as stage technology continued to improve and as American plays and musicals invited bolder design choices, a few designers, especially Mielziner, dominated. His designs for two of the greatest American plays of the era, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), in large part through his contributions, confirmed the triumph of American lyric realism. The European influence continued to be significant, as seen in the evocative and diverse scene designs of Russian-born Boris Aronson, who spent his career designing for Broadway into the 1970s after cutting his teeth as a designer during the 1920s and early 1930s in Moscow. Transplanted German designers also had an impact on Broadway and in opera, including Harry Horner, Herman Rosse, and Wolfgang Roth. From World War II to 1980, two generations of highly individual scene designers brought visual innovations as stage technology and available materials for stage use significantly improved in quality and variety. These scene designers, many of whom also designed costumes and/or lighting—and occasionally directed or produced—included Lemuel Ayers, Howard Bay, John Lee Beatty, Stewart Chaney, John Conklin, William and Jean Eckart,

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Ben Edwards, Karl Eigsti, Eldon Elder, Charles Elson, Frederick Fox, Ralph Funicello, Neil Peter Jampolis, George Jenkins, Albert R. Johnson, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, Peter Larkin, Eugene Lee, Ming Cho Lee, Samuel Leve, William Ivey Long, Santo Loquasto, David Mitchell, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Beni Montresor, Robert O’Hearn, Lester Polakov, William Ritman, Douglas W. Schmidt, Oliver Smith, Serge Soudekine, Raymond Sovey, Fred Voelpel, Robin Wagner, Tony Walton, Peter Wexler, and Ed Wittstein, among others. Many of these designers continue to contribute into the twenty-first century and many have been extraordinarily prolific on Broadway, although increasingly after 1960 many worked in OffBroadway, Off-Off-Broadway, regional, and university theatres, and also designed for opera, ballet, films, and television. Scene designers of the era between 1980 to 2010 were more likely to do their work away from Broadway, most often in regional and Off-Broadway theatres. Among these are such leading figures as Michael Anania, Loy Arcenas, John Arnone, Christopher Barreca, Gabriel Berry, Jim Clayburgh, David Gallo, David Hays, Robert Israel, Heidi Ettinger Landesman, Adrianne Lobel, Thomas Lynch, James Noone, Neil Patel, Kevin Rigdon, David Rockwell, Douglas Stein, Paul Steinberg, Tony Straiges, Julie Taymor, George Tsypin, Michael Yeargan, and David Zinn. Each have added innovations, particularly as computer-related technologies, emerged and offered new possibilities. Many among these designers—Julie Taymor, for example—are likely to blur the lines among the various areas of design and, in Taymor’s case, she also directs and writes with distinction. In the area of costume design, it is more likely that the designer focuses exclusively on costumes; however, like scene designers, they are inclined to work successfully in film (as in the case of Broadway’s Irene Sharaff) or in opera and dance, as well as regional and university theatres. Since 1930, most have contributed to Broadway, including such leading costume designers as Theoni V. Aldredge, Lucinda Ballard, Aline Bernstein, Rolf Gérard, Jane Greenwood, Willa Kim, Florence Klotz, Franne Lee, Robert Mackintosh, Mainbocher, Motley, Nancy Potts, Carrie Robbins, Ann Roth, Rouben Ter-Artunian, Susan Tsu, and Patricia Zipprodt, while post-1970s costume designers are more likely to have their work seen OffBroadway and in regional theatres, as well as film and television. Among these are Susan Hilferty, Ann Hould-Ward, Michael Krass, Martin Pakledinaz, Robert Perdziola, Dunya Ramicova, Paul Tazewell, Jennifer Von Mayrhauser, and Catherine Zuber, to name a few. Lighting design, particularly since World War II on Broadway, has tended to be dominated by few major names, among them Jules Fisher, Tharon Musser, Jean Rosenthal, Thomas R. Skelton, and Jennifer Tipton, but

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most of these artists also branched out to embrace opportunities away from Broadway, ultimately, in regional theatres. Other major lighting designers of the era between 1930 and 2010 include Martin Aronstein, Ken Billington, Peggy Clark, Pat Collins, Peggy Eisenhauer, Beverly Emmons, Abe Feder, Paul Gallo, John Gleason, Gilbert Hemsley, Mark Henderson, Peter Kaczorowski, Leo Kerz, Roger Morgan, Richard Nelson, Dennis Parichy, and Richard Pilbrow, among many others. American designers have also developed new theatre technologies—computerized equipment for drafting, lighting, and sound—and consulted on theatre architecture, including such designers as Herbert J. Krapp, Edward Kook, and, most notably, George Izenouer. Many, beginning with Robert Edmond Jones, have written theoretical works on theatre and design (Jones’s seminal The Dramatic Imagination has remained in print since its original publication in 1941) and the most noted and prolific of the scene and costume designers have had collections of their designs published which, in the cases of Jones, Simonson, Oenslager, Mielziner, and Aronson, provides a remarkable visual history of the American theatre between World War I and 1980. DETECTIVE STORY. Sidney Kingsley’s slice-of-life drama of a day in a police station opened on 23 March 1949 at the Hudson Theatre for 581 performances. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse produced, Kingsley directed, and Boris Aronson provided scene designs for this realistic large-cast play featuring Ralph Bellamy as a harried detective. The cast included veterans Jean Adair, Alexander Scourby, Joseph Wiseman, and Horace McMahon, while bright newcomers including Lee Grant and Maureen Stapleton made strong impressions. A 1951 film version directed by William Wyler featured members of the Broadway cast, including McMahon, Wiseman, and Grant, who garnered an Academy Award nomination, with Kirk Douglas replacing Bellamy. DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, THE. As part of the American Lyric Theatre Repertory, this play with music (some critics labeled it a “folk opera”) by Stephen Vincent Benét and Douglas Stuart Moore, adapted from Benét’s 1937 short story, opened on 18 May 1939 for 6 performances under the direction of John Houseman with scene designs by Robert Edmond Jones. Despite its brief Broadway life, Benét’s story, which was inspired by Faust and Washington Irving’s story “The Devil and Tom Walker,” and the play have had an enduring life on stages and on screen. The play centers on Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer with little luck, who sells his soul to the devil, known as Mr. Scratch. When Stone ultimately repents his decision, he calls upon Daniel Webster to defend him, although Mr. Scratch will only

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agree if he can summon a jury of historic villains from the bowels of hell to serve as a jury. An atmospheric 1941 RKO film version, sometimes called All That Money Can Buy, starring Walter Huston, in an Academy Awardnominated performance, as Mr. Scratch, has attained classic status, in part through Bernard Herrmann’s Oscar-winning score, although an updated 2007 remake failed to find favor. DEWHURST, COLLEEN (1924–1991). Born in Montreal, Canada, this much-honored actress of theatre, film, and television was raised in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, and attended Milwaukee-Downer College. She labored long in Off-Broadway theatres, beginning in a minor role in a 1952 revival of Desire under the Elms.* She won a Theatre World Award for Children of Darkness (1958) and a Drama Desk Award for Hello and Goodbye (1970) Off-Broadway, but much of her most noted work was done on Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for All the Way Home (1960) and garnering Tony nominations for Great Day in the Morning (1962), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), More Stately Mansions (1967), All Over (1971), and a revival of Mourning Becomes Electra in 1972 (for which she won a Drama Desk Award). Dewhurst appeared in another highly acclaimed revival, Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1973, continuing a long association with O’Neill’s work. She won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her performance of Connecticut farm girl Josie Hogan and appeared in a 1975 television production based on the revival. Dewhurst appeared with some frequency in films and television (winning four Emmy Awards and eleven nominations), but returned to the stage, receiving a Tony nomination for a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1976 and Drama Desk nominations for The Queen and the Rebels (1982) and a revival of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1988, this last being part of a two-play repertory with O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, both of which starred Dewhurst with her A Moon for the Misbegotten costar, Jason Robards, who, like Dewhurst, was much-admired in productions of O’Neill’s plays. Dewhurst’s other noted Broadway appearances include a revival of The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1970, An Almost Perfect Person (1977), and the all-star 1983 revival of You Can’t Take It with You. Dewhurst was twice married to and divorced from actor George C. Scott and is the mother of actor Campbell Scott. From 1985 to her death, Dewhurst was president of the Actors’ Equity Association. DEXTER, JOHN (1925–1990). A British theatre, opera, and film director, Dexter was born in Derby, England, and following service in the British army

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during World War II, he began his theatre career as an actor, but in 1957 joined the Royal Court Theatre as associate director prior to taking a similar position with the National Theatre of Great Britain in 1963 and, eventually, becoming its director. Despite the fact that much of his career was spent in England, he directed several Broadway productions, winning Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for his productions of Equus (1974) and M. Butterfly (1988). On Broadway, he also staged Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), Black Comedy/White Lies (1967), for which he was Tony-nominated, The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967), and revivals of The Misanthrope in 1975, The Glass Menagerie in 1983, and Threepenny Opera in 1989. DIAL “M” FOR MURDER. Frederick Knott’s hit thriller about a man’s plan to murder his wife opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 29 October 1952 for 552 performances under the direction of Reginald Denham. John Williams won a Tony Award as Inspector Hubbard, who works to determine who is the guilty party—husband Tony Wendice (Maurice Evans) or wife Margot (Gusti Huber). Alfred Hitchcock directed a 1954 film version in which Williams repeated his performance and costarred with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, THE. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett adapted the diary of an optimistic young Jewish girl lost in the Holocaust into a two-act Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Tony Award-winning drama that opened on 5 October 1955 in a Kermit Bloomgarden production at the Cort Theatre for 717 performances under the direction of Garson Kanin with scene design by Boris Aronson. Covering a period from July 1942 to August 1944, the play chronicles the struggles of the Frank family and a few other Jewish neighbors to live hidden in an Amsterdam attic as the occupying Nazi forces search for them and other hidden “undesirables.” Thirteen-year-old Anne, the daughter of the family, played by Theatre World Award winner and Tony Award-nominated Susan Strasberg, maintains an unyielding optimism and goes through growing pains under these extraordinary circumstances. The original cast, which included Joseph Schildkraut as Otto Frank, with Jack Gilford, Gusti Huber, Lou Jacobi, and others, received critical acclaim. The play, in a revised version by Wendy Kesselman and James Lapine, returned to Broadway in 1997 for 221 performances and a 1959 film version won three Academy Awards, including one for Shelley Winters in a supporting role, with Schildkraut, Huber, and Jacobi repeating their Broadway performances. In addition, there were two

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television film versions (1967, 1980) and two TV series (1987, 2008) based on the play also appeared. DIGGES, DUDLEY (1879–1947).† Born in Dublin, Ireland, Digges worked with the Irish National Theatre before moving to the United States in 1904. He played opposite Minnie Maddern Fiske* in The Rising of the Moon (1908) and George Arliss* in Disraeli (1911) joining The Theatre Guild in 1919. For the Guild, Digges distinguished himself in the original productions of The Adding Machine* (1923), Outward Bound* (1924), Marco Millions* (1928), and Dynamo* (1929), as well as a range of American productions of important European works. Digges also staged several Guild productions and when he left the Guild in 1930, he gave notable performances in Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time (1938), George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s George Washington Slept Here (1942), and a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida in 1942. He served as vice-president of Actors’ Equity Association and appeared in nearly 50 films, including the screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* (1933). Given his association with several O’Neill plays in the 1920s, it was fitting that Digges had his final Broadway role as Harry Hope in The Iceman Cometh (1946), a performance that won him critical plaudits. DINING ROOM, THE. A. R. Gurney, Jr.’s comedy of manners in 18 scenes was produced by Playwrights Horizons in their Studio Theatre, where it opened on 24 February 1982 for 511 performances. Gurney makes use of a single well-appointed dining room set in which the stories of several New England families overlap in a depiction of the decline of upper-middle class white families in the late twentieth century. The play derives some mocking comedy from particular characters, but also laments the passing of a certain kind of social stability inherent in their lives. The original cast featured William H. Macy, Lois de Banzie, Remak Ramsay, and John Shea. Despite the play’s success, a 1984 television film version failed to excite much critical enthusiasm. DINNER AT EIGHT. George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s brittle comedy-drama opened on 22 October 1932 in a Sam H. Harris production at the Music Box Theatre for 232 performances. Kaufman and Ferber capture a moment among New York City’s elite as its denizens face the hard economic realities of the Great Depression. Their rarified world would soon vanish and the only characters with a chance of survival must be resourceful and demonstrate strong moral character. Several of the play’s characters are in

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dire financial straits, but none are as desperate as Larry Renault, a played-out roué and ex-matinee idol, who has fallen into a casual month-long affair with the shipping magnate Oliver Jordan’s (Malcolm Duncan) socialite daughter, Paula (Marguerite Churchill), whose feelings for him are made of equal parts desire and pity. Paula’s mother, Millicent (Ann Andrews), a flighty social climber, plans a dinner for England’s Lord and Lady Ferncliffe and has invited Renault, unaware of his illicit relationship with Paula. The tribulations of the various guests, including stage star Carlotta Vance (Constance Collier), are seen as they all prepare to attend the party. Paula tries to stem Renault’s out-of-control drinking, but his impatience with her entreaties causes her to back off. When Renault is offered a minor role in an upcoming Broadway play, he is too proud to accept and, with nowhere to turn, commits suicide. Conway Tearle* scored a personal success as Renault and the entire production was praised, with the New York Herald Tribune critic calling it “one of the best of the shrewdly literate Broadway dramas.” A revival in 1966 with an all-star cast (Darren McGavin played Renault) ran for 127 performances, and a 2002 Lincoln Center production won plaudits for Byron Jennings as Renault, but the play lives most vividly in the cultural imagination through its lavish 1933 screen adaptation, and the character of Renault similarly merged with the brilliant, self-destructive John Barrymore,* who gave one of his finest screen performances under director George Cukor. DINNER WITH FRIENDS. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Donald Margulies was first performed in 1998 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville prior to its Off-Broadway production, which opened on 4 November 1999. In the play, happily married Gabe and Karen (Matthew Arkin, Lisa Emery) observe the collapse of the marriage of their friends, Tom and Beth (Kevin Kilner, Julie White), which ultimately forces them to assess their own marriage. Along with the Pulitzer, the play also won the Lucille Lortel Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award, among other acknowledgments. A 2001 television film version received two Emmy Award nominations and starred Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell, Greg Kinnear, and Toni Collette. DIRECTING/DIRECTORS. The director as the dominant force in theatrical production was a concept and a reality that began to emerge in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The position of the actor-manager of the eighteenth century and first three-quarters of the nineteenth century slowly evolved into a dominant interpretive force commanding overall responsibility for every facet of a theatre production. As pioneered by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meningen, in 1870s Europe, the modern director guides actors, design-

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ers, and technicians to achieve an aesthetically unified production, and as new technologies provided greater visual opportunities and the New Stagecraft* of fin de siècle Europe demanded a strong force to guide the growing number of collaborators, the contemporary director emerged. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American theatre practitioners largely embraced this model, although program credit for directing did not become standard until after World War I. The prior control of actor-managers, particularly those who were star actors, continued into the twentieth century as the star often remained the strongest presence in a commercial theatre production. Artistically inclined producers such as George M. Cohan (who often directed, while also producing, acting, and writing) or Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.* (strictly a producer, albeit one whose taste and artistic vision contributed significantly to the quality of his productions) employed directors as little more than glorified stage managers while they continued to control all aspects of production. Indeed, in England, the practice of directing continued to be ascribed to a “producer” for several decades after the term “director” became current in American theatre. In addition, many producers until well into the mid-twentieth century were also directors. The rise of realism in U.S. drama, first evident in James A. Herne’s* social problem play Margaret Fleming* (1890), and in the painstakingly detailed stage productions of David Belasco,* along with significant advances in stage technology, increased the need for a strong director to guide actors through the intricacies of challenging plays and to supervise increasingly complex technical productions. By the 1910s, with the emergence of the Little Theatre movement,* and particularly after World War I, the formation of ambitious producing organizations (the Provincetown Players,* the Theatre Guild, The Group Theatre, etc.) required directors with a fervent artistic vision coupled with sensitive interpretive skills, not to mention a strong organizational bent. The Russian-born theatre artist Theodore Komisarjevsky worked in the United States from 1934 and was among several international directors instrumental in demonstrating directorial artistry as distinct from producing or management, although some notable Americanborn directors were already at work on Broadway in the 1920s, including George Abbott, George M. Cohan, Jed Harris, Eva Le Gallienne, and Phillip Moeller, although Cohan and Le Gallienne were closer to the star actor-managers of the pre-World War I era and all were, at various times, producers. In fact, many leading actors, as well as producers, also directed in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the most acclaimed directors between 1920 and 1960 were also playwrights, including Abe Burrows, Moss Hart, Garson Kanin, George S. Kaufman, and Arthur Laurents, and some, like Eddie Dowling and

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Richard Whorf, were better known as actors (or producers) or, in the cases of Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg, acting teachers. Harold Clurman doubled as a director and a critic/teacher for a long career extending from the 1930s, when he rose to prominence with The Group Theatre, to the 1970s. Other directors became associated with a particular actor; for example, Guthrie McClintic guided the long and distinguished career of his wife, Katharine Cornell, although he occasionally directed plays without her involvement. Without question, Abbott, known to his colleagues by the affectionate and respectful moniker “Mister Abbott,” was the “brand name” Broadway director between the mid-1920s and the 1960s, although Kaufman was easily as versatile a director as Abbott; both men staged plays in every genre typical of Broadway, from the most serious dramas to musicals. In Kaufman’s case, the achievement is especially impressive since he was also a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. The Group Theatre was not the only entity in the 1930s to inspire directors like Clurman, Strasberg, and others. The Federal Theatre Project provided important early opportunities to a number of directors, none more so than Orson Welles, who rose to fame and notoriety as a director (and actor) with the FTP, most famously for his staging of Marc Blitzstein’s musical satire, The Cradle Will Rock (1937), which caused considerable controversy, but also for novel productions of Shakespeare, including his all-black “voodoo” Macbeth (1936) and a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar (1937), creating a parallel with the rise of European fascism. The 1930s also produced the most acclaimed Broadway director from the 1940s to the 1960s, Elia Kazan. Both Welles and Kazan spent at least as much time directing films as theatre once they had achieved fame. Welles’s returns to the stage were particularly rare after the early 1940s. Kazan, however, returned consistently to Broadway and was associated with some of the most important new American plays produced in the mid-twentieth century, most particularly the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Many stage directors in the wake of Welles and Kazan were influenced by their work on stage and screen, and most also worked as often in film (and television after the late 1940s) as theatre. Some directors arriving on the scene between the 1940s and the 1970s devoted themselves to Broadway’s more popular fare (Morton Da Costa, Vincent J. Donehue, Robert Moore, Gene Saks, Dore Schary), while others were identified with serious drama (William Ball, Gene Frankel, Jules Irving, Daniel Mann, Marshall W. Mason, Arthur Penn, José Quintero, Stuart Vaughan) or more experimental and avant-garde works either on Broadway or, more likely, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway (Julian Beck, Herbert Blau, Tom O’Horgan, Alan Schneider, Robert Wilson).

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Others, including Joseph Anthony, José Ferrer, Gerald Freedman, Joseph Hardy, Albert Marre, Jack O’Brien, Ellis Rabb, Mel Shapiro, Edwin Sherin, Daniel Sullivan, David Wheeler, and Garland Wright, demonstrated versatility, moving between commercial works and serious drama. Among the most versatile of the era, there are two standouts: Joshua Logan, although he is perhaps more remembered for his work in musicals (some of which he coauthored, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific), and Mike Nichols, who began as a performer before becoming a celebrated film and stage director who continued to work with distinction for five decades in all genres. Women directors were comparatively rare until the late 1960s and into the twenty-first century, although in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several star actress/managers had taken strong directorial control of their productions. Eva Le Gallienne, following on the model established by the most notable among such women, Minnie Maddern Fiske,* established herself as a director (and actress) with her Civic Repertory Theatre,* while other women, including British director Margaret Webster, who often directed Shakespeare’s plays on Broadway and in other American theatres, were increasingly accepted. Women playwrights, including Rachel Crothers, and later, Elaine May, often directed their own works, and by the 1940s, women directors including Antoinette Perry and Margo Jones, along with Webster, directed with some frequency. By the 1970s, more significant inroads were made when Julie Taymor became the first director to win a Tony Award (ironically named for Antoinette Perry), one sign of greater acceptance on Broadway, although Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres had been more welcoming to women directors since the 1950s, including such pioneers as Julie Bovasso (who was more known as an actress and a sometime writer), Elizabeth LeCompte, Judith Malina, and others. African American women directors were even more rare in the twentieth century, although Vinnette Carroll won acclaim as the first black woman director on Broadway in 1972, staging Miki Grant’s musical, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. Regional theatres, feminist companies, and other theatres away from the New York mainstream provided increased opportunities to women directors after 1980, including, among others, Pamela Berlind, Anne Bogart, Tina Landau, Carey Perloff, Lisa Peterson, and Mary Zimmerman. African American directors were few prior to the 1960s, but in the later decades of the twentieth century several rose to distinction, including Gilbert H. Moses, III, Harold Scott (who became the first African American to serve as artistic director of a major regional theatre, the Paper Mill Playhouse), and Douglas Turner Ward. Most notable among black directors were Lloyd Richards, who directed the premieres of most of August Wilson’s plays and headed

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the Yale School of Drama, and George C. Wolfe, who won acclaim as a playwright (The Colored Museum) and as artistic director of The Public Theatre. International and foreign-born directors worked with regularity in American theatre, on Broadway and elsewhere, from the 1920s, but more frequently after World War II, including, between the 1930s to 2010, Peter Brook, Michael Chekhov, Liviu Ciulei, Reginald Denham, John Dexter, Michael Grandage, Peter Glenville, Ulu Grosbard, Tyrone Guthrie, Adrian Hall, Peter Hall, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Langham, Vivian Matalon, Des McAnuff, Trevor Nunn, Ben Iden Payne, Erwin Piscator, Max Reinhardt, Michael Saint-Denis, Andrei Serban, John Tillinger, Matthew Warchus, Margaret Webster, and Bretaigne Windust. After 1970, most American stage directors not only worked frequently in film and television, but most either emerged from or developed long relationships with regional theatres and, on occasion, academic theatres. More importantly, many post-World War II directors were increasingly influenced by film techniques (as were playwrights) and were inspired by many modern and contemporary international stage techniques, from Asian theatre to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Directors continued to associate themselves either with particular artists and companies or with a genre of theatre, but most followed the model established by earlier major directors like Abbott and Kaufman, becoming skilled in all forms of theatre and often writing/ adapting plays, acting, and producing and/or serving as artistic directors of companies. From 1970 to 2010, these directors include such diverse figures as A. J. Antoon, Jeff Bleckner, Lee Breuer, Mark Brokaw, Arvin Brown, Carmen Capalbo, David Cromer, Gordon Davidson, Scott Elliott, Scott Ellis, David Esbjornson, Oskar Eustis, Robert Falls, Gene Feist, Frank Galati, Michael Greif, Gerald Gutierrez, Jon Jory, Michael Kahn, Moisés Kaufman, Brian Kulick, Mark Lamos, James Lapine, Wilford Leach, Michael Mayer, Gregory Mosher, Stephen Porter, John Rando, Peter Sellars, Bartlett Sher, Robert Woodruff, Jerry Zaks, and Scott Ziegler, among others. Some worked on Broadway and others devoted themselves exclusively to one or another theatre company, either in New York or other major cities, and some worked frequently in film and television, but all continued a long American directorial tradition dating back at least as far as 1920. DISNEY THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS. Set up by the Walt Disney Company in 1994, this production organization produces Broadway versions of Disney-owned screen properties. Thus far, it has only produced musicals based on Disney films, but among its contributions to the New York theatre was the careful restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, once the home of the Ziegfeld* Follies.

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DOCUMENTARY THEATRE. Since the classical period, much theatre has been based on history and topical events, but this term refers most directly to a brand of contemporary theatre based, in part, on the epic theatre style pioneered by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in Germany before World War II. Adherents to the epic style, including Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, and Heinar Kipphardt, like Brecht, turned to the historical to make political arguments about the impact of that history and current events. In the pre-World War II years in America, this approach with modifications was adopted by the Federal Theatre Project for their Living Newspaper productions, in which current issues taken from the headlines were presented in theatrical form, using direct quotes from documents, government officials, and others pertinent to the topic of a particular work. The documentary form was not much used by American playwrights in the first decades after the war. However with the social unrest of the 1960s, documentary theatre—sometimes referred to as docudramas—achieved a vigorous new life, particularly Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, in such works as Martin Duberman’s In White America (1964), Daniel Berrigan’s Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), Eric Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1972), all of which looked back at American history in response to more current issues. Many courtroom dramas, including Inherit the Wind (1955) and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1968), draw heavily on the historical record while fictionalizing as well. This balance of fact and fiction has blurred, even as more artful presentations of the historical record have appeared, and the necessity of following the historical record closely is at least partially challenged even as the work retains its documentary ambience, including Steve Dobbins’s The Dan White Incident (1983), Robert Wilson’s CIVIL WarS (1984), Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1985), Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1986), Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1991), Ping Chong’s The Undesirable Elements (1992), Marc Wolf’s Another American: Asking and Telling (1999), the Tectonic Theatre Project’s The Laramie Project (2001), Michael Rohd’s Witness Our Schools (2004), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2004). Gary Fisher Dawson has written a study surveying American documentary drama in Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft (Greenwood Press, 1999). Another sort of documentary theatre are solo performances depicting historical personages in which the subject’s own words are used, such as in Mark Twain Tonight! (1966), as well as numerous subsequent plays adopting a similar approach and focusing on such diverse figures as Harry S. Truman in Give ’Em Hell, Harry (1975), Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst (1976), Theodore Roosevelt in Bully! (1978), Paul Robeson in Paul

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Robeson (1978), and Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony (2003), and others, many of which succeeded on Broadway, on tour, and in regional theatres. DODSON, OWEN (1914–1983). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Owen Vincent Dodson graduated from Bates College and the Yale School of Drama before teaching at Howard University. A playwright, poet, and novelist, Dodson trained a number of important African American theatre practitioners, including Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Earle Hyman, Richard Wesley, Phylicia Rashad, and Debbie Allen. As a playwright, he acknowledged debts to Henrik Ibsen and Langston Hughes, and his work has mostly been produced in university theatres, including Divine Comedy (1938), Garden of Time (1939), Amistad (1939), Doomsday Tale (1941), Gonna Tear Them Pillars Down (1942), The Ballad of Dorrie Miller (1943), New World A-Coming (1944), The Third Fourth of July (1946; coauthored with Countee Cullen), Bayou Legend (1946), Medea in Africa (1959; coauthored with Countee Cullen), Till Victory Is Won (1965), The Story of the Soul (1978), and Freedom, The Banner (1983). Writing of Dodson’s significance in the Harlem Renaissance, James V. Hatch notes that Dodson “is the product of two parallel forces—the Black experience in America with its folk and urban routes, and a classical humanist education.” DODSWORTH. Sidney Howard’s three-act drama adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s novel was produced by Max Gordon and opened on 24 February 1934 at the Shubert Theatre for 147 performances under the direction of Robert B. Sinclair, with settings by Jo Mielziner. Walter Huston starred as the title character, a wealthy automaker who has retired to take his wife Fran (Fay Bainter) on a European grand tour. Instead of renewing their relationship and enjoying the cultural riches of Europe, the spoiled and childish Fran indulges in meaningless affairs. The unhappy Dodsworth meets Edith Cortright (Nan Sunderland), whose grace and compassion encourages him to stay in Europe with her while Fran, surprised by Dodsworth’s resolve to start his life over, faces her culpability in the end of their relationship. Huston repeated his performance in a 1936 film version, reaping an Academy Award nomination, as did Howard’s screenplay. DONALDSON AWARD. These theatre awards were created in 1944 to honor the memory of W. H. Donaldson, the founder of Billboard* magazine. Several categories were created, including best play, best musical, best debut performances, and best costumes and set design. The Donaldson Awards continued annually until 1955, a few years after the Antoinette Perry Tony Awards rendered the Donaldsons redundant.

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DONAT, PETER (1928– ). A native of Kentville, Nova Scotia, Canada, Pierre Collingwood Donat moved to the United States in 1950 and found work as an actor with the Provincetown Playhouse,* the Margo Jones Theatre, and several stock theatres, playing everything from Shakespeare and Shaw to contemporary American plays. The nephew of Academy Awardwinning actor Robert Donat, after a long apprenticeship in repertory and stock theatre, he found a semi-permanent home at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre beginning in 1968, winning praise for many performances, including the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac in 1972 and Dysart in Equus in 1975. Donat has given numerous film and television performances and appeared on Broadway in The First Gentlemen (1957), for which he won a Theatre World Award, a revival of The Country Wife in 1957, The Entertainer (1958), The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), and There’s One in Every Marriage (1972). DONEHUE, VINCENT J. (1915–1966). Born in Whitehall, New York, Vincent Julian Donehue began his career as an actor, appearing on Broadway in Jeremiah (1939), Christmas Eve (1939), and The Old Foolishness (1940), but switched to directing in 1953, scoring major successes staging Sunrise at Campobello (1958), for which he won a Tony Award, and The Sound of Music (1959), for which he received a Tony nomination. Adept at both drama and musicals, he also directed The Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Traveling Lady (1954), All in One (1955), Daughter of Silence (1961), Lord Pengo (1962), Jennie (1963), and Catch Me If You Can (1965). Donehue also directed for television during the 1950s and 1960s, most notably the 1960 TV production of Peter Pan* in 1960 and on the big screen he directed Lonelyhearts (1958) and the screen version of Sunrise at Campobello in 1960. DONNELLY, DONAL (1931–2010). This Anglo-Irish actor was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, but raised in Ireland. He attended the Synge Street Christian Brothers School before beginning a stage and film career touring in Anew McMaster’s Irish Repertory Company. On Broadway, he was nominated for a Tony Award in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1966), after which he replaced the lead in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1968). He received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Faith Healer (1979) and won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award as part of the ensemble of Dancing at Lughnasa (1991). Donnelly’s other Broadway appearances include The Mundy Scheme (1969), Execution of Justice (1986), Sherlock’s Last Case (1987), Ghetto (1989), and Translations (1995), and replaced Keith Baxter as Milo Tindle in Sleuth (1970) and also stepped in as a replacement in The Elephant Man (1979). He appeared in many

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television shows and films, including most notably The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965). DOUBT: A PARABLE. John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 November 2004 prior to transferring to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre on 31 March 2005 for 525 performances under the Tony-winning direction of Doug Hughes. Set in 1964, the play is set at a parochial school in the Bronx (designed by John Lee Beatty) where the principal, the rigid Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones in a Tony-winning performance) suspects that a priest, Father Flynn (Brían F. O’Byrne), has had an inappropriate relationship with the school’s first black student. Despite lacking hard evidence, Sister Aloysius enlists the somewhat unwilling assistance of Sister James (Heather Goldenhersh) and the boy’s mother, Mrs. Muller (Adriane Lenox in a Tonywinning performance). Shanley’s play transcends the question of whether or not Father Flynn has done what Sister Aloysius believes he has done, but instead centers on the nature of uncertainty and a range of inherent questions of morality, race, and religious belief. A 2008 film version was nominated for five Academy Awards and starred Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. DOUGHGIRLS, THE. Joseph Fields’s three-act comedy produced by Max Gordon opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 30 December 1942 for 671 performances. Directed by George S. Kaufman, the play is set in a Washington, D.C. hotel suite where three women, all unmarried although they have been living with men, are compelled to live together due to the wartime housing shortage in the nation’s capital. Virginia Field, Doris Nolan, and Arleen Whelan played the three women, with Arlene Francis as a Russian sniper who moves in with them. The personal relationships of the women cause a variety of complications, all resolved despite critical complaints at the risqué aspects of the plot. Despite this, wartime audiences clearly enjoyed this lighthearted romp expertly staged by Kaufman. A 1944 film version, starring Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, and Jane Wyman, ramped up the comedy, but diluted the moral ambiguities by providing the girls with husbands or more chaste relationships. DOUGLAS, MELVYN (1901–1981). Born Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg in Macon, Georgia, Douglas’s long acting career encompassed stage and screen. He began his career in stock companies, including that of Jessie Bonstelle,* before establishing his own theatre in Madison, Wisconsin. Douglas debuted on Broadway in 1928 in A Free Soul and shortly thereafter began a suc-

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cessful film career. On Broadway, Douglas won a Best Actor Tony Award for The Best Man (1960) and also appeared in Tonight or Never (1930), No More Ladies (1934), Within the Gates (1934), Two Blind Mice (1949), The Bird Cage (1950), Glad Tidings (1951), which he also directed, Time Out for Ginger (1952), a revival of The Waltz of the Toreadors in 1958, Juno (1959), The Gang’s All Here (1959), and Spofford (1967). Douglas also replaced Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind (1955). In the movies, Douglas won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award twice, for Hud (1963) and Being There (1979), and received an Oscar nomination for I Never Sang for My Father (1970). Other notable films include Counsellorat-Law (1933), Captains Courageous (1937), Ninotchka (1939), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Sea of Grass (1947), Billy Budd (1962), The Candidate (1972), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), and Ghost Story (1981). On television, Douglas was nominated for an Emmy Award for a TV production of Inherit the Wind in 1965 and he won an Emmy for Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (1967). Douglas’s second wife, actress Helen Gahagan, famously went into politics as a three-term Congresswoman who ran against Richard Nixon, who accused her of Communist leanings, stating that she was “pink right down to her underwear.” In response, Gahagan labeled Nixon “Tricky Dick.” Douglas’s granddaughter Illeana Douglas is a successful film and television actress. DOWD, HARRISON (1897–1964). Born in Madison, Connecticut, Dowd was a poet, pianist, and actor. In 1918, he made his Broadway debut in Chu Chin Chow. With the Provincetown Players* in 1919, he played Pierrot in Aria da Capo.* He also appeared in productions of A Trip to Scarborough (1929), The Dragon (1929), Night of Love (1941), Harriet (1943), a revival of Little Women* in 1944, The Assassin (1945), A Temporary Island (1948), Dinosaur Wharf (1951), See the Jaguar (1952), in support of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in The Visit (1958), Caligula (1960), and Night Life (1962). DOWLING, EDDIE (1889–1976). This actor, playwright, and producer was born Joseph Narcisse Gaucher in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, of Canadian parentage. He began his acting career in 1909 in a stock production of Quo Vadis? in Providence, Rhode Island. He toured in the Ziegfeld* Follies of 1918 and married actress/comedienne Ray Dooley. Much of Dowling’s early Broadway work was in musicals, including Sally, Irene and Mary (1922), Honeymoon Lane (1926), Sidewalks of New York (1927), for which he also wrote the book, music, and lyrics, and others before becoming a producer of such diverse plays as the Maurice Evans production of Richard II in 1937,

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Shadow and Substance (1938), and Here Come the Clowns (1938). As World War II approached, Dowling continued to produce (and sometimes direct and act, but he distinguished himself directing and starring as Joe in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939) and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), in which he played Williams’s alter ego, Tom Wingfield opposite the legendary Laurette Taylor. He also directed Saroyan’s Love’s Old Sweet Song (1940) and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946). Dowling also appeared in a few early “talkies” between 1929 and 1931. DRAKE, ALFRED (1914–1992). Born Alfredo Capurro in New York, he won his most lasting fame in musicals, but his acting career was far more varied. His first Broadway appearances were in the ensembles of several Gilbert and Sullivan operettas* of the Civic Light Opera Company in 1935, but he was first noticed as part of the exuberant young company of Babes in Arms (1937) and several other musicals before winning critical acclaim as the cowboy Curly in Oklahoma! (1943) and Fred Graham/Petruchio in Kiss Me, Kate (1948). Drake won a Tony Award for Kismet (1954) and subsequent nominations for Kean (1962) and Gigi (1974). Drake’s non-musical Broadway appearances were in Out of the Frying Pan (1941), a short-lived revival of As You Like It in 1941, Yesterday’s Magic (1942), The Gambler (1952), Love Me Little (1958), Lorenzo (1963), Those That Play the Clowns (1966), Song of the Grasshopper (1967), and a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth in 1975. Most notably on Broadway, Drake played Claudius to Richard Burton’s Hamlet in 1964. For the American Shakespeare Theatre he appeared as Othello and as Benedick opposite Katharine Hepburn’s Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing in 1957. In 1990, Drake was awarded a lifetime achievement Tony Award. DRAKE, SYLVIE (1930– ). Egyptian-born drama critic, Drake was raised in her birthplace of Alexandria prior to studying in England, where she achieved an Oxbridge Higher Certificate in England and French literature. In the United States after 1949, she worked at the Pasadena Playhouse and in television as an actress, writer, and director. In 1969, she began contributing theatre reviews to the Los Angeles Canyon Crier and the Los Angeles Times before joining the Times as a columnist and critic in 1971. In 1991, Drake replaced Dan Sullivan as the Times’s chief critic. Prior to her retirement in 1993, after which she served as an artistic associate at the Denver Center Theatre. DRAMA DEPT. Established in 1994 as a not-for-profit theatre collective, with Douglas Carter Beane supervising activities, the Drama Dept. aimed to

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produce one or two productions a year, focusing on either forgotten American classics or new plays. Among the collective’s membership are Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker, B. D. Wong, Billy Crudup, Mark Brokaw, Stephen Flaherty, Richard Greenberg, Nicky Silver, and others. Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown (1997) was one of the new works, along with Charles Busch’s Shanghai Moon (1999), Isaac Mizrahi’s Les MIZrahi (2000), David and Amy Sedaris’s The Book of Liz (2001), and others, with revivals of such diverse works as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1998, which generated some controversy, George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s* June Moon* in 1997, and the Irving Berlin-Moss Hart revue* As Thousands Cheer in 1998. See also REPERTORY THEATRE. DRAMA DESK, THE/ DRAMA DESK AWARDS. The Drama Desk was founded in 1949 (chartered a not-for-profit organization in 1974) with a membership of theatre critics and journalists. Theatre professionals speak at monthly lunches held by the Drama Desk, but its main mission is the acknowledgment of outstanding theatre work in New York with the annual Drama Desk Awards, which have been presented since 1955 in a range of categories. DRAMA LEAGUE, THE. Originally established in 1909 by an Evanston, Illinois, women’s literary group called the Riley Circle, the League expanded within a few years to include thousands of members across the United States. Beginning in 1911, the League published a monthly periodical, The Drama, kept its membership abreast of activities with bulletins, sponsored theatre tours of the Irish Players, the Hull-House Players,* and such noted actors as Minnie Maddern Fiske* and George Arliss,* published play collections, offered summer educational activities, and held annual conventions. In 1931, the national League disbanded, but some local organizations continued, including the New York Drama League, which presented awards and sponsored support for young playwrights and directors. DRAMATIC CRITICISM. See CRITICS, CRITICISM. DRAMATIC THEORY. The evolution of dramatic theory, which could be said to date back to Aristotle, began in earnest in the United States in the late nineteenth century when playwrights, critics, and academics began regularly writing and speaking on the nature of theatre and drama, including such figure as Dion Boucicault,* Bronson Howard,* David Belasco,* Edward Harrigan,* William Dean Howells,* and James A. Herne,* who threw down the gauntlet in support of an American drama based on realism in the mode of Henrik Ibsen’s plays.

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By the early twentieth century, the influence of the New Stagecraft* in European drama moved centrally into the theorizing in the United States, with such figures as Brander Matthews,* Sheldon Cheney,* Kenneth Macgowan, George Jean Nathan, Joseph Wood Krutch, and others dominated in the pre-World War II era, with leading playwrights (Eugene O’Neill, Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder), designers (Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Mordecai Gorelik), and directors, actors and acting teachers (Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler) debating, usually in print, the nature of contemporary American drama and its techniques of performance. Following World War II, most major dramatists (Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and others) contributed to a growing body of essays on dramatic theory. New trends in both European and American theatre were espoused after the war by such critics and practitioners as Eric Bentley, Northrup Frye, Richard Schechner, Herbert Blau, Richard Foreman, Marvin Carlson, Martin Esslin, Robert Brustein, and others, while feminist theorists began to have a significant impact after the 1970s, with such figures as Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Alisa Solomon, Judith Butler, and others contributing various viewpoints on gender and sexuality in contemporary theatre. Queer theory came to the fore in the early 1990s, with writers including Laurence Senelick, Solomon, and various playwrights, from Charles Ludlam to Tony Kushner, contributing concepts. Most late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century drama critics, particularly in such major publications as the New York Times or the New Yorker, explore dramatic theory, including Frank Rich, Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, John Lahr, and others, as well as a range of scholars in academic publications on theatre and drama, film, and other media. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. DRAMATISTS GUILD, INC., THE. This professional organization was founded in 1920 to protect the interests of writers of plays and musicals. In the early twenty-first century, the Guild’s membership exceeded 7,500 and continued in its original mission to protect the rights of playwrights. The Guild publishes the Dramatists Guild Quarterly and organizes auditions, readings, symposia and other activities for its membership. DRAPER, RUTH (1884–1956). Born in New York, Draper carved out a unique niche in American and international theatre as a monologist and writer, creating over 35 sketches in which she performed over 50 characters she had imagined from her world travels. Beginning her career as an actress in A Lady’s Name (1916), Draper soon discovered that her gifts as a mimic permitted her to create personas, accents, and attitudes from all walks of life

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and that skill in improvisation allowed her to depart from her text and make each performance original. As a monologist, she debuted at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1920 and on Broadway in 1929 and died only hours after giving her final performance in New York in December 1956. She toured widely, with frequent returns to Broadway in 1932, 1934, 1936, 1940, 1947, 1954, and her final performances. Draper’s monologues were recorded, but apparently no sound film of her in performance survives. Draper was the aunt of actor Paul Draper. DREAM GIRL. Elmer Rice made a rare foray into light comedy in this two-act semi-fantasy, which he also directed. It was produced by the Playwright’s Company at the Coronet Theatre where it opened on 14 December 1945 for 348 performances. Stylishly produced with scene and lighting designs by Jo Mielziner and costumes by Mainbocher, the play starred Betty Field (Rice’s wife) as Georgina Allerton, an unsuccessful novelist and book store owner, who escapes her drab existence through daydreams, including an encounter with a radio psychiatrist. Eventually, she meets Clark Redfield (Wendell Corey), a book reviewer with aspirations to be a sports writer, and Clark proposes marriage if Georgina can control her dreams. Betty Hutton played Georgina in a 1948 film version and Judy Holliday took on the role in a 1951 New York City Theatre Company revival and in 1965 a musical adaptation starred Julie Harris. DREXLER, ROSALYN (1926– ). A playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and pop artist, Drexler was born and educated in New York and had her first major solo exhibition of art works in 1960, but won three Obie Awards for her productions of Home Movies (1964), The Writer’s Opera (1979), and Transients Welcome (1985). Drexler’s other plays include Skywriting (1965), The Investigation (1966), Hot Buttered Roll (1966), The Line of Least Existence (1968), Softly and Consider the Nearness (1972), Was I Good? (1972), The Bed Was Full (1972), The Ice Queen (1973), She Who Was He (1974), Travesty Parade (1974), Graven Image (1979), Vulgar Lives (1979), The Tree Artist (1981), Starburn (1983), The Mandrake (1983), Dear (1983), Room 17C (1983), Lobby (1984), Delicate Feelings (1984), A Matter of Life and Death (1986), What Did You Call It? (1986), and The Heart That Eats Itself (1987). Drexler also won an Emmy Award for writing The Lily Show . . . A Lily Tomlin Special on CBS-TV in 1974. In 2004, Drexler stated, “I was born an artist. I’ve always been an artist.” DREYFUSS, HENRY (1904–1972). A scenic and industrial designer, Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied under Norman Bel

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Geddes prior to opening his own design firm. On Broadway, he designed Hold Everything! (1928), The Last Mile (1930), Fine and Dandy (1930), Pagan Lady (1930), The Gang’s All Here (1931), Shoot the Works (1931), The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), Strike Me Pink (1933), and Paths of Glory (1935) before shifting to industrial designs of everything from telephones, fountain pens, and alarm clocks to the “Democracity” model city of the future at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. DRIVING MISS DAISY. Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedydrama opened on 15 April 1987 in Playwrights Horizons production at the John Houseman Theatre for 1,195 performances. The play also won the Outer Critics Circle Award and received a Drama Desk Award nomination, while the play’s leading actors, Dana Ivey and Morgan Freeman, won Obie Awards for their respective performances as Daisy Werthan, an elderly Southern Jewish woman, and Hoke Colburn, her African American chauffeur. Miss Daisy resists having a chauffeur, but her protective son insists, and the play spans the years from 1948 to 1973 in Atlanta, Georgia, as the attitudes of its central characters reflect racial and other cultural changes filtered through the evolving personal relationship between them. The London production starred Wendy Hiller and a much-honored 1989 film version starred Jessica Tandy in an Academy Award-winning performance as Miss Daisy and Freeman repeating his stage role as Hoke. A 2010 Broadway revival, directed by David Esbjornson, starred James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave. DUKAKIS, OLYMPIA (1931– ). Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to immigrant Greek parents, Dukakis began a long career as an actress, teacher, and director following her graduation from Boston University. Dukakis labored in regional theatres and Off-Broadway for many years, cofounding Boston’s Charles Street Playhouse in 1957 and the Edgartown Summer Theatre in 1960 before debuting Off-Broadway in The Breaking Wall (1960) and on Broadway as understudy in The Aspern Papers (1962). On Broadway, Dukakis appeared in Abraham Cochrane (1964), Who’s Who in Hell (1974), Social Security (1986), and she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her solo performance in Rose (2000), which she had premiered at the National Theatre of Great Britain in 1999. Off-Broadway, Dukakis won Obie Awards for A Man’s a Man (1963) and The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985) and she has appeared in such repertory theatres as the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Hartford Stage, where she played Mrs. Goforth in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 2008. Dukakis served as artistic director of New Jersey’s Whole Theatre

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Company from 1976 to 1990 and won film stardom through her Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning performance in Moonstruck (1987). Among her many films are Working Girl (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), and The Great New Wonderful (2005). Dukakis is also a three-time Emmy Award nominee. She is married to actor Louis Zorich and is the cousin of 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. DUKES, DAVID (1945–2000). Son of a highway patrolman, David Coleman Dukes was born in San Francisco, California, and began his acting career on Broadway appearing in the Phoenix Theatre productions of The School for Wives, The Great God Brown,* and Don Juan in 1971–1972. He appeared in the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of The Play’s the Thing (1973) and Phoenix revivals of The Visit, Chemin de Fer, Holiday,* Love for Love, and The Rules of the Game in 1973–74, garnering Drama Desk Award nominations for the last two. As a replacement, he stepped into the role of Henry Carr in Travesties (1975), replaced Frank Langella in a revival of Dracula* in 1977, and also took over the role of Salieri in Amadeus in 1980. Dukes’s performance as Horst in Martin Sherman’s controversial Bent (1979) brought him Drama Desk and Tony Award nominations. He originated leading roles in Frankenstein (1981) and Broken Glass (1994), but replaced in M. Butterfly in 1988 and Someone Who’ll Watch over Me in 1992. He appeared in over 30 films and on television, garnering an Emmy nomination for The Josephine Baker Story (1991) and he appeared as the potential rapist of Edith Bunker in one of the most talked-about episodes of All in the Family in 1977. DUNNOCK, MILDRED (1901–1991). Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Dunnock attended Goucher College and did not begin a theatrical career until she was in her thirties. She debuted on Broadway in Life Begins (1932) and appeared in all manner of plays, from Shakespeare to modern dramas and even a musical (Lute Song in 1946). She appeared with Ethel Barrymore in The Corn Is Green (1940) and during the 1940s also appeared in a revival of Richard III in 1943, Only the Heart (1944), Foolish Notion (1945), Another Part of the Forest (1946), The Hallams (1948), and The Leading Lady (1948) prior to her most acclaimed performance as Linda Loman in the premiere of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Death of a Salesman (1949), repeating her performance in a 1951 film version (garnering an Academy Award nomination) and a 1966 television production (earning an Emmy Award nomination). Dunnock appeared in another Pulitzer Prizewinner, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) in the role of Big Mama. Dunnock also appeared in Broadway revivals of Henrik Ibsen’s

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Peer Gynt and The Wild Duck in 1951, In the Summer House (1953), Child of Fortune (1956), Pictures in the Hallway (1959), Farewell, Farewell Eugene (1960), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), Traveller without Luggage (1964), Days in the Trees (1976), and a revival of Tartuffe in 1977. Off-Broadway, Dunnock directed Graduation (1965) and won a 1971 Drama Desk Award for A Place without Doors. She also appeared for several seasons with the American Shakespeare Festival and in numerous films, including The Corn Is Green (1945), Viva Zapata! (1952), Baby Doll (1956), for which she was Oscar-nominated, The Nun’s Story (1959), The Story on Page One (1959), Butterfield 8 (1960), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). Dunnock appeared frequently on television dramas and continued acting into her late 80s. DURANG, CHRISTOPHER (1949– ). Montclair, New Jersey, was the birthplace of Christopher Ferdinand Durang, who was educated at Harvard University and the Yale School of Drama before emerging in 1971 as a major Off-Broadway playwright and sometime actor. His outrageously comic, often satiric works challenge images of homosexuality, Roman Catholicism, child abuse, and many aspects of contemporary American culture. His plays, particularly those challenging the Catholic Church, have generated controversy. Durang received Obie Awards for The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1973), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979), and Betty’s Summer Vacation (1999), and was nominated for a Tony Award for his libretto for the musical A History of the American Film (1976). Among his other works are Titanic (1974), The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (1975), ‘Dentity Crisis (1978), The Vietnamization of New Jersey (1978), The Idiots Karamazov (1980), Beyond Therapy (1981), The Actor’s Nightmare (1981), Baby with the Bathwater (1983), Laughing Wild (1987), Sex and Longing (1996), Adrift in Macao (2002), Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (2002), Miss Witherspoon (2005), Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them (2009), and numerous one-act parodies performed as an evening under the title Durang/Durang (1994). In 2010, Durang, in collaboration with Barrie Humphreys (aka Dame Edna Everage) and Michael Feinstein, wrote All about Me, featuring Humphreys and Feinstein on Broadway for a brief run at Henry Miller’s Theatre. With Marsha Norman, Durang cochairs the playwriting program at the Juilliard School. DURHAM, JIMMIE (1940– ). This Wolf Clan Cherokee Indian was born in Washington, Arkansas, and worked as a visual artist until he moved to Geneva in 1968 to study at the L’École des Beaux-Arts. Back in the United States in 1973, Durham became involved in the American Indian movement

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and other organizations working for Native American concerns. In the late 1970s, Durham established himself in New York where he made art to confront stereotypes of Native Americans. Along with visual art, Durham created performance art works, including My Land (1965), Thanksgiving (1982), Manhattan Giveaway (1985), and Savagism & You (1991), all challenging traditional identities of Native Americans and the relationship between Indians and whites. DURNING, CHARLES (1923– ). A native of Highland Falls, New York, Durning was drafted into the United States Army during World War II, participated in the D-Day invasion, and was awarded a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. Known mostly for his work in films and television, Durning has also appeared regularly on Broadway, winning a Drama Desk Award for his performance in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama That Championship Season (1972) and a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his performance in a 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Durning also appeared in Drat! The Cat! (1965), Pousse-Café (1966), The Happy Time (1968), Indians (1969), In the Boom Boom Room (1973), The Au Pair Man (1973), and revivals of Inherit the Wind in 1996, The Gin Game in 1997, and The Best Man in 2000. Among his many films, Durning was twice nominated for Academy Awards for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) and To Be or Not to Be (1983), and also appeared in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Tootsie (1982), Mass Appeal (1984), Home for the Holidays (1995), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). For his work in television, he received nine Emmy Award nominations and won a Golden Globe Award for The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1990). D’USSEAU, ARNAUD (1916–1990). Born in Los Angeles, California, as the son of film director and producer Leon D’Usseau, he followed in his father’s footsteps, writing for the screen, but was also a collaborator on a few plays. None managed long runs, but his first two plays, Tomorrow the World (1943), concerning a German child indoctrinated with Nazism adopted by an American couple, and Deep Are the Roots (1945), about an African American war hero returning to the South after the war, won critical approval. Both were written with James Gow, as was The Legend of Sarah (1950), which ran for less than a month on Broadway. In collaboration with Dorothy Parker, D’Usseau wrote Ladies of the Corridor (1953), which also had a moderately successful run on Broadway. D’Usseau also wrote several Hollywood films before being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He spent a number of years writing under pseudonyms in Europe before returning to the United States to teach writing at New York University and the School of Visual Arts.

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DUTCHMAN. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) faced controversy and won an Obie Award for this drama which was first produced by the Playwrights Unit before moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre in March 1964. The action focuses on a white woman, Lula, who encounters Clay, a black man, on a New York subway train. Lula, eating an apple in the manner of the biblical Eve, chooses her Adam when she engages Clay in a sexually charged conversation mixed with insults and racial slurs before she stabs him in front of other passengers who do not stop her. In fact, she orders the other passengers to throw his body from the train at the next stop as she approaches another black male as she had with Clay. Many critics found the play shocking, but it was filmed in 1967 starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman, Jr., and has endured as an example of Off-Broadway drama circa the mid-1960s. Dutchman was revived at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2007 starring Dulé Hill. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. DYING GAUL, THE. Craig Lucas’s play opened at the Vineyard Theatre on 31 May 1998 under the direction of Mark Brokaw and with a cast including Tony Goldwyn and Linda Emond. In the play, a young writer has written an autobiographical screenplay about the death from AIDS of his lover. A studio executive likes the script, but demands that the protagonist be changed from a gay man to a straight woman, which sets off moral compromises. A 2005 film version starred Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, and Campbell Scott.

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E EAST LYNNE COMPANY, THE. This not-for-profit theatre company in Jersey City, New Jersey, was established by Warren Kliewer in 1980 and is unique in its mission of producing classic American plays rarely staged, including nineteenth-century works by Washington Irving, David Belasco,* and William Dean Howells,* and early twentieth-century plays by such figures as Rachel Crothers. The theatre moved to Cape May, New Jersey, and under the artistic directorship of Gayle Stahlhuth since 1999, the theatre continues to focus on rarely produced American classics. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. EAST WEST PLAYERS. Based in Los Angeles, California, this not-forprofit company became the first Asian American theatre in 1965. Founded by Asian performers and writers frustrated by a lack of access to mainstream stages, its initial goal was to encourage integration of Asian American artists into the American theatre. Their earliest productions cast Asians in wellknown Caucasian works by playwrights including Carlo Goldoni and Bertolt Brecht, but in the 1970s when actor Mako took over as artistic director the company’s goal became encouraging new plays by Asian American writers, including David Henry Hwang, Wakako Yamauchi, and Valina Houston. In 1993, longtime company member Tim Dang became artistic director, continuing its mission of presenting Asian American plays and performers. See also REPERTORY THEATRE. EASTON, RICHARD (1933– ). This Canadian-born actor studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, but has spent much of his career on United States stages, following a stint as an original company member of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. His first Broadway appearance, in a 1957 revival of The Country Wife, was followed by a string of Shakespearean roles, including King Henry IV in 2003 at Lincoln Center. He won a Best Actor Tony Award for Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (2001), and has also appeared in revivals of The Rivals in 2004 and Entertaining Mr. Sloane in 2006. Easton also appears frequently at the Old

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Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, where he is on the faculty of the University of San Diego. ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE. See SUMMER AND SMOKE. ECKART, WILLIAM (1920–2000) and JEAN (1921–1993). This highly successful husband and wife became a design team following their training at Yale University. They were mostly identified with musicals (for which they received three Tony Award nominations), including The Golden Apple (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), Once Upon a Mattress (1959), Fiorello! (1959), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), and Mame (1966). They also designed Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), Take Her, She’s Mine (1961), Never Too Late (1962), Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1963), and a revival of Of Mice and Men in 1974, as well as opera, ballet, industrial, and television productions. EDELSTEIN, BARRY (1965– ). Born in New Jersey, Edelstein, who acted in high school plays in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, studied at Tufts University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He emerged as a significant director with his 1997 revival of All My Sons at the Roundabout Theatre. That same year, he became artistic director of the Classic Stage Company, where he staged a range of classic and contemporary works until 2003. He directed Gwyneth Paltrow in a production of As You Like It at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and is on the faculty of the University of Southern California. EDMONDS, RANDOLPH (1900–1983). A significant force in academia, Edmonds was widely regarded as a pioneer in African American theatre education. In 1935, he founded the first theatre department at Dillard University, a traditionally black school. To encourage other all-black institutions to establish programs, Edmonds founded the National Association of Drama and Speech Arts. He also wrote upwards of 50 plays, some of which he produced and were published in the collections Shades and Shadows (1930), Six Plays for the Negro Theatre (1934), and The Land of Cotton and Other Plays (1942). EDWARDS, BEN (1916–1999). A native of Union Springs, Alabama, Edwards attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts in New York and won acclaim as a scene designer leading to a 1998 lifetime achievement Tony Award (he had been nominated numerous times, but had never won a Tony). Influenced by the work of Robert Edmond Jones, he worked at Virginia’s

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Barter Theatre in 1935 prior to designing numerous Broadway productions beginning in 1938, including revivals of Pygmalion and Diff’rent* in 1938, Robinson Jeffers’s free adaptation of Medea (1947), The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), Anastasia (1954), The Honeys (1955), The Ponder Heart (1956), The Waltz of the Toreadors (1957), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), The Disenchanted (1958), Purlie Victorious (1961), A Shot in the Dark (1961), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), the Richard Burton revival of Hamlet in 1964, The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), Where’s Daddy? (1966), Purlie (1970), A Matter of Gravity (1976), A Texas Trilogy (1976), The West Side Waltz (1981), A Few Good Men (1989), and often in collaboration with director José Quintero, productions of several of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, including the American premiere of More Stately Mansions in 1967 and revivals of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1974, Anna Christie* in 1977, A Touch of the Poet in 1977, The Iceman Cometh in 1985, and Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1988. Beginning in the 1960s, he often worked closely with his wife, costume designer Jane Greenwood. EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS, THE. Paul Zindel’s breakthrough 1964 play, which premiered at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, won a Pulitzer Prize and Drama Desk Award when it opened on 7 April 1970 at the Mercer-O’Casey Theatre OffBroadway. This two-act play, under the direction of Melvin Bernhardt, reminded some critics of the work of Tennessee Williams, was also a personal triumph for Sada Thompson as Beatrice Hunsdorfer, an unhappy, domineering widow, who ekes out a living caring for an elderly woman. One of her two daughters, Tillie, is a brilliant science student and her class project, to study the impact of the exposure of radiation on flowers serves as a metaphor for Beatrice‘s toxic influence on her children. A number of noted actresses, including Joan Blondell and Shelley Winters, played Beatrice in various productions and the play was revived on Broadway in 1978 with Winters, but it managed only a brief run. A 1972 film version was directed by Paul Newman and starred Joanne Woodward. EHLE, JENNIFER (1969– ). Daughter of writer John Ehle and actress Rosemary Harris, Ehle was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and trained at the North Carolina School of the Arts and London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. She has acted in both England and America, gaining notice playing Elizabeth Bennett in the 1995 BBC-TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Ehle, who inherited her mother’s grace and dignity on stage, won two Tony Awards, for a revival of The Real Thing in 2000 and The Coast of Utopia (2007). She played opposite Kevin Spacey in

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the Old Vic’s revival of The Philadelphia Story in 2005 and in the Second Stage Theatre’s production of Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy Mr. and Mrs. Fitch (2010) opposite John Lithgow, and she has appeared in several films, including Wilde (1997), Sunshine (1999), The River King (2005), and Pride and Glory (2008). EICHELBERGER, ETHYL (1945–1990). Born James Roy Eichelberger in Pekin, Illinois, this drag performance artist and writer, began his career at Trinity Repertory Theatre before moving to New York in 1975 to work with Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, playing both men and women in various classic and contemporary works (including over 30 of his own creation), often reinventing the plays to challenge sexual stereotypes and traditional views of sexuality. Among the real and fictional characters Eichelberger portrayed were Lucrezia Borgia, Jocasta, Medea, Lola Montez, Nefertiti, Clytemnestra, and Empress Carlotta of Mexico. Eichelberger appeared with the Flying Karamazov Brothers in a revival of The Comedy of Errors on Broadway in 1987. Stricken with AIDS, he committed suicide not long after appearing in a revival of Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center in 1989. See also FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. EIGSTI, KARL (1938– ). A native of Goshen, Indiana, Eigsti designed scenery for many regional theatre companies, but developed a long relationship with Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Employing two distinct styles, realism and symbolism, he has also designed many Off-Broadway productions, including Boesman and Lena (1969), The House of Blue Leaves (1971), Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy (1974), and Losing Time (1979). He was nominated for a Tony Award for Knockout (1979) and on Broadway he designed scenery and/or lighting for Inquest (1970), Grease (1972), revivals of Sweet Bird of Youth in 1975 and Once in a Lifetime in 1978, Cold Storage (1977), Eubie! (1978), The American Clock (1980), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1982), Amen Corner (1983), Alone Together (1984), and the American premiere of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1984). Eigsti taught at New York University and is head of the design program at Brandeis University. EISENHAUER, PEGGY (1962– ). Born in New York City, Eisenhauer studied lighting design at Carnegie Mellon University before collaborating with Jules Fisher on Broadway productions, including Rags (1986), Grand Hotel (1989), Death and the Maiden (1992), and Angels in America (1993). She won Tony Awards for Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996)

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and a revival of Assassins in 2004, also winning Drama Desk Awards for both, and was nominated for a revival of Cabaret in 1998, Ragtime (1998), The Wild Party (2000), Marie Christine (2000), and Jane Eyre (2001). Eisenhauer’s other Broadway credits include Tommy Tune Tonight! (1992), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), Elaine Stritch At Liberty (2002), a revival of Gypsy in 2003, Caroline, or Change (2004), Laugh Whore (2004), Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (2005), a revival of The Ritz in 2007, and 9 to 5 (2009). She has also designed lighting for many musical performers and groups, including The Cars, Billy Ocean, and Lisa Lisa. EL TEATRO CAMPESINO (ETC). Luis Valdéz, a member of The San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded this company in 1965 in support of migrant Filipino and Mexican American farm workers striking against the grape farmers of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Their first works, in the agit-prop style of the Mime Troupe, were short pieces (actos) aimed at exploring and raising consciousness about the plight of the grape pickers. Over time, El Teatro Campesino broadened its themes to include issues of interest to the Chicano population and, at the same time, experimented with varied theatrical techniques, including commedia dell’arte, musicals, Mexican folk traditions, and Aztec and Mayan rituals. The group was vocal in opposition to the Vietnam War and, in 1971, found a permanent home in a warehouse in San Juan Bautista, although they often took their productions to larger theatres, including their most successful, Zoot Suit (1978), which they have frequently revived, Corridos! (1981) and I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! (1986). The ETC’s Bandido! (1981), written by Valdez, was coproduced by the Mark Taper Forum in 1994, and the theatre stages an annual Christmas pageant. In recent years, Valdez’s three sons, Anáhuac, Kinán, and Lakin, essentially took over operation of the theatre, and also moved the company toward film and video work as well. Annually, the ETC produces two Spanish folk plays, La pastorela and La Virgin of Guadalupe, at the San Juan Bautista mission. See also CHICANO THEATRE. ELDER, ELDON (1924–2000). Born in Atchison, Kansas, Elder studied scene design with Donald Oenslager at Yale University and worked as Oenslager’s assistant on Second Threshold (1951), and has amassed a resume of in excess of 200 design credits from regional theatre to Broadway. He also designed the Delacorte Theatre, the Central Park summer performance space of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and served as their resident designer from 1958 to 1961. Elder’s Broadway productions include revivals of Dream Girl and Idiot’s Delight, both in 1951, Time Out for Ginger (1952), Take a Giant Step (1953), The Girl in Pink Tights (1954), Phoenix

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’55 (1955), a revival of Fallen Angels in 1956, Shinbone Alley (1957), Of Love Remembered (1967), Will Rogers’ USA (1974), Music Is (1976), and Hizzoner! (1989), among others. He teaches at Brooklyn College, but has also designed numerous productions for the St. Louis Municipal Opera. He was the author of Will It Make a Theater, a book about creating theatres from non-traditional spaces, and felt his experiences with Joe Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival taught him that “you had a sense that you were making a contribution to society.” ELDER, LONNE, III (1931–1996). This Americus, Georgia-born playwright was raised in New Jersey and, worked for a time as an actor, including playing Bobo in the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959). He proved more successful as a writer, most notably with his drama Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), which won a Drama Desk Award and led to his becoming director of the Playwrights’ Unit of the Negro Ensemble Company. Much of his subsequent writing was for films, including the acclaimed Sounder (1972), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, but he also created a solo stage drama, Splendid Mummer (1988), on the life of nineteenth century black actor Ira Aldridge. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. ELDRIDGE, FLORENCE (1901–1988). Born Florence McKechnie in Brooklyn, New York, she began her Broadway career as a chorus girl in the musical Rock-a-Bye Baby (1918). Numerous subsequent roles during the 1920s included Ambush* (1921), The Cat and the Canary* (1922), the American premiere of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1922, and The Great Gatsby (1926), and she toured in The Theatre Guild productions with her husband, actor Fredric March. She also appeared in silent films in this era, but following her marriage to March, her stage work was often in partnership with him, including the original productions of The American Way (1939), the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Years Ago (1946), Arthur’s Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1950, The Autumn Garden (1951), and, most notably her last Broadway appearance as the haunted Mary Tyrone in the premiere production of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), for which she received a Tony Award nomination. She also appeared in Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come (1936) and in a few later films, including Mary of Scotland (1936), Another Part of the Forest (1949), Christopher Columbus (1949), and Inherit the Wind (1960), costarring with her husband and Spencer Tracy.

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ELEPHANT MAN, THE. This two-act play by Bernard Pomerance was first produced at London’s Hampstead Theatre, followed by an Off-Broadway production, but when it moved to Broadway on 19 April 1979, it ran for 916 performances at the Booth Theatre and won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award as Best Play. Recounting the life of Joseph Merrick, a nineteenthcentury Englishman physically deformed by a genetic disorder, the play explores the nature of human deformity, as Merrick is abandoned by family and hideously exploited by a carnival entrepreneur before he comes to the attention of Dr. Frederick Treves, who cares for Merrick, finds him a permanent home in his hospital, and introduces the brilliant and intellectually curious Merrick to life’s finer aspects. Philip Anglim and Kevin Conway won critical approval as Merrick and Treves, respectively. The play was revived on Broadway in 2002 starring Billy Crudup and Rupert Graves and was the basis for a 1980 film. ELIOT, T. S. (1888–1965). Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, although he spent much of his life in England. He studied at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before winning acclaim as a poet and sometime playwright. His first major play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival prior to being produced at Yale University and the Federal Theatre Project. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949) won a Tony Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, but his other plays, The Family Reunion (1939), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958), were less successful. Eliot’s 1939 collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, provided the source material for the musical Cats (1982), which ran for 18 years on Broadway. ELIZABETH THE QUEEN. The Theatre Guild produced the first of Maxwell Anderson’s historically based blank verse tragedies, in this case depicting the reign of England’s Elizabeth I and her relationship with the Earl of Essex, on 3 November 1930 at the Guild Theatre, where it ran for 147 performances. Directed by Philip Moeller, with scene design by Lee Simonson, Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt played the leads to critical acclaim, with a supporting cast including Percy Waram, Arthur Hughes, Phoebe Brand, and Morris Carnovsky. The play was occasionally revived for tours starring noted actresses, including Eva Le Gallienne in 1961 and Judith Anderson in 1966. A 1939 film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, was loosely adapted from Anderson’s play.

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ELLIOTT, SCOTT (1963– ). A wunderkind director born in Long Island, New York, Elliott (whose name often appears as Elliot) studied music at the Boston Conservatory prior to transferring to New York University to study film and psychology. On Broadway, he acted as a replacement in Les Misérables (1987) and Ain’t Broadway Grand (1993), but found greater success as a director and producer. He received Drama Desk Award nominations for his Off-Broadway direction of The Monogamist (1996), Goose-Pimples (1998), and a revival of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly in 2005. Off-Broadway, Elliott also directed End of the Day (1994), Ecstasy (1995), and Curtains (1995), for which he and the cast received an Obie Award. On Broadway, he has specialized in staging revivals, including Present Laughter in 1996, The Three Sisters in 1997, The Women in 2001, Barefoot in the Park in 2006, and Threepenny Opera in 2006. As founding artistic director for the New Group, Elliott helped bring Avenue Q (2004) to Broadway, and he directed Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1996. His only foray into film, A Map of the World (1999), starred Sigourney Weaver. In conversation with Arthur Miller, Elliott talked of the importance of bringing a play’s subtext to the surface because “I think audiences want to know the truth behind what’s happening to the people in the play. And I really do believe that’s because we understand more about what makes people tick than we did fifty years ago.” ELLIS, SCOTT (1957– ). Born in Washington, D.C., Ellis began as a performer in regional theatre and appeared on Broadway in Musical Chairs (1980) and The Rink (1984), but made his mark as a director of mostly musicals, although he has also staged dramas, including revivals of Picnic in 1994, A Month in the Country in 1995, A Thousand Clowns in 1996, The Rainmaker in 1999, and The Man Who Had All the Luck in 2002, most for the Roundabout Theatre where he is artistic director. Ellis won a Drama Desk Award for his direction of Off-Broadway productions of And the World Goes ’Round and a revival of A Little Night Music in 1991 and he was subsequently nominated for Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for a revival of She Loves Me in 1994, Steel Pier (1997), and revivals of 1776 in 1998 and 12 Angry Men in 2005. He also garnered a Tony nomination for Curtains (2007). In 2007, he received an Emmy Award nomination for his direction of an episode of 30 Rock; he works frequently in episodic television. He directed a 2008 revival of David Rabe’s Streamers at Boston’s Huntington Theatre and Off-Broadway, telling an interviewer that “For me, the text and characters and the situations are it—I don’t try to put something else on top of that.”

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ELSON, CHARLES (1909–2000). A native of Chicago, Illinois, Elson found his way into theatre through a Hull House* program. His first scene design, for a production of The Ticket-of-Leave Man at Whitefield, New Hampshire’s Chase Barn Playhouse in 1934, led to a long stint designing 44 productions for the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine from 1939 to 1945. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Elson became a highly prolific scene and lighting designer beginning with his first Broadway production, a flop 1945 revival of As You Like It. He assisted Donald Oenslager, with whom he studied at Yale, on a revival of Pygmalion in 1945, Born Yesterday (1946), Years Ago (1946), and The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947) before branching out on his own with scene and/or lighting designs for such Broadway productions as revivals of The First Mrs. Fraser in 1947, Private Lives in 1948, Regina (1949), Out of This World (1950), The Rose Tattoo (1951), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Quadrille (1954), Compulsion (1957), La Plume de Ma Tante (1958), Blue Denim (1958), First Impressions (1959), Wildcat (1960), Photo Finish (1963), and Mirele Efros (1967). Elson taught at Yale, the City University of New York, and Hunter College, and also designed for the Metropolitan Opera and his 1958 designs for Madame Butterfly were used for over 20 years. His sole film work, as assistant art director, was for a classic, the Judy Garland A Star Is Born (1954). EMMONS, BEVERLY (1943– ). Emmons began her career as an assistant to lighting designer Jules Fisher. She has been nominated for Tony Awards for her Broadway lighting designs for The Elephant Man (1979), A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980), Les Liasons Dangereuses (1987), Passion (1994), a revival of The Heiress in 1995, and Jekyll & Hyde (1997), with Drama Desk Award nominations for The Elephant Man, The Dresser (1981), Passion, The Heiress, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1995). Emmons’s first Broadway lighting design for a failed musical, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1975), led to many more distinguished productions, including Amadeus (1980), Piaf (1981), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1981), Good (1982), and revivals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990, Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1993, and Annie Get Your Gun in 1999. Off-Broadway, she designed lights for The Vagina Monologues (1999) and numerous other productions, winning a 1980 Distinguished Lighting Obie Award the year she designed lights for Sam Shepard’s True West. Emmons has collaborated frequently with Joseph Chaikin, Meredith Monk, Liviu Chiulei, and Robert Wilson, designing lights for some of his productions, including Einstein on the Beach (1976), and designed lighting for dance, including for Trisha Brown, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Emmons teaches lighting at Columbia University and from 1997 to 2002, she

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was artistic director of the Lincoln Center Institute, an outreach program for New York City schools. In thinking about the use of color in lighting, Emmons has said, “There is not one right answer: everyone thinks about color their own way, and it is important in teaching to defend the non-verbal aspects of the lighting experience.” EMOND, LINDA (1959– ). Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and raised in Southern California, Emond studied at the University of Washington. She began her career in Chicago, Illinois, winning several Joseph Jefferson Awards and nominations for performances in classics, including Shakespeare, for 11 years. She appeared on Broadway in the 1997 revival of 1776, received a Tony Award nomination and an Outer Critics Award for Life (x) 3 (2003), and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Nine Armenians (1997) Off-Broadway. Emond acted with Al Pacino in the 2002 National Actors Theatre revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and, in regional and Off-Broadway theatres in numerous productions, including the premieres of Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul at the Vineyard Theatre in 1998 and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Over & Over at the Signature Theatre in 1999. Emond won critical acclaim as the title character of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (2001), in which she delivered the play’s hour-long first-act monologue, winning an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for her performance. She played the role in the play’s long gestation process through revised productions at the New York Theatre Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Emond again worked with Kushner on the premiere performances of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) at the Guthrie Theatre. Emond also acts in film, including the screen version of The Dying Gaul (2005) and Julie & Julia (2009), and television, from soap operas to Law & Order. END OF SUMMER. S. N. Behrman’s three-act comedy opened on 17 February 1936 at the Guild Theatre in a Theatre Guild production for 152 performances. Directed by Philip Moeller, with scene designs by Lee Simonson, the adept cast won plaudits in this witty comedy starring Ina Claire as Leonie Frothingham, a wealthy New Englander from “old money” whose snobbish mother (Mildred Natwick), continually reminds her of her privileged background while Leonie observes her daughter, Paula, choosing between two suitors. One (Van Heflin) will be able to keep Paula in luxury, while the other, a young political radical (Shepperd Strudwick) promises only a stimulating existence as part of a rapidly changing society. The play’s title suggests Leonie’s dilemma, realizing her daughter’s choice of the radical will

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change all of their lifes. Osgood Perkins and Minor Watson also appeared in supporting roles. ENSEMBLE STUDIO THEATRE (EST). A not-for-profit theatre founded in 1969 by Curt Dempster (who led it until his death in 2007), the EST’s initial goals were to foster the talents of individual artists and to develop new American plays. Since its founding, a remarkable 6,000 plays have been produced, many new, bringing the operation numerous acknowledgments, including Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Awards, and others. Among the plays developed by EST are Christopher Durang’s controversial Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979) and Shirley Lauro’s Open Admissions (1984). EST’s Annual Marathon of One-Act Plays was significant in reviving the popularity of short form plays, and the annual Octoberfest presents new scripts. Among its membership, which includes numerous actors and playwrights, are John Patrick Shanley, Richard Greenberg, and David Mamet. See also REPERTORY THEATRE. ENSLER, EVE (1953– ). New York native Ensler was inspired in her work by her childhood experiences of abuse by her father. She attended Middlebury College. As a playwright and performer, Ensler is an antiviolence advocate for women. She rose to prominence with The Vagina Monologues (1996), a series of monologues recounting the sexual experiences and responses to their bodies of women of various ages and backgrounds. Ensler won an Obie Award and several critics awards, and her solo performance of the piece was filmed for television in 2002. The Vagina Monologues has been translated into nearly 50 languages and performed all over the world, often on an annual “V-Day” (Valentine’s Day) when many groups perform the play, including with leading actresses (as well as non-professionals) performing the monologues, often to controversial responses resulting from its content. Ensler’s other works include Necessary Targets (1997), The Good Body (2005), and The Treatment (2006). Of her work, Ensler has said, “My dream of a good play is that you’re laughing, you’re hysterical, and then you’re suddenly in the middle of hell and you don’t know how you got there.” ENTERS, ANGNA (1897–1989). Born in New York City as Anita Enters, she was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she graduated high school in 1915 and not long after enrolled at Milwaukee State Normal School intending to teach art. Not long after, she saw performances by Denishawn and Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes, which led to a move to New York, where she continued to study art at the Art Students League, beginning in 1919. She turned to dance and mime, studying with Michio Ito, becoming his stage

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partner in 1923. Enters created the dance-mime piece Moyen Age, developing a singular merger of the two forms, followed by her solo program Theatre of Angna Enters, first performed in 1939 and which she continued to present until 1960. Much of her work involved political satire and the experiences of women and she gained an international reputation with performances in London and Paris. Along with performances, Enters’s sketches, set and costume designs, and other art works drew attention. She taught at the Stella Adler Studio from 1957 to 1960 and was artist-in-residence at the Dallas Theatre Center in 1961–1962. Enters also wrote plays, including Love Possessed Juana: A Play of the Inquisition in Spain, cowritten with her husband, Louis Kalonyme (1946) and The Unknown Lover (1947), both produced by the Houston Little Theatre. Enters’s 1966 book, On Mime, chronicled her conceptions of movement, and she wrote three autobiographies. EPPERSON, JOHN (1955– ). Better known by his drag name, Lypsinka, Epperson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where at age four he lipsynched to his father’s collection of show tunes and imitated Ann-Margret from the film version of the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Taunted in school as a “sissy,” he studied classical piano prior to attending Belhaven College. Following graduation, he worked as a pianist in Colorado before moving to New York as rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theatre. On the side, Epperson appeared in drag in various nightclubs, including Club 51 and the Pyramid Club where he developed a following. He appeared as Lypsinka for the first time in 1988 with performances of Charles Busch’s long-running Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1984) before quitting his pianist job in 1991 to devote himself to the character he claimed was based, in part, on singer Dolores Gray. His particular technique is to lip-sync to show-length soundtracks meticulously assembled from diverse bits and pieces of many female performers from stage and screen. Before developing the character of Lypsinka, he created two musical drag pieces, Dial “M” for Model (1987) and Ballet of the Dolls (1988), the last based on Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. As Lypsinka, Epperson appeared to critical acclaim in a variety of solo Off-Broadway shows beginning with I Could Go on Lip-Synching! (1988), followed by many variations and sequels, including Lypsinka! Now It Can by Lip-Synched, Lypsinka! A Day in the Life, Lypsinka Must Be Destroyed, Lypsinka! The Boxed Set, and As I Lay Lip-Synching. In 2004, he appeared as the Wicked Stepmother in the New York City Opera’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and, also that year, in his autobiographical piece, Show Trash. Most recently, Epperson as Lypsinka as Joan Crawford appeared in The Passion of the Crawford (2006), a work he had begun developing in 1998. He also developed My

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Deah (2006), a parody of Medea without the Lypsinka persona present. The subject of an Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary, Epperson says of his work, “I don’t like the term ‘drag queen,’ because it describes an amateur. Why not call me an actor? I suppose drag artist would be okay.” See also FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION. EPSTEIN, ALVIN (1925– ). A native New Yorker, Epstein made his stage debut in a United States Army production of Richard III in 1945, followed by his first New York appearance at the Equity Library Theatre in a small role in a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1946. His numerous performances in international theatres, with regional companies, and Off-Broadway seldom made it to Broadway, but he appeared with distinction with mime Marcel Marceau in 1955, in the Orson Welles revival of King Lear as the Fool in 1956, as Lucky in the original Broadway production of Waiting for Godot (1956), beginning a long association with Samuel Beckett’s plays, From A to Z (1960), No Strings (1962), The Passion of Josef D (1964), Postmark Zero (1965), A Kurt Weill Cabaret (1979) with Martha Schlamme, and a revival of Threepenny Opera (1989). An actor with a wide range, Epstein moved comfortably from avant-garde work to mainstream commercial theatre, appearing in straight drama and musicals. From 1953 to 1955, he toured with Israel’s Habima Theatre, in productions of Lost in the Stars, The Living Corpse, The Golem, The Mother, Macbeth, Legend of 3 and 4, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Henry IV, and King Lear. Epstein appeared in the American premiere of Endgame (1958) at the Cherry Lane Theatre and in the world premiere of Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin’s When the World Was Green (A Chef’s Fable) (1996) and in a wide range of classic and contemporary plays in many theatres (with over fifty performances at the American Repertory Theatre), winning a 1968 Obie Award for Dynamite Tonight!, a 1996 Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, and the IRNE Award for Best Supporting Actor in Ivanov in 1999. Epstein appeared Off-Broadway in Tuesdays with Morrie (2002) and in numerous films and television shows. He also cofounded the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 1967, served as associate director of the Yale Repertory Theatre (1973–1977), and as artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre (1977–1979). EQUITY LIBRARY THEATRE (ELT). Founded by actor Sam Jaffe in 1943 with the cooperation of Actors’ Equity Association and the New York Public Library’s Theatre Collection, under the supervision of George Freedley,* the theatre’s goal was as a showcase for younger talents and to provide theatre at low prices for those unable to afford commercial theatre.

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ELT productions were originally presented in libraries, but in 1949 it moved to its own space at the Lenox Hill Playhouse and, later, to other available auditoriums. Actors including Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Jean Stapleton, Tony Randall, Ossie Davis, Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman, Danny DeVito, Rod Steiger, Treat Williams, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Sidney Poitier, Harvey Korman, and Richard Kiley had their early careers boosted by performances at the ELT, and two of its revivals had brief runs on Broadway, Night Music in 1951 and Canterbury Tales in 1980. The ELT won a special Tony Award in 1977 and a Drama Desk Award in 1984, but it closed in the midst of its 1989–90 season due to financial constraints. EQUUS. English playwright Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed drama of a psychiatrist’s effort to unravel the complex psyche of a young man who has blinded a stable full of horses opened in a Shubert Organization production under the direction of John Dexter on Broadway on 24 October 1974 at the Plymouth Theatre (later moving to the Helen Hayes Theatre) for 1,209 performances following its original run in London’s West End. In the years following World War II, numerous British plays found success in a Broadway transfer, but few won as much acclaim and as long a run as Equus. The play also won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award as Best Play. Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth won approval in the roles of psychiatrist and patient, respectively, but the production’s most talked-about element were the horses—actors wearing abstract horse heads and kothurni-like hooves, not to mention full male nudity at the climactic moment of the play’s first act. Noted actors took over the leading roles, with Richard Burton and Anthony Perkins both stepping in for Hopkins and Tom Hulce replacing Firth. A 2008 Broadway revival ran for 156 performances with Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe playing the leading roles. Burton and Firth both received Academy Award nominations and Golden Globe Awards in the film version, directed by Sidney Lumet. ESBJORNSON, DAVID (1953– ). Following completion of a B.A. in Theatre and English from Gustavus Adolphus College and an M.F.A. in Directing from New York University, Esbjornson began a directing career in which he served as artistic director of New York’s Classic Stage Company from 1992 to 1999 (a period acknowledged with a Lucille Lortel Award for the body of work done by CSC), after which he worked as a freelance and became artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Company from 2005 to 2009. His directing credits include plays by such leading contemporary dramatists as Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others. In

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fact, his directing and producing career vividly reflects the vast changes in American theatre since the 1960s—as one of the most honored and prolific directors working in the first decade of the new millennium, Esbjornson has only three Broadway credits, Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000), Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), and the aborted Bobbi Boland (2003), which never officially opened. Off-Broadway, Esbjornson won an Obie Award for a revival of Thérèse Raquin in 1997 and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Iphigenia and Other Daughters in 1995. Esbjornson staged Kushner’s one-act Homebody (1995), the precursor to Homebody/Kabul, at London’s Chelsea Centre, the world premiere of Parks’s In the Blood (1999) at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, and a 2004 revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart for the Public. He also directed the world premieres of Miller’s Resurrection Blues (2002), Mitch Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher’s Tuesdays with Morrie (2002), Neil Simon’s Rose and Walsh (2003), and the New York premieres of Albee’s The Play about the Baby (2002), and Israel Horowitz’s My Old Lady (2002), as well as numerous regional theatre and Off-Broadway productions. In 2010, Esbjornson directed James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave in a Broadway revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy. ESTERMAN, LAURA (1945– ). A native of Lawrence, Long Island, Esterman attended Radcliffe and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and with Uta Hagen. She began her Broadway career in two revivals, The Time of Your Life in 1969 and The Waltz of the Toreadors in 1973, subsequently appearing in God’s Favorite (1974), Teibele and Her Demon (1979), The Suicide (1980), Metamorphosis (1989), and a revival of The Show-Off* (1992), but has worked more frequently Off-Broadway, where she won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award playing a leukemia patient in Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room (1992). Her many Off-Broadway credits include revivals of Ghosts in 1973 at the Roundabout Theatre, Macbeth in 1974 at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Golden Boy* in 1975 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1981 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as playing Sarah Bernhardt* in Duet (2003) at the Greenwich Street Theatre, and in repertory theatres she has appeared notably in the Goodman Theatre’s revival of Mourning Becomes Electra in 1975 and Yale Repertory Theatre’s revival of Rip Van Winkle* in 1981 and The Glass Menagerie in 1999. She has appeared frequently on television, in films, and as won popularity as the title character of the radio drama Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe.

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ETHAN FROME. Owen Davis,* collaborating with his son Donald Davis, had his last success with this adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, which opened on 21 January 1936 at the National Theatre for 120 performances. Ruth Gordon, Raymond Massey, and Pauline Lord* won critical approval in this Max Gordon production directed by Guthrie McClintic and designed by Jo Mielziner. Wharton commented on the “great skill and exquisite sensitiveness” with which Davis and son adapted her New England tale of Mattie Silver (Gordon), who comes to live with her cousin Zenobia (Lord) and her husband, Ethan (Massey). When Ethan and Mattie fall in love, Zenobia orders them to leave and they attempt suicide. Instead, they are seriously and permanently injured and must be cared for by the bitter Zenobia. Wharton’s novel was filmed in 1993, but without the Davis adaptation. ETHNIC THEATRE. The significant influx of European and Asian immigrants into the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century somewhat abated by 1930 as immigration laws stiffened in the 1920s. The companies and individual artists nurtured in the theatre companies emerging during this great era of immigration to the United States had radically influenced American drama, but theatre companies with an ethnic character declined by the late 1920s, although the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal kept Yiddish, African American, and other ethnic performances and performers before American audiences during its short history, as did a few surviving groups, including New York’s Folksbiene Theatre* and Chicago’s Swedish Folk Theatre. The World War II years produced another fall-off in ethnic productions, but with the war’s end, Puerto Rican, European, and Eastern immigrants influenced the development of theatre, as did the rising civil rights movement, which brought black-themed theatre into the mainstream in the late 1950s and 1960s. The Puerto Rican influence was significant in New York City, as Spanish-speaking neighborhoods created their own companies as pre-1930 immigrant groups had done. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre and the Nuyorican Theatre were influential, and despite the decline of Broadway, a wide range of ethnic performances of various kinds turned up in non-traditional theatre spaces where production expenses could be kept low. Among Hispanic groups, Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino (Farm Workers’ Theatre) created original plays (actos) and provided a model for politically active theatres. The 1970s saw the emergence of Native American theatre with Hanay Geiogamah’s Native American Theatre Ensemble, which produced plays employing traditional dramatic techniques to present Native American values, issues, and history. After 1980, Asian American

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theatre grew significantly with the appearance of the East West Players in Los Angeles standing out in its accomplishment, which included providing a venue for such playwrights as David Henry Hwang. In California and Florida, other Chicano theatre companies appeared, addressing the concerns of Mexican and Cuban immigrants, respectively. Central and South American immigrants found voice through New York Teatro Cuarto and other groups and, by the mid-1980s, virtually every major ethnic group in the United States could boast a theatrical organization devoted to their concerns. Mainstream regional theatres increasingly found means to encourage new plays and artists emerging from these ethnic companies as even Broadway and Off-Broadway made room for more diverse dramas and performers and increasingly made use of multi-ethnic and race-blind casting. ETTINGER, HEIDI. See LANDESMAN, HEIDI ETTINGER. EUGENE O’NEILL MEMORIAL THEATRE CENTER. Leasing an estate in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1964, George C. White established this center named for America’s foremost dramatist, Eugene O’Neill, with the goal of providing a working environment for new playwrights away from commercial demands and media criticism. Focused on the work of playwrights and critics, as well as ways to educate and develop an audience, the center established some programs, including the National Playwrights Conference, and annual five-day retreat led after a few formative years by Lloyd Richards (James Hougton and Wendy C. Goldberg succeeded Richards), who guided the NPC from 1968 to 1999, leading to a special Tony Award in acknowledgment of the success of its new play development. The center also established the National Theatre of the Deaf and the National Critics Institute in 1967, the National Theatre Institute in 1970, New Drama for Television in 1976, the National Music Theater Conference in 1978, and the National Puppetry Conference in 1990. The center also oversees operations of the Monte Cristo Cottage, O’Neill’s family’s summer home in New London, Connecticut, which is a museum and archive for scholars and artists. In 2010, the center received the outstanding regional theatre Tony Award. EUREKA THEATRE COMPANY (ETC). This small not-for-profit San Francisco, California-based theatre, founded in 1972 by Robert Woodruff and Chris Silva, served as a collective presenting politically charged plays by such contemporary dramatists as Caryl Churchill, Dario Fo, and Emily Mann, whose Execution of Justice (1986) was commissioned by the Eureka. In 1981, the ETC’s church-basement space was destroyed by fire, but continued to function in various borrowed spaces until 1984 when it established a

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home base in a 250-seat space in the Mission District. Among its premieres are Anthony Clarvoe’s Pick Up Axe (1990), but the theatre won particular note when artistic director Oskar Eustis commissioned playwright Tony Kushner to write his two epic Angels in America plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, which were first performed there in 1991. The two plays premiered at the Eureka prior to subsequent performances at the Mark Taper Forum, the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Broadway. Other ETC artistic directors were Richard E. T. White and Tony Taccone. EUSTIS, OSKAR (1959– ). Born in Minnesota, Eustis was educated at New York University before moving to San Francisco, California, where he began his career with the politically radical Red Wing Theatre collective. In 1981, he became resident director and dramaturg for the Eureka Theatre Company and, five years later, emerged as its artistic director. Eustis actively encouraged politically charged new plays, commissioning Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice in 1986 and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1991. He became artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in 1989, where he directed Angels in America in its world premiere. He developed a reputation for encouraging new works, including plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eduardo Machado, among others. In 1994, Eustis became artistic director of Providence, Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company and moved to New York Shakespeare Festival/ Public Theatre in 2005, replacing George C. Wolfe as artistic director. The Public’s 2009 revival of Hair scored a major critical and commercial hit and moved to Broadway. Under Eustis’s leadership, the Public also staged Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in 2006. He has also taught at Brown University and at Middlebury College. EVANS, MAURICE (1901–1989). Born in England as Maurice Herbert Evans, he spent 15 years acting in England, making notable appearances as Hamlet for the Old Vic in 1934 and in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End (1929) before moving to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1941. Noted for his Shakespearean performances in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly directed by Margaret Webster, Evans also appeared in a range of roles on stage, screen, and television. On Broadway, he won a special 1950 Tony Award for leading the City Center Theatre Company, and he produced John Patrick’s Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), which won a Tony, and No Time for Sergeants (1955). He was nominated for a Tony as an actor for a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart in 1957 and for the musical Tenderloin (1961). He also appeared in Dial “M” for Murder (1952), The Aspern Papers (1962), and in other Shaw plays. He brought

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Shakespeare’s plays to 1950s’ television, appearing in his stage successes, and continued acting into his 80s. EVE OF ST. MARK, THE. Maxwell Anderson’s two-act drama opened on 7 October 1942 at the Cort Theatre for 307 performances in a Playwright’s Company production. This play was a rarity in that it dealt seriously with the human losses of World War II during the war. Anderson’s plot centered on a young man, played by William Prince, from a New York farm family who falls in love with a neighbor (Mary Rolfe). When the war begins, the young man enlists and he and his girl face the pain of separation. When he is killed, she and his family must face his death and attempt to understand its significance. Aline McMahon was also in the cast as the young man’s mother. A 1944 screen adaptation starred William Eythe and Anne Baxter. EVELYN, JUDITH (1913–1967). Born in Seneca, South Dakota, this stage and screen actress survived the September 1939 sinking of the S.S. Athenia when it was the first liner torpedoed by a German submarine in World War II. On Broadway, she appeared in major roles in Angel Street (1941), The Rich Full Life (1945), a 1947 revival of Craig’s Wife,* The Ivy Green (1949), and The Shrike (1952). Evelyn’s notable film roles include playing Miss Lonelyhearts in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1956), Giant (1956), and The Tingler (1959), among others, as well as numerous television dramas. EWELL, TOM (1909–1994). A familiar character actor of stage and screen, Ewell was born Samuel Yewell Tompkins in Owensboro, Kentucky. He made his first stage appearances in stock beginning in 1928, followed by his Broadway debut in a small role in John Wexley’s They Shall Not Die in 1934. He continued to work in stock and in supporting roles on Broadway, including in Let Freedom Ring (1935), Ethan Frome (1936), Stage Door (1936), and he played Cornelius Hackl in Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), directed by Max Reinhardt. Ewell took over the role of Gage in Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo (1939) during the run and also appeared in Liberty Jones (1941), Sunny River (1941), Apple of His Eye (1946), John Loves Mary (1947), and Small Wonder (1948). Ewell scored a major Broadway success in The Seven Year Itch (1952), for which he won a Tony Award. He repeated his role as a man imagining an affair with an attractive neighbor, and won a Golden Globe Award, in a 1955 film version directed by Billy Wilder and costarring Marilyn Monroe. Ewell studied at The Actors Studio and in a demonstration of versatility he appeared opposite Bert Lahr in the American premiere of Waiting for Godot (1956) at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida. His subsequent

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Broadway appearances were in The Tunnel of Love (1957), Patate (1958), A Thurber Carnival (1960), and Xmas in Las Vegas (1965). Ewell appeared frequently in films after 1940, including roles in Adam’s Rib (1949), The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), Tender Is the Night (1962), and State Fair (1962) as well as numerous television shows, including his own situation comedy, The Tom Ewell Show (1961–1962) and the drama series Baretta (1975–1978) for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. EXECUTION OF JUSTICE. Emily Mann’s Drama Desk Award-nominated ensemble drama examining the case of the People vs. Dan White was commissioned by the Eureka Theatre. An early version of the play was produced at the Arena Stage in 1984, but the play opened on Broadway on 13 March 1986 for 12 performances, with a cast including John Spencer as Dan White, with Wesley Snipes, Stanley Tucci, Mary McDonnell, and Earle Hyman. Ming Cho Lee designed scenery, with lighting by Pat Collins (Drama Desk winner) and sound by Tom Morse. The play focuses on events surrounding the trial of Dan White, a San Francisco city supervisor who shot and killed Harvey Milk, the first openly gay supervisor and San Francisco mayor George Moscone, a seminal tragedy in the gay rights movement. White was controversially acquitted using the “Twinkie” defense—claiming his actions were explained by eating an excess of junk food. The play featured many multimedia elements to explore the highly charged events surrounding the trial. A television film was first show in 1999, winning a GLAAD Media Award as Outstanding Television Movie. EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE, INC. (ET). This New York City-based company was founded in 1940 as a showcase for actors and playwrights, but World War II closed it a year later. ET was revived in 1946 with support from the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) and theatrical unions provided concessions to allow a season to proceed at low costs. Success was elusive and despite the concessions the company lost money and shuttered operations following the 1948–1949 season.

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F FALLS, ROBERT (1954– ). A native of Ashland, Illinois, Falls was educated at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign prior to studying acting with Edward Kaye-Martin. His directing career commenced with the Wisdom Bridge Theatre, where he served as artistic director from 1977 to 1985 and directed over 30 productions. In 1986, Falls became artistic director of the Goodman Theatre, where several of his productions have transferred to Broadway, including revivals of Galileo, The Iceman Cometh, The Night of the Iguana, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, the last bringing him a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination. Fall’s direction of Death of a Salesman in 1999 brought him a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. He also received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for a 2000 production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, and the Goodman under Falls’s leadership received a 1992 regional theatre Tony Award. Other Broadway productions directed by Falls include The Speed of Darkness (1991), a revival of The Rose Tattoo in 1995, The Young Man from Atlanta (1997), Aida (2000), Shining City (2006), Talk Radio (2007), and revivals of American Buffalo in 2008 and Desire under the Elms* in 2009. FAT PIG. Neil LaBute’s comedy opened 17 November 2004 at New York’s Manhattan Class Company with a cast, including Ashlie Atkinson, Andrew McCarthy, Jeremy Piven, and Keri Russell, winning an Outer Critics Circle Award. The play returned to a frequent LaBute theme of the overemphasis on physical attractiveness in human relationships, depicting a young businessman, Tom, who is attracted to an overweight librarian, Helen. Both end up heartbroken when Tom acknowledges that he cannot commit to her because he fears what his friends will think. Critic David Amsden, writing in New York Magazine, applauded LaBute’s “cruel wit” and his status as “the most legitimately provocative and polarizing playwright at work today.” A 2005 London premiere of the play brought LaBute an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Comedy.

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FAY, FRANK (1897–1961). Irish Catholic Francis Anthony Donner was born in San Francisco, California, prior to beginning a vaudeville* career during World War I. With the dawn of sound films, he had some success on screen beginning with The Show of Shows (1929). Notoriously difficult to work with, Fay’s Broadway appearances were mostly in musicals and revues,* with Fay often writing sketches and lyrics, including Girl o’Mine (1918), The Passing Show of 1918, Oh, What a Girl! (1919), Jim Jam Jems (1920), Frank Fay’s Fables (1922), Raymond Hitchcock’s Pinwheel (1922), Artists and Models (1923), Harry Delmar’s Revels (1927), Tattle Tales (1933), Frank Fay Vaudeville (1939), and Laugh Time (1943). Fay had his most notable success late in his career as the gentle tippler Elwood P. Dowd in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Harvey (1944). Fay was married to actress Barbara Stanwyck from 1928 to 1935. FAYE, JOEY (1909–1997). Born Joseph Palladino in New York to an Italian immigrant barber, he began his stage career in amateur nights, vaudeville,* and burlesque, becoming one of the last of a breed of stage performers adept in the traditions of burlesque comedy, although Faye survived the death of burlesque by developing himself as a character actor, going “legitimate” in the national tour of Room Service in 1937, and as straight man for Phil Silvers, with whom he appeared in two musicals, High Button Shoes (1947) and Top Banana (1951). Faye appeared in numerous films and television shows with occasional returns to Broadway for Strip for Action (1942), revivals of The Milky Way and Boy Meets Girl in 1944, several minor musicals and revues,* The Tender Trap (1954), Little Me (1962), a revival of Guys and Dolls in 1965, 70, Girls, 70 (1971), a revival of The Ritz in 1983, Grind (1985), and his last, a revival of Three Men on a Horse in 1993. FEDER, ABE (1909–1997). Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born Feder studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and became one of the earliest wellknown lighting designers beginning with Trick for Trick (1932). He designed lighting for numerous Federal Theatre Project productions, including the legendary The Cradle Will Rock (1938), and many Broadway productions, including Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), Angel Street (1941), Winged Victory (1943), The Immortalist (1954), The Flowering Peach (1954), Inherit the Wind (1955), My Fair Lady (1956), A Visit to a Small Planet (1957), Orpheus Descending (1957), Time Remembered (1958), The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), A Loss of Roses (1959), Camelot (1960), Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1964), Scratch (1971), and numerous revivals between the mid-1930s and the early 1970s. Feder was nominated for a Tony

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Award and a Drama Desk Award for Goodtime Charley in 1975, one of his last Broadway productions. He designed lighting as a consultant for the 1964 New York World’s Fair and numerous theatres and buildings, including Rockefeller Center and the Kennedy Center. FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP). President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” intended this project, a Federal One project of the Works Progress Administration, to fund theatre and other live artistic performances throughout the United States. Officially established on 27 August 1935, the FTP provided one of the most intriguing, albeit brief, chapters in the history of American theatre. Hallie Flanagan, a theatre professor at Vassar College, was appointed director by Harry Hopkins, who announced that the FTP productions would be “free, adult, and uncensored,” a promise that would be compromised almost immediately and ultimately lead to the project’s demise. Among its many productions, Living Newspapers were among the true innovations and perhaps the first documentary theatre in the U.S. Researchers combed daily newspapers to create plays on topical issues, with resulting performances addressing national farm policies, as in Triple-A Plowed Under (1935), which assailed the U.S. Supreme Court for halting an aid agency for farmers. Others dealt with such explosive topics as the spread of syphilis (Spirochete in 1938), the Tennessee Valley Authority (Power in 1937), unions (Injunction Granted in 1935), and inequities in housing (One Third of a Nation in 1938), creating controversy despite the fact that the Living Newspaper productions were popular with audiences. When the U.S. State Department objected to the depiction of foreign heads of state in Ethiopia (1936), a Living Newspaper production chronicling that country’s battle against Fascist Italy’s invading army, playwright Elmer Rice, head of the FTP’s New York office, resigned in protest. Another noted dramatist, Susan Glaspell, was the FTP’s Midwest director, and among the hundreds of young talents working on FTP productions (at the peak of the FTP over 10,000 artists were employed) were Orson Welles, John Houseman, Martin Ritt, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Canada Lee, Howard Bay, Joseph Cotten, Norman Lloyd, Will Geer, Paul Green, Mary Chase, Arlene Francis, Virgil Thomson, John Huston, Joseph Losey, Arthur Arent, Abe Feder, and Marc Blitzstein, whose collaboration with Welles and Houseman on his musical satire The Cradle Will Rock (1938) generated more controversy for the FTP when government officials padlocked the theatre where it was to premiere on its opening night. Welles, Houseman, and Blitzstein responded by renting a vacant theatre and opening the play sans scenery and costumes, with Blizstein playing his score and the actors, situated throughout the theatre, performing their roles.

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FTP was divided into numerous units, including those devoted to an African American theatre, children’s theatre, foreign-language productions, puppetry, religious drama, musicals, circuses, and dance. The so-called Negro Unit had several notable successes, including the “voodoo” Macbeth in 1936, Haiti (1938), and The Swing Mikado (1939). Other noted FTP productions included Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1936), which opened in 20 cities simultaneously, T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1936), and Paul Green’s enduring outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, which opened in 1937 in an outdoor theatre in Roanoke, Virginia, built by the WPA. This extraordinary and ambitious attempt at a nationalized theatre met with increasing resistance during its brief existence. Controversy over the content of several productions caused a conservative Congress to challenge its existence, and the FTP was ended officially on 30 June 1939. Flanagan published Arena, a 1940 memoir of her experiences leading the FTP, and numerous subsequent studies of the FTP have been published. In 1999, Tim Robbins’s film Cradle Will Rock offered a view of the FTP through the controversial events surrounding Blitzstein’s musical. FEFU AND HER FRIENDS. Maria Irene Fornés’s three-part examination of women’s issues and feminism opened under Fornés’s direction on 5 May 1977 at the New York Theatre Strategy prior to an American Place Theatre production, which opened on 8 January 1978. Ostensibly set in 1935 in the New England living room of the title character and her husband, Phillip (who is never seen, but presumed to be in the nearby garden), the first part depicts a group of eight women rehearsing a theatre education project. Fefu confesses to the women that she and Phillip play a game in which she fires blanks at him and he pretends to be shot, but ominously adds that Phillips has said that one day he might replace the blanks with live ammunition. In the second part, subsets of the women are seen sharing their individual problems and quests for individuality and liberation from the social and personal constraints they feel. Part Three focuses on the women’s hopes for themselves and for the creation of a shared community, despite the revelations of strains behind their seemingly affectionate relationships as they work on their theatre project. When Fefu fires her gun at Phillip in the garden once more, one of the women unexpectedly dies in the living room. FEIFFER, JULES (1929– ). Born Jules Ralph Feiffer in the Bronx, New York, Feiffer learned cartooning as an assistant to Will Eisner in the 1940s prior to creating his own cartoons (eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartoons in The Village Voice in 1986), children’s books, and numerous plays and screenplays. Feiffer’s films include an animated short

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Munro (1961), for which he won an Academy Award. He also contributed screenplays for Carnal Knowledge (1971), Popeye (1980), I Want to Go Home (1989), and an adaption of his own play, Little Murders (1971), which had first been performed Off-Broadway in 1967, but failed. It was later produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where it was well-received, and was subsequently staged at the Circle in the Square in 1969. Other Feiffer plays include Knock, Knock (1976), which was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award, and Grown Ups (1981), which received a Drama Desk Award nomination. His other Broadway productions include sketches for Oh! Calcutta! (1969), an “E-Mail” for Short Talks on the Universe (2002), and the musical The Apple Tree (1966), based on Feiffer’s 1957 story “Passionella.” Off-Broadway, Jules Feiffer’s Hold Me! (1977) was Drama Desk-nominated. His other plays, all short works, include Crawling Around (1961), Only When I Laugh (1967), and The White House Murder Case (1969). FEINGOLD, MICHAEL (1945– ). Chicago, Illinois-born Feingold attended Columbia University and Yale University prior to become a drama critic for The Village Voice in 1971, rising to chief critic in 1974. Recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award in 1996, Feingold has served as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre, and the American Repertory Theatre, and as literary advisor to New York’s Theatre for a New Audience. Feingold is also a playwright and translator of numerous European classics, including works by Molière, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, and others. FEIST, GENE (1923– ). Born Eugene Feist in New York, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon and New York University prior to training at The Actors Studio and the American Theatre Wing. He married actress Elizabeth Owens in 1957 and together they revived the New Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee, prior to founding the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1965, where he served as producing director of over 150 productions that won Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for revivals of Anna Christie* in 1993, Nine in 2003, and Assassins in 2004. Drama Desk Awards went to Roundabout productions of She Loves Me in 1994, and 12 Angry Men in 2005. Revivals of Glengarry Glen Ross in 2005, The Pajama Game in 2006, and The 39 Steps (2008) won Tonys. Feist was presented with a lifetime achievement Lucille Lortel Award in 1996. FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION. Cross-dressing (or “drag”) in theatre is as old as the theatre itself, although its popularity in mainstream theatre ebbs and flows. Gender flipping may suggest androgyny, challenge

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stereotypes, or provide broad comedy, all evident in nineteenth-century American theatre with such actors as Neil Burgess,* George W. Munroe, Gilbert Sarony, the Russell Brothers, and other men playing “dame” roles, often with an ethnic flavor, as did many minstrel* and vaudeville* performers, while actresses, most notably Charlotte Cushman,* continued the long tradition of “breeches roles” for women in Shakespeare and other plays. Sarah Bernhardt famously played Hamlet in the late nineteenth century, with a few twentieth-century actresses, notably Judith Anderson and Diane Venora, playing the melancholy Dane to decidedly mixed critical responses generations later. In the twentieth century, men in drag provided amusement in wartime musicals and other entertainments during both World Wars, although after World War II, most drag performance was relegated to the variety stage and gay nightclubs, with a few performers such as T. C. Jones, Craig Russell, Charles Pierce, and Lynn Carter, become well-known, mostly through impersonating female movie and stage stars. The era of gay liberation that began after World War II and picked up steam in the 1960s brought a more serious exploration of androgyny and gender boundaries which, in rock music, had been evident in the performance styles of Alice Cooper, Boy George, Michael Jackson, and Madonna, among others. Some groups took a more radical approach, described as “gender-fuck,” as seen first in San Francisco, California, with such groups as the Cockettes, Angels of Light, the Cycle Sluts, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, with parodies of gender roles and traditional drag even as groups like the all-male Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo continued it. On New York stages, drag evolved into performance art in the work of solo artists like John “Lypsinka” Epperson, while playwright and actor Charles Ludlam pioneered Ridiculous Theatre, a movement of the 1970s which elevated “camp” to a theatrical genre in which performers like Ludlam, Divine, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Charles Busch, in their highly individual ways, could mix many theatrical genres and devices with cinematic traditions to create plays and performances in which the smashing and reinventing of gender roles, not to mention theatrical styles parodied, was a central component. Gay men pioneered much of this work, but increasingly after 1990, lesbian theatre groups like Split Britches and others, brought “dyke noir” to the fore and otherwise assaulted gender stereotypes from their vantage point. Much of this work went on in Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theatres, nightclubs, and other performance venues, while mainstream Broadway plays only occasionally moved into this realm in the drag musical La Cage aux Folles (1983) or in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), while the cast of five men and three women in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993) crossed gender lines with each playing both male and female charac-

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ters in this epic work. In the new millennium, cross-dressing was accepted on Broadway and in regional theatres in both mainstream entertainments and serious drama at the level it had been in Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theatre for decades. The dual 2003 Broadway triumphs of the musical Hairspray, with Harvey Fierstein in the drag role of Edna Turnblad and Doug Wright’s one-person I Am My Own Wife, in which Jefferson Mays played German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, proved the point. See also SEXUALITY. FEMINIST THEATRE. Since the nineteenth century both male and female dramatists have addressed the issues of gender inequities, women’s rights, marriage, and sexuality, and despite the fact that women playwrights were comparatively scarce until the second half of the twentieth century (although such women as Rachel Crothers, Zona Gale,* Susan Glaspell, Lillian Hellman, Rose Franken, and others made significant strides), this situation began to change slowly after World War II as more women began to write, direct, and design for the American stage. This activity radically increased in the 1960s as feminism emerged as an organized political and cultural movement over such issues as equal pay and opportunity in all realms of American life, as well as various forms of liberation from social stereotypes about women and sexuality. Much energy centered around the National Organization for Women (NOW), which campaigned for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution of the United States. More militant forms of feminism emerged in this period based on the notion that patriarchal domination of the American society is systemic, stressing that gender roles are socially constructed, not a matter of nature. Numerous women scholars began to address the subject of feminism within the realms of theatre and drama (and American culture at large). In this period a number of women’s theatre groups appeared, including New York’s It’s Alright to Be a Woman Theatre, the Magic Theatre, and the Women’s Experimental Theatre, among others, and a number of individual women dramatists emerged between the 1960s and 1980s, including Megan Terry, Roberta Sklar, Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornés, and others, offering plays in which feminist issues, women’s history, and the nature of sexual roles were central. Other theatre groups appeared later in the twentieth century, including some with ethnic concerns as well, including Spider-Woman Theatre and At the Foot of the Mountain, and other groups not overtly identified with feminism increasingly included these concerns in their missions or produced feminist plays with regularity, including The Open Theatre, The Living Theatre, and The Performance Group. Increased gay and lesbian political activism led to the rise of lesbian theatre collectives like Split Britches and

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others, stressing gender-fuck and other issues inherent in challenging traditional sexual roles. During this era, much debate centered around the question of whether assimilation with or separatism from the mainstream theatre was in the best interest of feminist theatre artists. After 1980, women dramatists writing on feminist issues found more access to mainstream stages on Broadway and Off-Broadway, including such writers as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange, Wendy Wasserstein, and, later, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Naomi Wallace, and others. Noted performers, from Lily Tomlin to Cherry Jones, stressed their feminist concerns (and their personal lives as lesbians) through those works with which they associated themselves, and women directors, including Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, led the way in incorporating feminist principles in their productions as critics and theatre scholars increasingly wrote on the subject, particularly after 1990. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. FENCES. August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, directed by Lloyd Richards and with a strong cast headed by James Earl Jones, premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Center in 1983 and was performed elsewhere before opening on Broadway on 26 March 1987 at the 46th Street Theatre for 525 performances, winning, along with the Pulitzer, a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Set in the 1950s, the play centers on garbage man Troy Maxson (Jones), once a talented baseball player whose career was stunted by racism, and his complex relationship with his son (Courtney B. Vance) and wife (Mary Alice). Fences is one of the ten decade-by-decade plays Wilson wrote chronicling the experience of African Americans in the twentieth century. Richards, Jones, and Alice won Tonys, with nominations for Frankie R. Faison and Vance, with the latter winning a Theatre World Award. As of 2010, no film version of Fences has appeared, although it has had many productions in regional and university theatres. Under Kenny Leon’s direction, Fences was produced at Boston’s Huntington Theatre and subsequently revived on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Chris Chalk in 2010, and won critical approval, including a Tony and a Drama Desk Award as Best Revival, Tony and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Washington and Davis, and a Theatre World Award for Chalk. FERBER, EDNA (1887–1968).† A native of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Ferber is best known as author of Show Boat (1926), the durable novel of itinerant performers living on the Mississippi River between the 1880s and 1920s that became a celebrated Florenz Ziegfeld*-produced musical with a score by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II in 1927. Another Ferber

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novel, Saratoga Trunk (1941), was adapted into a 1959 musical. Despite success as a novelist, Ferber collaborated on several of the most popular plays of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Without a collaborator, Ferber wrote The Eldest (1920), but her best works for the stage were created with partners, beginning with her first important collaboration, with George V. Hobart,* which produced Our Mrs. Chesney* (1915), a sturdy vehicle for Ethel Barrymore, and $1200 a Year (1920), written with Newman Levy. Her longest and most successful collaboration was with George S. Kaufman and resulted in Minick* (1924) and The Royal Family* (1927). After 1930, Ferber and Kaufman had two of their most enduring successes with Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936). Both comedy-dramas, the plays garnered critical acclaim, long and profitable runs, and film versions now considered classics. Two subsequent collaborations with Kaufman, The Land Is Bright (1941) and Bravo! (1948), were less successful. FERNALD, JOHN (1905–1985). Born in Marin County, California, as John Bailey Fernald, he worked in England as a director before founding the Meadow Brook Theatre in Rochester, Michigan, in 1967 as a not-for-profit operation. The theatre performed on the campus of Oakland University, eventually growing to the largest professional company in Michigan. Under Fernald’s direction, the company performed a range of classic and modern revivals before dissolving in 2003. On Broadway, Fernald directed The Affair (1962) and a 1970 revival of The Cherry Orchard. He also authored the textbooks The Play Produced: An Introduction to the Technique of Producing Plays (1952) and Sense of Direction (1968), and an award in his name was established in 1988 to support assistant directors at the start of their careers. FERRER, JOSÉ (1912–1992). This versatile actor, director, and producer, was born José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and graduated from Princeton University in 1933. He began his acting career on Broadway in A Slight Case of Murder (1935), winning plaudits within a short time in such productions as Mamba’s Daughters (1939), Key Largo (1939), a revival of Charley’s Aunt in 1940, and as Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello in an acclaimed 1943 revival. In this period, he began to direct and produce with some regularity, staging Strange Fruit (1945) and producing an acclaimed revival of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1946, which brought him a Tony Award and which led to his Academy Award-winning performance in a 1950 screen version. Ferrer also received three Tonys as Best Director for The Fourposter (1951), Stalag 17 (1951), and The Shrike (1952), for which he also won a Best Actor Tony, and his libretto for the musical Oh Captain! (1958) was Tony-nominated.

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As an actor, Ferrer’s other Broadway appearances include revivals of Volpone, The Alchemist, and Angel Street in 1948, Twentieth Century in 1950, and Richard III in 1953, Edwin Booth* (1958), The Girl Who Came to Supper (1963), and he stepped in as a replacement for the title character in Man of La Mancha in 1966. On Broadway, Ferrer also directed As We Forgive Our Debtors (1947), The Chase (1952), My Three Angels (1953), Juno (1959), The Andersonville Trial (1959), and Carmelina (1979), among others. In films, Ferrer was Oscar-nominated for Joan of Arc (1948) and Moulin Rouge (1952), and also appeared in The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Shrike (1955), I Accuse! (1958), Ship of Fools (1965), Enter Laughing (1967), Fedora (1978), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), and To Be or Not to Be (1983), and directed several films. On television, Ferrer received two Emmy Award nominations and appeared in many dramatic shows. His three wives were actress/teacher Uta Hagen, actress Phyllis Hill, and singer Rosemary Clooney. FICHANDLER, ZELDA (1924– ). Born Zelda Diamond in Boston, Massachusetts, she attended George Washington University and Cornell University prior to marrying Thomas C. Fichandler and with him and Edward Mangum founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. She served at its artistic director for 41 years, until her retirement in 1991. Fichandler staged many of the Arena’s productions during her tenure, from great American plays to modern European classics. Under her guidance, the Arena also produced new works, including The Great White Hope (1967), Indians (1969), Moonchildren (1971), Raisin (1973), Zalmen, or The Madness of God (1976), A History of the American Film (1978), and K2 (1983), and she developed an interest in Russian and Eastern European drama during a trip there in 1973. In 1976, the Arena received the Tony Award for Regional Theatre and Fichandler won a Helen Hayes Award for directing a revival of The Crucible in 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Bill Clinton in 1997, and she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1999, the first nonNew York artist so honored. A theatre enthusiast, Fichandler stated, “There is a hunger to see the human presence acted out. As long as that need remains, people will find a way to do theatre.” FIELD, BETTY (1918–1973). A native of Boston, Massachusetts, this fine but largely unsung actress began her career in the London production of Howard Lindsay’s farce, She Loves Me Not (1933) and debuted on Broadway in a small role in Page Miss Glory (1934). She played a wide range of roles on stage, but for a time she was stuck in a range of comic ingénue roles after George Abbott cast her as the naïve secretary in the zany farce Room

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Service (1937) and similar characters in a series of comedies, including Angel Island (1937), If I Were You (1938), What a Life (1938), The Primrose Path (1939), Ring Two (1939), Two on an Island (1940), Flight to the West (1940), A New Life (1943), and she replaced Margaret Sullavan in the hit comedy The Voice of the Turtle in 1944. Field married playwright Elmer Rice in 1942. He wrote the comedy Dream Girl (1945) for Field, and she scored a major success. Her subsequent Broadway appearances were in a wide variety of plays, including The Rat Race (1949), Not for Children (1951), The Ladies of the Corridor (1953), Festival (1955), a revival of The Waltz of the Toreadors (1958), A Touch of the Poet (1958), A Loss of Roses (1959), a revival of Strange Interlude* in 1963, Where’s Daddy? (1966), and All Over (1971). She also replaced Jessica Tandy in The Fourposter in 1952. Field won plaudits in her first important movie role, as Mae in Of Mice and Men (1939), appearing in several films including King’s Row (1942), Flesh and Fantasy (1943), The Southerner (1945), The Great Gatsby (1949), Picnic (1955), Bus Stop (1956), Peyton Place (1957), Butterfield 8 (1960), and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Field and Rice were divorced in 1956 and, along with her stage and film work, she also appeared in numerous television dramas. FIERSTEIN, HARVEY (1954– ). Harvey Forbes Fierstein, born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, as the son of a handkerchief manufacturer and a school librarian began working as a drag performer around 1970. Featured as a 270-pound teenage transvestite specializing in Ethel Merman impersonations, Fierstein made his professional debut at Club 82 and also worked with the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in 1971 prior to attending the Pratt Institute in 1973. He also acted in plays, beginning with Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971), and while studying at Pratt, began writing plays, including In Search of the Cobra Jewels (1972), Freaky Pussy (1974), Cannibals Just Don’t Know No Better (1975), and Flatbush Tosca (1975), the last of which was produced by the New York City Theatre Ensemble. Fierstein’s playwriting gained significant attention with Torch Song Trilogy, a collection of three Off-Broadway one-act plays, The International Stud (first produced in 1976), Fugue in a Nursery (1979), and Widows and Children First! (1979), all held together by a central character, Arnold Beckoff, Fierstein’s alter ego, a role he played himself both onstage and in a subsequent 1988 film version. The Broadway production brought Fierstein a Tony Award, Theatre World Award, and Drama Desk Award for his performance and a Tony for Best Play. Fierstein followed Torch Song Trilogy with Spookhouse (1982), which failed to excite critical or commercial approval, but two years later he scored with his libretto for the long-running hit musical La Cage aux Folles (1984), for which he won a Tony.

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Turning his attention to the AIDS pandemic in the mid-1980s, Fierstein wrote Safe Sex (1987), another trilogy connected by topic. Fierstein appeared in Safe Sex when it moved to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, but it closed after a mere nine performances. Fierstein also contributed the libretto for the failed musical Legs Diamond (1988), but by the 1990s he devoted much of his attention to acting in films and television, as well as performing in cabarets. Back on the Broadway stage, he scored in the drag role of Edna Turnblad in the musical Hairspray (2002), winning a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for his performance, and scripted and performed in the musical A Catered Affair (2008). See also FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE; MEN/MASCULINITY; SEXUALITY. FIFTH COLUMN, THE. Ernest Hemingway made a rare foray into playwriting with his 1937 war drama adapted by Benjamin Glazer and directed by Lee Strasberg for The Theatre Guild. The play opened at the Alvin Theatre on 6 March 1940 for 87 performances with a cast including Franchot Tone, Lenore Ulric,* and Lee J. Cobb. Set in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, The Fifth Column involves two mismatched journalists, Philip Rawlings and Dorothy Bridges, who fall into an affair during a major battle. Glazer’s doctoring of Hemingway’s play stressed antifascist attitudes, but it found scant favor with audiences. New York’s Mint Theatre Company revived the play in 2008, but otherwise it has only rarely been produced. FIFTH OF JULY. Lanford Wilson’s two-act drama under the direction of Marshall W. Mason was produced by the Circle Repertory Company on 27 April 1978 for 158 performances with a cast including William Hurt, as Ken Talley, a gay paraplegic Vietnam War veteran who has returned to his Missouri home to teach, and Jeff Daniels, as Jed, Ken’s lover. Most of the play’s characters, including Gwen, a former schoolmate of Ken’s who with her husband, John, wants to buy Ken’s house for a recording studio; Ken’s sister, June, a former antiwar militant and her precocious adolescent daughter, Shirley; and Ken’s ailing, widowed aunt Sally all endeavor to free themselves from the constraints of the past and the impact of the 1960s and the Vietnam era. Confronted with selling his family home, Ken is ultimately gently guided by Jed and Sally to face his current reality and the specters of the past by keeping his home and imagining a new future in it. Critics found this play, like much of Wilson’s oeuvre, reminiscent of Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams. A Broadway production opened at the New Apollo Theatre on 5 November 1980 for 511 performances and reaped five Tony Award nominations and a Tony for Swoosie Kurtz as Gwen. Christopher Reeve replaced Hurt and Daniels reprised his role for the Broadway produc-

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tion. A PBS-TV film, with Richard Thomas stepping in for Reeve, was shown in 1982, with Daniels and Kurtz reprising their roles. FINLEY, KAREN (1956– ). Born in Evanston, Illinois, Finley completed an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and, with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, moved to New York and began her work as a performance artist and writer collaborating with the Kipper Kids (Brian Routh, Martin von Haselberg, and David Wojnarowicz). Many of her performance pieces reflect her concern with women’s bodies and sexuality, the collapse of the nuclear family (in part, a reaction to her father’s 1979 suicide), and society’s victimization of the disenfranchised. Among these are The Constant State of Desire (1987), The Theory of Total Blame (1988), We Keep Our Victims Ready (1989), A Certain Level of Denial (1993), The American Chestnut (1997), for which she won an Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman (1998), Make Love (2003), and George and Martha (2004). At the height of the Culture Wars, Finley was one of the “NEA Four,” artists whose grants were revoked due to charges of obscenity brought by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, setting off a controversy about national funding of art. Finley also courted considerable controversy by frequently appearing onstage nude and smeared with chocolate or honey, but with the articulated goal of desexualizing nudity. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; SEXUALITY; SOLO PERFORMANCES; WOMEN/FEMININITY. FISHER, JULES (1937– ). This noted Broadway lighting designer was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology before becoming one of the leading and most prolific lighting designers on Broadway and Off-Broadway (credited with over 200 productions) as well as in film, television, dance, opera, and the concert stage. On Broadway, his numerous Tony Award-winning designs include Pippin (1972), Ulysses in Nighttown (1973), Dancin’ (1978), Grand Hotel (1990), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996), and a revival of Assassins in 2004. He received a Drama Desk Awards for his designs for Chicago (1975), Grand Hotel, Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, and Assassins. Among Fisher’s many other Broadway designs are Anyone Can Whistle (1964), High Spirits (1964), The Subject Was Roses (1964), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967), The Man in the Glass Booth (1968), Hair (1968), Butterflies Are Free (1969), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), revivals of No, No, Nanette in 1971, The Iceman Cometh in 1973, and Uncle Vanya in 1973,

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American Buffalo (1977), La Cage aux Folles (1983), Death and the Maiden (1992), Angels in America (1993), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), and Caroline, or Change (2004). Fisher often works in collaboration with Peggy Eisenhauer and their joint productions include Song and Dance (1985), Rags (1986), Legs Diamond (1988), Ragtime (1998), revivals of Gypsy in 2003 and The Ritz in 2007, and 9 to 5 (2009). Fisher is married to dancer/choreographer Graciela Daniele and teaches at the New School for Social Research. FITZGERALD, GERALDINE (1913–2005). Born in Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland, Fitzgerald was inspired by her aunt, actress and director Shelah Richards. Her first work as an actress in Dublin in 1932 led to London two years later, where she acted in English films before moving to the United States to appear on Broadway opposite Orson Welles in a Mercury Theatre revival of Heartbreak House in 1938. That same year, Warner Bros. film producer Hal Wallis offered Fitzgerald a contract and she subsequently divided her time between movies and theatre, appearing on stage in Sons and Soldiers (1943), playing Goneril to Welles’s Lear in a revival of King Lear in 1956, Hide and Seek (1957), a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1975, The Shadow Box (1977), and a revival of A Touch of the Poet in 1977. Fitzgerald was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for her direction of Bill C. Davis’s Mass Appeal (1981) and Drama Desk-nominated for her Geraldine Fitzgerald in Streetsongs (1979). Her appearances Off-Broadway include a 1971 revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, for which she won a Drama Desk Award. Also in 1971, Fitzgerald became the first woman to play the Stage Manager in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Fitzgerald’s film appearances include her Academy Award-nominated performance in Wuthering Heights (1939), Dark Victory (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1943), Wilson (1944), Ten North Frederick (1958), The Pawnbroker (1964), Rachel, Rachel (1968), and Arthur (1981). On television, she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Rodeo Red and the Runaways in 1979 and was nominated for an Emmy for an episode of The Golden Girls in 1988. Fitzgerald was the mother of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and the great-aunt of actress Tara FitzGerald. FIVE STAR FINAL. Louis Weitzenkorn’s three-act melodrama,* produced by A. H. Woods,* opened at the Cort Theatre on 30 December 1930 for 175 performances. The highly charged plot involves a newspaper editor, Randall (Arthur Byron), compelled by his ruthless producer to dredge up an old story about Nancy Vorhees, a woman accused of killing her lover. Vorhees, now married and preparing for the marriage of her grown daughter Jenny, begs

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Randall to kill the story so as not to ruin Jenny’s chance for happiness. Under pressure, Randall runs the story, leading to the suicide of Vorhees and her husband. Jenny comes to Randall’s office intending to kill him, but she learns he has resigned his post over what has occurred. A 1931 film version was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and starred Edward G. Robinson. FLANAGAN, HALLIE (1890–1969). Born in Redfield, South Dakota, as Hallie Ferguson, she was raised in Iowa and attended Grinnell College and studied with George Pierce Baker* at Harvard University. She married Murray Flanagan, but his premature death in 1918 led her to take a job teaching theatre at Vassar College. Her interest in European experimentation in theatre practice and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926 provided the impetus for a European tour during which she met with such notables as John Galsworthy, Constantin Stanislavsky, Edward Gordon Craig, and Lady Augusta Gregory. Back at Vassar, Flanagan established the Vassar Experimental Theatre and cowrote Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931), which won national attention. In 1935, Harry Hopkins, head of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, selected Flanagan to direct the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a bold project intended to not only put theatre artists back to work during the Great Depression, but to bring all manner of theatre to American citizens (especially those with little or no access to mainstream theatre) that would be free, adult, and uncensored. Despite considerable success at meeting the heady goals Flanagan articulated, the FTP met with increasing controversy resulting from the content of various productions, from the topical “Living Newspapers” to the Orson Welles staging of Marc Blitzstein’s satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1938). In 1939, a conservative U.S. Congress bent on turning back New Deal programs succeeded in shutting down the FTP. Flanagan returned to her teaching post at Vassar and wrote a memoir of the FTP experience, Arena (1940). In 1942, Flanagan became head of the Theatre Department at Smith College, where she worked until her retirement. In Tim Robbins’s 1999 film Cradle Will Rock, which chronicled the censorship battle over the Blitzstein musical, actress Cherry Jones played Flanagan. FLEA THEATRE, THE. Established by artistic director Jim Simpson, scene designer Kyle Chepulis, and playwright Mac Wellman in 1996, partly in an attempt to revive the glory days of Off-Off Broadway experimentation, this company operates in two tiny performances spaces (one with 40 seats, the other with 80) and typically stages three productions annually. Their production of Anne Nelson’s The Guys (2002), which was written in nine days in

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response to the tragic events of 9/11, won acclaim for its depiction of the experiences of a fireman faced with eulogizing several of his colleagues killed at the World Trade Center. The Flea received a 2004 Drama Desk Award for Distinguished Achievement. FLETCHER, ALLEN (1922–1985). San Francisco, California-born Fletcher was educated at Stanford University, Yale University, the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art prior to beginning a career as a director in 1948 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, continuing with the festival for eight years. Fletcher directed for the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, and the Association of Producing Artists in the 1950s and early 1960s, winning acclaim for his 1963 staging of King Lear with Morris Carnovsky, after which he took over as director and head of the professional training program for the American Shakespeare Festival in 1962. He moved to the Seattle Repertory Theatre from 1966 to 1970, after which he established the Actor’s Company and served as director of the Conservatory for the American Conservatory Theatre until 1984, when he moved to the Denver Theatre Center for a brief time prior to his death. FLETCHER, BRAMWELL (1904–1988). Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, Fletcher became a stage, film, and television actor in the U.S. and England beginning in 1927. He debuted on Broadway in Scotland Yard (1929), after which he appeared in many plays, including Within the Gates (1934), revivals of The Circle and Outward Bound in 1938, Margin for Error (1939), Rebecca (1945), The Lovers (1956), and several revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s plays during the 1940s and 1950s. He also stepped in as a replacement Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1956). With the dawn of sound films, he appeared in several early classics, including costarring with John Barrymore* in Svengali (1931), as well as The Mummy (1932), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), White Cargo (1942), and Random Harvest (1942), and also appeared frequently on television in the 1950s and 1960s. Fletcher wed actresses Helen Chandler and Diana Barrymore, but both marriages ended in divorce. FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY AND THEATRE. Established in 1932 with a gift from Henry Clay Folger and his wife Emily Jordan Folger, the library, which is located on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. houses the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials, as well as Renaissance books, manuscripts, and art works. For many years, it included a theatre, which left the library in 1992 for larger facilities. The Folger Theatre features

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a three-play season in a 250-seat Elizabethan-style space reminiscent of an innyard theatre. FOLKSBIENE YIDDISH THEATRE.† Originally one of many theatres established in New York City during the heyday of Yiddish theatre, the Folksbiene has staged productions annually since 1915, becoming the longest surviving theatre. Joseph Buloff and Jacob Ben-Ami were among early directors and the theatre established itself in the Central Synagogue, but lost their home there in 1998 as the result of a fire. After brief periods in other spaces, the theatre settled into the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and in 2006 changed its name to the National Yiddish Theatre–Folksbiene. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. FONDA, HENRY (1905–1982). One of the great American film stars of mid-twentieth century, Henry Jaynes Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, and began his theatrical career acting at the Omaha Community Playhouse prior to working in stock in New England. Fonda made his Broadway debut in a small role in The Game of Love and Death (1929), followed by I Loved You Wednesday (1932) and New Faces of 1934 (1934) before a notable success in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), which led to his long Hollywood career with his 1935 appearance in the film version. Despite movie stardom, Fonda returned frequently to the Broadway stage, scoring a notable success as the title character in Mister Roberts (1948), which brought him a Tony Award. He repeated his performance as the selfsacrificing navy office in the 1955 screen version of the play. Fonda also appeared on Broadway in Point of No Return (1951), The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), Two for the Seesaw (1958), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1958), Critic’s Choice (1960), A Gift for Time (1962), Generation (1965), a revival of Our Town in 1969, Clarence Darrow (1974), for which he received a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination, and First Monday in October (1978). In 1979, Fonda was presented with a special Tony. Fonda appeared in over 100 films, including such classics as Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lady Eve (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946), 12 Angry Men (1957), Advise & Consent (1962), The Best Man (1964), FailSafe (1964), and he won an Academy Award for On Golden Pond (1981), although he had been presented with an honorary Oscar the year before. He also appeared on television, garnering Emmy Award nominations for The Red Pony (1973), Clarence Darrow (1974), and Gideon’s Trumpet (1980). In 1980, he appeared in a rare live television presentation of Preston Jones’s play The Oldest Living Graduate, one of the works in A Texas Trilogy.

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Fonda was the father of Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda and the grandfather of Bridget Fonda. FONTANNE, LYNN (1887–1983).† Born in England, Lillie Louise Fontanne debuted at the age of 17 in Cinderella (1905), after studying acting with the great Victorian star, Ellen Terry. Fontanne’s American debut came five years later in the innocuous Mr. Preedy and the Countess (1910). In 1916, she appeared with her future husband, Alfred Lunt, who she married in 1922, in A Young Man’s Fancy (1916). Fontanne scored a personal success in Dulcy* (1921) and several Theatre Guild productions, including Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Strange Interlude* (1928). She appeared with Lunt in Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman (1924), a triumph for the couple as a team, and after the late 1920s they worked together exclusively. The team won acclaim in The Second Man* (1927), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), Caprice (1928), and Meteor* (1929). After 1930, the stature of Lunt and Fontanne grew with each new production, beginning with Maxwell Anderson’s historical verse drama, Elizabeth the Queen (1930). The Lunts achieved an impressive ability to work as a complementary unit, with Fontanne’s beauty, poise, and subtlety balanced by Lunt’s more impassioned acting. They were particularly applauded for their well-honed effect of seeming to interrupt each others’ lines which, to critics of the time, created a higher level of naturalism than had been previously seen. Post-1930, their successes included three Robert E. Sherwood plays, Reunion in Vienna (1931), Idiot’s Delight (1936), and There Shall Be No Night (1940), S. N. Behrman’s Amphitryon 38 (1937) and The Pirate (1942), and Noël Coward’s Design for Living (1933), in which the playwright joined the Lunts onstage in a memorable threesome. After World War II, the vehicles selected by the Lunts, O Mistress Mine (1946), I Know My Love (1949), Quadrille (1954), and The Great Sebastians (1956), proved somewhat less worthy of their unique talents than prior plays, although all were well-received. Their final appearance in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s grim drama The Visit (1958) once again provided an appropriate challenge met by the greatest acting team in Broadway history. They appeared in an acclaimed television production of The Magnificent Yankee in the 1960s, but in old age chose to live quietly in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin. Their rare public appearances during their retirement included accepting a joint Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1970. FOOL FOR LOVE. Sam Shepard’s two-act, three-character drama premiered at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre on 8 February 1983 prior to its Off-Broadway production at the Circle Repertory Theatre on 26 May

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1983. Ed Harris and Kathy Baker played unhappy lovers Eddie and May battling in a Mojave Desert motel where she is attempting to hide in order to get away from Eddie. They are haunted by the specter of an old man whose presence suggests that Eddie may, in fact, be May’s half-brother. A 1985 film version directed by Robert Altman with Shepard costarred with Kim Basinger as the ill-starred lovers, and the play also had a major London revival in 2006 and was performed by the Bull and The Living Theatre in a coproduction in 2009. FOOTE, HORTON (1916–2009). Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was born in Wharton, Texas, and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1931, but by 1940 with his play Wharton Dance he embarked on a long career as a playwright and screenwriter, inspired by the plays of Anton Chekhov. His nearly 50 plays include his Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Awardnominated The Young Man from Atlanta (1995) and The Trip to Bountiful (1953), which debuted on live television before moving to Broadway. Other Foote plays produced on Broadway include Only the Heart (1944), The Chase (1952), The Traveling Lady (1954), and Dividing the Estate (2008), which was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. As a screenwriter, Foote won Academy Awards for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). He adapted his play The Trip to Bountiful for a 1985 film version and received an Oscar nomination. For television, Foote won a 1997 Emmy Award for Old Man, adapted from William Faulkner’s story. Foote, the father of actress Hallie Foote, received a 2006 Drama Desk Career Achievement Award. Discussing the themes of his work in 1986, Foote stated, “I believe very deeply in the human spirit and I have a sense of awe about it because I don’t know how people carry on. I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don’t ask quarters.” FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF. Poetic drama was occasionally offered by American dramatists, but in this unique work African American playwright/ performer Ntozake Shange pioneered a radically new dramatic form, the “choreopoem,” a bold mixture of character, poetry, song, and dance which might more accurately be labeled a dramatic/poetic collage, an expression conveying the unique mixture of language, theatre, movement, and music that has become more the rule than the exception in theatrical explorations of the experiences of blacks. In this case, Shange focused on the coming-ofage experiences of contemporary black women. for colored girls premiered

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Off-Broadway at New York’s Studio Rivbea on 7 July 1975, where it met with critical approval before transferring to the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre on 1 June 1976, followed by a move to Broadway’s Booth Theatre on 15 September 1976. In all, for colored girls gave an impressive 867 performances in New York, leading to a cast album and a PBS-TV American Playhouse film in 1982. for colored girls won numerous honors, including an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Award, an Audelco Award, and a Mademoiselle Award, as well as nominations for a Tony Award, a Grammy for the cast album, and an Emmy for the television film. In 2010, director/writer Tyler Perry produced and adapted the play as a film starring Janet Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Phylicia Rashad, Thandie Newton, Loretta Devine, and Anika Noni Rose. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; SEXUALITY. FORD, PAUL (1901–1976). This character actor of stage, screen, and television was one of those familiar faces audience members could rarely name, despite Ford’s ability to move effortlessly from broad comedy to drama. Born Paul Ford Weaver in Baltimore, Maryland, he appeared in four Broadway flops, Decision (1944), War President (1944), Lower North (1944), and Flamingo Road (1946), and one moderate success, Kiss Them for Me (1945), before landing roles in stronger plays, including Another Part of the Forest (1946), As We Forgive Our Debtors (1947), and Command Decision (1947). Generally playing fathers, military officers, and pompous businessmen, Ford demonstrated a particular affinity for comic approaches to such characters, first evident in his Broadway performance as Colonel Purdy in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), a role he repeated in the 1956 film version and, on television, in the hapless Colonel Hall in the Sgt. Bilko series. Much sought after for character roles in movies and on TV, Ford returned to Broadway with some regularity, stepping in to replace David Burns as blustering Mayor Shinn in the hit musical, The Music Man (1957), a role he repeated in the 1962 film version. He scored again in the revue A Thurber Carnival (1960) and especially in Sumner Arthur Long’s comedy Never Too Late (1962), garnering a Tony Award nomination as a middle-aged expectant father, a role he repeated in the 1965 movie version. His subsequent Broadway roles were less successful, including roles in 3 Bags Full (1966), What Did We Do Wrong (1967), a short-lived revival of Three Men on a Horse in 1969, as a replacement in a revival of The Front Page* (1969), and Fun City (1972). In films, Ford’s supporting performances in the all-star comedies It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1962) and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) added considerably to the hilarity of both.

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FORD, RUTH (1915–2009). Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to parents in the hotel business in Tennessee, Ford worked as a photographer’s model, posing in Harper’s, Town and Country, and Mademoiselle before her 1937 stage debut at the Ivorytown Playhouse in Connecticut, after which she joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, where she appeared in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1938) and Danton’s Death (1938), after which she debuted in films with roles in Murder in the Big House (1942), The Devil’s Trail (1942), The Keys to the Kingdom (1944), Circumstantial Evidence (1945), and Act One (1964). On Broadway, Ford appeared in such diverse productions as the musical Swingin’ the Dream (1939) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential oneact No Exit (1946). Ford’s other Broadway appearances include This Time Tomorrow (1947), Clutterbuck (1949), The House of Bernarda Alba (1951), Island of Goats (1955), The Stronger (1956), Requiem for a Nun (1959), revivals of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 1964 and Dinner at Eight in 1966, The Ninety Day Mistress (1967), The Grass Harp (1967), Poor Murderer (1976), and Harold and Maude (1980). She also appeared Off-Broadway, in stock, and regional theatre, playing Claire Zachanassian in The Visit at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1982. Ford’s second husband was the actor Zachary Scott. FOREIGNER, THE. Actor-playwright Larry Shue’s farce premiered at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre prior to an Off-Broadway production at the Astor Place Theatre where it opened on 1 November 1984 for 686 performances. Under the direction of Jerry Zaks, the play received an Outer Critics Circle Award, and Zaks and star Anthony Heald won Obie Awards. Set in a faded fishing lodge in rural Georgia, the play centers on Charlie Baker and his friend, Englishman Froggy LeSueur. Charlie is so painfully shy that he is unable to speak in front of strangers, so Froggy concocts the idea of telling others that Charlie is from an unnamed exotic country and does not speak English. Unexpectedly, this revelation permits other characters to speak freely in Charlie’s presence and he is eventually able to reveal and foil a plot by a local Ku Klux Klansman to oust the owner of the lodge. Matthew Broderick and Frances Sternhagen appeared in a 2004 Roundabout Theatre revival and The Foreigner has been widely produced by regional, stock, and university theatres. FOREMAN, RICHARD (1937– ). New York-born playwright educated at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre Company in 1968 where most of his plays have been produced, although other companies, most notably the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), the Music Theatre Group, and the Wooster

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Group have coproduced several. Foreman’s avant-garde works have brought him five Best Play Obie Awards and five Obies for directing and sustained achievement. He had also received MacArthur, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), and Ford fellowships or grants, a 1990 NEA Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement, a 2001 PEN/Laura Pels Master American Playwright Award, and an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters from France in 2004. Foreman’s plays eschew Aristotelian concepts and instead are driven by disorientation and misunderstanding. Over time, Foreman has moved toward multimedia techniques. His plays include Total Recall (1970), Pandering to the Masses (1975), Le Livre de splendeurs (1976), Penguin Touquet (1981), Egyptology (1983), Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good (1987), Love and Science (1990), Eddie Goes to Poetry City (1991), Samuel’s Major Problems (1993), I’ve Got the Shakes (1995), The Universe, I.E.: How It Works (1996), Pearls for Pigs (1997), Benita Canova (1998), Badboy Nietzsche! (2000), King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe (2004), The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (2005), Zomboid! (2006), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! (2007), Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (2008), and Idiot Savant (2009). In 2009, Foreman directed John Zorn’s opera Astronome: A Night at the Opera. Foreman received a 1976 Drama Desk Award nomination for his direction of a revival of Threepenny Opera on Broadway for the NYSF. His only other Broadway entry, Stages (1978), closed after a single performance. Foreman has published a novel, collections of his plays, and essays, including Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theatre (1992). In 2009, Foreman publicly announced that his Public Theatre production of Idiot Savant, which he wrote and directed, and which New Yorker critic Hilton Als described as “elegiac and beautiful,” would be his last theatre piece and that in the future he would work in film. FORNÉS, MARIA IRENE (1930– ). Born in Havana, Cuba, Fornés moved to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1951 and by the 1960s was a fixture of Off-Broadway theatre emphasizing Hispanic American themes, gender issues, and others social concerns of that era. Her first produced work was Tango Palace (1963) and her numerous plays and musicals have brought her an impressive nine Obie Awards, including a 1982 “sustained achievement” award. Fornés’s best-known works, Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and Sarita (1984), emphasize the varied dilemmas of contemporary women reaching for self-actualization despite societal oppressions and sexual tensions. She has adapted plays by a varied array of writers, including Federico García Lorca, Calderón, and Anton Chekhov, and col-

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laborated with various composers. Her most characteristic works make use of cinematic techniques, fantasy, music, and humor with a strong feminist perspective. Among her other works are Promenade (1965), The Successful Life of Three (1965), Dr. Kheal (1968), Lolita in the Garden (1977), Mud (1983), The Danube (1984), The Conduct of Life (1985), A Matter of Faith (1986), Lovers and Keepers (1986), Abingdon Square (1987), Hunger (1988), And What of the Night? (1989), Oscar and Bertha (1992), Enter the Night (1993), Terra Incognita (1992), Summer in Gossensass (1995), Manual for a Desperate Crossing (1996), and Letters from Cuba (2000). Fornés’s The Office (1966), under the direction of Jerome Robbins, closed in previews before an intended Broadway production. Fornés had a longtime relationship with Susan Sontag and, as a teacher she championed the work of Nilo Cruz. In 2010, International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR) and New York University staged the New York Fornés Festival to celebrate her 80th birthday. See also CHICANO THEATRE; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. FORSYTHE, HENDERSON (1917–2006). Born in Macon, Missouri, Forsythe worked in his family’s gas station and transferred from Culver-Stockton College to the University of Iowa, where he was a classmate of Tennessee Williams. Following service in World War II, Forsythe acted for several years with Pennsylvania’s Erie Playhouse. He had a long career onstage, winning a Tony Award for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1979), film, with roles in Silkwood (1983) and Chances Are (1989), and television, where he appeared for 32 years on the soap opera As the World Turns, earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination in 1981. He made his first Broadway appearance in the short-lived The Cellar and the Well (1950), which he also directed, and Miss Lonelyhearts (1957). He replaced Arthur Hill as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and his roles improved as he moved into middle age in The Right Honourable Gentleman (1965), Malcolm (1966), the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance (1966), The Birthday Party (1967), a revival of Harvey in 1970 playing opposite James Stewart and Helen Hayes, The Engagement Baby (1970), The Freedom of the City (1974), A Texas Trilogy (1976), and Some Americans Abroad (1990). Forsythe also appeared in numerous television dramas and films. FOSTER, FRANCES (1924–1997). Yonkers, New York-born Frances Helen Brown studied with the American Theatre Wing and took the stage name Foster. She was a cofounded of the Negro Ensemble Company, acting in more than 25 of their productions, including The River Niger (1973), The First Breeze of Summer (1975), and Henrietta (1985). Foster received a 1985 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance, and she was

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nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Nevis Mountain Dew (1979). On Broadway, she appeared in The Wisteria Trees (1955), understudied the roles of Beneatha and Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Miss Sadie Delaney in Having Our Say (1995), and was seen in a 1970 revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. Foster appeared in several films, including three directed by Spike Lee: Malcolm X (1992), Crooklyn (1994), and Clockers (1995), and on television she acted numerous roles from soap operas to Law & Order. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FOSTER, GLORIA (1933–2001). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Foster studied at the University of Illinois and the Goodman Theatre School prior to beginning her acting career at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre. OffBroadway, Foster won a Drama Desk Award for her debut performance in the documentary theatre production of In White America (1964), a Theatre World Award in the title role of Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Medea in 1966, and was Drama Desk-nominated for The Forbidden City (1989). She appeared in several productions for the New York Shakespeare Festival/ Public Theatre, including revivals of Coriolanus in 1979, Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980, and Blood Wedding in 1992. On Broadway, Foster began by understudying roles in Purlie Victorious (1961) and appeared in A Hand Is on the Gate (1966), Yerma (1966), and Having Our Say (1995). In occasional films, she appeared in The Cool World (1964), The Comedians (1967), and The Matrix (1999), and on television she appeared in several television films, including The Atlanta Child Murders (1985) and Separate but Equal (1991), and guested on such varied programs as The Cosby Show in 1987 and Law & Order in 1992 and 1997. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FOURPOSTER, THE. Jan de Hartog’s two-character Tony Award-winning play opened on 24 October 1951 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 632 performances under the Tony-winning direction of José Ferrer and starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Cronyn and Tandy played Michael and Agnes, a married couple, and the comedy-drama traced their ups and downs for 35 years, from their wedding night in 1890 to their last in the bedroom that is the play’s sole setting. Cronyn and Tandy repeated their performances in a 1955 television production, but a 1952 film version starred Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. In 1966, The Fourposter was adapted as the musical I Do! I Do! starring Robert Preston and Mary Martin. FOX, FREDERICK (1910–1991). New York-born scene (and sometimes lighting and costume) designer Fox was educated at Yale University and

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the National Academy of Design and worked at Connecticut’s Ivoryton Playhouse before his first Broadway design for Farewell Summer (1937), amassing an extraordinary 200 designs during a 30-year career, including productions of Johnny Belinda (1940), Junior Miss (1941), The Doughgirls (1942), Those Endearing Young Charms (1943), The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1944), Anna Lucasta (1944), The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), Dear Ruth (1944), Kiss Them for Me (1945), John Loves Mary (1947), Light Up the Sky (1948), Darkness at Noon (1951), The Seven Year Itch (1952), King of Hearts (1954), Anniversary Waltz (1954), The Warm Peninsula (1959), The Hostage (1960), Send Me No Flowers (1960), and From the Second City (1961), among many others. In the earliest days of television in the 1940s, Fox was one of the first major designers to work in the new medium. FRANCIS, ARLENE (1907–2001). Born Arline Francis Kazanjian in Boston, Massachusetts, to an Armenian father and American mother, she attended Finch College before beginning a long career on stage, screen, and television. She made her Broadway debut in the short-lived La Gringa (1928), working steadily through the 1930s in mostly innocuous plays, although she was in the original cast of The Women (1936) and by the 1940s, the size and range of her roles improved with The Doughgirls (1942), The Overtons (1945), Metropole (1949), The Little Blue Light (1951), and Late Love (1953). Francis had a particular success in the comedy Once More with Feeling (1958), playing opposite Joseph Cotten, and also appeared in Beekman Place (1964), Mrs. Dally (1965), a revival of Dinner at Eight in 1966, and Don’t Call Back (1975), and she stepped into roles in Tchin-Tchin in 1963 and Gigi in 1973. Francis appeared in occasional films, including All My Sons (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961), opposite James Cagney and directed by Billy Wilder. Beginning in the early days of television, she became a popular personality, garnering an Emmy Award nomination for the Home series in 1956, and on game shows and talk shows, including a long stint as a panelist on What’s My Line? from 1950 to 1967. Francis was married twice, the second time to actor/producer Martin Gabel. FRANKEL, GENE (1920–2005). New York-born Eugene Frankel served in the United States Army during World War II, after which he was one of the first members of the Actors Studio, but made his mark as a director. Frankel’s Broadway productions include Once There Was a Russian (1961), A Cry of Players (1968), Indians (1969), The Engagement Baby (1970), a revival of Lost in the Stars in 1972), The Lincoln Mask (1972), and The Night That Made America Famous (1975), but it was for his Off-Broadway work that he most known. Frankel’s directing of revivals of Volpone in 1957 and

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Machinal* in 1960 won Obie Awards, and among his most noted OffBroadway productions were a revival of John Wexley’s They Shall Not Die (1949), Nat Turner (1950), The Enemy of the People (1959), The Blacks: A Clown Show (1961), which racked up a remarkable 1,400 performance at St. Mark’s Playhouse, Brecht on Brecht (1962), The Firebugs (1963), and To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969). He also staged the premiere of Pueblo (1971) at the Arena Stage and worked in other regional and international theatres. Frankel founded the Berkshire Theatre and was artistic director of the Gene Frankel Theatre Workshop. FRANKEN, ROSE (1895–1988). Born Rose Lewin in Fort Worth, Texas, as the daughter of divorced parents, Franken grew up to work out her insecurities in stories and plays about a young and appealingly naïve wife, Claudia. She abandoned her studies at Barnard College to marry Dr. Sigmund Franken, who encouraged her writing. Her first play, Another Language (1932), was successfully produced on Broadway and in London. Franken remains best known for her Claudia stories, which became the basis for her 1941 play Claudia, two motion pictures, and a popular radio series. She wrote nine plays, including Outrageous Fortune (1943), Doctors Disease (1943), Soldier’s Wife (1944), and The Hallams (1948), and directed most of them on Broadway. FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIRE DE LUNE. Terrence McNally’s two-character play opened at Stage II of the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) on 2 June 1987 under the direction of Paul Benedict and featuring Kathy Bates as Frankie and F. Murray Abraham as Johnny. When the play moved to Stage I at MTC in the following October, Kenneth Walsh took over as Johnny. In the play, Frankie, a wisecracking waitress whose tough manner is a cover for a gentler side, and Johnny, a cook and recovering alcoholic, work in a diner where despite being middle-aged and their past heartbreaks they tentatively move toward a relationship. A 1991 film, with the title shortened to Frankie and Johnny, starred Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, and a 2002 Broadway production featured Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci (in a Tony Award-nominated performance) under Joe Mantello’s direction for 243 performances. Joe Pantoliano and Rosie Perez, in her Broadway debut, replaced Falco and Tucci during the run. FRANZ, ELIZABETH (1941– ). Born Betty Jean Frankovitch in Akron, Ohio, Franz worked as a secretary after completing high school, saving up enough for tuition to the American Academy of Dramatic Art. She made her Broadway debut in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and

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worked intermittently in regional theatre and New York. On Broadway, she received a Tony Award nomination for Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) and won a Tony as Linda Loman in a 1999 revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. She was nominated for a Tony again in 2002 for a revival of Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven. Her other Broadway appearances include a 1977 revival of The Cherry Orchard, The Octette Bridge Club (1985), The Cemetery Club (1990), and revivals of Getting Married in 1991 and Uncle Vanya in 1995. She also replaced Linda Lavin in Broadway Bound in 1987. Off-Broadway Franz won an Obie Award as the title character of Christopher Durang’s controversial Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1979) and appeared to critical plaudits in Julia Cho’s The Piano Teacher (2007). In London, Franz appeared in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child at the Royal National Theatre in 2004. Franz has also been a reliable character actress in films and television, appearing on the big screen in Jacknife (1989), School Ties (1992), Sabrina (1995), and The Substance of Fire (1996), and on TV in soap operas, made-for-TV films, a recurring role on the Roseanne series, and she was nominated for an Emmy Award for reprising her Broadway role in Death of a Salesman in 2000 and garnered a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1990 for an ABC Afterschool Special. FREE SOUTHERN THEATRE. A response to the civil rights movement, this New Orleans, Louisiana-based company was founded by John O’Neal, Gilbert Moses, and Doris Derby in 1963, with guidance from Richard Schechner. The founders articulated a mission of nurturing a theatre as responsive to the black experience as blues or jazz music. The company also devoted itself to bringing theatre to rural and poor audiences, giving free performances, and offering workshops in the black community. The company disbanded in 1980. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FREEDLEY, GEORGE (1904–1967). Born in Richmond, Virginia, George Reynolds Freedley graduated from the University of Richmond in 1925, after which he studied with George Pierce Baker* at Yale University until 1928, when he worked for The Theatre Guild, including serving as an assistant stage manager for Eugene O’Neill’s Dynamo* (1929). As an actor, he appeared in The Grey Fox (1928), The Camel through the Needle’s Eye (2929), and Everything’s Jake (1930), but in 1931 began to work at the New York Public Library, where in 1938 he took over curatorship of the theatre collection. During his tenure at the library, he established the Theatre Library Association, serving as its president from 1937 to 1963. Freedley also served on the Board of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) and produced the Broadway flop The Cellar and the Well (1950). In 1956,

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the Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library was presented with a special Tony Award. Freedley wrote several books, was a columnist for Playbill, and a sometime drama critic. FREEDMAN, GERALD (1927– ). This noted director and educator was born in Lorain, Ohio, and educated at Northwestern University, after which he worked as assistant director on Broadway, including for several classic musicals, Bells Are Ringing (1956), West Side Story (1957), and Gypsy (1959). As a director, he staged The Gay Life (1961), Man in the Moon (1964), revivals of West Side Story in 1964 and 1980, a revival of King Lear in 1968, Soon (1971), The Incomparable Max (1971), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Au Pair Man (1973), An American Millionaire (1974), the 1975 and 1976 productions of The Robber Bridegroom, both of which brought him Drama Desk Award nominations, a revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1976, The Grand Tour (1979), and revivals of Broadway* in 1987 and The School for Scandal in 1995. Freedman also directed, and wrote book and lyrics, for A Time for Singing (1966) and directed the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre production of Hair (1968). He served as artistic director of the Great Lakes Theatre Festival and as Dean of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. FREEMAN, MORGAN (1937– ). Born Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, he began acting in school plays in childhood and worked as a mechanic for the United States Air Force. In the mid-1960s, he toured in a production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and debuted Off-Broadway in The Nigger Lovers (1967) and on Broadway in the all-black version of the musical Hello, Dolly! in 1968. He received a Drama Desk Award Off-Broadway as Zeke in The Mighty Gents (1978) and won Obie Awards in revivals of Coriolanus in 1979 and Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980, The Gospel at Colonus (1984), and Driving Miss Daisy (1987), a role he repeated in the 1989 film version, garnering an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe Award. Freeman appeared with Tracey Ullman in a Wild West version of The Taming of the Shrew for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990. In 2008, Freeman returned to Broadway in a revival of The Country Girl playing opposite Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher. On screen, Freeman won an Academy Award (and Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards) for his performance in Million Dollar Baby (2005), with prior nominations for Street Smart (1987), Driving Miss Daisy, and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Freeman’s other films include Glory (1989), Unforgiven (1992), Amistad (1997), Deep Impact (1998), Batman Begins (2005), and played

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Nelson Mandela in Invictus (2009). On television, he had gained his first recognition as the Easy Reader on PBS-TV’s Electric Company, appearing from 1971 to 1976. In 2008, he was selected for the Kennedy Center Honors. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FRENCH, ARTHUR (1942– ). Born in New York as Arthur Wellesley French, Jr., he was educated at Brooklyn College and debuted Off-Broadway in 1962 and made an early appearance in Day of Absence (1965). He was involved with the Negro Ensemble Company and worked as a versatile character actor, appearing on Broadway in Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), The River Niger (1973), revivals of The Iceman Cometh in 1973, All God’s Chillun Got Wings* in 1975, and Death of a Salesman in 1975, The Poison Tree (1976), revivals of You Can’t Take It with You in 1983 and Design for Living in 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Death and the King’s Horseman (1987), Mule Bone (1991), and Dividing the Estate (2008). Off-Broadway, French acted in productions including A Soldier’s Play (1982), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1996), and productions of Medea and King Lear in 2002. He has also appeared in supporting roles in film and television. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FRIEDMAN, BRUCE JAY (1930– ). A native New Yorker born in the Bronx, Friedman was educated at the University of Missouri in journalism, after which he served in the United States Air Force from 1951 to 1953. He wrote for many magazines, several novels, including A Change of Plan which, on screen, became The Heartbreak Kid (1972, remade in 2007), screenplays, and a few whimsically satiric plays, including Scuba Duba (1967), sketches for Oh! Calcutta! (1969), Steambath (1970), and Have You Spoken to Any Jews Lately? (1995). Friedman’s screenplays include The Lonely Guy (1984), adapted from one of his novels, and Splash (1984), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. A television production of his play Steambath in 1973 brought him an Emmy Award nomination. See also SEXUALITY. FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s autobiographical drama in which three actresses play numerous roles, recounts the journey of Holland’s life in Greenwood, Mississippi, from a rape in her tragic youth, to life as a prostitute, and a rebirth through the civil rights movement and education when she received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. The play also focuses on the life of Holland’s mother, known as Aint Baby, who rented rooms to prostitutes. Holland began writing the play in 1981, and it was first produced at the New Federal Theatre in New York in September 1987, as well as in several regional theatres (Goodman Theatre, Arena

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Stage, Hartford Stage), prior to a production at the Circle in the Square, where it opened on 11 November 1991. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FRYER, ROBERT (1920–2000). A prolific Broadway producer, Fryer was born in Washington, D.C., and attended Western Reserve University. His second production, Wonderful Town (1953), won a Tony Award and his productions would reap numerous Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations and wins. Among the wide range of plays and musicals Fryer and his partners in Fryer, Carr & Harris, Inc. produced are The Desk Set (1955), Auntie Mame (1956), Redhead (1959), Advise & Consent (1960), Sweet Charity (1966), Mame (1966), Abelard and Heloise (1971), a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1972, Chicago (1975), The Norman Conquests (1975), California Suite (1976), Chapter Two (1977), On the Twentieth Century (1978), They’re Playing Our Song (1979), Sweeney Todd (1979), The West Side Waltz (1981), A Little Family Business (1982), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Noises Off (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), Benefactors (1985), and Wild Honey (1986). Fryer also produced several films, including The Boston Strangler (1968), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Myra Breckinridge (1970), Travels with My Aunt (1972), Mame (1974), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and The Shining (1980). FUGARD, ATHOL (1932– ). A dramatist, actor, novelist, and director born in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, his plays, many of which deal with racial strife and related issues in South Africa, have often been produced in the United States, initially in collaboration with Lloyd Richards at the Yale Repertory Theatre, where his A Lesson from Aloes was produced in 1980 before moving to Broadway. Yale Rep also produced three other Fugard world premieres, including “Master Harold”. . .and the Boys (1982), which won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk Award when it transferred to Broadway, The Road to Mecca (1984), and A Place with the Pigs (1987). Yale also revived other Fugard works, including The Blood Knot (1961), Hell and Goodbye (1965), and Boesman and Lena (1969), during the 1980s. FULLER, CHARLES (1939– ). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, native Charles H. Fuller, Jr., attended Villanova University, after which he joined the United States Army in 1959. When he left the service in 1962, he continued his education at La Salle University and cofounded the Afro-American Arts Theatre in Philadelphia in 1967. His early plays include The Village: A Party (1969), The Brownsville Raid (1975), and he won an Obie Award for Zooman and

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the Sign (1980), all of which deal with race tensions. His most noted work, A Soldier’s Play (1982), won a Pulitzer Prize and his screenplay, retitled A Soldier’s Story, was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Writer’s Guild of America Award. Most of Fuller’s subsequent writing has been for the screen because, as he explains, “I always wanted to reach the most people with my work. Not enough people go to the theatre.” See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FUNICELLO, RALPH (1947– ). He studied at New York University prior to working as a scene designer on the West Coast, including as director of design for the American Conservatory Theatre from 1988–1990. On Broadway, he was assistant scene designer for Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and designed Division Street (1980), QED (2001), Henry IV in 2003, which brought him Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations, King Lear in 2004, Brooklyn Boy (2005), and Julius Caesar in 2005. His work has been seen in numerous regional theatres in the United States, including the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Denver Theatre Center, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and others. Funicello is Powell Chair in Set Design at San Diego State University. FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO. Adrienne Kennedy’s Obie Award-winning one-act drama was written in 1960 and first produced Off-Broadway at the East End Theatre in 1962. The surreal, semi-autobiographical work is expressed from the nightmarish imaginative world of Sarah, a troubled young black woman. Focused on issues of black identity in America, gender, and history, Kennedy makes use of poetic imagery in her language and attempt to portray the state of mind of her central character. Billie Allen, who played Sarah in the original production, directed a 2006 revival of this muchproduced play at the Harlem School of the Arts Theatre. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. FUSCO, COCO (1960– ). Born in New York of Cuban American heritage, Fusco was educated at Brown University and Stanford University prior to developing a career as a performance artist stressing interdisciplinary concepts and techniques in creating pieces on women’s lives, war, and race. With Guillermo Gómez-Peña, her best-known work is The Couple in the Cage (1993), which dealt with Amerindian issues, and she has collaborated with other on Stuff (1996), Dolores from 10 to 10 (2001), and The Incredible Disappearing Woman (2003). Her other performances include Rights of Passage (1997), The Last Wish (1997), and A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006). After a stint (1995–2001) at Temple

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University, Fusco teaches at Columbia University. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE; CHICANO THEATRE; FEMINIST THEATRE; NATIVE AMERICANS ON STAGE. FUTZ. Rochelle Owens’s comedy of sexual satire was first produced by the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1965, prior to a run at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in June 1968. The play, which generated some controversy, centers on a farm boy, Cyrus Futz (John Bakos), who is in love with a pig named Amanda. A parable of non-conformist attitudes and sexual liberation, the play met with mixed reviews, although even naysayers felt it was, as the Saturday Review critic wrote, “one of the most original and uninhibited pieces of dramatic poetry ever written.” Tom O’Horgan’s direction won praise, and he subsequently directed a 1969 film version, adding an exclamation mark to the title.

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G GABEL, MARTIN (1912–1986). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gabel had a varied career as an actor, film director, producer, and television personality. On Broadway, Gabel appeared in a range of plays, including Dead End (1935) and several plays for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, including revivals of Julius Caesar in 1937 and Danton’s Death in 1938. He also appeared on Broadway in a revival of King Lear in 1950, The Little Blue Light (1951), Reclining Figure (1954), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), The Rivalry (1959), Children from Their Games (1963), Baker Street (1965), Sheep on the Runway (1970), and In Praise of Love (1974), and won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor for Big Fish, Little Fish (1961). As a director, Gabel staged The Cream in the Well (1941), The Survivors (1948), and Men of Distinction (1953), and he produced Café Crown (1942), The Hidden River (1957), Once More with Feeling (1958), and Mrs. Dally (1965). Gabel occasionally appeared in movie character roles, including Marnie (1964), Divorce American Style (1967), Lady in Cement (1968), There Was a Crooked Man (1970), the 1974 remake of The Front Page,* and The First Deadly Sin (1980). He was married to actress/television personality Arlene Francis. GABRIEL, GILBERT W. (1890–1952). Born Gilbert Wolf Gabriel in Brooklyn, New York, he attended Williams College prior to beginning a long career as a critic in 1912 with the New York Evening Sun, where he reviewed music. Gabriel switched to reviewing drama in 1924 when he joined the staff of the New York Telegram-Mail for a year prior to returning to the Evening Sun as theatre critic until 1929. That year, he moved to the New York American until 1937, writing for a mainstream audience on theatre and the New York cultural scene. Gabriel also wrote fiction, including novels such as The Seven-Branched Candlestick (1917) and stories published in Munsey’s Magazine and others. Gabriel later served as drama critic for THEATRE ARTS MONTHLY and Cue Magazine, continuing to his death. GAHAGAN, HELEN (1900–1980). A native of Boonton, New Jersey, and brought up in a strict Catholic family, Gahagan attended Barnard College

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prior to appearing in numerous Broadway plays during the 1920s, including Manhattan (1922), Fashions for Men (1922), Chains (1923), a revival of Leah Kleschna* in 1924, The Enchanted April (1925), Young Woodley (1925), a revival of Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1927, Diplomacy (1928), Tonight or Never (1930), and Moor Born (1934), among others. She married Melvyn Douglas and continued her career in the 1930s, appearing in one film, She (1935). Active in politics from 1940 as Helen Gahagan Douglas, she was a Democratic National Committeewoman from 1940–1944 and elected as a liberal Democratic Congresswoman from California in 1944. In 1950, she ran for the Senate against Richard M. Nixon, who smeared her as a Communist, stating that she was “pink right down to her underwear.” Douglas responded by calling him “Tricky Dick,” but the damage was done and she lost the election. She and Douglas remained married until her death, although it was rumored that she had long affair with Lyndon B. Johnson beginning during her time in Congress. Douglas returned to Broadway once, in 1952, in a revival of First Lady. GAINES, BOYD (1953– ). A versatile actor easily able to move from musicals to dramas, Gaines was born Boyd Payne Gaines in Atlanta, Georgia, and was trained at the Juilliard School. He won a Theatre World Award for a 1980 revival of A Month in the Country at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Tony Awards for The Heidi Chronicles (1989), a 1994 revival of She Loves Me, Contact (2000), and a 2008 revival of Gypsy. He also won Drama Desk Awards for She Loves Me, Gypsy, and a 2007 revival of Journey’s End. Gaines has appeared in film and television, but found the most success onstage, appearing in numerous regional theatres and Off-Broadway, where he won critical approval in Bach at Leipzig (2005) at the New York Theatre Workshop. His other Broadway appearances include revivals of The Show Off* in 1992, Company in 1995, 12 Angry Men in 2004, Pygmalion in 2007, The Grand Manner (2010), playing Guthrie McClintic, and in 1999 he took over the role of Cliff in a revival of Cabaret. GALATI, FRANK (1943– ). Born in Highland Park, Illinois, he trained and later taught at Northwestern University and began his career as a devotee of Robert Breen’s theories on chamber theatre. Galati joined Steppenwolf Theatre in 1986 and was associate director of the Goodman Theatre beginning in 1987. Although he occasionally acted, mostly with the Wisdom Bridge Theatre, Galati increasingly focused on directing and adapting texts, including his most noted production, The Grapes of Wrath in 1990, adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel and first produced at the Steppenwolf prior to transferring to Broadway, where it won Tony

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Awards for Best Play and a Best Direction for Galati. His other adapted productions include She Always Said, Pablo (1987) from Gertrude Stein, As I Lay Dying (1995) from William Faulkner, After the Quake (2005) from Haruki Murakami. On Broadway, he directed a revival of The Glass Menagerie starring Julie Harris in 1994, Ragtime (1998), for which he received Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations, and The Pirate Queen (2007). He also directed Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (2003) at Steppenwolf, was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of The Accidental Tourist (1988), and staged the world premiere of the operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1999. GALLAGHER, HELEN (1926– ). This Brooklyn, New York-born actress studied dance at the American Ballet School and began as a dancer on Broadway in her late teens, where she labored in such musicals as Seven Lively Arts (1944) and High Button Shoes (1947). Graduating to supporting roles, she won a Tony Award for the 1952 revival of Pal Joey. Another revival, No, No, Nanette, in 1971, brought Gallagher a Tony as Best Actress, and she also appeared in the musicals Make a Wish (1951), Hazel Flagg (1953), Sweet Charity (1966), for which she received a Tony nomination, and Cry for Us All (1970), among others. Off-Broadway, Gallagher moved away from musicals in Hothouse (1974), Tickles by Tucholsky (1976), a revival of Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady in 1977, Money Talks (1980), and Tallulah (1983), playing stage legend Tallulah Bankhead. She also won three Emmy Awards for her performance on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope. GALLAGHER, PETER (1956– ). Born Peter Killian Gallagher in New York, Gallagher attended Tufts University and developed a career encompassing stage, film, and television. On Broadway, he began as a replacement in the original production of Grease (1972) and won a Theatre World Award in the short-lived musical A Doll’s Life (1982). He moved comfortably between dramatic and musical roles, reaping a Tony Award nomination playing Edmund for the 1986 revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night opposite Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey, and a Drama Desk Award nomination as Sky Masterson in a 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls. He also appeared in revivals of Noises Off in 2001 and The Country Girl in 2008. On film, he shared in a Golden Globe Award with the ensemble of Short Cuts (1993), and his many movie appearances include The Player (1992), While You Were Sleeping (1995), To Gillian on her 37th Birthday (1996), American Beauty (1999), Mr. Deeds (2002), and among his many television roles, his recurring role as Sandy Cohen on The O.C. (2003–2007) won critical approval.

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GALLO, DAVID (1966– ). Born on a navy base in Delaware, Gallo was raised in Spain, Long Island, and New York City prior to attending the State University of New York at Purchase. A prolific scene designer, Gallo has done numerous New York productions, winning a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his designs for the musical The Drowsy Chaperone (2006). He received a Tony nomination for Gem of the Ocean (2005) and Drama Desk nominations for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1999), King Hedley II (2001), Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), Radio Golf (2007), which also brought him a Tony nomination, and A Catered Affair (2008). Gallo’s other Broadway credits include the Al Pacino revival of Hughie in 1996, Titanic (1997), Jackie (1997), revivals of A View from the Bridge in 1997, Little Me in 1998, and The Lion in Winter in 1999, Epic Proportions (1999), revivals of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2003 and Company in 2006, Reasons to Be Pretty (2009), and Memphis (2009). Off-Broadway, Gallo won Drama Desk Awards for his designs of Bunny Bunny (1997) and Jitney (2000), and received Drama Desk nominations for a revival of Machinal* in 1991, The Wild Party (2000), and Wonder of the World (2002). He also received an Obie Award for sustained excellence in 2000. GALLO, PAUL (1953– ). Bronx, New York-born Gallo graduated from Ithaca College and continued his studies at Yale University before becoming an accomplished lighting designer who has designed more than 200 productions in New York and in regional theatres, beginning on Broadway with Passione (1980). Gallo has been nominated for Tony Awards for The House of Blue Leaves (1986), a revival of Anything Goes in 1988, City of Angels (1990), a revival of Guys and Dolls in 1992, Crazy for You (1992), revivals of 42nd Street in 2001 and The Crucible in 2002, and Three Days of Rain (2006). On Broadway, Gallo won a Drama Desk Award for Guys and Dolls, and Drama Desk nominations for The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1986), Anything Goes, Lend Me a Tenor (1989), City of Angels, and The Civil War (1999). His Broadway credits include the Elizabeth Taylor revival of The Little Foxes in 1981, Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Beyond Therapy (1982), a revival of The Front Page* in 1986, Six Degrees of Separation (1990), I Hate Hamlet (1991), revivals of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 2000 and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in 2006, Losing Louie (2006), Mauritius (2007), A Bronx Tale (2007), November (2008), and a revival of Pal Joey in 2008. Off-Broadway, Gallo received Drama Desk nominations for Wenceslas Square (1988), Miracolo D’Amore (1989), Blade to the Heart (1995), and Blackbird (2007). Of his work, Gallo says, “Lighting is very primal. To all of us, it’s the most natural thing, more than we realize. When we’re born, the

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first thing we respond to is light. And when we get up and look outside and it’s a sunny day, we don’t feel the same as when it’s a dark day.” GARBER, VICTOR (1949– ). Born Victor Joseph Garber in London, Ontario, Canada, he took to acting as a child and worked at the University of Toronto’s Hart House in his teens and was in a folk band. In the United States from the early 1970s, Garber appeared Off-Broadway in a 1973 revival of Ghosts at the Roundabout Theatre, which brought him a Theatre World Award, Joe’s Opera (1975), Cracks (1976), Wenceslas Square (1988), and Assassins (1990). He has won consistent acclaim on Broadway, reaping Tony Award nominations for Deathtrap (1978), a revival of Little Me in 1982, Lend Me a Tenor (1989), and a revival of Damn Yankees in 1994. On Broadway, he also appeared in The Shadow Box (1977), a 1977 revival of Tartuffe, Sweeney Todd (1979), Noises Off (1983), revivals of You Never Can Tell in 1986 and The Devil’s Disciple in 1988, Two Shakespearean Actors (1992), Arcadia (1995), ‘Art’ (1998), and revivals of A Little Night Music in 2009 and Present Laughter in 2010. He has appeared in numerous films, including Godspell (1973), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The First Wives Club (1996), Titanic (1997), Legally Blonde (2001), and Milk (2008), and has been nominated for six Emmy Awards for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), for the series Alias in 2002, 2003, and 2004, and guest spots on Frasier in 2001 and Will & Grace in 2005. GARDENIA, VINCENT (1922–1992). This Italian American actor was born Vincent Scognamiglio in Naples, Italy, but left with his family for the United States when he was a baby. He began acting in 1935. On Broadway, this short, rotund actor debuted in The Visit (1958) with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, after which he appeared in many productions, winning a Tony Award in 1972 for The Prisoner of Second Avenue and a nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for Ballroom (1978). His other Broadway credits include The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), Rashomon (1959), Only in America (1959), The Wall (1960), Daughter of Silence (1961), Seidman and Son (1962), The Chinese and Dr. Fish (1970), God’s Favorite (1974), and he stepped in as a replacement in California Suite (1976), Sly Fox (1976), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). Off-Broadway, Gardenia won Obie Awards for a 1960 revival of Machinal* and Passing through Exotic Places (1969), and he also appeared in The Man with the Golden Arm (1956). Gardenia acted in numerous films, receiving Academy Award nominations for his performance in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) and Moonstruck (1987), and he also acted in Little Murders (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Little Shop of Horrors (1986). On television, he was a regular on All in the Family in 1973–74,

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won an Emmy Award for a TV movie Age-Old Friends (1989), and appeared in many other shows beginning in 1954. GARDNER, HERB (1934–2003). Born Herbert George Gardner in Brooklyn, New York, he had a unique career as an artist, cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter. He attended New York’s High School for the Performing Arts and Antioch College. He created a popular 1950s’ comic strip called The Nebbishes prior to scoring a Broadway success with his touching, whimsical play A Thousand Clowns (1962), in which Jason Robards played Murray Burns, an unemployed writer forced to choose between his nonconformist life and gaining custody of his young nephew. Gardner’s screenplay for the 1965 film version was nominated for an Academy Award. His most successful play, I’m Not Rappaport (1985) won a Tony Award as Best Play and was also filmed in 1996 with Gardner directing. His other Broadway plays include The Goodbye People (1968), which Gardner directed on film in 1984, Thieves (1974), the failed musical One Night Stand (1980), and Conversations with My Father (1992). Gardner also wrote the screenplay for Who Is Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971). GARFIELD, JOHN (1913–1952). Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Garfield spent several years in a school for difficult children following his mother’s premature death and became interested in boxing and acting. Because of his own health woes, which had weakened his heart, he had to give up athletics and instead won a scholarship to study acting with Maria Ouspenskaya prior to his Broadway debut in Lost Boy (1932). He also appeared in a revival of Counsellor-at-Law in 1932, Peace on Earth (1933), and Gold Eagle Guy (1934) before joining The Group Theatre, where he appeared as Ralph Berger in the original production of Awake and Sing! (1935). He also appeared in The Group productions of Weep for the Virgins (1935), Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), and Johnny Johnson (1936). Clifford Odets wrote Golden Boy (1937) with Garfield in mind, but he was instead given a secondary role and left The Group for Hollywood, receiving a 1938 Academy Award nomination for his performance in Four Daughters. He was nominated again in 1948 for Body and Soul and also appeared notably in Juarez (1939), Saturday’s Children* (1940), The Sea Wolf (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Humoresque (1946), and Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947). Garfield’s career suffered a blow in the late 1940s when he was blacklisted in Red Channels and compelled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Despite the ban on his appearances in films resulting from his appearance before the HUAC, he was able to work on

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Broadway, having continued with occasional stage roles during his film career. His later Broadway appearances include Having a Wonderful Time (1937), Heavenly Express (1940), Skipper Next to God (1948), The Big Knife (1949), and revivals of Peer Gynt in 1951 and Golden Boy in 1952, finally having the opportunity to play the role of Joe Bonaparte written by Odets with Garfield in mind. He died of a heart attack a month after the show closed. His daughter, Julie Garfield, is an actress. GASSNER, JOHN (1903–1967). Born John Waldhorn Gassner in MarajarosSziget, Hungary, he emigrated to the United States during childhood and studied at Columbia University. He became a book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune in 1926 and was play editor for The Theatre Guild from 1931 to 1944. He taught theatre criticism and playwriting at several universities, including Columbia, Hunter College, the University of Michigan, Queens College, and the New School for Social Research before settling at the Yale School of Drama in 1956 as Sterling Professor of Playwriting. He wrote and edited several theatre books, including Treasury of the Theatre (1940), Form and Idea in Modern Theatre (1956), and the Best American Plays series. GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. These terms most often refer to plays written by and for homosexuals, mostly since the mid-1960s as various marginalized groups—women, African Americans, Chicanos, among others— sought liberation from the social constraints which denied them opportunity and equality in American life and this struggle was reflected on stages in the United States. Homosexual men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals are traditionally grouped together as “gay” within the realm of drama, but in the past few decades the term has also come to refer to a sensibility in which the world is viewed through the lens of gay culture. With the onset of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, gay dramas have more overtly explored serious questions inherent in being homosexual in the United States and, to a significant extent, gay drama has grown extraordinarily on American stages since 1980. Most gay dramas achieving mainstream acclaim have been by and about gay men, with the other subgroups making strides in Off Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, and regional theatre. Alfred Kazin writes, “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ (in the nineteenth century) cannot, in the twentieth, shut up,” but the emergence of a vigorous gay drama demonstrates that there is much to say on a subject about which the stage has been silent for centuries. Perhaps the first American play to deal openly with homosexuality is believed to be Mae West’s* The Drag, which generated so much controversy that it closed before completing a tumultuous pre-Broadway tour in 1927. A few other curiosities appeared in subsequent

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decades, most notably Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), in which the question of a lesbian relationship is at the center of the play, or in imported plays such as England’s The Green Bay Tree (1933) by Mordaunt Shairp, which featured a gay villain. Secondary homosexual characters appear in a few plays of the 1930s and 1940s, but these are rarely identified as such. For example, Simon Stimson, the alcoholic choir master of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town (1938), is typical in that he is comparatively unimportant to the plot, mostly as a tragic victim, and Wilder makes no overt identification of the character as homosexual (even supplying Stimson with an off-stage wife). Gay characters became more prevalent after World War II, most overtly in the plays of Tennessee Williams, who initially placed gay characters offstage, as in the case of Blanche DuBois’s long-dead closeted husband, Allan Gray, in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) or predatory Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), but closeted characters appeared with Williams’s Brick Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and, after the 1960s, Williams presented openly gay characters in his plays, as in Small Craft Warnings (1972) and Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981). In the early 1950s, Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953) won popularity on stage and screen in its depiction of a sensitive young man viewed by his peers as a homosexual (even though it later becomes clear that he is probably not) and, as such, he should be ostracized, but more fully dimensioned gay characters and themes slowly came out of the shadows in the 1950s. William Inge, inspired to become a playwright by Williams’s example, did not feature openly homosexual characters in any of his major plays, but in a few lesserknown one-acts he does so, including The Tiny Closet (1959) and The Boy in the Basement (1962), works making a plea for tolerance. By the mid-1960s, mainstream theatre in general was catching up with Williams’s depictions of homosexuality and a major breakthrough came with the appearance of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), a comedy-drama in which a group of varied gay men—some deeply closeted and others “out”—gather to celebrate the birthday of one, but end up confronting their feelings about their sexual orientation. Between 1960 and the early 1980s, however, gay characters were often reduced to peripheral status in the plays—or were seen most vividly in musicals like La Cage aux Folles (1983), tolerance plays like Torch Song Trilogy (1981), or in broad stereotypes in straight plays. There were a exceptions Off-Broadway, as in the case of LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) The Toilet (1964) and Ed Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man (1965) or on Broadway in Edward Albee’s Everything in the Garden (1967), which flopped, or more overtly in the grotesquerie of drag in Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous. The 1970s brought

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forth more dimensioned portraits of gay characters in Robert Patrick’s Kennedy’s Children (1973), James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (1975), Albert Innaurato’s Gemini (1977), Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1978), Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Martin Sherman’s Bent (1978), and Alan Bowne’s Forty-Deuce (1981). In the 1980s, with the appearance of AIDS, homosexual plays became scathing indictments of American society’s failure to respond adequately to the crisis, as in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), works reflecting the fears of AIDS and grieving the tragedies, as in Robert Chesley’s Night Sweat (1983) or Rebecca Ransom’s Warren (1984), or darker tolerance pleas as in William M. Hoffman’s As Is (1981). The continuing AIDS crisis and changes in American attitudes about gay life brought significant changes to gay-themed drama, particularly evident in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America (1993), in which Tony Kushner brought an intense intellectualism, love of language, and complex issues of history, politics, and morality to bear in this two-play epic which depicts gays as central to American life. No plea for tolerance, Angels offers a view of homosexuals living with the ramifications of post-World War II American history, from McCarthyism to the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president and the frightening height of the AIDS pandemic in the mid-1980s, not to mention their own highly charged personal struggles. The play’s Broadway production featured a cast of eight (five men, three women) crossing genders to play a multitude of roles. Another Pulitzer Prize-winning gay-themed play, Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) proved to be little more than an updating of The Boys in the Band, presenting a group of gay friends adding fears of AIDS to negotiating their relationships and other works celebrated life (if somewhat satirically) in the face of the pandemic, as in Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey (1993). Gay-themed plays seemed to dominate the selections of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, with awards presented to Angels in America, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and either works centrally featuring gay characters and themes or written by openly gay playwrights, as with Albee’s Three Tall Women (1994), Horton Foote’s Young Man From Atlanta (1995), Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent (1996), Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz (1992) and How I Learned to Drive (1998), Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics (2003), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2004). Obie Award-winning gay playwright Harry Kondoleon demonstrated promise in 17 plays, most produced Off-Broadway before his career was cut short by AIDS in 1994. In the late 1990s, some plays addressed grim historical realities of homophobia, as in the Tectonic Theatre’s productions of Gross Indecency (1997), about the Oscar Wilde trials, and The Laramie Project (2001), which

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gave voice to the town’s varied responses in the aftermath of the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, employing the techniques of documentary theatre. In the 1980s and beyond, feminist writers brought lesbian characters to the fore, as in the work of playwrights like Vogel, Maria Irene Fornés, Jane Chambers, and others, and groups like Split Britches or solo performers like Holly Hughes. Minority theatre companies draw a gay and lesbian audiences with works featuring such characters, and the queering of American life was continued in the work of dramatists like Craig Lucas, who addressed post-AIDS gay life on a cultural and familial level in The Dying Gaul (1998) or What I Meant Was (1999), and Richard Greenberg, whose Take Me Out (2002) found gays (and homophobia) present even in such traditionally macho environments as major league baseball. A storm of controversy arose (including pickets, bomb threats, and the possible withdrawal of the play) when homosexuality met religion in McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998), which equated Christ’s passion with gay lives, although curiously enough, when Rudnick visited the same terrain with The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1999) a year later, little furor accompanied the production. As the end of the first decade of the new millennium approached, gay and lesbianthemed drama was as prevalent as any other type of play on American stages from Broadway to regional, academic, and community theatres. See also SEXUALITY. GAZZARA, BEN (1930– ). Born Biagio Anthony Gazzara in New York to Italian immigrants, he studied electrical engineering at the City College of New York prior to taking acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, studying with Erwin Piscator. Gazzara joined The Actors Studio and appeared on Broadway, in films, and on television. He received a 1954 Theatre World Award for his performance in End as a Man and scored Tony Award nominations for A Hatful of Rain (1956), Hughie/Duet (1975), and a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playing George opposite Colleen Dewhurst’s Martha, which also brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination. He originated the role of alcoholic athlete Brick Pollitt in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and received two additional Drama Desk nominations, one for the Off-Broadway play Nobody Don’t Like Yogi (2004), as a member of the ensemble of a 2006 revival of Awake and Sing! Gazzara’s other Broadway appearances include The Night Circus (1958), a revival of Strange Interlude* in 1963, Traveller without Luggage (1964), and Shimada (1992). Gazzara’s notable film appearances include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Rage to Live (1965), Capone (1975), They All Laughed (1981), and The Big Lebowski (1998). On television, Gazzara won an Emmy Award for Hysteri-

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cal Blindness (2002), and three Emmy nominations, two for his series Run for Your Life in 1967 and 1968 (which also brought him three Golden Globe Award nominations), and for the TV film An Early Frost (1985). GEDDES, BARBARA BEL (1922–2005). The daughter of noted scene designer Norman Bel Geddes, she was born in New York and began acting in stock in 1940, while still in her teens. Her first Broadway roles were as an ingénue* in Out of the Frying Pan (1941), Little Darling (1942), Nine Girls (1943), and Mrs. January and Mr. X (1944) before she won critical praise in a key role in Deep Are the Roots (1945), winning a 1946 Theatre World Award. Her versatility is suggested by the two roles for which she received Tony Award nominations: “Maggie the Cat” in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and in the title role of Jean Kerr’s light comedy Mary, Mary (1961). Geddes continued to move easily from such popular entertainments to more serious dramas in her other Broadway appearances, including major roles in Burning Bright (1950), The Moon Is Blue (1941), The Living Room (1954), The Sleeping Prince (1956), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959), Everything in the Garden (1967), and Finishing Touches (1973). She also replaced Anne Jackson in Luv in 1965. Geddes also acted in films, including I Remember Mama (1948), Blood on the Moon (1948), Caught (1949), and Summertree (1971), and she appeared in numerous television dramas, including a long stint as matriarch Miss Ellie on the TV drama Dallas (1978–1990). GEDDES, NORMAN BEL (1893–1958).† Born Norman Melancton Geddes in Adrian, Michigan, Geddes studied art in Cleveland, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois, before beginning his distinguished designing career at the Los Angeles Little Theatre* in 1916. Profoundly influenced by the modernist designers of Europe, including Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, Geddes abandoned the proscenium for some of his productions and brought current movements in art into his productions, as his art deco designs for musicals demonstrate. He collaborated with Max Reinhardt on The Miracle* (1924), for which he converted Broadway’s Century Theatre into the interior of a gothic cathedral, and he demonstrated his originality and versatility designing Broadway productions of Lady, Be Good! (1924), Jeanne d’Arc (1925), Ziegfeld Follies* (1925), Julius Caesar (1927), The Five O’Clock Girl (1927), The Patriot (1928), and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), among many others. After 1930, Geddes designed less frequently, but no less notably with productions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1930), Raymond Massey’s Hamlet (1931), the musical Flying Colors (1932), Sidney Kingsley’s gritty drama Dead End (1935), Iron Men (1936), The Eternal Road (1937), Siege (1937),

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It Happened on Ice (1940), and the musical revue Seven Lively Arts (1944). Geddes also worked as an industrial designer, designed a few theatres, pioneered the use of lenses in lighting instruments, and was the father of actress Barbara Bel Geddes. GEER, WILL (1902–1978). A native of Frankfort, Indiana, born William Aughe Ghere, he aimed to be a botanist and completed a master’s degree at the University of Chicago before switching to theatre, debuting as an actor on show boats* and tent shows before his 1928 Broadway debut in a revival of The Merry Wives of Windsor with Otis Skinner,* Henrietta Crosman,* and Minnie Maddern Fiske.* Very active in political and social causes during the Great Depression, he joined the Communist Party in 1934, and many of his Broadway roles reflected his political beliefs. He stepped into the role of Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1933) as a replacement and appeared in productions of Let Freedom Ring (1935), Bury the Dead (1936), 200 Were Chosen (1936), A House in the Country (1937), and Of Mice and Men (1937). For the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), he played Mr. Mister in Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1938), the famous production directed by Orson Welles that was shut down by the government on opening night, but performed without sets and costumes in another theatre in defiance of the attempted censorship. Geer’s subsequent Broadway credits include Journeyman (1938), Washington Jitters (1938), Sing Out the News (1938), The More the Merrier (1941), Johnny on a Spot (1942), Comes the Revelation (1942), revivals of Tobaaco Road in 1942 and The Cradle Will Rock in 1947, On Whitman Avenue (1946), The Wisteria Trees (1955), The Vamp (1955), The Ponder Heart (1956), We, Comrades Three (1966), and Scratch (1971), among others. Geer received a Tony Award nomination for the musical 110 in the Shade (1963). He appeared with the American Shakespeare Festival and the Association of Producing Artists, and in 1933 founded the Folksay Theatre in Los Angeles. Geer was blacklisted from films during the McCarthy era, but by the 1960s he was working again in such films as Advise & Consent (1962), Seconds (1966), In Cold Blood (1967), and others, and he won a 1975 Emmy Award (and five additional nominations) playing Grandpa Walton on the hit television series The Waltons from 1972 until his death in 1978, despite having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. GEIDT, JEREMY (1933– ). This English-born actor and teacher trained at the Old Vic Theatre School with Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine prior to touring to the United States in 1954 in an Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, later, in the satiric cabaret The Establish-

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ment in 1962. He remained in the United States, acting on Broadway in Alfie! (1964), Off-Broadway and in television prior to becoming a founding member of the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966, appearing in numerous productions before helping Robert Brustein found the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University in 1980, where he has appeared in nearly 100 productions, from the classics to new works, earning the Elliot Norton Award in 1992. See also REGIONAL THEATRE. GEIOGAMAH, HANAY (1945?– ). Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, of Native American and Irish heritage, Geiogamah studied at the University of Oklahoma, after which he worked as an intern for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. In the early 1970s, he conceived the idea of an all-Indian acting company and founded the Native American Theatre Ensemble with their first production, his own play Body Indian (1972), which was staged at New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. The play toured the United States and Germany. Geiogamah’s subsequent play, Foghorn (1973), premiered in Berlin. Geiogamah returned to school at Indiana University to complete a major in theatre and continued to write, including the musical 49 (1982). In 1987, he became director of the American Indian Dance Theatre and Teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles. Of his work, Geiogamah has said, “For decades American Indians have been portrayed in films and on television in a manner entirely derogatory to their cultural and mental well-being. Who wants to see themselves and their race depicted as fiendish savages and murderers?” GELBART, LARRY (1928–2009). Son of Jewish immigrant parents, Larry Simon Gelbart was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he began writing comedy for Danny Thomas’s radio program at the age of 16, and later writing for Bob Hope, Red Buttons, and Jack Paar. Gelbart moved to television writing in the 1950s, most notably as part of the extraordinary team writing for Sid Caesar’s live variety show, which included Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner. By the 1960s, Gelbart was writing for Broadway and films. He shared a Tony Award with Burt Shevelove for their book for the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and he later wrote Sly Fox (1976), Mastergate: A Play on Words (1989), and the libretto for the musical City of Angels (1989), which also brought him a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. Gelbart’s play Power Failure (1991) was performed by the American Repertory Theatre, he won a Peabody Award and an Emmy Award for his writing of the long-running television series M*A*S*H (1972–1983), and he was twice nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays of Oh, God! (1977) and Tootsie (1982).

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GEMINI. Albert Innaurato’s two-act comedy-drama of a dysfunctional South Philadelphia Italian family premiered at Playwrights Horizons in December 1976, followed by a March 1977 production at the Circle Repertory Company. The play moved to Broadway’s Little Theatre on 21 May 1977 for 1,819 performances under the direction of Marshall W. Mason. The Geminiani family has gathered in the summer of 1973 to celebrate the 21st birthday of their son, Francis, a recent Harvard University graduate. Two of Fran’s college friends, Judith and Randy, are present for the party, a stressful situation for Fran since Judith has romantic feelings for him, but he is drawn to Randy, uncertain of his own sexual orientation. Fran’s outrageously dysfunctional extended family and neighbors add to his stresses. Gemini was adapted as a film by Richard Benner with the title Happy Birthday, Gemini (1980). See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. GENTLE PEOPLE, THE. This three-act “Brooklyn fable” by Irwin Shaw, produced by The Group Theatre, opened on 5 January 1939 at the Belasco Theatre for 141 performances under Harold Clurman’s direction, with scene design by Boris Aronson. The plot involves two middle-aged cronies, Jonah Goodman and Philip Anagnos (played by Sam Jaffe and Roman Bohnen), who enjoy fishing and their otherwise simple life. When they fall under the control of a gangster, Goff (Franchot Tone), who extorts money and attempts to steal the affections of Goodman’s daughter, Stella (Sylvia Sidney), Goodman and Anagnos realize they have no choice and take Goff out in their boat, kill him, dump his body in the sea, and return to their simple life. The cast also included Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Karl Malden, and Martin Ritt. A film version, renamed Out of the Fog (1941), starred John Garfield, Ida Lupino, and Thomas Mitchell. GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE. Produced by Sam H. Harris, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act comedy opened on 18 October 1940 at the Lyceum Theatre for 173 performances under Kaufman’s direction. Ernest Truex, as Newton Fuller, persuades his wife, played by Jean Dixon, to join him in purchasing a ramshackle old country house where, he has been told, George Washington once slept. The house proves largely uninhabitable and family problems, from their daughter’s affair with a married actor from a stock company and the arrival of boorish Uncle Stanley (Dudley Digges), who was once rich, but is now broke and needing to live with the Fullers. Adding insult to injury, the Fullers discover that Washington did not sleep in the house, but Benedict Arnold did. Percy Kilbride, later Pa Kettle in the movies, added to the hilarity as a local character, Mr. Kimber.

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Kilbride repeated his role in the 1942 film version starring Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, and Charles Coburn. GÉRARD, ROLF (1909– ). Born in Berlin, Germany, Gérard became a British citizen and worked in the United States and Europe. In theatre, Gérard became known for his glamorized approach in costume designs, and he was nominated for a Tony Award for his costumes for the musical Irma La Douce (1960). His other Broadway credits include That Lady (1949), a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1949, An Evening with Beatrice Lillie (1952), The Love of Four Colonels (1953), The Strong Are Lonely (1953), The Fighting Cock (1959), and Tovarich (1963). Gérard also designed for films, including The Silver Chalice (1954), Invitation to the Dance (1956), and The Honey Pot (1967), and he designed a television production of The Merry Widow in 1983. Gérard is also an accomplished painter and, in celebration of his 100th birthday, an exhibit of his work was in Locarno, Switzerland, near where he resides in Ascona. GETTING OUT. Marsha Norman’s two-act drama was first produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville by the Phoenix Theatre on 19 October 1978 at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre for 22 performances. It reopened at the Theatre de Lys on 15 May 1979 for 237 performances. Norman’s first play, it received an American Theatre Critics Award for its unique story of Arlene (Susan Kingsley), a woman recently released from prison who plans to find a better life. Holed up in a decrepit flat, she grapples with specters from her past, including her own former persona, played by Pamela Reed, as well as her former pimp, a jailer who tried to seduce her, and her mother. With the help of a kind neighbor, Arlene determines that she can face her past and restart her life. A 1994 film version starred Rebecca De Mornay and Ellen Burstyn. GIBBS, WOLCOTT (1902–1958). Born Oliver Wolcott Gibbs in New York, he attended and was expelled from the Hill School, after which he attended another prep school, but did not go to college. Over the course of his long and varied career as a writer and critic, Gibbs was embarrassed about his lack of formal education. He joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1927 as a copyreader, moving through the ranks to editorial writer and, in 1940, succeeding Robert Benchley* as theatre critic, a post he held until his death. Gibbs was admired for the quality of his writing, but was feared for his sarcasm and walked out of performances at the end of first acts if he did not like the show. Despite this, he had a timid persona. He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun (1950), but it ran only one month on Broadway.

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GIBSON, MELISSA JAMES (1970?– ). Gibson moved to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in hopes of an acting career, which she soon abandoned. Further study at Columbia University and the Yale School of Drama led Gibson to playwriting and an Obie Award and the Joseph Kesselring Prize for [sic] (1997), a work commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre and first produced in New York at Soho Repertory in November 2001. Gibson’s other plays, many of which have been produced Off-Broadway and in regional theatre, include Nuda Veritas (1994), Given Fish (1995), Six Fugues (1995), God’s Paws (1996), Brooklyn Bridge (2001), a children’s play, Suitcase, or Those That Resemble Flies from a Distance (2003), Current Nobody (2007), and This (2009). Gibson has won a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lucille Lortel Award. GIBSON, WILLIAM (1914–2008). Born in New York, Gibson lived in Topeka, Kansas, in his youth, and his first plays were produced at the Topeka Civic Theatre. He studied at the City College of New York before becoming a playwright and novelist. He was nominated for a Tony Award for Two for the Seesaw (1958), which was later adapted as the musical Seesaw (1973), and he won a Tony for The Miracle Worker (1959), a drama focused on Annie Sullivan, the devoted teacher of Helen Keller. Gibson scripted the 1962 film version, earning an Academy Award nomination. The stars of both the play and the film, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, won Tonys on stage and Academy Awards for the film. Gibson also received a Tony nomination for his libretto for the musical Golden Boy (1964). His other plays include I Lay in Zion (1947); Dinny and the Witches (1948); A Cry of Players (1968); A Mass for the Dead (1968); John and Abigail (1969); The Body and the Wheel (1974); The Butterfingers Angel (1974); Golda (1977); Goodly Creatures (1980); Monday After the Miracle (1982), a sequel to The Miracle Worker; Handy Dandy (1984); the libretto for the musical Raggedy Ann and Andy (1986); and Golda’s Balcony (2003), a revision of Golda that became the longest-running solo performance in the history of Broadway. Gibson also wrote non-fiction, most notably The Seesaw Log, his account of the preparations for the Broadway production of Two for the Seesaw. For films, Gibson adapted his novel The Cobweb as a screenplay in 1955, but otherwise only wrote screenplays for film versions of his own plays. Late in his long life, speaking about writing, he said “that’s the thing where I feel most alive—at least while I’m doing it. I started out to be a writer and I’m still a writer. Not bad.” GIDEON. Paddy Chayefsky’s two-act play about man and divinity opened on 9 November 1961 at the Plymouth Theatre for 236 performances under

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Tyrone Guthrie’s direction. God (Fredric March), in the guise of an Angel, appears to simple farmer Gideon (Douglas Campbell), whom He wishes to lead the Israelites against the Midianties. Gideon takes some convincing, but eventually does so with God’s help, although he later resists orders from God to kill the elders of Succoth. Gideon’s pride distresses God, who recognizes that man cannot seem to rise above human circumstances and recognize the divine. The play was nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Play. A 1971 television production starred Peter Ustinov and José Ferrer. See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. GILDER, ROSAMUND (1891–1986).† Born Janet Rosamond de Kay Gilder in Marion, Massachusetts, she grew up in an artistic milieu, exposed to literature, art, and music, and socializing with such cultural leaders as Mark Twain, Jacob Riis, and Eleonora Duse.* After contributing articles to Theatre Arts Monthly during the 1920s, she joined its staff in 1936 and, in 1946, succeeded founding editor Edith Isaacs to the editorship. In 1947, Gilder was one of the founders of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). Under its auspices, she promoted international cultural exchanges, sending American theatre companies to tour abroad. Elected president of the American center of ITI, she served from 1963 to 1969. She launched a number of theatre publications and published her own articles and books on theatre. GILFORD, JACK (1908–1990). Born Yankel Gellman in Brooklyn, New York, this seemingly gentle, mild-mannered character actor carved out a long career in a wide range of roles. He began as a master of ceremonies in nightclubs and was “discovered” by Milton Berle. On Broadway, he was nominated twice for Tony Awards as Hysterium, the nervous Roman slave, in the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and the gentle Herr Schultz in Cabaret (1966). His other Broadway credits include Meet the People (1940), They Should Have Stood in Bed (1942), Alive and Kicking (1950), The Live Wire (1950), The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), Romanoff and Juliet (1957), Drink to Me Only (1958), Look After Lulu (1959), Once Upon a Mattress (1958), The Tenth Man (1959), revivals of Three Men on a Horse in 1969 and No, No, Nanette in 1971, Sly Fox (1976), The Supporting Cast (1981), and The World of Sholom Aleichem (1982). Gilford replaced Jack Albertson in the Broadway production of The Sunshine Boys in 1973. He had appeared with frequency in films and on television, despite his career being damaged in the early 1950s during the McCarthy era when his left-leaning politics led to his blacklisting, although he worked steadily in theatre and his career had a major resurgence in the early 1960s. In films, Gilford was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for his performance in Save the Tiger (1973), and he recreated

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his Broadway performance in the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). Gilford also appeared in such films as Enter Laughing (1967), Catch-22 (1970), and Cocoon (1985). On television, he received two Emmy nominations in one year in 1989, for guest roles on The Golden Girls and “thirtysomething” and he won a Daytime Emmy Award for The Big Blue Marble (1974). GILL, BRENDAN (1914–1997). The erudite writer and critic of theatre, film, and architecture, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He attended Yale University and he began writing books and contributing to periodicals, most particularly the New Yorker, after graduating, eventually becoming film critic in 1961 and theatre critic in 1968, continuing in that post until 1987. He wrote well-received biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright, Tallulah Bankhead, and Cole Porter, edited a collection of eight Philip Barry plays, and his book The Day the Money Stopped (1957) was adapted as a play by Maxwell Anderson in 1958. GILLMORE, MARGALO (1897–1986).† London, England-born actress Margaret Lorraine Gillmore, spent much of her career on the Broadway stage, beginning in A Scrap of Paper (1917) and continuing to the 1960s. Among Gillmore’s numerous credits are a range of plays from the classics to new works, including Alias Jimmy Valentine* (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), Outward Bound* (1924), The Green Hat (1925), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), The Silver Cord* (1926), The Second Man* (1927), Marco Millions* (1928), Berkeley Square* (1929), The Dark Tower (1933), Valley Forge (1934), The Women (1936), No Time for Comedy (1939), Outrageous Fortune (1943), State of the Union (1945), Kind Sir (1953), Peter Pan* (1954), and Sail Away (1961). She also stepped in as a replacement in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1931 and The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. Late in her career, Gillmore also appeared in films, including Perfect Strangers (1950), Cause for Alarm! (1951), Gaby (1956), and High Society (1956), and television productions, most notably as Mrs. Darling in the 1955, 1956, and 1960 broadcasts of the Mary Martin Peter Pan,* recreating her Broadway role. GILMAN, REBECCA (1964– ). Born in Trussville, Alabama, Gilman attended Middlebury College, Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Iowa. She moved to Chicago, Illinois, and began writing plays, a number of which have been produced at the Goodman Theatre. Her best known play, Spinning into Butter (1999), is typical of her work in addressing sociopolitical concerns, in this case political correctness and racial strife. Her

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other works include The Glory of Living (1999) and Boy Gets Girl (2000), both of which examine contemporary sexual issues, and The Crime of the Century (1999), The American in Me (1999), Speech Therapy (1999), Heaven and Hell on Earth (2001), Blue Surge (2002), Bill of (W)rights (2004), The Sweetest Swing in Baseball (2004), The Boys Are Coming Home (2007), and A True History of the Johnstown Flood (2010). Gilman’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was produced by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009. GILMAN, RICHARD (1923–2006). Brooklyn, New York-born Gilman was a writer and critic with particular interest in European drama and literature. He wrote theatre and literary criticism for Commonweal (1961–1964), Newsweek (1964–1967), and the New Republic (1968–1970), and taught at Yale University from 1967 to 1999. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for Drama Criticism in 1971. Among his several books on drama are The Making of Modern Drama (1974), Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (1996), and The Drama Is Coming Now: The Theatre Criticism of Richard Gilman (2005). GILROY, FRANK D. (1925– ). Born Frank Daniel Gilroy in New York, son of a coffee salesman, he studied at Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama. He won an Obie Award for his first play, Who’ll Save the Plowboy? (1962), and his first Broadway production, The Subject Was Roses (1964), won the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for this three-character play featuring Jack Albertson, Martin Sheen, and Irene Dailey about a returning World War II soldier and the troubled marriage of his seemingly happy parents. Patricia Neal replaced Dailey in a much-honored 1968 film version. Gilroy’s subsequent plays, including Any Given Day (1993), found scant approval, but he worked as a successful film and television writer. For the movies, he scripted The Gallant Hours (1960) and The Only Game in Town (1970), and for TV he wrote many scripts for episodic shows. He also directed several films and TV films. GIN GAME, THE. D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-act, twocharacter play premiered at American Theatre Arts in Hollywood, California, in September 1976, followed by a run at Actors Theatre of Louisville prior to opening on Broadway on 6 October 1977 at the John Golden Theatre for 517 performances under Mike Nichols’s direction. Set in a home for the aged, Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey become acquainted and play gin rummy, revealing their life stories as the gin game, which Fonsia persistently

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wins, escalating into a pitched battle. Weller finally explodes in rage, ending the game. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy played the leads, with Tandy winning a Tony and Drama Desk Award. Cronyn and Tandy appeared in a 1981 television production of the play and were replaced by E. G. Marshall and Maureen Stapleton during the Broadway run. The play was revived on Broadway in 1997 with Charles Durning and Julie Harris under the direction of Charles Nelson Reilly. A West End production starred Joss Ackland and Dorothy Tutin in 1999. GIOVANNI, PAUL (1933–1990). This New York-born playwright, actor, director, and musician, won notice for his music for the horror film The Wicker Man (1973), and he wrote and directed the successful Sherlock Holmes* play, The Crucifer of Blood (1978), reaping a Tony Award nomination for his direction. The play was produced as a TV film in 1991 starring Charlton Heston. In 1981, he directed Edward Sheehan’s Kingdoms on Broadway. He completed an unproduced musical, Shot Through the Heart, but he succumbed to the effects of AIDS. GISH, DOROTHY (1898–1968).† The younger sister of Lillian Gish was born in Massillion, Ohio, and first performed on stage at age four as Little Willie in the melodrama* East Lynne. She played child roles on the road* and in New York until 1912. That year, she and her sister joined D. W. Griffith’s motion picture company, for which Dorothy made 61 films prior to obtaining her first star contract in 1915, after which she appeared in one of her most popular films, Hearts of the World (1917). Gish returned to legitimate theatre in 1928 to perform in Young Love on Broadway, followed by a London engagement. Among her other Broadway credits are four revivals in 1930–1931, The Inspector General, Getting Married, The Streets of New York, and Pillars of Society. She also appeared in The Bride the Sun Shines On (1931), Foreign Affairs (1932), Autumn Crocus (1932), By Your Leave (1934), Brittle Heaven (1934), in which she played Emily Dickinson, Mainly for Lovers (1936), Missouri Legend (1938), and Morning’s at Seven (1939). Gish was also one of the numerous mature “name” actresses to take over from Dorothy Stickney as Vinnie in the long-running Life With Father (1939). Her final Broadway appearances included a revival of Love for Love (1940), The Great Big Doorstep (1942), The Magnificent Yankee (1946), The Story of Mary Surratt (1947), and The Man (1950). GISH, LILLIAN (1896–1993).† Born in Springfield, Ohio, Gish, the elder sister of Dorothy Gish, made her stage debut as “Baby Lillian” in a touring melodrama* in 1902. Occasionally during childhood she toured apart from

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her protective mother and sister. After she was hired by D. W. Griffith to star in motion pictures in 1912, Gish devoted most of her acting career to film, including such silent classics as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), La Boheme (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The Wind (1928). She appeared on Broadway once in this period, in A Good Little Devil (1913). Her work on the legitimate stage included appearances in revivals of Uncle Vanya in 1930 and Camille in 1932, Nine Pine Street (1933), The Joyous Season (1934), Within the Gates (1934), as Ophelia opposite John Gielgud in Hamlet (1936), The Star-Wagon (1937), Dear Octopus (1939), Mr. Sycamore (1942), Crime and Punishment (1947), The Curious Savage (1950), The Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Family Reunion (1958), All the Way Home (1960), a revival of Too True to Be Good in 1963, Anya (1965), I Never Sang for My Father (1968), an all-star Circle in the Square revival of Uncle Vanya in 1973, and A Musical Jubilee (1975). After the silent film days, Gish continued to act in films, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Duel in the Sun (1946), and she also appeared in Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Unforgiven (1960), The Comedians (1967), which brought her a Golden Globe Award nomination, and The Whales of August (1987). Gish was presented with an Honorary Oscar in 1971 and she appeared in several television dramas. Her autobiography, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, was published in 1973. GLASPELL, SUSAN (1882–1948).† A native of Davenport, Iowa, Glaspell was educated at Drake University and the University of Chicago before embarking on a career writing novels and plays. She was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players* along with her husband George Cram Cook,* with whom she wrote one-act plays including Suppressed Desires* (1914; coauthored by Cook) and Trifles* (1916). A committed feminist, Glaspell’s intellectualism and literary skill are evident in her plays and when she began writing full-length works with Bernice (1919), she found critical approval for subsequent plays, including The Inheritors* (1921), The Verge* (1921), and Alison’s House (1930), a fictionalization of Emily Dickinson’s life, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Like Eugene O’Neill, another dramatist whose career was launched by the Provincetown Players, Glaspell merged contemporary themes with dramatic techniques emerging from modernist European playwrights. Expressionistic* and symbolist elements are found in her plays, which often depict the “new woman.” In collaboration with her second husband, Norman Matson, Glaspell wrote The Comic Artist, which met with success in Europe, but failed in its 1933 New York production. During the Great Depression, Glaspell headed the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).

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GLASS MENAGERIE, THE. Tennessee Williams’s first Broadway play was recognized as a masterpiece by many critics when it premiered in the midst of a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, on 26 December 1944, followed by a Broadway production beginning on 31 March 1945. The performance received 24 curtain calls and a rhapsodic response from critics, both for the play and the performance of legendary actress Laurette Taylor in her last role, playing Amanda Wingfield in what Williams labeled as a “memory play.” The four-character cast also included Eddie Dowling, Julie Haydon, and Anthony Ross. As a self-avowed “stage magician,” Tom Wingfield (Dowling) reflects back on his life with his mother (Taylor) and sister (Haydon), conjuring scenes from the past. At the height of the Great Depression, the sensitive Tom aspires to be a writer, but financial exigencies force him to work in a St. Louis factory. His mother, Amanda, is an unhappy woman who was deserted by her husband years before and is ill-equipped to cope with the hard realities of her reduced circumstances. Amanda struggles to make ends meet and worries about the future of her deeply repressed daughter, Laura. Amanda pressures Tom to bring home a “gentleman caller” for Laura in a desperate hope that she might find security in a marriage. Despite practical pressures, Amanda frequently retreats into either real or imagined memories of herself as a romantic Southern belle receiving 17 gentlemen callers. Laura, too, frequently escapes into a fantasy world, listening to old Victrola records her father left behind and collecting glass figurines. Among these, a unicorn is her favorite; as a unique and fragile creature herself, she relates to the symbolism of its distinguishing horn. Amanda’s browbeating finally convinces Tom to bring Jim O’Connor (Ross), his factory coworker, home to dinner. Laura and Jim discover they were high school classmates and, alone with Jim, Laura touchingly recalls the crush she had on him, remembering his good-humored teasing and revealing that her feelings for him have remained unchanged. Jim apologizes, making a hasty departure after confessing his engagement to another girl. Amanda angrily turns on Tom for his blunder and they argue bitterly. Tom, as Amanda has predicted and feared, storms out the door never to return. As the play ends, Tom is again seen in the present reflecting with sadness on the past, explaining that despite geographic distance and the intervening years he has been unable to extinguish the memory of his sister and her plight. The Glass Menagerie has been filmed no less than four times, first in a 1950 Hollywood adaptation with Gertrude Lawrence, Arthur Kennedy, Jane Wyman, and Kirk Douglas. Other versions include a 1966 television production featuring Shirley Booth, Barbara Loden, Hal Holbrook, and Pat Hingle, another television production in 1973 starring Katharine Hepburn

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in her first small-screen appearance as Amanda, with Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles, and Michael Moriarty in support, and a 1987 big-screen version with Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen, John Malkovich, and James Naughton, under the direction of Paul Newman. The Glass Menagerie has been revived on Broadway five times, starring Maureen Stapleton, Piper Laurie, George Grizzard, and Pat Hingle in 1965; Stapleton again in 1975, costarring with Paul Rudd, Pamela Payton-Wright, and Rip Torn; Jessica Tandy played Amanda in 1983, supported by Amanda Plummer, Bruce Davison, and John Heard; Julie Harris took on the role of Amanda in 1994, costarring with Calista Flockhart, Zeljko Ivanek, and Kevin Kilner; and Jessica Lange, Josh Lucas, Sarah Paulson, and Christian Slater appeared in a 2005 revival. The play has also been revived Off-Broadway, including a 2010 Lucille Lortel Award-winning production at the Roundabout Theatre. Helen Hayes played Amanda in the original London production in 1948, drawn to a character within whom both tragic and comic aspects are richly represented. GLEASON, JOANNA (1950– ). Born Joanne Hall in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the daughter of television personality Monty Hall, Gleason was educated at the University of California at Los Angeles and Occidental College before winning a Theatre World Award for her performance in I Love My Wife (1977) and Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Into the Woods (1987). Much of her work has been in musicals, including Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005), which brought her Tony and Drama Desk nominations, and Nick & Nora (1991). She has also been lauded in dramatic roles, including winning Drama Desk Awards for It’s Only a Play (1986) and Social Security (1986), and she was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards for a revival of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1985). She married actor Chris Sarandon in 1994 and has appeared in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), and Sex and the City (2008). GLEASON, JOHN (1941–2003). Brooklyn, New York-born Gleason studied at Hunter College and as a lighting designer worked on over 100 Broadway productions, including We Bombed in New Haven (1968), Lovers and Other Strangers (1968), The Great White Hope (1968), A Cry of Players (1968), In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969), Two by Two (1970), The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (1972), Veronica’s Room (1973), Over Here! (1974), All Over Town (1974), and numerous classics and revivals. Gleason was also resident designer for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and the Mark Taper Forum. He also taught at New York University from 1972 to 1997.

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GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning two-act drama depicting the dark side of American-style capitalism premiered in England, at London’s Royal National Theatre, where it opened on 23 September 1983, and was well-received. The Broadway production opened on 25 March 1984 at the John Golden Theatre, where it ran for 378 performances under the direction of Gregory Mosher. The cast of seven actors, Joe Mantegna (Tony winner), Mike Nussbaum, Robert Prosky (Tony nominee), Lane Smith, James Tolkan, Jack Wallace, and J. T. Walsh, won a Drama Desk Award as outstanding ensemble. They played present-day Chicago real estate agents or their clients in a savage portrait of the moral decadence inherent in selling, as the agents, under intense pressure to make unrealistic quotas selling what may be bogus condominiums, abandon ethics to employ any tactic in order to prevail. The play was revived on Broadway in 2005, winning the Tony for Best Revival and a Tony for actor Liev Schreiber, a Theatre World Award for Gordon Clapp, and a Drama Desk Award for the ensemble cast and Santo Loquasto’s scene design. A 1992 screen version, starring Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Jonathan Pryce, and Al Pacino, who was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, won critical approval. GLENVILLE, PETER (1913–1996). Born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne in Hampstead, London, Glenville came from a family of actors. He was educated at Oxford University and became director of the Old Vic in 1944. Continuing to work in England, he also directed frequently on Broadway, scoring Tony Award nominations for Separate Tables (1957), Rashomon (1959), Take Me Along (1959), and Tchin-Tchin (1963). His other Broadway productions include such American and British plays and musicals as The Browning Version (1949), The Innocents (1950), The Curious Savage (1950), Island of Goats (1951), Hotel Paradiso (1957), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959), Becket (190), Tovarich (1963), Dylan (1964), Everything in the Garden (1957), A Patriot for Me (1969), and Out Cry (1973), as well as a revival of Romeo and Juliet in 1951 starring screen actress Olivia de Havilland in her Broadway debut. GOAT, THE; or WHO IS SYLVIA? Edward Albee won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for this two-act play about sexual taboos. It opened at the John Golden Theatre on 10 March 2002 for 309 performances under the direction of David Esbjornson with scene design by John Arnone. Bill Pullman played Martin, a middle-aged architect, comfortably married and middle class, who falls in love with a goat. This rev-

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elation sets off a family crisis and allows Albee to explore cultural taboos, including bestiality, incest, infidelity, and homosexuality as he questions the boundaries of a liberal society. Mercedes Ruehl (Tony-nominated) played Stevie, Martin’s wife. During the Broadway run, Bill Irwin and Sally Field stepped into the roles of Martin and Stevie. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE; SEXUALITY. GOLDEN, JOHN (1874–1955).† Born in New York, Golden grew up in Ohio before returning to New York in his teens to become an actor. He was not successful, so he spent a dozen years as a salesman, during which time he wrote sketches, short plays, and songs, some of which were performed on Broadway as early as 1900, including his most enduring song, “Poor Butterfly.” In 1918, Golden abandoned his sales career to produce Turn to the Right. He produced more than 150 shows and gained a reputation for emphasizing family entertainments. His Broadway productions include Lightnin’* (1918), Three Wise Fools* (1918), The First Year* (1920), Seventh Heaven* (1922), Let Us Be Gay* (1929), As Husbands Go (1931), When Ladies Meet (1932), The Bishop Misbehaves (1935), Susan and God (1937), Skylark (1939), Claudia (1941), Made in Heaven (1946), and Maurice Chevalier in concert (1948). Golden was also centrally involved in founding the Stage Relief Fund and the Stage Door Canteen. GOLDEN BOY. Clifford Odets’s three-act drama, one of the biggest hits produced by The Group Theatre and one of its most quintessential works, opened at the Belasco Theatre on 4 November 1937 for 250 performances under the direction of Harold Clurman, with scene designs by Mordecai Gorelik. Despite the fact that Odets wrote the play with John Garfield in mind (Garfield appeared in a 1952 Broadway revival), Luther Adler appeared as Joe Bonaparte, a young man torn between a career as a violinist and boxing, which might raise him, his family, and his girl, Lorna, from the tenements at the height of the Great Depression. Joe’s struggle between his idealistic artistic pursuits and the practical realities of survival made for compelling drama as performed by Adler, Morris Carnovsky as his father, and Frances Farmer as Lorna. Garfield appeared in a supporting role, as did such Group Theatre luminaries as Lee J. Cobb, Phoebe Brand, Roman Bohnen, Howard Da Silva, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Art Smith, and Martin Ritt, among others. Golden Boy was filmed in 1939 with William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. The play has had numerous revivals Off-Broadway and in regional theatres and Odets later collaborated with William Gibson on a successful (568 performances) Tony Award-nominated musical version starring Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1964.

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GOLDMAN, JAMES (1927–1998). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Goldman wrote a few plays and screenplays of note, including Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole (1961) and, more notably, The Lion in Winter (1966), which he adapted for a 1968 film version, winning an Academy Award. He also contributed libretti for two Broadway musicals, A Family Affair (1962), with music by John Kander, and Follies (1971), with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, which brought Goldman a Tony Award nomination. In collaboration with Sondheim, Goldman also wrote another musical for television, Evening Primrose (1966). Goldman’s other plays include They Might Be Giants (1961), which was produced in England and later adapted as a 1971 film, adaptations of Oliver Twist (1982) and Anna Karenina (1985), Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986), and Tolstoy (1996). Goldman’s screenplays include Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Robin and Marian (1976), and White Nights (1985). Goldman was also the author of several novels and a few television films. GÓMEZ-PEÑA, GUILLERMO (1955– ). This Mexican-born performance artist, writer, and teacher moved to the United States in 1978. His themes emphasize the intersections of American and Mexican cultures with emphasis on issues of the border between the countries, immigration, assimilation, cultural identity, and racial and linguistic concerns. Gómez-Peña employs multimedia elements, including radio, video, photographs, and visual art elements. Among his best-known works, sometimes created in collaboration with others, are Border Brujo (1988), The Couple in the Cage (1992), The Crucifiction Project (1994), The Temple of Confessions (1995), The Mexterminator Project (1997), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999), and The Mapa-Corpo Series (2004–2008). Among his frequent collaborators are Coco Fusco, James Luna, Maria Estrada, and Demián Flores, among others. See also CHICANO THEATRE. GOODBYE AGAIN. Allan Scott and George Haight’s three-act comedy opened at the Masque Theatre on 28 December 1932 for 216 performances. The play featured Osgood Perkins as Kenneth Bixby, a famous writer confronted by Julia, an ex-lover anxious to restart the relationship. When her husband shows up the situation becomes complicated, but Bixby’s loyal assistant, Anne, helps restore order. Future movie star James Stewart appeared in a small role as a chauffeur. A 1943 revival flopped, as did a 1956 revival starring Donald Cook. A 1933 film version starred Warren William and Joan Blondell. GOODBYE, MY FANCY. Fay Kanin’s three-act comedy, which starred film actress Madeleine Carroll, opened at the Morosco Theatre on 17 November

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1948 for 446 performances. Agatha Reid, a liberal Congresswoman, returns to Good Hope College for Women to receive an honorary degree. Her past engagement to the college’s conservative president, James Merrill (Conrad Nagel) creates some awkwardness. When they were students at Good Hope, she had been expelled for covering up his misdeeds, but now he falls in love with her again. Unable to abide his politics, and annoyed at his attempts to prevent his liberal-minded daughter from pursuing her own dreams, she threatens to reveal the truth of her expulsion. Merrill relents and Agatha finds happiness with a magazine photographer. Shirley Booth was among the supporting cast, and she won a Tony Award as Best Supporting Actress. Sam Wanamaker, who was also in the cast, directed and Donald Oenslager designed the settings and lights. Joan Crawford and Robert Young starred in a 1951 film version. GOODMAN THEATRE AND SCHOOL.† Founded in 1925 as a memorial to Kenneth Sawyer Goodman,* a promising playwright of Chicago’s art and literary renaissance of the 1910s who died of influenza while serving in the United States Navy in 1918, the theatre was built on Lake Shore Drive behind Chicago’s Art Institute. The theatre, which also housed a drama school, was constructed underground, but its resident company thrived in productions of original plays and classics, opening its doors with the U.S. premiere of John Galsworthy’s The Forest. The Great Depression forced the termination of the company in 1930, and the Goodman remained a drama school until the resident company was re-established in 1969. Led by Robert Falls and Gregory Mosher, the Goodman focused on new works and provided an early platform for the plays of Chicago dramatists David Mamet and David Rabe. The Goodman school was uncoupled from the theatre in 1978 and shifted to DePaul University and the old theatre at the Art Institute was abandoned for a new state-of-the-art facility on N. Dearborn Street. Numerous Goodman productions have shifted from Chicago to Broadway, most notably their 1999 revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Brian Dennehy in an acclaimed performance as Willy Loman. In recent years, the Goodman’s annual season has included pre-Broadway tryouts for new works, including Stephen Sondheim’s musical Bounce (2003). GOODRICH, FRANCES (1890–1984) and ALBERT HACKETT (1900– 1995). This married team of playwrights and screenwriters collaborated for over 50 years. Goodrich was born in Belleville, New Jersey, and attended Vassar College, after which she pursued an acting career, appearing on Broadway in Daddy Long Legs* (1918) and several other plays. After two failed marriages (including actor Robert Ames), Goodrich married Albert

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Maurice Hackett, who had been born in New York and began his career as a child actor, continuing into adulthood, appearing on Broadway in The Happy Marriage (1909), The Nervous Wreck* (1923), Twelve Miles Out (1925), and the musical Whoopee! (1928). They embarked on a long writing career in the 1920s, prior to their 1931 marriage. Hackett also appeared in their first writing collaboration on Up Pops the Devil (1930), after which both abandoned their acting careers to pursue their writing. More frequently writing for films, Goodrich and Hackett occasionally wrote for Broadway, most notably The Diary of Anne Frank (1956), which brought them a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. They adapted the play for film in 1959, winning a Writers Guild Award. Their other Broadway plays include the libretto for Everybody’s Welcome (1931), the musical version of Up Pops the Devil, Bridal Wise (1932), and The Great Big Doorstep (1942). For the movies, Goodrich and Hackett were nominated for Academy Awards for The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), Father of the Bride (1950), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). They received Writers Guild Awards for Easter Parade (1948) in collaboration with Sidney Sheldon, Father’s Little Dividend (1951), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Their other screenplays include Lady in the Dark (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Pirate (1948), In the Good Old Summertime (1949), and Five Finger Exercise (1962). GORDON, MAX (1892–1978). This noted Broadway producer was born Mechel Salpeter in New York. In partnership with Albert Lewis, he began producing plays with the hit comedy The Nervous Wreck* (1923). Among the other Lewis and Gordon productions, The Jazz Singer* (1925) scored a hit. Gordon branched out on his own, becoming one of Broadway’s most prolific producers from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. He produced a few films, but Gordon’s taste associated him with some of the most successful and critically applauded plays and musicals of the era, including among many others, The Band Wagon (1931), Roberta (1933), Dodsworth (1934), The Great Waltz (1934), The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), Pride and Prejudice (1935), Ethan Frome (1936), The Women (1936), Sing Out the News (1938), The American Way (1939), Very Warm for May (1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), The Land Is Bright (1941), Junior Miss (1941), The Doughgirls (1942), Over 21 (1944), The Late George Apley (1944), Born Yesterday (1946), Years Ago (1946), and The Solid Gold Cadillac (1953). Cole Porter, whose Jubilee (1935) Gordon produced, immortalized him in the lyrics of the song “Anything Goes”: “When Rockefeller can still hoard enough/money to let Max Gordon/produce his shows, Anything Goes!”

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GORDON, RUTH (1896–1985). Born Ruth Gordon Jones in Wollaston, Massachusetts, as the only child of a former ship captain and his wife, Gordon completed high school and saw actress Hazel Dawn in The Pink Lady. When Gordon received a letter from Dawn in reply to one she had written the star, it inspired Gordon to pursue an acting career. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and appeared in some silent films before debuting on Broadway as Nibs, a lost boy, in a 1915 revival of Peter Pan* starring Maude Adams.* She scored a personal success in Seventeen* (1918), costarring Gregory Kelly, whom she married in 1921 (they divorced in 1926). She subsequently appeared in numerous plays, initially in Hotel Universe (1930), A Church Mouse (1931), Three-Cornered Moon (1933), They Shall Not Die (1934), and A Sleeping Clergyman (1934). Gordon’s acting career achieved distinction with her performances in Ethan Frome (1936), revivals of The Country Wife in 1936, A Doll’s House in 1937, and The Three Sisters in 1942, costarring with Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson in the latter. Gordon married playwright/director Garson Kanin in 1942, and she began writing scripts for stage and screen, sometimes with Kanin’s collaboration. Her two hit plays, Over 21 (1944), in which she appeared, and the autobiographical Years Ago (1946), in which Fredric March (who won a Tony Award) and Florence Eldridge played her parents, slowed her acting career, as she spent increasing amounts of time writing. She made periodic returns to Broadway, most notably as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955), which brought her a Tony nomination, and My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963), her own play A Very Rich Woman (1965) in which she starred, The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Dreyfus in Rehearsal (1974), and a revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1976. On screen, Gordon was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Her other film appearances include playing Mary Todd Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), Edge of Darkness (1943), Where’s Poppa? (1970), and her most memorable role, Maude, in the cult classic Harold and Maude (1971). She won a 1979 Emmy Award for a guest appearance on Taxi and was nominated three additional times. Among the film scripts she collaborated on with Kanin, Gordon was nominated for Academy Awards for A Double Life (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat and Mike (1952), the last two with her close friends, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy played Gordon’s father in the film version of Years Ago, retitled The Actress (1953).

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GORDONE, CHARLES (1925–1995). The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Gordone was born Charles Edward Fleming in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied at Los Angeles City College, California State University, New York University, and Columbia University. Following service in the United States Air Force, Gordone settled in New York and began acting in Off-Broadway productions, including a 1953 all-black revival of Of Mice and Men for which he won an Obie Award. During the 1950s, he continued acting, adding directing experiences, and he performed in Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1961), after which he began to write, completing his first play A Little More Light Around the Place (1964). His play No Place to Be Somebody (1969), won the Pulitzer, a Drama Desk Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. None of Gordone’s subsequent plays met with similar critical acclaim, but these include Worl’s Champeen Lip Dansuh an’ Watah Mellon Jooglah (1969), Chumpanzee (1970), Willy Bignigga (1970), Gordone Is a Muthah (1970), Baba-Chops (1975), Under the Boardwalk (1976), The Last Chord (1977), A Qualification for Anabiosis (1978), The Block (1983), and Anabiosis (1983). He also acted in a few films, including Coonskin (1975) and Angel Heart (1987). GORELIK, MORDECAI (1899–1990).† Born in Russia, Gorelik came to the United States in his youth to study at the Pratt Institute and with several American designers, most notably Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Serge Soudeikine. His first designs were on a modest scale for the Provincetown Players beginning in 1920, but he became one of Broadway’s most important scenic artists. He won attention for his design of Processional* in 1925 and his work with the Neighborhood Playhouse, and when he joined The Group Theatre he designed Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Men in White (1933), as well as Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and Night Music (1940). After World War II, Gorelik’s most notable designs were for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (1957), and others. Inspired by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, as well as Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, Gorelik also taught and wrote several books on theatrical art, including New Theatres for Old (1940). GOTANDA, PHILIP KAN (1951– ). Born in Stockton, California, this Japanese American playwright and filmmaker graduated from Hastings College with a degree in law and training in music, but has been a significant force in the evolution of Asian American theatre since the 1980s. His

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plays have been performed by Asian American companies and at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Mark Taper Forum. Gotanda’s most acclaimed plays include The Wash (1987), which he also adapted for film, concerns a divorcing Japanese American couple. His most-produced work, Yankee Dawg You Die (1987), assails Hollywood stereotyping of Asians. He has written musicals, including Bullet Headed Birds (1981), family dramas such as Fish Head Soup (1991), and historical works such as After the War (2007), performed by the American Conservatory Theatre, which focused on the plight of Japanese Americans following their release from World War II internment camps. Other Gotanda plays include Song of a Nisei Fisherman (1980), Day Standing on Its Head (1993), Ballad of Yachiyo (1995), Under the Rainbow (2005), and Yohen (2006). GOTTFRIED, MARTIN (1933– ). New York-born and educated at Columbia University, Gottfried has had a long career as a drama critic and author. He began writing music criticism for The Village Voice in 1961, followed by a long stint as theatre critic for Women’s Wear Daily beginning in 1962. He ultimately moved in 1974 to the New York Post as senior drama critic, while also contributing to other periodicals. Gottfried has written a score of books on theatre, beginning with A Theatre Divided (1967), a study of postWorld War II American drama, which won the George Jean Nathan Award, and he has written biographies of such theatre luminaries as Arthur Miller, Jed Harris, Stephen Sondheim, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury, and Bob Fosse. His other books include Opening Night (1969) and Broadway Musicals (1979). GOTTLIEB, MORTON (1921–2009). A native of Brooklyn, New York, Morton Edgar Gottlieb studied drama at Yale University prior to beginning his career as a press agent, moving up to production manager in stock. He began on Broadway as company manager of Edward, My Son (1948), moving up to the producing with His and Hers (1954). His many productions included Enter Laughing (1963), The Killing of Sister George (1966), Lovers (1968), We Bombed in New Haven (1968), Sleuth (1970), Veronica’s Room (1973), Same Time, Next Year (1975), Tribute (1975), Faith Healer (1979), Romantic Comedy (1979), Special Occasions (1982), and Dancing in the End Zone (1985). Commenting on his own career, Gottlieb said, “The Broadway theatre is the only place in the world where the easiest way to break in is by starting at the top. You don’t need experience, you don’t need a license, you don’t need money. All you need is chutzpah.”

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GRAND HOTEL. W. A. Drake’s translation/adaptation of Vicki Baum’s German novel opened on 13 November 1930 at the National Theatre for 459 performances in a Herman Shumlin production. Set in the Grand Hotel in Berlin, this 18-scene drama featured Eugenie Leontovich as Grusinskaia, a heartsick ballerina, and followed her story and those of a dying clerk (Sam Jaffe), a secretary, a ruthless businessman, and a jewel thief, among others. The play is rarely performed, but Grand Hotel has endured. It was famously adapted to the screen in 1932, winning the Academy Award as Best Picture, with an all-star cast including Greta Garbo, John Barrymore,* Lionel Barrymore,* Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery. In 1989, it was adapted as a Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical by Luther Davis (libretto), Robert Wright (music and lyrics), and George Forrest (music) and ran for 1,017 performances. GRAND MANNER, THE. A. R. Gurney’s semi-autobiographical play about a stagestruck schoolboy meeting legendary Broadway actress Katharine Cornell and her theatrical inner circle, opened on 27 June 2010 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center. Kate Burton starred as “Kit” Cornell, dubbed by critic Alexander Woollcott* as “The First Lady of the Theatre,” seen here at a transition moment in her life and career, contending with her closeted gay husband and theatre director Guthrie McClintic (Boyd Gaines), her own lesbian lover (Brenda Wehle), and an admiring schoolboy (Bobby Steggert) to whom she reveals more about her conflicted feelings about life, sexuality, and theatrical art than she initially intends. Gurney’s play was based on his own meeting with Cornell when she was appearing in a 1947 revival of Antony and Cleopatra; his audience with the star was brief, but in the play, Gurney imagines what might have transpired if he had stayed longer. Directed by Mark Lamos, with scene designs by John Arnone and costumes by Ann Hould-Ward, the play opened to mixed reviews. GRANDAGE, MICHAEL (1962– ). Born in Yorkshire, England, Grandage was trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked as an actor for a dozen years before turning to directing in 1996. Most of his work has been done in England, where he is artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse. Grandage won Olivier Awards for his directing of Caligula (2004), Grand Hotel (2004), and a 2006 revival of Guys and Dolls. On Broadway, he received a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination for Frost/Nixon (2007), and won the Tony for John Logan’s Red (2010). His other Broadway productions include revivals of Mary Stuart, The Philanthropist, and Hamlet, all in 2009.

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GRAPES OF WRATH, THE. Frank Galati adapted and directed John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel at Steppenwolf Theatre in 1988, with stops at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in 1989 and the Royal National Theatre in London prior to opening on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on 22 March 1990 for 188 performances, winning a Tony Award as Best Play and another for Galati’s direction (he also won a Drama Desk Award), as well as a slew of nominations for cast members (Terry Kinney, Gary Sinise, Lois Smith) and designers (Kevin Rigdon, Erin Quigley). This much-honored production featured a cast of 41, a live band, and spare, evocative settings to recreate the story of the Joad family’s struggle to survive the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and prejudice. Under Galati’s direction, the production was filmed for television in 1991. GRAY, SPALDING (1941–2004). Born Spalding Rockwell Gray in Providence, Rhode Island, this noted writer, monologist, and actor was educated at Emerson College before working as an actor. Joining The Performance Group in 1970, he worked with Richard Schechner until 1980, when he became a founding member of The Wooster Group. Influenced by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, he wrote the autobiographical Three Places in Rhode Island between 1975 and 1978, with collaboration from Elizabeth LeCompte, and between 1979 and 2000 he wrote and performed 18 monologues also drawn from his own life experiences, most notably Swimming to Cambodia (1985), Monster in a Box (1991), Gray’s Anatomy (1993), It’s a Slippery Slope (1996), and Morning, Noon, and Night (1999), several of which he performed on Broadway. As an actor, he won acclaim playing the Stage Manager in the Wooster Group’s revival of Our Town in 1988, appeared in a Broadway revival of The Best Man in 2000, and acted in numerous films. Gray battled depression for his entire life and following serious injuries in an auto accident that seemed to exacerbate his problems, he committed suicide. GREAT WHITE HOPE, THE. Howard Sackler’s drama based on the life of African American boxer Jack Johnson won the Tony Award as Best Play when, following an initial 1967 run at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, it opened on 3 October 1968 at the Alvin Theatre for 546 performances. Directed by Edwin Sherin with scene design by Robin Wagner, it won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. The play examined the rise and fall of the first black world heavyweight boxing champion as a result of racism and his relationship with a white woman in the 1910s. Jones and Alexander recreated their performances, and garnered Academy Award nominations, in a 1970 film version directed by Martin Ritt.

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GREEN, ABEL (1900–1973). New York-born and educated at New York University, Green was hired by Sime Silverman* as a cub reporter for VARIETY, the theatrical trade newspaper, in 1918 and he rose to editor in 1933. In collaboration with Joe Laurie, Jr., Green wrote Show Biz: From Vaude to Video (1951), a chronicle of the stage, screen, and television era he knew intimately. His other books include Inside Stuff on Popular Songs (1927) and The Spice of Variety (1952). Green is credited with creating the short, pithy headlines (“Hix Nix Stix Pix”) and slang typical of Variety in its midtwentieth-century heyday. See also CRITICISM; PERIODICALS. GREEN, PAUL (1894–1981).† Paul Eliot Green was born in Lillinton, North Carolina, and wrote many one-act plays beginning during his schooling at the University of North Carolina, where he studied with Frederick Koch, and Cornell University. In 1926, Green’s drama of racial conflict in the South, In Abraham’s Bosom,* received the Pulitzer Prize. Green’s leftist politics, evident in his plays, often focused on racial issues. From the mid-1920s to World War II, he wrote several critically applauded works, including The Field God (1927), The House of Connelly (1931), Roll, Sweet Chariot (1934), Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936), the libretto and lyrics for the antiwar musical Johnny Johnson (1936; with music by Kurt Weill), and a collaboration with Richard Wright on a stage adaptation of Wright’s novel Native Son (1941). From 1937, when he wrote the first outdoor drama (or symphonic drama), the historical pageant The Lost Colony set on Roanoke Island, North Carolina), Green wrote others, including The Common Glory (1947), The Founders (1957), and Cross and Sword (1965), and taught drama at the University of North Carolina. GREEN PASTURES, THE. Marc Connelly won a Pulitzer Prize for this “fable” in 18 scenes, adapted from Roark Bradford’s folk tales of African American life. It opened on 26 February 1930 for 644 performances at the Mansfield Theatre. Connelly also directed the original production, mixing traditional spiritual music with the story of a black minister in a small Southern church teaching biblical history to a Sunday school class. Employing images of black life (much now deemed stereotypical), The Green Pastures pleased Depression-era audiences with its simple, childlike depiction of familiar Bible tales and Christian values. Featuring an all-black cast, a rarity on Broadway in 1930, Rex Ingram starred as “De Lawd,” whose entrance was announced by the angel Gabriel shouting, “Gangway! Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!” With the assistance of De Lawd, the minister recounted numerous Old Testament legends, including the stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah, and Moses, all leading to the cli-

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mactic crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The Green Pastures was revived successfully in 1935, made into a hit film in 1936 (with Ingram repeating his role), and revived again in 1951, although its short run suggests that changing attitudes about race deemed images in the play as racist. See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. GREENBERG, RICHARD (1958– ). Born in East Meadow, New York, Greenberg grew up on Long Island before attending Princeton University and completing an M.F.A. in Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. A prolific and imaginative writer, Greenberg won a Tony Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Lucille Lortel Award for Take Me Out (2003), a comedy-drama about the ramifications resulting from a major league baseball player announcing his homosexuality. Some of his early plays, including The Bloodletters (1984), Life Under Water (1985), Vanishing Act (1986), The Author’s Voice (1987), The Hunger Artist (1987), The Maderati (1987), Eastern Standard (1988), Neptune’s Hips (1988), The American Plan (1990; revised 2009), The Extra Man (1991), and Jenny Keeps Talking (1992), were produced in regional theatres. He revised the book of the musical Pal Joey for a 1992 revival, and his Three Days of Rain (1997), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won acclaim in a Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) production. His subsequent plays, which have been produced at such theatres as the MTC and the Roundabout Theatre, including Hurrah at Last (1998), The Dazzle (2000), Everett Beekin (2000), The Dance of Death (2003), The Violet Hour (2003), A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005), Bal Masque (2006), The Well-Appointed Room (2006), The House in Town (2006), The Injured Party (2008), and Our Mother’s Brief Affair (2009). Among the honors for his work, he is a recipient of the Oppenheimer Award and the first PEN/Laura Pels Award for a mid-career playwright. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. GREENSPAN, DAVID (1956– ). This actor and playwright was educated at the University of California at Irvine, moved to New York in 1978, and studied at New Dramatists. He won Obie Awards for his performances in a revival of The Boys in the Band in 1996, Some Men in 2007, and Faust, Parts I and II in 2007. He has acted in a range of plays, classic and contemporary, at such theatres as the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, Second Stage, Classic Stage Company, Playwrights Horizons, and Primary Stages, and regional theatres including Hartford Stage. He has received numerous foundation grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Foundation grant, for his playwriting, with such works as The Horizontal and the Vertical (1986), Jack (1987), Dig a Hole and Bury Your

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Father (1987), The Home Show Pieces (1988), Principia (1988), 2 Samuel 11, Etc. (1989), Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain (1991), Dog in a Dancing School (1993), Trains Passing (1993), Son of an Engineer (1993), Start from Scratch (1993), Something’s Gotta Give (1993), Them (1999), The Myopia (2003), She Stoops to Comedy (2003), which won an Obie, The Argument (2007), Aristophanes’ The Frogs (2008), and the musical Coraline (2009). New York Times critic Charles Isherwood described Greenspan as one of contemporary theatre’s “glorious freaks.” GREENWOOD, JANE (1934– ). This British-born costume designer whose designs have brought her 17 Tony Award nominations, was born in Liverpool and educated at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts. After designing for the Oxford Playhouse, she moved to Canada, but ultimately found her way to New York. Her first Broadway costume design, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), introduced her to her future husband, scene designer Ben Edwards. Her diverse credits include numerous classics and revivals, as well as Incident at Vichy (1964), Where’s Daddy? (1966), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), More Stately Mansions (1968), Les Blancs (1970), Wise Child (1972), Same Time, Next Year (1975), A Matter of Gravity (1976), California Suite (1976), A Texas Trilogy (1976), Vieux Carré (1977), Romantic Comedy (1979), The West Side Waltz (1981), Plenty (1983), Lillian (1986), The Secret Rapture (1989), I Hate Hamlet (1991), Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1991), The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), Passion (1994), Master Class (1995), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), An American Daughter (1997), The Dinner Party (2000), The Violet Hour (2003), and Thurgood (2008). Among the many revivals she has designed, Greenwood won particular praise for Hay Fever in 1971, Medea in 1982, Heartbreak House in 1984 and 2007, The Iceman Cometh in 1986, Our Town in 1989, She Loves Me in 1994, The Heiress in 1995, A Delicate Balance in 1996, Morning’s at Seven in 2002, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2005, and Waiting for Godot and Brighton Beach Memoirs in 2009. Greenwood was presented with the Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2004. She had also designed several films, including The Four Seasons (1981), Arthur (1981), Sweet Liberty (1986), Glengarry Glen Ross (1993), and Oleanna (1994), and television productions, including the Richard Burton Hamlet in 1964, which she had designed on Broadway. GREGORY, ANDRE (1934– ). Born in New York and educated at Harvard University, Gregory has had a successful career as an actor, director, and pro-

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ducer in both avant-garde and mainstream theatre and film circles, beginning Off-Broadway in the late 1950s. He spent time in Poland studying the techniques of Jerzy Grotowski. Gregory’s directing won critical attention at The Writer’s Stage in the early 1960s, after which he established The Manhattan Project (TMP), winning an Obie and Drama Desk Award for his direction of Alice in Wonderland (1970). At TMP, which was made up of six actors, he also directed the company’s radically staged revivals of Endgame (1973) and The Seagull (1975), and Jinx’s Bridge (1976). These productions inspired critical debate and Gregory largely left the theatre in 1975 for film work, but he has occasionally returned to the stage, most notably for a production of David Mamet’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya, which he spent nearly four years (1990–1994) developing, a process subsequently filmed as Vanya on 42nd Street by Louis Malle. Gregory also directed Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner (2002). As an actor, Gregory appeared on Broadway in Rumors (1988) and the following year played Prospero in The Tempest with Boston’s Shakespeare & Company. In films, he notably costarred with Shawn in My Dinner With Andre (1981) playing himself, but has also appeared in Protocol (1984), The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Celebrity (1998). GREIF, MICHAEL (1958– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Greif completed an M.F.A. in directing at the University of California, San Diego in 1985 and began his career as assistant director of the Broadway production of Sleight of Hand (1987). In 1991, Greif won an Obie Award directing a revival of Machinal* Off-Broadway and he staged the 1994 premiere of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent for the New York Theatre Workshop, winning another Obie and, ultimately, a Tony Award nomination when Rent moved to Broadway in 1996. From 1995–1999, Greif served as artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse, bringing their 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and 2000 productions of a musical version of Jane Eyre and The Green Bird to Broadway, as well as staging the premieres of Tony Kushner’s Slavs! (1995) and Diana Son’s Boy (1996). He won a third Obie for Dogeaters (2001) after leaving La Jolla, and has also directed Never Gonna Dance (2003), the musical Grey Gardens (2006), which brought him a Tony nomination, and Next to Normal (2009), which brought him another Tony nomination. In 2009, he directed the premiere of Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) at the Guthrie Theatre. GRIEBLING, OTTO (1896–1972). This much-loved clown was born in Koblenz, Germany, and had a long career in American circus from his

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arrival in the United States in 1910. He began his career as an equestrian, but an injury in 1930 forced him to reinvent himself as a silent clown. He performed with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and the Cole Brothers Circus, but ultimately joined Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1951. His popularity rivaled the most famous American clown of the period, trampclown Emmet Kelly. While Kelly played the sad clown in the tradition of Pierrot, Griebling, also adopting the persona of a tramp, was a happy clown and made use of props from a steadily melting block of ice to a plant that grows into a tree to amuse his audiences. Griebling made his last appearance at Madison Square Garden in 1970, little more than a year before his death. GRIFFIES, ETHEL (1878–1975). Born Ethel Woods in Sheffield, England, Griffies had a remarkably long career on stage and in films and television, making her debut as a child in 1881 and continuing to 1967. On Broadway, Griffies appeared in such plays as Old English (1924) with George Arliss,* The Criminal Code* (1929), The Druid Circle (1947), The Hallams (1948), The Leading Lady (1948), The Shop at Sly Corner (1949), the Irving Berlin musical Miss Liberty (1949), Legend of Sarah (1950), a revival of The Royal Family* in 1951, The Autumn Garden (1951), Write Me a Murder (1961), A Very Rich Woman (1965), a 1966 revival of Ivanov with John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh, and The Natural Look (1967). She acted in over 90 films, including two with Arliss, Old English (1930) and The Millionaire (1931), Waterloo Bridge* (1931 and 1940), Love Me Tonight (1932), Alice in Wonderland (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), How Green Was My Valley (1941), Saratoga Trunk (1945), The Birds (1963), and Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965). From its earliest days, Griffies occasionally appeared on TV. GRIMES, TAMMY (1934– ). Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, as Tammy Lee Grimes, this versatile actress studied at Stephens College and The Neighborhood Playhouse. She began her Broadway career as Kim Stanley’s understudy in Bus Stop (1955) and Off-Broadway in The Littlest Revue (1956). When Noël Coward saw her perform in a nightclub, he cast her in his play Look After Lulu (1959), which won her a Theatre World Award. A Tony Award followed for the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960). She won a second Tony and a Drama Desk Award for a revival of Coward’s Private Lives (1969) and costarred in the musical adaptation of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, renamed High Spirits (1964), with Beatrice Lillie. On Broadway, Grimes has also appeared in Rattle of a Simple Man (1963), The Only Game in Town (1968), A Musical Jubilee (1975), California Suite (1976), a revival of Tartuffe in 1977, Trick (1979), 42nd Street (1980), and

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a 1989 revival of Orpheus Descending. Off-Broadway and in regional theatre, Grimes appeared in Father’s Day (1979) and Paducah (1985) at the American Place Theatre, Simon Gray’s Molly in 1982 at the Long Wharf Theatre, A Month in the Country in 1979 at the Roundabout Theatre, and Over My Dead Body in 1984 at the Hartman Theatre. She also appeared for several years with the Stratford Festival of Canada and in 2003 was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. Grimes also appeared in films, including The Runner Stumbles (1979), Can’t Stop the Music (1980), Mr. North (1988), High Art (1998), and television, including her own short-lived TV series in 1966. Grimes was married to Christopher Plummer and is the mother of actress Amanda Plummer. GRIZZARD, GEORGE (1928–2007). This versatile Broadway, film, and television actor was born in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, once in New York following a brief advertising career, he studied acting with Sanford Meisner. He debuted on Broadway in The Desperate Hours (1955). Grizzard won a Theatre World Award for The Happiest Millionaire in 1957 and was nominated for Tony Awards for The Disenchanted (1959), Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), and won a Tony for a 1996 revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. He demonstrated a particular affinity for Albee’s plays, appearing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and a 2005 revival of Seascape as well. Grizzard also appeared on Broadway in Face of a Hero (1960), a revival of The Glass Menagerie in 1965, You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967), Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato (1968), The Gingham Dog (1969), Inquest (1970), a revival of The Country Girl in 1972, The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), Crown Matrimonial (1973), a revival of The Royal Family* in 1975, California Suite (1976), a revival of Man and Superman in 1978, and Judgment at Nuremberg (2001). OffBroadway, Grizzard acted in The Gingham Dog (1969) and Regrets Only (2006), and appeared in numerous repertory productions, including playing Hamlet in the Guthrie Theatre’s first production in 1963. Grizzard acted in many films, including Advise & Consent (1962), Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971), Comes a Horseman (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), and Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and numerous television programs, winning an Emmy Award for The Oldest Living Graduate, one of the plays in A Texas Trilogy, in 1980. GROSBARD, ULU (1929– ). Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Grosbard, a theatre and film director, lived in Cuba beginning in 1942 before moving

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to the United States in 1948, where he studied at the University of Chicago and the Yale School of Drama prior to entering the U.S. Army and becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1954. As a director, he debuted OffBroadway with The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstemaker (1962). On Broadway, he was Tony Award-nominated for The Subject Was Roses (1964), which he also directed in its 1968 film version, and he won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award for an Off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 1965. Grosbard directed Miller’s The Price (1968) and received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for American Buffalo (1977). His other Broadway directing credits include Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1966), which he also translated, That Summer—That Fall (1967), The Floating Light Bulb (1981), The Wake of Jamey Foster (1982), and a revival of The Tenth Man (1989). Off-Broadway, Grosbard also staged Weekends Like Other People (1982). Grosbard also served as assistant director on several films in the 1960s prior to directing several himself, including Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me? (1971), Straight Time (1978), True Confessions (1981), Falling in Love (1984), Georgia (1995), and The Deep End of the Ocean (1999). GROUP THEATRE, THE. This profoundly influential theatre company, founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, responded to the social issues of the 1930s and the Great Depression as no other American theatre entity managed with the exception of the Federal Theatre Project. Its most lasting impact has been the widespread acceptance of acting techniques based in those of the Moscow Art Theatre* and its director, Constantin Stanislavsky. The Group would ultimately splinter in part over disagreements in interpreting Stanislavsky’s principles, with the result that several of The Group’s members taught their own individual approaches based in Stanislavsky, including most notably Strasberg and Stella Adler, a leading actress with The Group. Its membership and those involved with individual Group productions, included Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Sanford Meisner, Art Smith, Ruth Nelson, Luther Adler, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Lewis, Roman Bohnen, Margaret Barker, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Franchot Tone, Sam Jaffe, Frances Farmer, Sidney Lumet, J. Edward Bromberg, Burgess Meredith, Martin Ritt, Sylvia Sidney, Karl Malden, Charles Bickford, Howard Da Silva, Russell Collins, Leif Erickson, Van Heflin, designers Mordecai Gorelik and Boris Aronson, and playwright Clifford Odets, whose finest plays were written for The Group, including Awake and Sing! (1935), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and others.

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Between The Group’s founding in 1931 and its demise in 1940, it generated 22 new American plays, including among them Paul Green’s The House of Connelly (1931), Maxwell Anderson’s Night Over Taos (1932), Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Men in White (1933), John Howard Lawson’s Success Story (1932), Erwin Piscator and Lena Goldschmidt’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s The American Tragedy renamed Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), Green and Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson (1937), Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People (1939), and William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939). GUARE, JOHN (1938– ). A New York-born playwright educated at Georgetown University and Yale School of Drama, Guare won an Obie Award for one of his earliest plays, Muzeeka (1968). He also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The House of Blue Leaves (1971)— and its revival in 1986 won four Tony Awards. Guare also won Tony, Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his libretto for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) and an Obie, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and England’s Olivier Award for Six Degrees of Separation (1990). Guare’s other plays include Cop-Out (1969), Rich and Famous (1974), Landscape of the Body (1977), which was Drama Desk-nominated, Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1977), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), Lydie Breeze (1982), Gardenia (1982), Women and Water (1990), Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), which was nominated for a Tony, Lake Hollywood (1999), Chaucer in Rome (2001), A Few Stout Individuals (2002), and the libretto for Sweet Smell of Success (2002), which was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. New York’s Signature Theatre devoted a season to honoring Guare’s work in 1998–1999 and, in 2010, Jeffrey Wright was announced for the leading role in Guare’s Free Man of Color, a play set in 1801 New Orleans, in its Broadway premiere. Guare was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989, inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1993, and won a PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award in 2003. Guare has written for film, most notably the screenplay for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), which brought him an Academy Award nomination and a New York Film Critics Association Award. Of Guare’s work, Malle wrote that Guare “practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare’s peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.”

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GUERNSEY, OTIS LOVE, JR. (1918–2001). This drama critic and editor was born in New York and studied at Yale University. He worked at the New York Herald Tribune from 1941–1960, sometimes as drama or film critic. He edited and was theatre critic for Show Magazine (1963–1964), edited the Dramatists Guild Quarterly from 1964–1994, and was a founding member of the American Theatre Critics Association. His most significant contribution was taking over from Henry Hewes as editor of the Best Play Series from 1965–2000. Guernsey also wrote several books, including Directory of the American Theatre (1971), Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers on Theatre (1974), Broadway: Song & Story (1986), and Curtain Time (1987). GUNN, MOSES (1929–1993). A St. Louis, Missouri, native, Gunn left his family at age 12 following his mother’s death. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1954, after which he attended Tennessee State University and the University of Kansas before teaching and Grambling College and beginning an acting career. He was a cofounder of the Negro Ensemble Company, winning a 1968 Obie Award for his Off-Broadway work, which included Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1962), In White America (1963), and Sky of the Blind Pig (1971), among others. Gunn was nominated for a Tony Award for The Poison Tree (1976). Gunn played Othello on Broadway for the American Shakespeare Festival in 1970. His other Broadway appearances were in A Hand in on the Gate (1966), as Orsino in Ellis Rabb’s production of Twelfth Night (1972), The First Breeze of Summer (1975), and he stepped into the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. in I Have a Dream (1976). In film, Gunn appeared in The Great White Hope (1970), Shaft (1971), Remember My Name (1978), Ragtime (1981), and Heartbreak Ridge (1986). On television, Gunn was nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in the mini-series Roots (1977). See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. GURNEY, A. R., JR. (1930– ). Born in Buffalo, New York, as Albert Ramsdell Gurney, Jr., he was educated at Williams College and the Yale School of Drama. He took a job teaching humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began writing novels and plays. Among Gurney’s plays, The Dining Room (1981) and Love Letters (1988), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, are best known. His over 40 other plays include Love in Buffalo (1958), The Rape of Bunny Stuntz (1966), The Golden Fleece (1968), Scenes from American Life (1970), What I Did Last Summer (1975), Who Killed Richard Cory? (1976), The Middle Ages (1977), The Golden Age (1981), Another Antigone (1987), The Cocktail Hour (1988), Sylvia (1995), Ancestral Voices (1999), Buffalo Gal (2001), Screen Play (2005), Post Mortem (2006), Indian Blood (2006), Crazy Mary (2007), and A Light Lunch

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(2008). In 2010, Gurney’s The Grand Manner, directed by Mark Lamos, played a limited engagement at Lincoln Center, with a cast including Kate Burton as Katharine Cornell and Boyd Gaines as Guthrie McClintic. Gurney has written of his hometown (also Cornell’s) that “I was bitten by the theatre bug in Buffalo at an early age and have remained infected ever since.” GUSSOW, MEL (1933–2005). A New York native of Jewish Lithuanian heritage, he was born Melvyn Hayes Gussow and educated at Middlebury College and Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in journalism. After a stint in the United States Army, he became a theatre and film critic for Newsweek in 1962. He joined the staff of the New York Times in 1969 and continued until shortly before his death, writing in excess of 4,000 reviews and articles for the paper. He won particular praise for his astute writing about twentieth-century American and European drama. Gussow wrote a biography of Edward Albee and published books of his interviews with Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. In 2008, he was posthumously inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. GUTHRIE THEATRE. Named for Sir Tyrone Guthrie, who directed the theatre’s first production, Hamlet, in 1963, the Guthrie Theatre was established by Oliver Rea, Peter B. Zeisler, and Guthrie with the goal of creating a permanent repertory company away from New York City, until that time the center of American theatre. In 1959, with the support of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who supplied a $400,000 grant, Guthrie and designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch planned an asymmetrical arena/thrust space seating over 1,400 people completed in time for the 1963 opening. Guthrie seasons were typically a mix of classics, modern European and American drama, and occasional new works. Ultimately, the company mounted tours, offered educational programs, and grew in size and scope, also providing a regional theatre model followed by many other companies forming after the mid-1960s. In 2006, under the guidance of artistic director Joe Dowling, the Guthrie moved to a new multistage complex on the Mississippi River. In 2009, the Guthrie staged a festival in honor of playwright Tony Kushner, which included a premiere of Kushner’s latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and included productions of Kushner’s other plays, symposia and speakers, including Kushner himself. GUTHRIE, TYRONE (1900–1971). This celebrated British director, born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, studied at Oxford University and began his career at the Oxford Playhouse. After a long, distinguished career in England and

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Canada, in 1953, he helped establish the Stratford Festival of Canada, working closely with Tanya Moiseiwitsch to design a Shakespeare Theatre for the festival, a process they repeated in founding (along with Peter B. Zeisler and Oliver Rea) the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a repertory theatre that became a prototype for the regional theatre movement in the United States. In 1963, Guthrie directed Hamlet as the Guthrie Theatre’s first production. The theatre has thrived. He authored two books, Theatre Prospect (1932) and A Life in the Theatre (1959), largely based on lectures he had given. Guthrie was knighted in 1961. GUTIERREZ, GERALD (1950–2003). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gutierrez trained at the Juilliard School and developed a successful directing career, although he acted on Broadway in The Acting Company revivals of Edward II, The Time of Your Life, and The Three Sisters (in which he understudied two roles) in 1975. Following some initial experiences directing for the McCarter Theatre and other regional theatres, he staged OffBroadway productions of Geniuses (1982), The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket (1983), and he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Isn’t It Romantic? (1984). On Broadway, Gutierrez was Drama Desk-nominated for a 1992 revival of The Most Happy Fella, a Tony Award for a 1993 revival of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for revivals of The Heiress in 1995 and A Delicate Balance in 1996. He directed the original works The Curse of the Aching Heart (1982) and Honour (1998), but the remainder of his Broadway productions were intelligently interpreted, lovingly staged revivals, including Little Johnny Jones in 1982, White Liars & Black Comedy in 1993, Once Upon a Mattress in 1996, Ivanov in 1997, Ring Round the Moon in 1999, and Dinner at Eight in 2002. Gutierrez also directed a few television movies.

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H HACKETT, ALBERT (1900–1995). See GOODRICH, FRANCES. HAGAN, JAMES P. (1888–1947). After a successful career in journalism in St. Louis, Hagan (sometimes billed as Hagen) decided to write for the stage. To learn the craft, he did some acting, including appearing on Broadway in The Faith Healer* (1910), a revival of If I Were King (1916), The Great Divide* (1917), Molière (1919), The Letter of the Law (1920), in a season of Shakespearean roles with E. H. Sothern* and Julia Marlowe,* Fashions for Men (1922), The Potters* (1923), and Collision (1932). Hagan also stagemanaged for producer Arthur Hopkins and his best-known plays were Guns (1928), one of Broadway’s earliest gangster plays, One Sunday Afternoon (1933), Mid-West (1936), and Here Come the Clowns (1938). HAGEDORN, JESSICA (1949– ). A Filipino American born in Manila as Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn studied at the American Conservatory Theatre and settled in New York in the 1970s as a playwright and actor. Inspired by historical questions of the relationship of race and gender/sexuality, she makes use of poetry, dialogue, music, and multimedia visual images to explore these themes. Hagedorn’s style was influenced by playwright/actress Ntozake Shange during Hagedorn’s time in the original cast of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in 1974. With Shange and Thulani Davis, she created When the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977), which was performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival/ Public Theatre. Her other works include Tenement Lover (1981), Airport Music (1994), and Dogeaters (1998), which was staged at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse. See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. HAGEN, UTA (1919–2004). This German American acting legend and teacher was born in Göttingen, Germany, emigrated to the United States in childhood, and began her career at the age of 17 playing Ophelia to Eva Le Gallienne’s Hamlet in 1937 on tour as a result of writing the great actress a letter asking for an audition. Hagen had an equally auspicious Broadway

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debut in 1938 as Nina in The Seagull playing opposite Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, with New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson enthusing that Hagen was “grace and aspiration incarnate.” Her next appearance in Charlotte Armstrong’s flop, The Happiest Days (1939), did not advance her career, but it freed her to appear in Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo (1939). Following a brief run in the farce Vickie (1942), Hagen was cast as Desdemona to Paul Robeson’s Othello and José Ferrer’s Iago in an acclaimed 1943 revival of Othello, continuing in it until the summer of 1945. Hagen and Ferrer had married in 1938, but she had an affair with Robeson and she and Ferrer were divorced a decade later. Hagen acted in the short-lived The World Over (1947) prior to taking on the role of Blanche DuBois opposite Anthony Quinn’s Stanley Kowalski in the national tour of A Streetcar Named Desire from 1947 to 1950, with an interruption of several months in 1948 when she returned to Broadway to play Mrs. Manningham in Angel Street (1948). In 1947, Hagen began teaching at the HB Studio in New York, which was founded by Herbert Berghof (a decade later, they married and remained so until his death in 1990). Despite continuing her acting career, Hagen became a devoted teacher of acting, utilizing her own approach to the theories of Constantin Stanislavsky, as was true of the other major American acting teachers of her time, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner, and others. She especially rejected Strasberg’s dependence on emotional memory and became one of the most admired and sought-after teachers of acting in New York. While teaching, Hagen worked sporadically as an actor, including originating the role of Georgie Elgin in Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl (1950), which brought her a Tony Award, and other Broadway productions, including revivals of Saint Joan in 1951 and Tovarich in 1952, three short-lived original plays, In Any Language (1952), The Magic and the Loss (1954), and Island of Goats (1955), and two 1956 revivals: A Month in the Country and The Good Person of Setzuan. As foul-mouthed, alcoholic Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Hagen won critical acclaim and a Tony in what was regarded as one of the finest performances of her career. She only returned to Broadway for three brief runs, in revivals of The Cherry Orchard in 1968 and You Never Can Tell in 1986 and the short-lived Charlotte (1980), directed by Berghof. Off-Broadway, Hagen received a 1996 Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in Mrs. Klein and appeared in Collected Stories (1998). In 2001, she appeared at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks. Due to the McCarthy-era blacklist, Hagen’s film work

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was limited to the last phase of her career with character roles in The Other (1972), The Boys from Brazil (1978), A Doctor’s Story (1984), Reversal of Fortune (1990), and she narrated Limón: A Life beyond Words (2001). On television, Hagen appeared occasionally, including receiving two Daytime Emmy Award nominations, in 1986 for the soap opera One Life to Live and in 1988 for the ABC Afterschool Special: Seasonal Differences. She also appeared in an episode of Oz in 1999. Hagen was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981, received a Lucille Lortel Award (1995) and a Tony (1999) for lifetime achievement, and President George W. Bush presented her with the National Medal of the Arts in 2002. Hagen published two books on her theories on acting, Respect for Acting (1973) and A Challenge for the Actor (1991), widely considered essential reading. HAILEY, OLIVER (1932–1993). A native of Pampa, Texas, Hailey worked as a journalist for the Dallas Morning News before becoming a playwright and television writer. He won a Drama Desk Award for his play Hey You, Light Man! (1963), but all of his Broadway efforts, First One Asleep, Whistle (1966), Father’s Day (1971), and I Won’t Dance (1981), folded after a single performance. His other plays include Child’s Play: A Comedy for Orphans (1962), Home By Hollywood (1964), Animal (1965), Picture (1965), Kith and Kin (1966), Who’s Happy Now? (1967), Crisscross (1969), Orphan (1970), Continental Divide (1970), For the Use of the Hall (1974), And Furthermore (1977), Red Rover, Red Rover (1977), Triptych (1978), I Can’t Find It Anywhere (1979), And Baby Makes Two (1981), About Time (1982), and Round Trip (1984). In collaboration with Marilyn Cantor Baker, he won a Writers Guild of America Award for Sidney Shorr: A Girl’s Best Friend (1981), which also brought an Emmy nomination and led to a short-lived television series, the first to feature an openly gay man, played by Tony Randall, as the central character. He also wrote for episodic television, and his only theatrical film was Just You and Me, Kid (1979). HAIMES, TODD (1956– ). Manhattan-born Haimes attended Yale University and came armed with an M.B.A. to the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1986 where he reversed the company’s financial woes, becoming its artistic director in 1990. By the end of the decade, Haimes had led the Roundabout to its status as the second-largest theatre operation in the United States. Under Haimes’s leadership, the Roundabout has reaped Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards, as well as nominations, for a number of revivals (such as Cabaret in 1998) and new works (Side Man [1999]) of classics, musicals, and occasional original works. See also REPERTORY THEATRE.

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HALL, ADRIAN (1928– ). Born in Van, Texas, Hall studied at the Texas State Teacher’s College, Pasadena Playhouse, and with Lee Strasberg prior to directing Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. He was a founder of the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1964, serving as its artistic director until 1989, during which the theatre won the 1981 Tony Award Regional Theatre Award. In 1983, he also took over artistic directorship of the Dallas Theatre Center. The plays and innovative production approaches he presented have often generated controversy, whether the choices involve using cross-gender and cross-racial casting or presenting plays in non-traditional spaces or styles. His Off-Broadway revival of As You Like it in 1993 brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, and he also directed Off-Broadway and regional theatre productions of Orpheus Descending in 1959, The Grass Harp in 1966, Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1994, F. Murray Abraham in King Lear in 1996, and, for New York’s 29th Street Repertory, In the Belly of The Beast (2004). On Broadway, Hall has directed Wilson in the Promised Land (1970), The Suicide (1980), The Hothouse (1982), and On the Waterfront (1995). Hall also teaches at the University of Delaware. HALL, PETER (1930– ). Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, as Peter Reginald Frederick Hall, he founded the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 and took over the artistic directorship of the National Theatre of Great Britain from Laurence Olivier in 1973, continuing in that position until 1988. Most of his work as a director has been done in England, but he has either exported productions or staged a few directly for Broadway, most notably winning Tony Awards for The Homecoming (1967) and Amadeus (1981), and Tony nominations for The Rope Dancers (1958), Old Times (1972), Bedroom Farce (1979), The Merchant of Venice (1990), Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), and An Ideal Husband (1996). Hall also won Drama Desk Awards for Old Times and Amadeus and Drama Desk nominations for Saturday Sunday Monday (1975) and Bedroom Farce. In 2009, Hall remained at work directing Pygmalion for the Hong Kong Arts Festival. HALLIDAY, JOHN (1880–1947). The actor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was educated in London. He went prospecting for gold in Nevada; after losing everything, he joined a touring company. With T. Daniel Frawley’s company, he traveled to the Far East. On Broadway, Halliday appeared in The Whip (1912), The Ware Case (1915), A Place in the Sun (1918), The Circle (1921), East of Suez (1922), Two Fellows and a Girl (1923), Dancing Mothers (1924), The Spider (1927), Jealousy (1928), The Humbug (1929),

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Damn Your Honor (1929), Rain from Heaven (1934), and Tovarich (1936). He has appeared in numerous silent films, but he switched permanently to films in the early sound era, appearing in The Dark Angel (1935), Peter Ibbetson (1935), Desire (1936), Intermezzo (1939), and most notably as Katharine Hepburn’s father in The Philadelphia Story (1940). Actress Eva Lang was the second of his three wives. HAMBLETON, T. EDWARD (1911–2005). A native of Baltimore, Maryland, where he was born to a wealthy family, Hambleton was educated at Yale University, where he studied chemistry, but gave it up for the theatre. Inspired by Orson Welles and John Houseman, Hambleton began producing on Broadway and, with Norris Houghton (and later Ellis Rabb’s Association of Producing Artists), established and operated the Phoenix Theatre from 1953–1983. Among the over 100 productions of ancient and modern classics, American plays, and new works he produced in New York, both on Broadway and Off-Broadway, was the premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (1947). The APA-Phoenix was presented with a special Tony Award in 1968 and Hambleton was presented with a 2000 lifetime achievement Tony. HAMPDEN, WALTER (1879–1955).† One of the last prominent actors of the nineteenth-century romantic style, Brooklyn-born and Harvard-educated Walter Dougherty Hampden received his theatrical training in Shakespeare and the classics as an apprentice in F. R. Benson’s British stage company. Hampden’s 1907 American debut was as Alla Nazimova’s leading man and his long career vacillated between popular contemporary plays and the classics. Much of his reputation was built in Shakespearean roles and Hampden made a particularly noteworthy Cyrano de Bergerac in a 1923 Broadway revival (revived again in 1932 and 1936). During the 1940s, Hampden was a member of the American Repertory Theatre (ART) and won plaudits in the ART’s productions of Henry VIII (as Cardinal Wolsey) and What Every Woman Knows, both in 1946. On Broadway, he also played Hamlet in 1934, appeared in a revival of Seven Keys to Baldpate* in 1935, Achilles Had a Heel (1935), revivals of An Enemy of the People in 1937, Love for Love in 1940, and The Rivals in 1942, The Strings, My Lord, Are False (1942), The Patriots (1943), And Be My Love (1945), The Traitor (1949), and The Velvet Glove (1949). Hampden’s career extended well into the 1950s, when he appeared in a few films, most notably as the old actor in All About Eve (1950) and as Humphrey Bogart’s crotchety father in Sabrina (1954). His final stage appearance was in the role of Governor Danforth in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953).

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HANDMAN, WYNN (1922– ). A New Yorker educated at City College and Columbia University, he served in the United States Navy during World War II, after which he joined The Neighborhood Playhouse and studied with Sanford Meisner. As cofounder and artistic director of the not-for-profit American Place Theatre, Handman remained in that post until 2002. He was praised for his interest in non-traditional casting, which brought him the Rosetta LeNoire Award from Actors’ Equity Association in 1994. HANLEY, WILLIAM (1931– ). Born in Lorain, Ohio, he became a playwright best known for his Broadway drama, Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964). Hanley also won two Drama Desk Awards for the Off-Broadway Mrs. Dally (1962), which moved to Broadway in 1965, and Whisper into My Good Ear (1962). His other plays include Conversations in the Dark (1963), Today Is Independence Day (1963), Flesh and Blood (1968), and No Answer (1968). Hanley also wrote novels, the screenplays for The Gypsy Moths (1969) and Too Far to Go (1982), and won two Emmy Awards, for the television films Something About Amelia (1984) and The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988), and was Emmy-nominated for several other TV films. HANSBERRY, LORRAINE (1930–1965). Born into a well-to-do African American family of civil rights activists in Chicago, Illinois, Hansberry was exposed to some of the luminaries of pre-World War II black life, including Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. DuBois. Educated in Chicago schools prior to entering the University of Wisconsin in 1948, Hansberry spent two years studying drama before leaving school for New York City in 1950. After working for a time as a reporter for a black newspaper, the experiences of her early life inspired the outstanding achievement of Hansberry’s playwriting career, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a drama concerning the frustrated hopes and dreams of a South Side Chicago family in the period. It was the first play by a black woman produced successfully on Broadway. Hansberry followed A Raisin in the Sun with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), which dealt with the turbulent lives of Greenwich Village intellectuals. It failed to equal the success of Raisin, and during its preparations Hansberry learned she was suffering from cancer. Following her death, Hansberry’s husband, writer and producer Robert Nemiroff, whom she had married in 1953, pieced together three plays taken from Hansberry’s unfinished writings, What Use Are Flowers?, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, and Les Blancs, and he encouraged frequent revivals of A Raisin in the Sun. Ultimately, other bits and pieces of previously unproduced Hansberry works emerged, including an unproduced script commissioned by

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CBS-TV for the centennial of the Civil War. Entitled The Drinking Gourd, it deals with the harsh conditions of slavery and its effects on a young black couple. In 1973, Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg adapted A Raisin in the Sun into the musical Raisin, which won a Tony Award as Best Musical and was successfully revived in 1981. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Anita Loos’s two-act comedy provided a light respite for dramatic actress Helen Hayes, who was applauded for her performance in this otherwise slight play which opened on 31 October 1946 at the Broadhurst Theatre for 563 performances in a Rodgers and Hammerstein production directed by Joshua Logan. Hayes played Addie Bemis, a shy Newark, New Jersey, librarian, frustrated by her feelings for a young man named Paul (Louis Jean Heydt). She follows him to the Jersey Mecca Bar and loses her inhibitions with her first drinks, including the notorious “Pink Lady,” described as the “tart’s drink.” Addie finds the courage to express her feelings, which include singing for the bar’s patrons. Critics, while acknowledging the play’s slight plot, and Broadway audiences clearly enjoyed seeing Hayes have a comic field day, for which she won a Tony Award, as did costume designer Lucinda Ballard. HAPPY TIME, THE. Samuel Taylor’s three-act comedy sent in Ottawa, Canada, in 1920, opened on 24 January 1950 at the Plymouth Theatre for 614 performances in a Rodgers and Hammerstein production directed by Robert Lewis. A young man, Bibi (Johnny Stewart), is coming of age, and his mother (Leora Dana) worries that the carousing brothers of his father (Claude Dauphin) will lead him astray. A 1952 film version starred Charles Boyer and a 1968 musical adaptation by N. Richard Nash, with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, was Tony Award-nominated as Best Musical. HARDWICK, ELIZABETH (1916–2007). Born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky, Hardwick wrote novels, but ultimately became a noted dramatic and literary critic. She wrote theatre reviews for the New York Review of Books from 1963–1983 and was the first woman to receive the George Jean Nathan Award in 1967. Hardwick was married to poet Robert Lowell from 1949 to 1972. HARDY, JOSEPH (1929– ). A native of Carlsbad, New Mexico, Hardy has had a varied career as a director of theatre and film. He won a Drama Desk Award for his direction of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1967), a Tony Award nomination for Play It Again, Sam (1969), and won both

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Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Child’s Play (1970), credits suggesting the range of his work. Hardy’s other Broadway credits include Johnny NoTrump (1967), Bob and Ray: The Two and Only (1970), Children! Children! (1972), Gigi (1972), a 1976 revival of The Night of the Iguana, Diversions and Delights (1978), and Romantic Comedy (1979). Hardy’s film work includes his direction of television productions of numerous literary classics, including Shadow of a Gunman in 1972, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1974, and Great Expectations in 1974, and episodes of the television series The Paper Chase (1978). He most recently directed Lynn Redgrave in her onewoman play Nightingale (2009) for the Manhattan Theatre Club and has directed Grace (2008) Off-Broadway and in regional theatres. HARE, DAVID (1947– ). English-born playwright, screenwriter, and director, Hare has worked mostly in Great Britain, but his plays have been produced with some frequency on Broadway. He won a 1983 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his play Plenty, which also received a Tony Award nomination, as did Racing Demon (1996) and Skylight (1997). He won a Drama Desk Award for Via Dolorosa (1999) and Drama Desk nominations for The Secret Rapture (1990), which he also directed, and Stuff Happens (2006). Other Hare works on Broadway included his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov in 1997, The Judas Kiss (1998), The Blue Room (1998), which caused a stir when film actress Nicole Kidman appeared nude in a scene, and The Vertical Hour (2006). Hare also directed Vanessa Redgrave in the Broadway production of The Year of Magical Thinking (2007). Hare has received two Academy Award nominations for screenplays for The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) and has adapted several of his plays for the screen. HARRIET. Produced by Gilbert Miller, this three-act play by husbandand-wife playwrights Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements opened on 3 March 1943 at Henry Miller’s Theatre for 377 performances under Elia Kazan’s direction. Helen Hayes played Harriet Beecher Stowe who discovers that her marriage to Calvin Stowe, played by Rhys Williams, and her writing are a means of escaping family pressures. None of her family approved of her writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but its success encourages Stowe to support abolitionist movement and the Civil War as a means of ending slavery. HARRIGAN, WILLIAM (1893–1966). Son of actor/playwright Edward Harrigan,* this stage and screen actor appeared in films beginning in 1915, but had begun earlier on stage, appearing on Broadway in one of his father’s

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plays, Old Lavender (1906). Among his many Broadway roles, Harrigan appeared in The Chaperone (1908), The Melody of Youth (1916), Bought and Paid For* (1921), Polly Preferred* (1923), The Great God Brown* (1926), The Moon in the Yellow River (1932), The Dark Tower (1933), Paths of Glory (1935), Days to Come (1936), In Time to Come (1941), and won plaudits as the tyrannical Captain in Mister Roberts (1948). He often played military personnel, but also appeared as Charlie Chan in the play Keeper of the Keys (1933). His final Broadway appearances were in The Wayward Saint (1955) and A Shadow of My Enemy (1957). HARRIS, AURAND (1915–1996). Born in Jamesport, Missouri, this pioneer of children’s theatre studied at the University of Kansas City and Northwestern University. He wrote over 50 plays for young audiences between his first success, a commedia dell’arte-style Androcles and the Lion (1963), and his last, The Orphan Train (1996). Harris also wrote Steal Away Home (1972), Yankee Doodle (1975), A Toby Show (1978), and The Arkansas Bear (1980). He was the first playwright to receive the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and the New England Theatre Conference established an annual award in Harris’s name in 1997. HARRIS, JED (1899–1979).† Born Jacob Horowitz in Vienna, Austria, Harris arrived in America as a child and attended Yale University before working as a newspaper reporter for the New York Clipper. Often described as the “wonder boy” of Broadway, many coworkers found his near-mythical eccentricities, ruthless business practices, and cutting sarcasm unpleasant. George Abbott called him the “Little Napoleon” of the American stage, an apt description that captures Harris’s brilliance, flamboyance, and dictatorial style (George S. Kaufman joked that after his death he wished to be cremated and have his ashes thrown in Harris’s face). Most of Harris’s greatest successes were in the 1920s, including the original productions of Broadway* (1926), Coquette* (1927), The Royal Family* (1927), and The Front Page* (1928), but his staging of Uncle Vanya (1930) starring Lillian Gish was well-received and his production of the early gaythemed melodrama* The Green Bay Tree (1933) provided Laurence Olivier with one of his first Broadway appearances. The same year, Harris presented Katharine Hepburn in The Lake, a failure that nearly ended Hepburn’s career. More important later productions included Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), also directed by Harris, and The Heiress (1947), adapted by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich from Henry James’s Washington Square, but his productions of Dark Eyes (1943) and The Traitor (1949) were only mildly successful. Harris directed Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

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in 1953, but his final production, Guy Bolton’s Child of Fortune, which he also directed, failed in 1956. Two Harris memoirs, Watchman, What of the Night? (1963), which offered his point of view on the backstage squabbles during the production of The Heiress, and an autobiography, A Dance on the High Wire (1979), were rare moments in the spotlight for Harris, who became increasingly reclusive after the mid-1950s, but who also appeared on Dick Cavett’s television show for a rare extended interview shortly before his death. HARRIS, JULIE (1925– ). This much-honored actress was born Julia Ann Harris in Grosse Point, Michigan, and was educated at the Yale School of Drama. She debuted on Broadway in It’s a Gift (1945), beginning a distinguished stage career that lasted half a century. She won a Theatre World Award for Sundown Beach (1949) and Tony Awards for John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera (1952), The Lark (1956), Forty Carats (1969), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1973), and The Belle of Amherst (1977), garnering Tony nominations for Marathon ’33 (1964), Skycraper (1966), her only musical, The Au Pair Man (1974), Lucifer’s Child (1991), and a 1997 revival of The Gin Game. She also received a Drama Desk Award for The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, and a Drama Desk nomination for The Belle of Amherst. Her many other Broadway credits include Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1950), a revival of The Country Wife in 1957, The Warm Peninsula (1959), Little Moon of Alban (1960), A Shot in the Dark (1961), Ready When You Are, C.B.! (1964), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Voices (1972), In Praise of Love (1974), Break a Leg (1979), Mixed Couples (1980), and a revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in 1994, among many others on Broadway, in regional theatres, and on tour. The slight, slim Harris suggests fragility, but her performances in a wide range of characters and genres reveals a strength of body and voice, and a stage technique that ranks her among the greatest twentieth-century American stage actors. Her love of her art has encouraged her to continue her work even in her 80s, and after suffering a stroke in 2001. In 2008, the intrepid Harris appeared as Nanny in a production of Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and she continued to appear in films. Harris was nominated for an Academy Award in her debut appearance in the film version of The Member of the Wedding (1952) and also appeared in East of Eden (1955), I Am a Camera (1955), The Haunting (1963), Harper (1966), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Hiding Place (1975), and The Bell Jar (1979). On television, Harris won three Emmy Awards for Little Moon of Alban (1951), Victoria Regina (1961), and for her voiceover performance in Not for Ourselves Alone (1999). She also received

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eight other Emmy nominations. Harris was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, received a Kennedy Center Honor, a 1994 National Medal of Arts, and lifetime achievement awards: Tony Award (2002) and Drama Desk Award (2005). HARRIS, ROSEMARY (1930– ). Born in Ashby, Suffolk, England, Rosemary Ann Harris attended convent schools, worked in repertory theatres, and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Since debuting on Broadway in Climate of Eden (1951), for which she won a Theatre World Award, Harris has worked frequently in New York and London’s West End, as well as in films and television. In England, her many performances included playing Ophelia to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet in the debut production of the National Theatre of Great Britain. Exuding elegance and authority on stage, Harris often plays upper-class characters or royalty, but has demonstrated diversity in a wide range of roles. On Broadway, she won a Tony Award playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1966) and Drama Desk Awards for Old Times (1972), in revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (1973) and The Merchant of Venice (1973), and Pack of Lies (1985). Harris also won an Obie Award for an Off-Broadway revival of All Over in 2002. Harris’s other notable Broadway appearances include Troilus and Cressida (1956), Interlock (1958), The Disenchanted (1958), The Tumbler (1960), revivals of The School for Scandal and Right You Are If You Think You Are in 1966, We, Comrades Three (1966), revivals of The Wild Duck and You Can’t Take It With You in 1967, War and Peace (1967), revivals of The Royal Family* in 1975, Heartbreak House in 1983, and Hay Fever in 1985, she replaced Irene Worth in Lost in Yonkers in 1991, revivals of An Inspector Calls in 1994 and Waiting in the Wings in 1999, and Oscar and the Pink Lady (2008). On screen, Harris was nominated for an Academy Award in Tom & Viv (1994) and has appeared in The Boys from Brazil (1978), Crossing Delancey (1988), Looking for Richard (1996), Hamlet (1996), and she plays Aunt May in Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels. She won Emmy awards for Notorious Woman (1976) and Holocaust (1978), the latter bringing her a Golden Globe Award as well. Harris is the mother of actress Jennifer Ehle. See also SHAKESPEARE ON U.S. STAGES. HARRIS, SAM H. (1872–1941).† A native of New York’s Lower East Side, Samuel Henry Harris became manager of boxer Terry McGovern, who appeared in a touring burlesque show between bouts. When Harris bought a piece of the show, his producing career began and it expanded in 1900 when he embarked on a four-year partnership with A. H. Woods* and P. H. “Paddy” Sullivan to mount touring melodramas.* In 1904, Harris formed a

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legendary Broadway producing partnership with George M. Cohan, staging innumerable productions, including virtually all of Cohan’s works until they amicably dissolved their partnership in 1920. On his own, Harris kept up a prodigious and diverse producing schedule that included The Music Box Revues and many of the most successful musicals and plays of the 1920s and 1930s, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Icebound* (1923), a rare foray into serious drama for Harris. Harris’s prestige only expanded in the 1930s with productions of the Pulitzer Prize-winners Of Thee I Sing! (1933) and You Can’t Take It with You (1936), and a reunion with Cohan, who starred in the Harris-produced Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical satire I’d Rather Be Right (1937). His other 1930s’ productions include Once in a Lifetime (1930), Face the Music (1932), Dinner at Eight (1932), As Thousands Cheer (1933), Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933), Merrily We Roll Along (1934), Jubilee (1935), Room Service (1935), Stage Door (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), George Washington Slept Here (1940), and Lady in the Dark (1941). Harris was well-respected for his taste, attention to every detail, and his genial manner. HARRISON, BERTRAM (1877–1955). Harrison began his career as a journeyman actor and stage manager for Henry Miller’s* company, with Miller ultimately casting him in important roles. On Broadway, Harrison appeared in Zira* (1905) and The Great Divide* (1906), and worked successfully as a director and production manager for many Broadway shows. He directed both musicals and comedies, including Little Women* (1912), Parlor, Bedroom, and Bath* (1917), Up in Mabel’s Room* (1919), Ladies’ Night* (1920), Getting Gertie’s Garter* (1921), Lawful Larceny (1922), Partners Again (1922), The Kiss in the Taxi (1925), Potash and Perlmutter,* Detectives (1926), Treasure Girl (1928), Singin’ the Blues (1931), Hot Money (1931), The Red Cat (1934), Say When (1934), Swing Your Lady! (1936), Around the Corner (1936), Miss Quis (1937), Sea Legs (1937), and 30 Days Hath September (1938). HARRISON, REX (1908–1990). Born Reginald Carey Harrison in Huyton, Lancashire, England, and studied at Liverpool College. He began acting in 1924, but his career was interrupted by his service in the Royal Air Force in World War II. Following the war, he found stardom onstage in London and New York, and in films. He was often associated with the plays of George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, and Terence Rattigan, but other than Shakespeare (he was the only major English actor of his generation to avoid Shakespeare’s plays) he played diverse roles in dramas, com-

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edies, and a musical. On Broadway, Harrison won Tony Awards for his performances playing Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) and Henry Higgins in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956, 1981), the musical adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion in which he famously talked-sang the songs, including “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Harrison was presented with a special Tony in 1969, nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for a 1983 revival of Heartbreak House, and he received a 1985 Drama Desk Special Award for his career achievement. Harrison also appeared notably on Broadway in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1950), John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle (1950), Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed (1952), Peter Ustinov’s The Love of Four Colonels (1953), which he also directed, Jean Anouilh’s The Fighting Cock (1959) directed by Peter Brook, a revival of Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV in 1973, Rattigan’s In Praise of Love (1974), a 1977 revival of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, William Douglas Home’s The Kingfisher (1978), Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t We All? (1985), and Somerset Maugham’s The Circle (1989). Harrison was nominated for an Academy Award for Cleopatra (1963) and won an Oscar and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for the film version of My Fair Lady (1964). Harrison’s varied film roles reflected his theatrical tastes, including his appearances in film versions of Major Barbara (1941), Blithe Spirit (1945), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and The Fourposter (1952). Harrison was married six times and among his wives were the actresses Lili Palmer and Rachel Roberts. An affair with Hollywood starlet Carole Landis during Harrison’s marriage to Palmer ended in Landis’s suicide, which caused a front-page scandal. However his career was not harmed by the tragedy. Harrison was the father of actor Noël Harrison, named for his father’s friend, Noël Coward. HARRISON, RICHARD B. (1864–1935). Born in London, Ontario, Canada, Richard Berry Harrison was the son of fugitive slaves who had escaped the United States via the Underground Railroad. He studied at the Detroit Training School of Dramatic Art and with Edward Weitzel, touring as a dramatic reader of Shakespeare and poetry prior to working with the Lafayette Theatre. His most noted roles, as De Lawd in Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Green Pastures, (1930) kept him on Broadway and the road* for a few years, including a 1935 revival, and he taught speech and drama at North Carolina A&T University and other schools prior to his death. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE.

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HART, MOSS (1904–1961). New York-born playwright and director, Hart was interested in theatre from childhood thanks to an aunt who took him to plays. He worked on amateur productions, as entertainment director at a summer resort, and as an actor, appearing on Broadway in a revival of The Emperor Jones* in 1926. He convinced veteran playwright/director George S. Kaufman to collaborate with him. Their first play, Once in a Lifetime (1930), was a hit and during the 1930s they wrote several successful works, including their Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1936), as well as Merrily We Roll Along (1934), the libretto for the musical I’d Rather Be Right (1937), The Fabulous Invalid (1938), The American Way (1939), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), and George Washington Slept Here (1940). During his partnership with Kaufman, Hart also wrote the books for the musicals Face the Music (1932), As Thousands Cheer (1933), The Great Waltz (1934), Jubilee (1935), and The Show Is On (1936). After the end of his partnership with Kaufman, Hart continued to write and increasingly turned his attention to directing, sometimes combining the two, as he did with Lady in the Dark (1941), Winged Victory (1943), Christopher Blake (1946), Light Up the Sky (1948), and The Climate of Eden (1952). He directed Junior Miss (1941), Dear Ruth (1944), The Secret Room (1945), Miss Liberty (1949), Anniversary Waltz (1954), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960). Hart’s screenplays include his Academy Award-nominated condemnation of anti-Semitism, Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born (1954). Hart also wrote Act One (1959), one of the most admired autobiographies of a Broadway personality, although the book only covers his life up to beginning his partnership with Kaufman. He was married to actress Kitty Carlisle from 1946 until his death, despite being bisexual. HARTFORD STAGE COMPANY (HSC). Jacques Cartier founded this theatre in 1963 in a grocery warehouse where it opened with a 1964 production of Othello. In 1968, operations moved to a permanent theatre designed by architect Robert Venturi. The HSC gained national recognition after 1980 under the artistic leadership of Mark Lamos, who stressed a mixture of classics, great American plays, and new works. To date, the HSC has staged over 260 productions, established the annual Tennessee Williams Marathon, and various education and community programs. Michael Wilson replaced Lamos in 1998. HARVEY. Mary Coyle Chase’s seemingly innocuous comedy about a genial tippler who imagines a six-foot rabbit as his drinking companion improbably won a Pulitzer Prize and ran for 1,775 performances at the 48th Street

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Theatre in its original Broadway production which opened on 1 November 1944. Chase, whose subsequent plays did not find either critical or commercial success, originally named this pleasing comedy The Pooka, an ancient Celtic term for a fairy spirit in animal guise. The aforementioned pooka is Harvey, the imaginary rabbit friend of whimsical drunk Elwood P. Dowd (played in the original production by vaudevillian* Frank Fay), who causes unending distress for Dowd’s social-climbing sister, Veta Louise Simmons (Josephine Hull), and Veta’s unmarried daughter, Myrtle Mae (Jane Van Duser). When Elwood shows up at home unexpectedly during a gathering of local society matrons, Myrtle is humiliated when the invisible Harvey is introduced to one and all. Pressuring the conflicted Veta, Myrtle wants to send Elwood to the “booby hatch,” Chumley’s Rest, fearing that future social gaffs will prevent her from finding a husband and social position. At Chumley’s a series of misunderstandings leads to the accidental incarceration of Veta as a patient, as well as other comical confusions. Although it seems only Elwood can see and converse with Harvey, those around him, including Dr. Chumley, slowly begin to feel the pooka’s presence. Elwood’s benign, friendly philosophy, reflected by his relationship with Harvey, calls into question what it means to be sane and Veta, realizing she likes Elwood as he is, takes him—and Harvey—home. Fay won critical plaudits, but film star James Stewart subsequently replaced him during the run and also played Elwood in a 1950 screen version for which he was Academy Award-nominated (along with Hull in an Oscarwinning performance), a 1970 Broadway revival (costarring with Helen Hayes) filmed for television in 1972, and became permanently identified with the character. A film version to be directed by Steven Spielberg was planned for 2011. HATFUL OF RAIN, A. Actor Michael V. Gazzo’s three-act drama on the impact of a Korean War veteran’s drug addiction and its impact on his family opened on 9 November 1955 at the Lyceum Theatre for 389 performances under Frank Corsaro’s direction and with scene designs by Mordecai Gorelik. Ben Gazzara and Anthony Franciosa were both nominated for Tony Awards and the strong cast also included Shelley Winters, Frank Silvera, Harry Guardino, and Henry Silva in this naturalistic treatment of a largely taboo subject in Broadway drama up to that time. Franciosa repeated his performance in a 1957 screen version directed by Fred Zinnemann and garnered Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. HAVING WONDERFUL TIME. Marc Connelly produced and directed this three-act comedy by Arthur Kober at the Lyceum Theatre, where it

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opened on 20 February 1937 for 372 performances. Katherine Locke played Teddy Stern, a young secretary vacationing at a Berkshire resort to escape an unhappy relationship with an older man. She meets Chick Kessler (John Garfield, then billed as Jules), a young waiter. Teddy vacillates for a time, but when she is heavily courted by a vulgar ladies’ man, Pinkie Aaronson (Sheldon Leonard), she decides to turn to Chick. Having Wonderful Time was the source material for the musical Wish You Were Here (1952). HAVOC, JUNE (1913–2010). Born Ellen Evangeline Hovick in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Havoc began in theatre as a child vaudevillian* billed as “Baby June” under the guidance of her mother Rose and with her sister, Rose Louise Hovick, later known as the burlesque “ecdysiast” Gypsy Rose Lee. Havoc’s childhood in vaudeville became a theatrical legend in the fictionalized musical Gypsy (1959), based on Lee’s memoirs. Beginning with her Broadway debut in Forbidden Melody (1936), Havoc worked on stage and screen until the 1990s. On Broadway, she was nominated for a Tony Award for the direction of her own play, Marathon ’33 (1963), based on her memoirs, which starred Julie Harris. Havoc also received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in Habeas Corpus (1975), and she also appeared in Pal Joey (1940), Mexican Hayride (1944), Sadie Thompson (1944), The Ryan Girl (1945), Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945), The Infernal Machine (1958), a revival of The Beaux Strategem in 1959, The Warm Peninsula (1959), a revival of Dinner at Eight in 1966, and she stepped in as a replacement Miss Hannigan in the long-running musical Annie in 1982. HAYDON, JULIE (1910–1994). A native of Oak Park, Illinois, the small, ethereal Haydon was born Donella Lightfoot Donaldson and began her career in her teens touring with Minnie Maddern Fiske* in Mrs. BumpsteadLeigh.* She made her Broadway debut in Philip Barry’s flop Bright Star (1935) and, in less than a decade, appeared in three legendary performances, as Brigid the maid caught in a love triangle with a conservative churchman and a liberal school master in Ireland in Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance (1938), as the despairing prostitute Kitty Duval in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939), and as the fragile recluse Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945). Haydon’s rare other Broadway appearances included Magic/Hello Out There (1942), The Patriots (1943), Miracle in the Mountains (1947), and Our Lan’ (1947). Haydon appeared in a few films after 1931, most notably in The Age of Innocence (1934), The Scoundrel (1935) playing opposite Noël Coward, and the first Andy Hardy film, A Family Affair (1937), and she later appeared in a few television dramas. She married critic George Jean

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Nathan in 1955 and when he died in 1958, Haydon taught acting and gave readings of Nathan’s books. HAYES, HELEN (1900–1993).† Born Helen Brown in Washington, D.C. to an actress and a salesman, Hayes debuted at the age of five with a stock company before appearing in Lew Fields’s Broadway musical, Old Dutch (1909). After appearing in other musicals, she acted opposite William Gillette* in Dear Brutus (1918). Beginning with Clarence* (1919), her demure, natural acting, which departed from the more histrionic approach typical in the 1920s, elevated her stature. In 1926, she assayed her favorite role, Maggie, in a revival of What Every Woman Knows, which she followed with an acclaimed performance in Coquette* (1927). After 1930, and throughout her long career, Hayes appeared with distinction in a range of classic and contemporary roles almost all of which enhanced her title as one of the “First Ladies of the American Theatre,” along with contemporaries Lynn Fontanne and Katharine Cornell. Hayes gave standout performances in Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland (1933), a well-liked revival of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1940, Candle in the Wind (1941), as Harriet Beecher Stowe in Harriet (1943), in Anita Loos’s Happy Birthday (1946), in Joshua Logan’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard retitled The Wisteria Trees (1950), in Mary Chase’s Mrs. McThing (1952), Jean Anouilh’s Time Remembered (1957), in the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet (1958), revivals of George Kelly’s The Show-Off* (1967), The Front Page* (1969), which was cowritten by her late husband, Charles MacArthur, and her last New York appearance in Mary Chase’s Harvey (1970) opposite James Stewart. Her signature performance in Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1935) was a virtuosic turn in which she played Queen Victoria from youth to old age. Hayes also appeared in films periodically, winning Academy Awards as Best Actress in 1931 for The Sin of Madelon Claudet and again in the supporting category for Airport (1970). On television, she was nominated nine times for an Emmy Award, winning once in 1953. HAYS, DAVID (1930– ). This multi-Tony Award-nominated scene and lighting designer was born in New York City as David Arthur Hays and graduated from Harvard University. Inspired by the work of Jo Mielziner, he became a successful Broadway designer and founded the National Theatre of the Deaf in 1967. He was also a cofounder of the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Center. On Broadway, he received Tony nominations for his designs of The Tenth Man (1960), All the Way Home (1961), No Strings (1962), a revival of Marco Millions* in 1964, and Drat! The Cat!

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(1965). His other notable designs include the original Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), Gideon (1961), Sunday in New York (1961), A Family Affair (1962), a revival of Strange Interlude* in 1963, UTBU (1966), A Cry of Players (1968), The Goodbye People (1968), Two By Two (1970), The Gingerbread Lady (1970), Bring Back Birdie (1981), and Kingdoms (1981). HAYWARD, LELAND (1902–1971). Born in Nebraska City, Nebraska, Hayward studied at Princeton University, but quit to work as a journalist and press agent, ultimately developing his own talent agency and managing some of the top Hollywood stars, including Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn (with whom he was romantically involved), Greta Garbo, Henry Fonda, Judy Garland, and others. In 1945, he sold his talent agency and became a Broadway producer responsible for several major hits, including two Pulitzer Prize-winners, State of the Union (1945) and South Pacific (1949), as well as A Bell for Adano (1945), Mister Roberts (1948), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), Call Me Madam (1950), Wish You Were Here (1952), Gypsy (1959), The Sound of Music (1959), Goodbye, Charlie (1959), A Shot in the Dark (1961), Mr. President (1962), and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1971). He was married to actress Margaret Sullavan and was the father of actress Brooke Hayward. HECHT, BEN (1894–1964).† Born in New York and reared in Wisconsin, Hecht is often thought of as a Chicagoan since his best-known play, coauthored with Charles MacArthur, is The Front Page* (1928), a scathing and hilarious melodrama* of 1920s yellow journalism in the Windy City. Also in partnership with MacArthur, Hecht wrote the farce Twentieth Century (1932), and on his own he wrote the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical Jumbo (1935), Ladies and Gentlemen (1939), Swan Song (1946), and A Flag Is Born (1946). He collaborated with Gene Fowler on The Great Magoo (1932), but Hecht spent most of his career writing novels and particularly screenplays. He wrote (credited or uncredited) over 150 films, including Scarface (1932), Viva Villa! (1934), Nothing Sacred (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), A Farewell to Arms (1957), as well as screen adaptations of his plays. HECHT, JESSICA (1965– ). Born in Princeton, New Jersey, Hecht was educated as an actor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On Broadway, her credits include Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997) and revivals of After the Fall in 2004, Julius Caesar in 2005, Brighton Beach Memoirs in 2009, and A View from the Bridge in 2010. Off-Broadway, she has ap-

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peared in Plunge (1997), Stop Kiss (1998), and Lobster Alice (1999). She has appeared in several films, including Sideways (2004) and Calling It Quits (2009), and many television programs, most notably in the recurring role of the lesbian lover of Ross’s ex-wife on the comedy series Friends from 1994 to 2000. HECKART, EILEEN (1919–2001). A Columbus, Ohio, native born Anna Eileen Heckart, she attended Ohio State University before beginning a long and successful career as a character actress on Broadway and in movies and television. Her Broadway debut was as understudy and assistant stage manager of The Voice of the Turtle (1943). After appearing in a few flops, she won critical praise as Rosemary Sydney in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1953), winning a Theatre World Award. She received Tony Award nominations for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), Invitation to a March (1960), Butterflies Are Free (1969), and she was presented with a special Tony in 2000. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her Off-Broadway performance in Northeast Local (1996) and won an Obie Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, and a Drama Desk Award for The Waverly Gallery (2000). On Broadway, Heckart’s other notable appearances included The Bad Seed (1954), A View from the Bridge (1955), Everybody Loves Opal (1961), A Family Affair (1962), a revival of Too True to Be Good in 1963, And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967), The Mother Lover (1969), Veronica’s Room (1973), Ladies at the Alamo (1977), and The Cemetery Club (1990). In regional theatres, Heckart played such varied roles as Mother Courage and Daisy Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy, and she toured as Eleanor Roosevelt in Eleanor (1976). Heckart won an Academy Award reprising her Broadway role as the controlling mother Mrs. Baker in Butterflies Are Free (1972) and was nominated repeating another stage role, as Mrs. Daigle, the mother of a murdered child, in The Bad Seed (1956), for which she won a Golden Globe Award. On television, she won an Emmy Award for Love & War in 1994 and was nominated five other times, as well as garnering a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for the soap opera One Life to Live in 1987. HEDGEROW THEATRE. Jasper Deeter founded this repertory theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1923. In its first three decades, the theatre operated as a true repertory, performing a rapidly changing bill of fare year-round. In the 1950s, the theatre abandoned the repertory approach and continued until 1985, when a fire destroyed Hedgerow’s facility. However, it was rebuilt and opened in 1990 under artistic director Penelope Reed,

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staging two dozen plays a year and operating a school and mounting children’s theatre productions. HEIDI CHRONICLES, THE. Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Drama Desk Award-winning play opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on 18 November 1988 before transferring to Broadway on 9 March 1989 at the Plymouth Theatre for 622 performances under the direction of Tony nominee Daniel Sullivan. Tony nominee Joan Allen played Heidi Holland, a woman in search of her identity set against the cultural background of the era between the 1960s and the 1980s, depicting the changes in women’s lives and expectations in American life. Heidi is a committed feminist in the 1970s, but her attitudes evolve over the course of the play. Joanne Camp, playing several of Heidi’s friends, was Tony-nominated, and Boyd Gaines won a Tony as Heidi’s gay best friend. A 1995 television film version featured Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Hulce and a 2006 revival was staged at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times of the original production, praised Wasserstein as a “clever writer of comedy,” adding that in this case “she has been exceedingly watchful about not settling for easy laughter, and the result is a more penetrating play.” See also WOMEN/FEMININITY. HEIFNER, JACK (1946– ). Born in Corsicana, Texas, and educated at Southern Methodist University, Heifner started his theatre work as an actor, but moved toward playwriting following the success of his first produced work, Vanities (1976), which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, ran Off-Broadway for over 1,700 performances, and was widely produced in regional, university, and community theatres. Vanities tracked the lives of three women who are first seen as high school cheerleaders on the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and follows them into adulthood. In the aftermath of the success of Vanities, Heifner’s Patio/Porch (1978) was produced unsuccessfully on Broadway and he provided material for the musical Leader of the Pack (1985). Heifner’s other plays, none of which have matched the success of Vanities, include Casserole (1975), Star Treatment (1980), America Was (1982), Running on Empty (1982), Smile (1983), Natural Disasters (1985), American Beauty (1988), Boy’s Play (1989), Home Fires (1990), Jumping for Joy (1994), Dwarf Tossing (1999), Key West (1999), Earth to Bucky (2001), China Dolls (2002), and Seduction (2004). A musical version of Vanities, with music by David Kirshenbaum, was produced in 2009 at New York’s Second Stage. Heifner is playwright-in-residence at Stephen F. Austin State University.

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HEILPERN, JOHN (1942– ). Born in Manchester, England, Heilpern studied law at Oxford University prior to writing for The Observer in London, where his profiles of major figures in the arts led to work as a dramaturg for Peter Hall on a 1976 National Theatre of Great Britain production of Tamburlaine. After 1980, when he moved to New York, Heilpern wrote theatre criticism for the New York Observer and the “Out to Lunch” feature in Vanity Fair, and books on theatre, including Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa (1977), How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway? (1999), and John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man (2006). HEIRESS, THE. Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square to the stage and, under Jed Harris’s direction, it opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre on 29 September 1947 for 410 performances. The stellar cast featured Wendy Hiller, Basil Rathbone, who was nominated for a Tony Award, Peter Cookson, and Patricia Collinge. Costume designer Mary Percy Schenck won a Tony Award for her lavish nineteenth-century costumes. Set in 1850, the play follows the novel’s plot involving a repressed daughter, a domineering father, a meddling aunt, and a gold-digging suitor. Rathbone repeated his performance in a short-lived 1950 revival with Margaret Phillips, John Dall, and Edna Best and a 1976 revival starring Jane Alexander, Richard Kiley, David Selby, and Jan Miner also flopped, but an acclaimed 1985 revival, starring Cherry Jones and Frances Sternhagen, both of whom won Tonys, with Philip Bosco and Jon Tenney, won a Tony and Drama Desk Award as Best Revival. An acclaimed 1949 film version, directed by William Wyler, starred Olivia de Havilland in an Academy Award-winning performance, with Ralph Richardson, Montgomery Clift, and Miriam Hopkins. Julie Harris, Barry Morse, Farley Granger, and Muriel Kirkland appeared in a 1961 television adaptation. A 1997 film version of Washington Square did not make use of the Goetz adaptation. HELBURN, TERESA (1887–1959).† Born in New York, Helburn was educated at Bryn Mawr College, studied with George Pierce Baker* and at the Sorbonne in Paris before briefly pursuing an acting career. She worked briefly as theatre critic for The Nation before serving as literary manager of The Theatre Guild from its founding in 1919. She became casting director and ultimately executive director. Under her leadership, the Guild achieved some financial stability and she developed strong relationships with American (Eugene O’Neill) and European (George Bernard Shaw) dramatists, as well as talented actors, including Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. She left the Guild in 1933 for Hollywood, but returned within a year as administrative director with Lawrence Langner. Among the Guild’s many

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successes under her leadership were the Broadway productions of most of O’Neill’s plays of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Oklahoma! (1943), and the Paul Robeson Othello in 1943. Helburn completed her memoirs of her time with the Guild, A Wayward Quest (1960), shortly before her death. HELLMAN, LILLIAN (1905–1984). Born into a Jewish family in New Orleans, Louisiana, Hellman spent much of her childhood dividing her time between New York City, where she attended public school, and a boarding house in New Orleans run by her aunts, a place populated with family members and boarders who inspired characters in many of her works. Hellman studied at New York University and Columbia University, never completing a degree, before marrying writer Arthur Kober in 1925 (they divorced in 1932). She worked as a press agent and play reader for Broadway producer Herman Shumlin, as well as screenplay reader for MGM. Discouraged about her own writing, she considering quitting until writer Dashiell Hammett encouraged her to continue. The two met in 1931 and began a 30-year off-and-on-again love affair. Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other detective novels, is believed to have modeled The Thin Man’s central female character, Nora Charles, on Hellman. Hellman’s first Broadway play, The Children’s Hour (1934), produced by her old boss Shumlin, generated both controversy and acclaim through its story of a schoolgirl’s defamation of two women teachers. Despite hints of lesbianism, the play had a long Broadway run and most critics heralded Hellman as a major talent and as a standout among a small group of women playwrights. Hellman’s follow-up play, Days to Come (1936), was a disappointment, but her third play, The Little Foxes (1939), was admired by critics for its scalding melodrama* exposing the dark side of capitalism in the Old South and was a resounding commercial hit. With the outbreak of World War II, Hellman wrote two plays in response to the crisis. The first, Watch on the Rhine (1941), is an anti-Nazi drama implying America’s ultimate commitment to defeating fascism, and it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and became a successful film. Hellman’s next play, The Searching Wind (1944), also championed antifascist efforts and offered blunt criticism of American failures to halt the aggressions of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Following the war, Hellman’s Autumn Garden (1951) drew on childhood memories of the New Orleans boarding house run by her aunts. Critics expressed disappointment that the play offered little of the ferocity of her earlier dramas and seemed more inspired by Anton Chekhov than Henrik Ibsen, whose realistic social problem plays seemed a more likely precursor to Hellman’s earlier plays.

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Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1960) also drew on her New Orleans childhood, offering a harrowing depiction of possessive love. It was awarded a New York Critics Circle Award. Her final play, My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963), was a rare departure from realism in its seriocomic depiction of Jewish family life drawn, once again, from her own past. Despite a cast including Ruth Gordon, Lili Darvas, and Walter Matthau, it closed after a mere 17 performances. During her career, Hellman also contributed to the troubled libretto of the 1956 musical version of Voltaire’s Candide, and adapted two plays, Montserrat (1949) and Jean Anouilh’s The Lark (1956). She also occasionally worked on films, including the first screen version of The Children’s Hour, renamed These Three (1936), and the cinematic adaptation of The Little Foxes (1942), as well as The Dark Angel (1935), Dead End (1937), and The North Star (1943). After Toys in the Attic, Hellman devoted her attention to three acclaimed memoirs, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976). Hellman’s plays ensure her place in American theatre history, but her actions during the early 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Communist “witch hunt” era guaranteed a place in American history. Hammett had been a Communist Party member for a time in the 1930s; called by HUAC to testify in 1952, Hellman was pressed to name acquaintances with Communist Party affiliations. Although some historians dispute the claim, Hellman is believed to have responded with a prepared statement in which she refused to do the “inhuman and indecent and dishonorable” act of hurting former friends to “save myself” and insisted that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions” by naming names. Hellman frequently battled publicly and privately with her critics, including Diana Trilling and, most famously, Mary McCarthy, who challenged her veracity. Hellman has been the subject of films (Julia) and plays (Imaginary Friends, Cakewalk) and, despite controversies, is an essential character in American cultural life. See also FEMINIST THEATRE. HEMSLEY, GILBERT (1936–1983). A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Hemsley studied history at Yale University prior to earning an M.F.A. at the Yale School of Drama, after which he worked as assistant to lighting designer Jean Rosenthal. He designed for and managed tours of opera and ballet companies and served as production manager for the inaugurations of President Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Hemsley designed many operas for the New York City Opera Company, for the American Ballet Theatre, the Bolshoi Ballet, and Martha Graham. He also oversaw the premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass at the Kennedy Center and the Philip Glass opera Einstein

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at the Beach (1976) at the Metropolitan Opera. On Broadway, Hemsley was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for his designs of a 1977 revival of Porgy and Bess and The Mighty Gents (1978) and, among his Broadway designs are We, Comrades Three (1966), revivals of The Wild Duck and You Can’t Take It with You in 1967, War and Peace (1967), Cyrano (1973), Jumpers (1974), Your Arms Are Too Short to Box With God (1976), I Love My Wife (1977), and Sugar Babies (1979). Hemsley also taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. HENDERSON, MARK (1950?– ). The British-born lighting designer from Nottinghamshire, England, began at Opera North and has designed over 50 productions in London, winning four Olivier Awards, as well as designs for opera and dance productions. Henderson has also frequently provided designs on Broadway, where he won a Tony Award for The History Boys (2006) and nominations for Indiscretions (1995), a 1999 revival of The Iceman Cometh, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2005), and Faith Healer (2006). Henderson’s other Broadway designs include revivals of The Merchant of Venice in 1989, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990, and Hamlet in 1995, Racing Demon (1995), The Judas Kiss (1998), Amy’s View (1999), Copenhagen (2000), revivals of The Real Thing in 2000 and A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2007, and Deuce (2007). Of his design process, Henderson says, “I normally come in relatively late to a production. I read a script, talk to the director, and I see the designer’s model. Then you start putting the pictures together in your head, from what you’ve talked to the director about and what the script is telling you.” HENLEY, BETH (1952– ). Born Elizabeth Becker Henley in Jackson, Mississippi, she was educated at Southern Methodist University and the University of Illinois before beginning a career as a playwright and actress. Her writing became her dominant pursuit when her 1978 play, Crimes of the Heart, premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville prior to a Broadway production that brought her a Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Tony Award nomination. Henley’s 1986 screenplay for this comedy-drama about three Southern sisters was nominated for an Academy Award. Henley adapted her own The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979) into a film starring Holly Hunter in 1989, and The Wake of Jamey Foster (1981), which starred Hunter on Broadway but only lasted a dozen performances. Henley’s other plays include Am I Blue (1972), The Debutante Ball (1985), The Lucky Spot (1986), Abundance (1990), Control Freaks (1992), Signature (1995), L-Play (1996), Impossible Marriage (1998), Family Week (2000), and Ridiculous Fraud (2006). Family Week was revised for Broadway in

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2010, but met with predominantly negative reviews. Henley has also written screenplays for True Stories (1986) and Nobody’s Fool (1986). HENRY, WILLIAM ALFRED, III (1950–1994). South Orange, New Jersey-born Henry studied at Yale University and for a time acted in stock and at the Yale Repertory Theatre before going into journalism, writing for the Boston Globe and shared a Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 coverage of desegregation in Boston. In the 1980s he became theatre critic for Time Magazine and won an Emmy Award for a documentary on Bob Fosse. Among his books, he wrote a 1992 biography of Jackie Gleason and In Defense of Elitism (1994), which argued for renewed interest in education, multiculturalism, and the arts in the United States. HEPBURN, KATHARINE (1907–2003). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to a doctor father and suffragette mother, Katharine Houghton Hepburn attended Bryn Mawr and debuted in a stock production of The Czarina in 1928 in Baltimore. She spent a few years being hired, fired, and rehired by Broadway producers of Night Hostess (1928), These Days (1928), and Art and Mrs. Bottle (1930), among others, before she scored a Broadway success in as an Amazon princess in The Warrior’s Husband (1932). This performance led to a Hollywood contract and the start of a legendary 62-year screen career that brought her four Best Actress Academy Awards and 12 nominations. Hepburn, who exuded confidence, but played as many vulnerable women as strong ones, was drawn to films with a theatrical source and she returned to the stage with some frequency, including a disastrous performance in The Lake (1934), which inspired Dorothy Parker to write, “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Undaunted, Hepburn appeared with great success in Jane Eyre (1936) and triumphed in The Philadelphia Story (1938), which playwright Philip Barry had written for her (Hepburn had previously appeared in a 1938 film version of Barry’s Holiday*). Hepburn returned to Broadway in Barry’s Without Love (1942) and acclaimed revivals of As You Like It in 1950 and George Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess in 1952. In 1955, she toured Australia with the Old Vic in productions of The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and The Taming of the Shrew, following by two seasons with the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, appearing in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing in 1957 and Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night in 1960. In 1969, she took on the challenge of a Broadway musical, appearing for a year in Coco, playing celebrated French designer Coco Chanel, which brought her a Tony Award nomination. She toured with Coco and in 1976 returned to Broadway in Enid Bagnold’s A

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Matter of Gravity. Her final Broadway appearance, in Ernest Thompson’s The West Side Waltz (1981), brought her a Tony nomination. On screen, Hepburn won Oscars for her performances in Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981), and was Academy Award-nominated for Alice Adams (1935), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), The African Queen (1951), Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). Hepburn’s Emmy Award-nominated television appearances included The Glass Menagerie in 1973 and The Corn Is Green in 1979, as well as Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986), and she appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in Love among the Ruins (1975), winning an Emmy Award. Hepburn had been briefly married to Ludlow Ogden Smith, but in the 1930s had relationships with such notable men as John Ford, Leland Hayward, and Howard Hughes, but after working with Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, they began a close relationship that survived until his death in 1967. Following Hepburn’s death, the town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where she had lived her entire life, constructed the state-of-the-art Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center and Theatre, and it opened in 2009. HER MASTER’S VOICE. Based on her vaudeville* sketch, “The Choir Boy,” this two-act comedy by Clare Kummer* opened in a Max Gordon production on 23 October 1933 at the Plymouth Theatre for 224 performances. Roland Young* starred as feckless Ned Farrar, an aspiring singer, whose wife, Queena, and meddling mother-in-law are frustrated by his inability to hold a job. When Queena’s pretentious aunt (Laura Hope Crews*) arrives, she mistakes Ned for a servant. Ultimately, Ned is a success as a radio singer, and he and Queena are reconciled following a temporary break-up. A 1964 revival Off-Broadway flopped. A 1936 film version featured Edward Everett Horton as Ned, with Crews repeating her stage role. HERBERT, F. HUGH (1897–1958). Vienna, Austria, was the birthplace of this playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who studied at the University of London prior to moving to the United States. He wrote several screenplays for musicals and light comedies in the 1930s and 1940s and directed a few of them. On Broadway, his first play, Quiet, Please! (1940) flopped, but he scored long-running hits with Kiss and Tell (1943) and The Moon Is Blue (1951). Herbert adapted both to the screen, but The Moon Is Blue, for which Herbert received a Writers Guild of America nomination, caused a scandal when the Motion Picture Production Code refused its seal of approval because of the frank sexual themes in the film. The uproar only helped the

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movie’s box office and as such The Moon Is Blue contributed to the weakening of the code. Herbert’s other Broadway plays, For Keeps (1944), Oh, Brother! (1945), For Love or Money (1947), A Girl Can Tell (1953), and The Best House in Naples (1956), had short runs. Herbert won a Writers Guild of America Award for his screenplay for Sitting Pretty (1948) and he wrote episodic television as well. HERLIE, EILEEN (1920–2008). Born in Glasgow, Scotland, this versatile actress of stage and screen equally at home in the classics and musicals began her career with the Scottish National Theatre before moving to London, where she won critical plaudits in Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads (1944) before an eventual move to New York. On Broadway, Herlie made her debut as Irene Molloy in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955) and was nominated for a Tony Award for Take Me Along (1959), the musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! She also appeared in Makropoulos Secret (1957), Epitaph for George Dillon (1958), All American (1962), Photo Finish (1963), as Gertrude in the Richard Burton Hamlet in 1964, Halfway Up the Tree (1967), a 1973 revival of Emperor Henry IV with Rex Harrison, and Crown Matrimonial (1973). In films, Herlie played Gertrude in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and appeared in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), Freud (1962), and others. On television, Herlie appeared in the long-running soap opera All My Children, garnering four Daytime Emmy Award nominations. HERLIHY, JAMES LEO (1927–1993). A native of Detroit, Michigan, Herlihy joined the United States Navy after high school and the G. I. Bill allowed him to study at Black Mountain College where he became interested in the arts. He became a playwright, novelist, and sometime actor until the 1980s, when he increasingly spent his time teaching. His 1958 play, Blue Denim, had a moderately successful run on Broadway under Joshua Logan’s direction. His other plays include Streetlight Sonata (1950), Moon in Capricorn (1953), Crazy October (1959), and Stop, You’re Killing Me: Three Short Plays (1969). Herlihy acted in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story in Boston and Paris in 1963 and appeared in the film Four Friends (1981) and is perhaps best known for his novels, All Fall Down (1960), Midnight Cowboy (1965), and The Season of the Witch (1971), the first two of which were successfully adapted to the screen. HERNE, CHRYSTAL (1882–1950).† Daughter of nineteenth-century playwright/actor James A. Herne,* she was born Katherine Chrystal Herne in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She debuted on Broadway in her father’s

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play, Sag Harbor* (1900), and had a long career ranging from ingénue roles to character parts in such plays as Major Andre (1903), the first American production of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1905 (and several other Shaw plays), The Melting Pot (1909), As a Man Thinks* (1911), and Polygamy (1915). In her later roles, including Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters (1917) and Rachel Crothers’s Expressing Willie* (1924), she moved toward playing haughty society women. She scored a notable success in the title role of George Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Craig’s Wife* (1925). Her later appearances in These Modern Women (1928), Mayfair (1930), Ladies of Creation (1931), and A Room in Red and White (1936) were less successful. HERRMANN, EDWARD (1943– ). Born Edward Kirk Herrmann in Washington, D.C., he attended Bucknell University and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Successful as an actor in theatre, film, and television, Herrmann made his first Off-Broadway appearance in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in 1971 and debuted on Broadway in Moonchildren (1972). He won a Tony Award in a revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1976. Herrmann also appeared on Broadway in a revival of The Philadelphia Story in 1980 and garnered another Tony nomination for Plenty (1983). He also returned to Broadway in a revival of The Deep Blue Sea in 1998. Herrmann received a Drama Desk Award nomination for John Patrick Shanley’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1997), and his other noted Off-Broadway appearances include Tom and Viv (1985) and Life Sentences (1993), and he played opposite Alec Guinness in A Walk in the Woods in London in 1988. He has also appeared in regional theatres, including the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Huntington Theatre. In films, Herrmann has appeared in The Great Gatsby (1974), Reds (1981), Annie (1982), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Born Yesterday (1993), Nixon (1995), The Cat’s Meow (2001), and The Aviator (2004). Herrmann has been nominated for five Emmy Awards, winning one for a guest appearance on The Practice in 1999. Two of his nominations for were Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977), two acclaimed television films in which he played Franklin D. Roosevelt. Herrmann appeared in a recurring role on the television series, The Gilmore Girls beginning in 2007. HEWES, HENRY (1917–2006). The scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, Hewes was born in Boston, and educated at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Columbia University. He served in the United States Army-Air Corps during World War II and later became drama critic, writ-

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ing first for the New York Times before settling in at the Saturday Review in 1954. He edited the annual Best Plays volumes from 1961 to 1964, created the Drama Desk Awards, and was founded of the American Theatre Critics Association in 1974. The American Theatre Wing named its design awards in Hewes’s honor in 1999. HEYWARD, DUBOSE (1885–1940) AND DOROTHY (1890–1961). With his wife, Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, Edwin Dubose Heyward crafted two of his novels into important folk dramas* of African American life in the early twentieth century. A native of South Carolina, Heyward was an insurance man who published short stories and poetry in the early 1920s. With his wife’s collaboration, he crafted his novel Porgy* into a 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama depicting a crippled beggar’s doomed love for a faithless woman. Heyward collaborated when George Gershwin composed a folk opera, Porgy and Bess (1935), from this work. In 1931, Heyward’s drama Brass Ankle, written specifically for the stage and recounting the tale of a woman who plans suicide when she learns she has Negro blood, managed 44 performances, but another Heyward novel, Mamba’s Daughters (1939), a tragic melodrama* of three generations of a black family, was well-received in a production directed by Guthrie McClintic, in part due to the compelling performance of Ethel Waters in the leading role, a first for a black woman in a Broadway drama. The play’s respectful reception and Waters’s breakthrough performance opened the door to greater opportunity for black writers and actors on the New York stage. HICKEY, WILLIAM (1928–1997). Born in Brooklyn, New York, of Irish American descent, Hickey became a successful stage, and later film and television actor, and began teaching at the HB Studio in 1953. He made his Broadway debut in 1951 in a revival of Saint Joan, followed by character roles in a revival of Tovarich in 1952, Miss Lonelyhearts (1957), The Body Beautiful (1958), Make a Million (1958), Moonbirds (1959), Step on a Crack (1962), Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970), a revival of Mourning Becomes Electra in 1972), Thieves (1974), and a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986. He also appeared frequently Off-Broadway, most notably in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings (1972). Hickey received an Academy Award nomination for his performance as a wizened Mafia don in Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and he also appeared memorably as a drunk in The Producers (1968), as well as The Boston Strangler (1968), Little Big Man (1970), Wise Blood (1979), and Da (1988). Among his many television appearances, Hickey was nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in Tales from the Crypt in 1990.

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HIGGINS, JOHN MICHAEL (1963– ). A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Higgins attended Amherst College. Both an actor and director, Higgins acted on Broadway in David Hirson’s La Bête (1991) and won acclaim for his Off-Broadway performance in the title role of Paul Rudnick’s comedy Jeffrey (1994) playing a gay man in the age of AIDS. He also appeared in a 2000 Second Stage revival of Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for A. R. Gurney’s Big Bill (2003), and appeared at the Mark Taper Forum as Donald Rumsfeld in David Hare’s Stuff Happens in 2004. In films, Higgins has appeared in Wag the Dog (1997), Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003), For Your Consideration (2006), Evan Almighty (2007), and numerous television shows. HIGH TOR. Maxwell Anderson’s three-act blank-verse fantasy opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on 9 January 1937 for 171 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for its story of Van Van Dorn, a young man disillusioned with contemporary life, who quarrels with his girlfriend, Judith. He retreats to a piece of property he owns overlooking the Hudson River, where he runs afoul of land speculators wanting his property, thieves, and ghosts of Dutch-era sailors. Ultimately, he sells his land for a profit and reconciles with Judith. Anderson adapted the play as a television musical with music by Arthur Schwartz in 1956. HIKEN, GERALD (1927– ). A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Hiken first appeared Off-Broadway in a 1955 revival of The Cherry Orchard and made his Broadway debut in The Lovers (1956). He was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his performance in Strider (1979) and also appeared on Broadway in The Good Woman of Setzuan (1956), The Cave Dwellers (1957), The Nervous Set (1959), The Fighting Cock (1959), The 49th Cousin (1960), Foxy (1964), a revival of The Three Sisters in 1964, Golda (1977), and Fools (1981). He also took over the title role in Gideon from Douglas Campbell in 1962, but Hiken appeared more frequently Off-Broadway and became best known for his performances in the plays of Anton Chekhov, including revivals of Uncle Vanya and The Seagull in 1956. He also appeared Off-Broadway in the 1957 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and in Tony Kushner’s Slavs! (1994). He was artistic director of the Stanford Repertory from 1966 to 1968. HILFERTY, SUSAN (1953– ). Born in Massachusetts, Hilferty studied at Syracuse University and the Yale School of Drama, as well as St. Martin’s School of Art. Her work as a costume designer has included theatre, opera, and film. On Broadway, she won a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and

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Outer Critics Circle Award for Wicked (2003). She received Tony nominations for a 2002 revival of Into the Woods, Lestat (2006), and Spring Awakening (2006), and her other Broadway designs include A Lesson from Aloes (1980), a 1985 revival of Blood Knot, Coastal Disturbances (1987), revivals of The Comedy of Errors in 1987, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying in 1995, and The Night of the Iguana in 1996, Sex and Longing (1996), Dirty Blonde (2000), revivals of “Master Harold”. . .and the Boys in 2003 and Assassins in 2004, The Good Body (2004), and Radio Golf (2007). Off-Broadway and in regional theatre, Hilferty’s designs have been seen in numerous productions, and she has designed for the ballet troupes of Eliot Feld, Alvin Ailey, and Jennifer Muller. Hilferty won a 2000 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in costume design, and she heads the Graduate Department of Design at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. HILL, ARTHUR (1922–2006). A native of Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada, Arthur Edward Spence Hill studied law at the University of British Columbia and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II before taking up acting. He debuted on Broadway in a 1957 revival of The Matchmaker and won a Tony Award as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Hill also appeared in Look Homeward, Angel (1957), The Gang’s All Here (1959), All the Way Home (1960), Something More! (1964), and More Stately Mansions (1967), but concentrated on a successful film and television career after the early 1960s, including roles on the big screen in Harper (1966), Petulia (1968), The Chairman (1969), The Andromeda Strain (1971), and A Little Romance (1979), and nearly 100 television programs. HINGLE, PAT (1924–2009). Born Martin Patterson Hingle in Miami, Florida, he studied at the University of Texas, but dropped out to enlist in the United States Navy at the start of World War II. Following the war, he completed his degree in broadcasting at the University of Texas before beginning his acting career. He debuted on Broadway in End as a Man (1953) and played a range of roles, including reaping a Tony Award nomination as Rubin Flood in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). His other notable appearances include playing Gooper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), the title character in J.B. (1958), and Victor Franz in The Price (1968), and he also appeared in Festival (1955), Girls of Summer (1956), The Deadly Game (1960), a revival of Strange Interlude* in 1963, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), A Girl Could Get Lucky (1965), a 1965 revival of The Glass Menagerie, Johnny No-Trump (1967), Child’s Play (1970), The Selling of the President (1972), a revival of The Lady from the Sea in 1976, A Life (1980), and he made his last appearance as Benjamin Franklin in a 1997 revival of the

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musical 1776. Hingle also replaced Walter Matthau as Oscar in The Odd Couple in 1966 and Richard A. Dysart as the coach in That Championship Season in 1973. Hingle appeared in many films, including Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Ugly American (1963), All the Way Home (1963), Hang ’Em High (1968), Norma Rae (1979), and Batman (1989), as well as over 100 television appearances. HIRSCH, JUDD (1935– ). Born Judd Seymore Hirsch in the Bronx to a Russian Jewish family, Hirsch studied physics at the City College of New York before beginning an acting career that has encompassed theatre, film, and television. He debuted on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park as the telephone man replacing Herb Edelman in 1966. He won a 1976 Drama Desk Award for his performance in Jules Feiffer’s Knock, Knock and a nomination for Neil Simon’s Chapter Two (1977). He was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award as Jewish immigrant Matt Friedman in Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly (1980). He won Tonys for two Herb Gardner plays, I’m Not Rappaport (1985), appearing in the title role again in the 2002 revival, and Conversations with My Father (1992). He also appeared in a 1996 revival of A Thousand Clowns, stepped into the role of Marc in Art in 1998, and acted in Sixteen Wounded (2004). He also appeared in several Off-Broadway productions, most notably The Hot L Baltimore (1973) and a Circle Repertory Company revival of The Seagull in 1983. On screen, Hirsch was nominated for an Academy Award for Ordinary People (1980), and won two Emmy Awards for leading roles in the television series Taxi (1978–1983) and a Golden Globe Award for another series, Dear John (1988–1992). HIRSCHFELD, AL (1903–2003). Few individuals captured Broadway’s Golden Age by any means more memorably than one man whose career lasted a remarkable 75 years. Born Albert Hirschfeld in St. Louis, Missouri, he studied art in New York and Paris before moving into doing drawings of theatre personages for several New York newspapers, settling at the New York Times in 1925. Until shortly before his death at age 100, Hirschfeld provided the Times with illustrations to accompany theatre and film reviews and articles about the latest plays and stage personalities of the era. Hirschfeld published several collections of his illustrations. He was presented with two special Tony Awards (1975, 1984) and shortly after his death, the Martin Beck Theatre was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. See also CARICATURES; PERIODICALS. HISPANIC THEATRE. See CHICANO THEATRE.

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HOCH, DANNY (1970– ). Brooklyn-born Hoch began as a break dancer, rapper, and writer in his teens, but in the 1990s won acclaim for his solo OffBroadway shows in which he captured a range of characters and dialects drawn from his childhood on the streets of Brooklyn, including Some People (1994), which brought him an Obie Award. Especially adept at recreating a range of accents and attitudes, Hoch’s subsequent works, including Pot Melting (1991), Clinic Con Class (1997), Jails, Hospitals, & Hip Hop (1997), Up Against the Wall (1999), Till the Break of Dawn (2007), and Taking Over (2008), reflected the rapidly changing landscape of city life. HOFFMAN, DUSTIN (1937– ). Born in Los Angeles, California, as Dustin Lee Hoffman, he studied medicine at Santa Monica College, but quit to join the Pasadena Playhouse. After moving to New York with his roommate Gene Hackman, he joined The Actors Studio and began working OffBroadway, debuting in Ronald Ribman’s Harry, Noon, and Night (1965) followed by Ribman’s The Journey of the Fifth Horse (1966). He also had a small role on Broadway in the short-lived A Cook for Mr. General (1961) and was Martin Sheen’s standby for The Subject Was Roses (1964). Hoffman won critical acclaim in Harry Livings’s Eh? (1966), which brought him a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. He was cast the following year as Benjamin Braddock in the film The Graduate (1967), which brought him his first Academy Award nomination and established him as a major movie star. He occasionally returned to the stage, winning a Drama Desk Award for the musical Jimmy Shine (1968), and he appeared in Murray Schisgal’s All Over Town (1974). For a decade, Hoffman devoted himself to films, but he returned to Broadway as Willy Loman in an acclaimed revival of Death of a Salesman in 1984, winning a Drama Desk Award. His only other return brought him Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations as Shylock in a revival of The Merchant of Venice in 1989. On screen, Hoffman has appeared in nearly 50 films and been nominated for the Academy Award seven times, winning twice for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Rain Man (1988), both of which also brought him Golden Globe Awards, as did his performance in Tootsie (1982). He also won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award reprising his stage performance in Death of a Salesman in 1985. HOFFMAN, PHILIP SEYMOUR (1967– ). A native of Rochester, New York, Hoffman trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts prior to beginning an acting career on stage, film, and television. His two Broadway appearances, in revivals of Sam Shepard’s True West in 2000 and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 2003, brought him

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Tony Award nominations and he received a Theatre World Award for the former. Off-Broadway, Hoffman has appeared in Defying Gravity (1997), Shopping and Fucking (1998), The Author’s Voice (1999), and a revival of The Seagull in 2001. Also a director, Hoffman has staged Labyrinth Theatre productions of Our Lady of 121st Street (2003), Jesus Hopped the A-Train (2004), The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2005), and The Little Flower of East Orange (2008), and, for the Manhattan Class Company, he directed The Glory of Living (2001). On screen, Hoffman won an Academy Award for Capote (2005) and has been nominated for Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) and Doubt (2008), and his other films include Nobody’s Fool (1994), Twister (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), The Big Lebowski (1998), Magnolia (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Cold Mountain (2003), and Synecdoche, New York (2008). On television, Hoffman was nominated for an Emmy Award for the mini-series Empire Falls (2005). HOFFMAN, WILLIAM M. (1939– ). New York-born dramatist who began writing for Off-Off-Broadway theatres in the mid-1960s, Hoffman rose to prominence with his AIDS-themed play, As Is (1985), one of the first to respond to the mounting pandemic and its impact on the gay community. The play won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination and was filmed for television the following year. Hoffman’s other plays include Thank You, Miss Victoria (1965), Good Night, I Love You (1966), Saturday Night at the Movies (1966), Incantation (1967), xxx (aka Nativity Play) (1969), Luna (1970), From Fool to Hanged Man (1972), Children’s Crusade (1972), Giles De Rais (1975), and The Cherry Orchard, Part II (1983). Hoffman teaches at the City University of New York, worked as an editor at Hill and Wang, and was Emmy Award-nominated for writing the TV soap opera One Life to Live in the 1990s. HOGAN’S GOAT. William Alfred’s two-act play opened Off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre on 11 November 1965 for 607 performances and won a Drama Desk Award for Alfred and Theatre World Awards for actors Faye Dunaway and Richard Mulligan. Set in the world of New York’s Irish Americans in 1890, the play depicts a mayoral candidate, Matthew Stanton (Ralph Waite), attempting to defeat a corrupt mayor, Ned Quinn (Tom Ahearne), who uncovers Stanton’s secret, that he and his wife, Kathleen (Dunaway), were not married in the Catholic Church and that he was once a kept man (a “goat”) of Agnes Hogan, now Quinn’s mistress. Cliff Gorman and Conrad Bain played supporting roles. Alfred wrote lyrics and cowrote

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the book for a musical version of the play called Cry for Us All (1970), but it flopped on Broadway. A 1971 PBS television version featured Dunaway, Robert Foxworth, George Rose, Philip Bosco, Kevin Conway, and Rue McClanahan. HOLBROOK, HAL (1925– ). Born Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr. in Cleveland, Ohio, he began his acting career in 1942 with a local stock company, where he stayed for four years before touring in classical scenes and developing his solo show Mark Twain Tonight! (1955), which he has played throughout his career, including Off-Broadway in 1959, winning a Drama Desk Award, and on Broadway in 1966, winning a Tony Award. Holbrook’s other Broadway credits include Do You Know the Milky Way? (1961), After the Fall (1964), a revival of Marco Millions* (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), a revival of Tartuffe in 1965, I Never Sang for My Father (1968), Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969), and An American Daughter (1997). He also stepped in to replace leads in a revival of The Glass Menagerie in 1965, The Apple Tree in 1967, and Man of La Mancha in 1968. On screen, Holbrook was nominated for an Academy Award for Into the Wild (2007) and appeared in numerous films, including The Great White Hope (1970), as “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men (1976), Julia (1977), The Firm (1993), Judas Kiss (1998), and The Majestic (2001). On television, he won Emmy Awards for an episode of The Bold Ones in 1970, Pueblo (1973), Lincoln (1974), and Portrait of America (1983). HOLLIDAY, JUDY (1923–1965). The daughter of Russian Jewish parents, she was born Judith Tuvim in New York and worked as a switchboard operator for The Mercury Theatre following school. She partnered with Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, Alvin Hammer, and John Frank to form a nightclub act called “The Revuers” in 1938 and the worked together until 1944. Holliday made her Broadway debut in Kiss Them for Me (1945), winning a Theatre World Award. When screen star Jean Arthur withdrew from the cast of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday (1946), Holliday took over the role of Billie Dawn, a role she repeated on screen in an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning performance. Holliday also appeared in a 1951 revival of Dream Girl and starred in the musical Bells Are Ringing (1956), winning a Tony Award. She made her final Broadway appearance in the shortlived musical Hot Spot (1963). On screen, Holliday appeared in Golden Globe Award-nominated performances in Adam’s Rib (1949), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), and Bells Are Ringing (1960). Her early death from breast cancer robbed theatre and film of one of its most unique performers.

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HOLM, CELESTE (1917– ). Born in New York, this versatile actress studied at the University of Chicago. She appeared with Leslie Howard and in stock productions prior to her earliest Broadway appearance in the late 1930s. Following the flop Gloriana (1938), she played the mysterious Mary L. in William Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life (1939), followed by Another Sun (1940), The Return of the Vagabond (1940), Eight O’Clock Tuesday (1941), My Fair Ladies (1941), Papa Is All (1942), All the Comforts of Home (1942), and The Damask Cheek (1942) before delivering a memorable performance as Ado Annie in her first musical, Oklahoma! (1943). Holm followed Oklahoma! with another musical, this time starring as Evalina in Bloomer Girl (1944), and she pursued a film career beginning in 1946. She returned to Broadway with some frequency, including Affairs of State (1950), she replaced an ailing Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I in 1952, a revival of Anna Christie* in 1952, His and Hers (1954), Interlock (1958), Third Best Sport (1958), Invitation to a March (1960), she was one of a long series of actresses playing the title role in Mame (1966), a revival of Candida in 1970, Habeas Corpus (1975), The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall (1979), and I Hate Hamlet (1991). In the movies, Holm won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) and was nominated for Oscars for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950), and appeared in The Snake Pit (1948), The Tender Trap (1955), High Society (1956), and Tom Sawyer (1973). On television, Holm was nominated for Emmy Awards for an episode of Insight in 1968 and Backstairs at the White House (1979). HOLY GHOSTS. Romulus Linney’s 1971 drama was first staged at Eastern Carolina University prior to two Off-Off Broadway productions and several regional theatre staging before it opened at New York’s Theatre 890 in a San Diego Repertory Theatre production in August 1987. Set in a makeshift church, the play depicts the motley congregation of Rev. Obediah Buckhorn, Sr., and the failed lives to some extent redeemed by their bedrock and occasionally blind faith. The play is frequently produced in regional and university theatres. HOME OF THE BRAVE. Arthur Laurents’s three-act drama opened at the Belasco Theatre in a Lee Sabinson production on 27 December 1945 for 69 performances. An uncommonly realistic examination of anti-Semitism in the United States military and the problem of battle fatigue, the play centered on the loss of speech of a soldier whose trauma is ultimately revealed and leads to his cure. The cast included Eduard Franz and Russell Hardie and

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was directed by Michael Gordon, with scene and lighting design by Ralph Alswang. A 1949 film version dropped the Jewish protagonist in favor of a black hero, played by James Edwards. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. HOMEBODY/KABUL. Tony Kushner’s Obie Award-winning three-act epic drama of a British family’s encounter with Afghanistan under Taliban rule premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop on 19 December 2001 under the direction of Declan Donnellan. Kushner continued to revise the play through a Trinity Repertory Company production in 2002 directed by Oskar Eustis and a 2004 production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music directed by Frank Galati. The play begins with an hour-long monologue by The Homebody, an unhappy middle-class British woman fascinated with Afghanistan who journeys to that country and disappears. The remainder of the play deals with her daughter’s search for her mother and for answers. Unwilling to believe the Taliban’s official account of her mother’s death, the daughter takes to the streets of the mysterious and frightening city of Kabul, seeking answers. Kushner originally wrote The Homebody’s monologue for English actress Kika Markham, who performed it at London’s Chelsea Theatre Centre in 1999. HOMOSEXUALITY. See GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. HOOKS, ROBERT (1937– ). Washington, D.C.-born Robert Dean “Bobby” Hooks is a pioneering African American actor who won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his debut Broadway performance in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Hooks was a founder of two of the most important black companies of the period: New York’s Group Theatre Workshop and Washington’s Black Repertory Company. He also was among the cofounders of the Negro Ensemble Company. He appeared in the original productions of Dutchman (1964) and Where’s Daddy? (1966), which brought him a Theatre World Award. He was nominated for a Tony Award for the musical Hallelujah, Baby! (1967). Hooks also appeared in Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962) and Day of Absence (1966). In films, Hooks appeared in Sweet Love, Bitter (1967) and Hurry Sundown (1967), and in numerous television shows. He was the first black actor to play a lead on a television drama in N.Y.P.D. (1967–1969). HOPKINS, ARTHUR (1878–1950).† Born in Cleveland, Arthur Melancthon Hopkins worked as a newspaper reporter covering President William McKinley’s assassination before becoming a vaudeville* press agent, doing publicity for Vernon and Irene Castle, and beginning his producing work

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as a booking agent. His first Broadway producing effort, Poor Little Rich Girl (1913), was successful and he followed it with On Trial* (1914) and Redemption (1918) starring John Barrymore.* Hopkins produced two notable Shakespearean productions, Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), starring Barrymore. When he directed Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Christie* (1921) and The Hairy Ape* (1922), Hopkins began a decade of producing and/or directing many of the most important plays of the era, including What Price Glory* (1924), Paris Bound* (1927), Burlesque (1927; which he coauthored), Holiday* (1928), Machinal* (1928), and his own play Conquest (1933), a retelling of Hamlet. Hopkins worked closely with designer Robert Edmond Jones for several of these productions, and he is credited with discovering Pauline Lord* and Katharine Hepburn. Hopkins produced and directed with less frequency after 1930, but he was associated with a few more important plays, most notably Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935), which starred Leslie Howard and provided Humphrey Bogart with his first significant role, Sidney Howard’s Paths of Glory (1935), Sophie Treadwell’s* Plumes in the Dust (1936), Philip Barry’s Without Love (1942; Hopkins took over the direction when original director Robert B. Sinclair joined the army), Emmet Lavery’s The Magnificent Yankee (1946), and a hit 1946 revival of Burlesque starring Bert Lahr. Hopkins believed it was the role of the producer to introduce new talent to the theatre. His polished productions did just that, not only introducing new stars and playwrights, but also providing support to those already established. HORNER, HARRY (1910–1994). Born in Holitz, Czechoslovakia, designer, art director, architect, and director Horner worked as an assistant director for Max Reinhardt in Vienna and moved to the United States with Reinhardt in 1936 to work on the Broadway production of The Eternal Road. Horner designed scenery (and sometimes lighting) for such Broadway plays and musicals as Reunion in New York (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), Banjo Eyes (1941), In Time to Come (1941), a revival of A Kiss for Cinderella in 1942, Winged Victory (1943), Christopher Blake (1946), Me and Molly (1948), and Hazel Flagg (1953), among others. Horner’s art director for films brought him Academy Awards for The Heiress (1949) and The Hustler (1961), and an Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). HOROVITZ, ISRAEL (1939– ). A native of Wakefield, Massachusetts, Horovitz attended Harvard University and spent two years (1961–1963) at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He was resident playwright with

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the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the author of more than 70 plays. In the United States, his first successes were in Off-Broadway theatres, including one-act plays examining the increasingly violent and isolating cityscape: It’s Called the Sugar Plum (1968), The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968), which won him an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award, Rats (1968), and Line, which opened in 1974 and was still running in 2010. His North Shore Fish (1987) was Drama Desk-nominated. On Broadway, Horovitz contributed the one-act Morning to a bill called Morning, Noon, and Night (1968), which also included plays by Terrence McNally and Leonard Melfi. His 1991 play, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, directed by Zoe Caldwell, starred Jason Robards and Judith Ivey in a Tony Award-nominated performance. Among his numerous other plays are The Wakefield Plays (1974–1979), The Good Parts (1982), Henry Lumper (1985), The Chopin Playoffs (1986), A Rosen by Any Other Name (1987), Unexpected Tenderness (1994), Lebensraum (1996), My Old Lady (1996), Stations of the Cross (1998), and What Strong Fences Make (2009). Horovitz has also written for films, including The Strawberry Statement (1970), the semi-autobiographical Author! Author! (1982), and Sunshine (1999). HOTEL UNIVERSE. Philip Barry’s one-act drama was produced by The Theatre Guild at the Martin Beck Theatre, where it opened on 14 April 1930 for 81 performances under the direction of Philip Moeller. Katherine Alexander played Ann Field, a wealthy woman who has invited several friends to her estate where her mystical father, Stephen (Morris Carnovsky), causes the guests to reveal the frustrations preventing fulfillment of their hopes and dreams. As the gathering ends, all depart with new hope unaware that Stephen has died. Among the cast for this intermissionless play were Ruth Gordon, Glenn Anders, Franchot Tone, Earl Larimore,* and Phyllis Povah. HOT L BALTIMORE. Lanford Wilson’s three-act comedy-drama opened in an Off-Off Broadway production of the Circle Repertory Company on 27 January 1973, prior to a move to the Circle in the Square where it opened on 22 March 1973 for 1,166 performances, winning an Obie Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Directed by Marshall W. Mason, Wilson’s play depicts the misfit residents of a rundown New York hotel, all of whom imagine better lives but are unable to rise above their circumstances. The original cast featured Judd Hirsch, Conchata Ferrell, Jonathan Hogan, and Trish Hawkins. Ferrell was in the cast of a short-lived 1975 half-hour television series of the same name inspired by the play.

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HOUGHTON, NORRIS (1909–2001). A Broadway producer and designer born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Houghton attended Princeton University as a classmate of Joshua Logan and James Stewart. He took a job in stage management for the University Players on Cape Cod, where he worked with Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. In 1934, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Houghton toured the theatres of the Soviet Union, where he met with and observed the productions of Constantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Houghton wrote Moscow Rehearsals (1936) when he returned to the United States, a book about Russian theatre. He designed and directed Broadway productions, most notably staging a production of Macbeth starring Michael Redgrave in 1948. In partnership with T. Edward Hambleton in 1953, Houghton founded the Phoenix Theatre, one of the first not-for-profit Off-Broadway theatres, keeping production costs and ticket prices low and offering a repertory of important classical and modern plays. HOULD-WARD, ANN (1951– ). Born in Glasgow, Montana, Hould-Ward studied at Mills College, the University of Virginia, and the Art Students League with the aim of becoming a costume designer. She worked as an assistant to Rouben Ter-Arutunian and Patricia Zipprodt, with whom she collaborated on her first Broadway production, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984), which brought them a Tony Award nomination. Hould-Ward also received Tony nominations for a revival of Into the Woods in 1988, and she won a Tony for her design of Beauty and the Beast (1994). Among her other Broadway productions are Falsettos (1992), revivals of Saint Joan, Three Men on a Horse, In the Summer House, and Timon of Athens, all in 1993, The Molière Comedies (1995), On the Waterfront (1995), Dream (1997), More to Love (1998), a revival of Little Me in 1998, Dance of the Vampires (2002), a revival of Company in 2006, A Catered Affair (2008), which brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination, and The Grand Manner (2010). Hould-Ward has designed costumes for numerous regional theatres, including La Jolla Playhouse, the Goodspeed Opera House, and San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, and Off-Broadway, where she designed Lobster Alice (2000) for Playwrights Horizons and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2007) and Road Show (2008) at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre. HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. John Guare’s two-act comedy-drama opened on 10 February 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre under the direction of Mel Shapiro. Harold Gould played Artie Shaughnessy, an aspiring songwriter who works for the zoo. Artie’s disturbed wife, Bananas (Kath-

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erine Helmond), thinks she’s a dog and his hard-boiled mistress, Bunny (Anne Meara), sleeps with him but refuses to do housework until he divorces Bananas and marries her. Artie’s son, Ronnie, shows up with a bomb in an attempt to kill the pope, who is visiting New York, but accidentally kills his girlfriend instead. The play won significantly more attention in a Lincoln Center production, which opened on 29 April 1986 at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre for 398 performances under the direction of Jerry Zaks. House of Blue Leaves was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play and actors John Mahoney and Swoosie Kurtz, along with scene design Tony Walton and Zaks, won Tonys, with Julie Hagerty winning a Theatre World Award. HOUSE OF CONNELLY, THE. Paul Green’s two-act play was produced by The Group Theatre at the Martin Beck Theatre, where it opened on 28 September 1931 for 91 performances under the direction of Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. The large cast, including Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler, Phoebe Brand, Franchot Tone, Clifford Odets, Rose McClendon,* Mary Morris,* Robert Lewis, and Art Smith, appeared in this moody Chekhovian drama set in the American South in 1905 on a plantation where issues of family ties, class distinctions, and race control the lives of Connelly family members. A film version, retitled Carolina (1934), starred Janet Gaynor, Lionel Barrymore,* and Robert Young, but won little attention. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. HOUSEMAN, JOHN (1902–1988). Born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest, Hungary, Houseman studied at Clifton College in England and worked in the grain business there prior to emigrating to the United States in 1925. He produced many Broadway plays and also directed Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), a revival of The Lady from the Sea in 1934, Valley Forge (1934), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1939), Lute Song (1946), a 1950 revival of King Lear, Pantagleize (1967), revivals of The Country Girl in 1972 and Don Juan in Hell in 1973, and others. Houseman rose to prominence and faced controversy working with the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), first overseeing the FTP’s Negro unit and working in partnership with Orson Welles staging an acclaimed all-black production of Macbeth in 1936 that became known as the “Voodoo Macbeth.” Controversy came to Houseman and Welles with their production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937), a satirical musical about unions set in a fictional Steeltown. Government officials padlocked the theatre where the production was being prepared and Houseman and Welles responded by inviting the audience to join them at the Venice Theatre, which they had hastily rented, where the show was performed without scenery and costumes.

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With the end of the FTP in 1939 and the start of World War II, Houseman worked for the Voice of America, produced films, and acted with increasing frequency, winning an Academy Award for his performance in The Paper Chase (1973), and he also received two Golden Globe Award nominations for a TV series based on the film. Houseman taught at the Juilliard School, where he established a touring repertory group ultimately known as The Acting Company. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE; CENSORSHIP. HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE. Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama opened on 16 March 1997 at New York’s Vineyard Theatre for 400 performances, also winning an Obie Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Directed by Mark Brokaw, the play examines the relationship of adolescent Li’l Bit, played by Mary-Louise Parker, and her aunt’s husband, Peck (David Morse), who begins molesting her at age 11 while ostensibly teaching her to drive. The play tracks their interaction until Li’l Bit leaves for college and reflects on what has transpired, leading to her complete rejection of Peck, who has waited for her 18th birthday so they might marry. Controversy was aroused by the fact that Peck is a sympathetic pedophile and the inherent issues of incest and misogyny troubled some critics who, nonetheless, admired the play’s artistry. How I Learned to Drive was produced by many regional and university theatres, and firmly established Vogel as a major American dramatist. See also SEXUALITY. HOWARD, KEN (1944– ). Born Kenneth Joseph Howard, Jr. in El Centro, California, he studied at Amherst College and the Yale School of Drama, after which he proved himself a versatile actor, winning a Tony Award for the drama Child’s Play (1970), but also starring in musicals, including 1776 (1969), which brought him a Theatre World Award, Seesaw (1973), and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976). On Broadway, Howard also appeared in Promises, Promises (1968), Little Black Sheep (1975), The Norman Conquests (1975), and Rumors (1988). Howard also appeared in the national tour of Equus in 1976, and Off-Broadway in Camping with Harry and Tom (1995), In the Moonlight Eddie (1996), and According to Tip (2007). Howard has also appeared in films, including Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Such Good Friends (1971), 1776 (1972), Mastergate (1992), In Her Shoes (2005), Michael Clayton (2007), and Rambo (2008). On television, he received an Emmy Award nomination for Grey Gardens (2009), he won a Daytime Emmy for The Body Human: Facts for Boys (1980), and he starred in television series, including Adam’s Rib (1973) with Blythe Danner and The White Shadow (1978–1981).

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HOWARD, LESLIE (1893–1943).† British-born Leslie Stainer, who changed his name to Howard, made his first appearance in the United States in Just Suppose (1920) and although he appeared on stage and in films in England, by the mid-1920s he was performing more frequently in America. He acted notably in Outward Bound* (1924), The Green Hat (1925), Her Cardboard Lover* (1927), and Berkeley Square (1929), but his greatest stage successes came in three important post-1930 productions, Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom (1932), Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935), and his last appearance in his own staging of Hamlet in 1936. That same year, his own play, Elizabeth Sleeps Out, had a short run at the Comedy Theatre. On screen, Howard notably repeated his role as the disillusioned poet in The Petrified Forest (1936) and he directed and starred in the film Intermezzo (1939), which introduced Ingrid Bergman to American audiences. He also had cinematic successes in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Pygmalion (1938), and Gone with the Wind (1939). Howard, who was admired for his sensitive, intellectual acting, died in a plane crash while serving in the British military during World War II. HOWARD, SIDNEY (1891–1939).† Born Sidney Coe Howard in Oakland, California, the eminent playwright studied under George Pierce Baker* in 1915–1916. He served in Europe during World War I, before writing for Life magazine (1919–1922). He was married to actress Clare Eames from 1922 to 1930. In 1938, he was a founding member of the Playwrights’ Company. His 25 or so plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew What They Wanted* (1924) as well as Lucky Sam McCarver* (1925), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), The Silver Cord* (1926), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), and Alien Corn (1933), which starred Katharine Cornell. Despite occasional turgid sequences, his plays hold up well as realistic treatments of ordinary people in emotionally fraught situations. Howard, who also wrote for motion pictures (most notably, Gone With the Wind [1939]), died as a result of a tractor accident on his farm. HOWE, TINA (1937– ). New York-born Howe was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and received a Tony Award nomination for her play Coastal Disturbances (1986). Howe’s other plays, The Art of Dining (1979), Painting Churches (1983), which won an Outer Critics Circle Award, and Pride’s Crossing (1997), won critical plaudits. Howe was awarded a 1983 Obie Award for her body of work, which also includes The Nest (1969), Museum (1976), Approaching Zanzibar (1989), One Shoe Off (1993), her translation of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano in 1994, Birth and After Birth (1995), Rembrandt’s Gift (2002), Skin Deep (2007), and Chasing Manet (2008).

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Howe, who claims the Marx Brothers* as an influence on her early plays, blends a comic touch with darker issues that explore the discordance between public expectations and private pain. HOYLE, GEOFF (1945– ). English-born performer known as a “new vaudevillian,”* who appeared with Bill Irwin in the Pickle Family Circus in the late 1970s, working ultimately as a solo artist in performances he has created, including Boomer (1986), Feast of Fools (1988), Don Quixote de La Jolla (1990), The Convict’s Return (1991), Geni(us) (1995), and The First 100 Years (1999), among others. He has also appeared with Cirque du Soleil and originated the role of Zazu in The Lion King (1997), receiving a Drama Desk Award nomination. HSIEH, TEHCHING (1950– ). A native of Nanjhou, Taiwan, he joined the Merchant Seamen for the Republic of China, but jumped ship and arrived in the United States in 1974, emerging as a performance artist known as Sam Hsieh. A painter and performer influenced by a range of inspirations from Asian martial arts to Nietzsche and Kafka, he staged a series of bodyart works in New York in 1976–1977 and a series of ordeal performances between 1978 and 1986. In 1986, he began his “Thirteen-Year Plan,” which ran until 2000 during which time he made art but did not show it until after 2000. He has since retired from performance art work. See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. HUDSON GUILD THEATRE. Established in 1896 during the settlement house movement, the aim of this theatre was to involve the poor children of the Chelsea neighborhood in New York in theatrical endeavors. It continued until World War II, when it sank into a dormant period before being revived by David Kerry Heefner in 1975, who moved the operation to the Neighborhood House on West 26th Street, in the midst of a housing project populated with poor, multiracial families, but with a professional agenda. In 1990, the Hudson Guild withdrew support and the theatre closed. See also COMMUNITY THEATRE. HUGHES, BARNARD (1915–2006). Born Bernard Aloysius Kiernan Hughes in Bedford Hills, New York, Hughes was the son of Irish immigrants. He studied at the LaSalle Academy and Manhattan College. Hughes began his career with the Shakespeare Fellowship Repertory Company and is believed to have played over 400 roles in theatre during his long life, including his Tony Award and Drama Desk Award-winning performance in the title role of Hugh Leonard’s Da (1978), a part he played again in the 1988 film

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version. He had previously been Tony-nominated for a 1973 revival of Much Ado about Nothing, and in 2000 he was presented with a lifetime achievement Drama Desk Award. Among his many Broadway credits are such plays as A Majority of One (1959), Advise & Consent (1960), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), the Richard Burton Hamlet in 1964, How Now, Dow Jones (1967), Sheep on the Runway (1970), the Circle in the Square revival of Uncle Vanya in 1973, The Good Doctor (1973), All Over Town (1974), Angels Fall (1983), a revival of The Iceman Cometh in 1984, Prelude to a Kiss (1990), and Waiting in the Wings (1999). Hughes’s many film appearances include Midnight Cowboy (1969), Oh, God! (1977), Doc Hollywood (1991), The Fantasticks (1995), and Cradle Will Rock (1999). Hughes appeared in over 100 television programs and won an Emmy Award for a guest performance on Lou Grant in 1978. He was married to actress Helen Stenborg and had two children, including director Doug Hughes. HUGHES, DOUG (1950?– ). Son of actors Bernard Hughes and Helen Stenborg, Hughes has discussed his desire to avoid acting as a career, but did not stray far from his roots when he turned to directing. He won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his direction of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2005) and was nominated for a Tony for Frozen (2004) and reaped Drama Desk Award nominations for The Grey Zone (1996) OffBroadway and the 2007 Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind. He has also directed A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005), a revival of A Touch of the Poet in 2005, Mauritius (2007), and revivals of A Man for All Seasons in 2008, The Royal Family* in 2009, Oleanna in 2009, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 2010. Hughes has also directed for many regional theatres. HUGHES, HOLLY (1955– ). Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Hughes studied painting at Kalamazoo College and moved to New York in 1979. She managed the WOW Café in the East Village until 1983, where she encouraged performances in which artists were able to show and discuss their work. As a self-avowed lesbian performance artist, she first gained critical attention with The Well of Horniness (1983), among others, and worked closely with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver on Dress Suits to Hire (1987). Her other solo performances have included The Lady Dick (1984), World Without End (1988), Dead Meat (1990), Clit Notes (1993), and Preaching to the Perverted (2000), the last a response to Hughes’s experiences as part of the NEA Four (also including Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Tim Miller), a 1990 controversy in which their grants were revoked by the National Endowment for the Arts on obscenity grounds at the height of the “Culture Wars.” As the winner of two Obie Awards, Hughes intends her work, which is often satiric,

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to create controversy, exploring issues of feminism, sexuality, and she has explored the boundaries between eroticism and pornography, which has generated critical controversy. Hughes teaches at the Michigan School of Arts and Design. See also CENSORSHIP; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE; WOMEN/FEMININITY. HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967).† James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the most celebrated African American poets of the first half of the twentieth century, was among the few black writers to present serious dramas on Broadway prior to the 1960s. Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by his grandmother, who had lost her first husband in John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, Hughes grew to love literature through her encouragement. His first published play, The Gold Piece, appeared in 1921, but his first Broadway success was Mulatto (1935), a melodramatic* work focusing on racial strife in the South. His previously unproduced 1930 play, Mule Bone, coauthored with Zora Neale Hurston, was produced at Lincoln Center in 1991. Many of his pre-World War II dramatic works, including Little Ham (1936), Troubled Island (1936), Joy to My Soul (1937), and Front Porch (1938) premiered at the Karamu Theatre in Cleveland, but by the late 1940s his contributions, including the book and lyrics for Kurt Weill’s musical drama Street Scene* (1947), were seen more frequently on New York stage. Street Scene was a critical and commercial success, but another musical, The Barrier (1950), failed. He established three theatre companies, the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, where his Don’t You Want to Be Free? (1938) played for a substantial run, Los Angeles’s New Negro Theatre in 1939, and Chicago’s Skyloft Players in 1949, although none lasted for long. Hughes’s folk musical Simply Heavenly (1957; music by David Martin) and Tambourines to Glory (1963; music by Jobe Huntley) had short New York runs and a Hughes poem inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun. HUGHIE. Eugene O’Neill completed this 1942 one-act character study of a down-on-his-luck Broadway gambler as part of an intended eight-play cycle of one-acts with the all-encompassing title of By Way of Obit. Hughie was the only play for the cycle that O’Neill completed. It was not published until after his death in 1959. Its first Broadway production, directed by José Quintero, opened at the Royale Theatre on 22 December 1964 for 51 performances and starred Jason Robards in a Tony Award-nominated performance as Erie Smith, returning to his rundown hotel room following a bender in the aftermath of the death of the night clerk, Hughie, his only friend whose romanticizing of Erie’s exploits gave the small-time gambler the confidence he needed. Erie discovers a new night clerk on the job whose name, Hughes

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(Jack Dodson), intrigues Erie and a new friendship is born. Robards and Dodson repeated their performances for a 1984 Showtime-TV production. Ben Gazzara played Erie in a 1975 Broadway revival, and Al Pacino starred in and directed a 1996 revival. In 2010, Brian Dennehy played the role on a double-bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. HULL, HENRY (1890–1977).† Brother of actor Shelley Hull,* this durable stage and screen actor was born in Louisville, Kentucky. During the first decade of his career, Hull played leading roles in The Man Who Came Back* (1916), The Cat and the Canary* (1922), The Youngest (1924), Lulu Belle* (1926), and Grand Hotel (1930), among others. He occasionally appeared on stage after 1930, including roles in John Galsworthy’s The Roof (1931), Will Cotton’s The Bride the Sun Shines On (1931), Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River (1932), Paul Hervey Fox and George Tilton’s Foreign Affairs (1932), Benn W. Levy’s Springtime for Henry (1933), Maxwell Anderson’s The Masque of Kings (1936), and Philip Barry’s Foolish Notion (1945), but his major triumph was as sharecropper Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1933), after which he spent much of his career as a respected character actor in Hollywood films. HULL, JOSEPHINE (1886–1957).† Josephine Sherwood, a native of Newtonville, Massachusetts, was educated at Radcliffe and studied with nineteenth-century actress Kate Reingolds* before gaining practical experience in several stock companies and in a few minor Broadway offerings. She retired from acting in 1910 when she married actor Shelley Hull,* but when he died in 1919, his wife, now billed as Josephine Hull, returned to the theatre and achieved success as a character actress on both stage and screen. In the 1920s, she won strong reviews in Neighbors (1923), Fata Morgana (1924), Craig’s Wife* (1925), and Daisy Mayme* (1926), but her greatest successes came after 1930, first in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1936) in which she played the mother-playwright Penny Sycamore. This role typecast the small, rotund actress as flighty, lovable little old ladies, but she was fortunate in playing the type in significant plays. In 1941, Hull played Abby Brewster, one of two elderly New England spinsters who sweetly murder lonely old men, in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), repeating her performance in Frank Capra’s 1944 film version. That year, Hull also scored another success as the confused social climber Veta Louise Simmons in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, Harvey, also repeating this role (and winning an Academy Award) in the 1950 film starring James Stewart, who had succeeded comedian Frank Fay as Elwood P. Dowd in the

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stage production. Following Harvey, she appeared in three failures, Minnie and Mr. Williams (1948), The Golden State (1950), and Whistler’s Grandmother (1952). Hull’s last stage role as Lucy Patridge, a minor stockholder who takes on a corporation in Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac (1953), won her plaudits and a long run. HULL-HOUSE THEATRE.† From the beginning, Jane Addams made the arts integral to her social work at Chicago’s Hull-House, which she founded with Ellen Gates in 1889. There were play readings, concerts, and art exhibits offered with the aim of inculcating good values among the laboring poor through “recreation and education.” Addams shunned the cheap appeals of the popular melodrama* of the day and instead fostered theatre through a Shakespeare Club. The first fully staged production at Hull-House—indeed, the first settlement house theatrical performance in the United States—was The Sleeping Car by William Dean Howells,* presented in 1896 on a platform in the gymnasium. Others followed, and the success of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in 1897 resulted in the hiring of Walter Pietsch as director of drama for Hull-House. A new theatre was completed in 1899. After a group of Greek immigrants performed a dramatization of The Odyssey in Greek, other ethnic groups mounted plays in their own languages. In 1900, retired actress Laura Dainty Pelham became director and brought the theatre to a new level of professionalism, eventually changing the name from Hull-House Dramatic Association to Hull-House Players. Because of Addams’s insistence on producing plays of literary merit, Hull-House was recognized as a leading proponent of the art theatre movement. Maurice Browne* credited the Hull-House Players as the true origin of the Little Theatre* movement in America. See also COMMUNITY THEATRE; ETHNIC THEATRE. HUNT, HELEN (1963– ). This Academy Award-winning film actress born in Culver City, California, to a film director and a photographer, has occasionally appeared in theatre, beginning her Broadway career replacing Penelope Ann Miller as Emily in a 1988 revival of Our Town. Hunt also appeared as Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with Paul Rudd, Philip Bosco, and Kyra Sedgwick in a 1998 Lincoln Center revival directed by Nicholas Hytner (Hunt also appeared in a television version of this production). In 2003, Hunt appeared in Yasmina Reza’s Life (x) 3 in a Circle in the Square production directed by Matthew Warchus, costarring with Linda Emond, Brent Spiner, and John Turturro. In 2010, Hunt stepped into the role of the Stage Manager, usually played by a male actor, in the Off-Broadway revival of Our Town directed by David Cromer. Hunt won her Oscar (as well as a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award) for As Good as

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It Gets (1997) and has appeared in numerous films and in the long-running television situation comedy, Mad About You (1992–1999), for which she won an Emmy Award. HUNT, LINDA (1945– ). Born in Morristown, New Jersey, to a prosperous family, Hunt attended the Interlochen Arts Academy. As an actress, she debuted on Broadway in 1975, playing the Irish maid in a revival of Ah, Wilderness! and on film in 1980 in Robert Altman’s Popeye, but rose to prominence with her performance as a male Indonesian dwarf (Hunt is 4’9” tall) in The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), which brought her an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress and a New York Film Critics Circle Award. Her theatre work includes the Off-Broadway productions of the Obie Award-winning Metamorphosis in Miniature (1982), and she was part of the Obie-winning ensemble of Top Girls (1983). Continuing to act in films, Hunt also pursued a series of challenging stage roles, including her Tony Award-nominated performance in Arthur Kopit’s End of the World (1984). Off-Broadway, Hunt won critical plaudits for Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon (1984), Emily Mann’s Annulla (1988), a 1988 revival of The Cherry Orchard, and others. In regional theatres, she has played the title role in Mother Courage and Her Children, Olga in The Three Sisters, Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, and Sister Aloysius in Doubt, among others. Hunt also directs and in the movies has appeared in Dune (1984), She-Devil (1989), Prêt-à-Porter (1994), and Stranger than Fiction (2006), and was a regular on the television series The Practice (1997–2002), Carnivàle (2003–2005), and NCIS: Los Angeles beginning in 2009. HUNTER, KIM (1922–2002). As Janet Cole, Hunter was born in Detroit, Michigan, and, after completing high school, began acting in 1939. Her Broadway debut was an auspicious one, as Stella Kowalski, the tragic Blanche DuBois’s sister, in the original production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Hunter reprised her performance in the 1951 film version, winning an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Hunter only sporadically appeared in movies, but she acted more consistently on television from the late 1940s and she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for the soap opera The Edge of Night in 1980. By the 1960s, she appeared occasionally in films again, including Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequels. Hunter’s other Broadway appearances include Darkness at Noon (1951), The Chase (1952), a 1952 revival of The Children’s Hour, The Tender Trap (1954), Write Me a Murder (1961), Weekend (1968), The Penny Wars (1969), an all-star revival of The Women in 1973, To Grandmother’s House We Go (1981), and she stepped

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into the role of Lady Markby during the run of a revival of An Ideal Husband in 1996. She also toured with Julie Harris in the national company of And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little and acted with the Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Off-Broadway, appearing in The Eye of the Beholder (1993). HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY, THE. Boston University founded this theatre in 1982 and established it as a not-for-profit company in 1986. Its productions have ranged from American and European classics to world premieres, including 2009 productions of Richard N. Goodwin’s Two Men of Florence and David Grimm’s The Miracle at Naples. The company’s first artistic director was Peter Altman, followed in 2000 by Nicholas Martin who, in turn, was replaced by Peter DuBois in 2008. The company has three performances spaces, two of which are located at the Boston Center for the Arts. HURLYBURLY. David Rabe’s drama about the drug-riddled Hollywood scene of the 1980s had its first performances at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in April 1984 before opening Off-Broadway in June 1984, after which it transferred to Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 7 August 1984, where it ran for 343 performances and received a Tony Award nomination as Best Play. Directed by Mike Nichols on Broadway, the stellar cast included William Hurt, Ron Silver (replaced by Christopher Walken who had played the role earlier), Sigourney Weaver, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Jerry Stiller, and Judith Ivey, who won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her performance. The play emphasized male relationships in the cutthroat environment of contemporary Hollywood, emphasizing the characters’ selfdestructiveness. Rabe had been dissatisfied with the Broadway production and changes made to the play, so it was performed in 1986 at the Trinity Repertory Theatre and under David Wheeler’s direction the cuts were restored. Rabe himself directed a later production in Los Angeles at the Westwood Playhouse, and in 1998 a film version was released with a cast including Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright Penn, Chazz Palminteri, Garry Shandling, Anna Paquin, and Meg Ryan. The play was revived Off-Broadway by the New Group Theatre in 2005 to considerable critical acclaim under the direction of Scott Elliott with a cast including Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Parker Posey, and Wallace Shawn. New York Magazine critic John Simon wrote that this revival of Hurlyburly “confirms it as a major play.” HURT, MARY BETH (1948– ). Born Mary Beth Supinger in Marshalltown, Iowa, after studying at the University of Iowa and New York Univer-

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sity’s Tisch School of the Arts, Hurt began her stage career in 1974. She was nominated for Tony Awards in a 1976 revival of Trelawny of the “Wells”, as Meg in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (1981), and in Michael Frayn’s Benefactors (1986). On Broadway, her credits include revivals of Love for Love and The Rules of the Game in 1974, The Member of the Wedding in 1975, Secret Service* and Boy Meets Girl in 1976, The Cherry Orchard in 1977 and The Misanthrope in 1983, The Secret Rapture (1989), a revival of A Delicate Balance in 1996, and Top Girls (2008). Hurt won an Obie Award for the Off-Broadway production of Crimes of the Heart prior to its Broadway run and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her OffBroadway performance in Don DeLillo’s The Day Room (1988). Hurt’s film roles include Interiors (1978), The World According to Garp (1982), The Age of Innocence (1993), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and Lady in the Water (2006), and she has appeared in television films and series. Hurt was married to actor William Hurt for a decade; following their divorce, she married writer/director Paul Schrader. HURT, WILLIAM (1950– ). A native of Washington, D.C., he attended Tufts University to study theology, but chose to pursue acting and attended the Juilliard Drama School. Hurt debuted Off-Broadway in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Henry V in 1977. He won a 1978 Theatre World Award for his performances with the Circle Repertory Theatre, an Obie Award for Corinne Jacker’s My Life (1977), and a Tony Award nomination for Hurlyburly (1984), his only Broadway appearance to date. In film, Hurt emerged as a major leading man, won an Academy Award for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and was nominated for Oscars for Children of a Lesser God (1986), Broadcast News (1987), and A History of Violence (2005), for which he also won a New York Film Critics Award. He also appeared in the films Altered States (1980), Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), Alice (1990), Michael (1996), Sunshine (1999), A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Syriana (2005), and Into the Wild (2007). HUSTON, WALTER (1884–1950).† Canadian-born Walter Huston spent most of his career on U.S. stages and in films following his 1902 stage debut in Toronto. Huston’s first Broadway appearance in the melodrama* In Convict Stripes (1905) led to a long and varied career on vaudeville* stages between 1909 and 1924 before he scored major successes in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms* (1924) and The Fountain (1925). With the advent of sound films, Huston shifted his attention to screen work with D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930), but he made periodic returns to the

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stage, most notably in the title role of Sidney Howard’s Dodsworth (1934), repeating his performance in a lavish 1936 screen adaptation. Huston’s 1937 performance as Othello was respectfully received, but he scored a personal triumph as Peter Stuyvesant in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s musical, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), in which he introduced “The September Song.” During the 1940s, Huston became one of the screen’s most versatile character actors, appearing as George M. Cohan’s vaudevillian* father in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Howard, the grizzled prospector, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), written and directed by his son John. Huston made his final Broadway appearance in the unsuccessful Apple of His Eye (1946). HWANG, DAVID HENRY (1957– ). Born in Los Angeles, California, to Chinese parents, Hwang studied at Stanford University and the Yale School of Drama prior to studying playwriting with Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés. He has written for stage (including musicals, for which he writes music and lyrics) and screen. Hwang’s early plays include FOB (1980), Dance and the Railroad (1981), Family Devotions (1981), which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, and Rich Relationship (1986), which deal with the Asian American experience, but he rose to prominence, the first Asian American playwright to do so, with M. Butterfly (1988), which won a Tony Award as Best Play and which he later adapted to the movies (1993). Hwang subsequently received Tony nominations for Golden Child (1998), the revised book he wrote for the 2003 revival of Flower Drum Song. His own musical, Face Values (1993), failed to open on Broadway, but he provided the librettos for Aida (2002) and Tarzan (2008). His other full-length plays include Tibet Through the Red Box (2004) and Yellow Face (2007), and he has written several short plays, including The Dance and the Railroad (1981), The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983), The Sound of a Voice (1983), As the Crow Flies (1986), Bondage (1992), Trying to Find Chinatown (1996), Bang Kok (1996), Merchandising (1999), and Jade Flowerpots and Bound Feet (2001). While artist-in-residence at the Trinity Repertory Theatre, Hwang completed a 1998 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in collaboration with Stephan Muller. HYDRIOTAPHIA, OR THE DEATH OF DR. BROWNE. An early play by Tony Kushner, this “epic farce about death and primitive capital accumulation” was first performed in June 1987 at HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art in New York with Stephen Spinella in the cast prior to revisions by Kushner and an April 1997 production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, after which the play was staged in a joint production by

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Houston’s Alley Theatre and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1998. The cast, led by Jonathan Hadary as seventeenth-century scientist and writer Sir Thomas Browne, presents a behind-the-scenes scramble of family and sycophants vying for Browne’s wealth as he lay on his sickbed. Kushner views Browne as a seminal capitalist, interested only in accumulating a bigger fortune despite the ramifications on family and community. HYMAN, EARLE (1926– ). Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York and when he attended a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts starring Alla Nazimova at age 13, he decided to pursue acting. On Broadway, he debuted in Run, Little Chillun (1943) and became a member of the American Negro Theatre. He appeared for two years as Rudolf in Anna Lucasta (1944). Hyman won a Theatre World Award in 1956 and appeared on Broadway in The Climate of Eden (1952), a revival of The Merchant of Venice in 1943, No Time for Sergeants (1955), Mister Johnson (1956), revivals of Saint Joan in 1956, Waiting for Godot (an all-black cast) in 1957, The Duchess of Malfi in 1957, The Infernal Machine (1958), Les Blancs (1970), and he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in The Lady from Dubuque (1980). Hyman’s later Broadway appearances include Execution of Justice (1986), Death and the King’s Horseman (1987), and a revival of The Master Builder in 1992. On tours, in England, and on university campuses, he has frequently acted in Shakespeare’s plays, including multiple appearances in Othello and in several other roles with the American Shakespeare Theatre in the late 1950s. He won the State Award in Oslo, Norway, for the title role of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* in 1965. Off-Broadway, he replaced Morgan Freeman as Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy in 1988 and appeared in a New York Shakespeare Festival/ Public Theatre production of East Texas Hot Links in 1994, among other roles. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. HYTNER, NICHOLAS (1956– ). An English-born director and producer, he was born in Manchester and attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge University before working as associate director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre prior to become artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain in 2003. On Broadway, Hytner was nominated for Tony Awards for his direction of Miss Saigon (1991) and Jumpers (2004), and he won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his acclaimed revival of Carousel in 1994 and for The History Boys (2006). Hytner was also Drama Desk-nominated for The Sweet Smell of Success (2002), and he also staged a Broadway revival of Twelfth Night in 1998 starring Helen Hunt.

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I I AM A CAMERA. John Van Druten’s three-act drama based on Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories opened on 28 November 1951 for 214 performances at the Empire Theatre. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and plaudits for leading lady Julie Harris as Sally Bowles, an eccentric young singer in a Berlin café. A young writer, Christopher Isherwood, resides in a Berlin rooming house run by Fräulein Schneider in the early 1930s as the Nazis rise to power, terrorizing the city. Christopher and the amoral Sally become seriously involved with each other, but Christopher realizes he cannot close his eyes to what is going on about him and leaves Berlin, while the apolitical Sally remains in Berlin ignoring the mounting terror. Harris and supporting actress Marian Winters won Tony Awards for their performances. In 1966, John Kander and Fred Ebb adapted Isherwood’s stories and Van Druten’s play into the groundbreaking musical Cabaret. I AM MY OWN WIFE. This unique solo show by Doug Wright opened on 3 December 2003 at the Lyceum Theatre for 360 performances, winning a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Drama Desk Award. Directed by Moisés Kaufman with Tony-winning actor Jefferson Mays, the play focuses on the real-life character Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite. Mays played Charlotte, but also 40 other characters needed to recount an extraordinary life that involved surviving the Nazi and Communist eras. Mays took the play to London, but it met with a disappointing reception there. I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER. Robert Anderson’s drama of a middle-aged man facing the mortality of his aging parents opened on 25 January 1968 for 124 performances at the Longacre Theatre in a Shubert production. Directed by Alan Schneider, with scene design by Jo Mielziner, the cast included Hal Holbrook as Gene Garrison, a college professor who has been unable to connect with his remote and domineering father Tom, played by Alan Webb, although he has a more sympathetic relationship with his mother (Lillian Gish). Gene feels guilt about his desire to move on with his life despite the demands and needs of his parents. In 1970, a film version featured Gene Hackman, Melvyn Douglas, and Estelle Parsons. 382

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I REMEMBER MAMA. Facile Broadway dramatist and adaptor John Van Druten adapted Kathryn Forbes’s stories, Mama’s Bank Account, into this two-act drama produced by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It opened on 19 October 1944 at the Music Box Theatre for an impressive 713 performances. Mady Christians played Mama with a young Marlon Brando in his Broadway debut as the family’s son, Nels. The play depicts the lives of a large immigrant family in 1910 San Francisco remembered by the family’s eldest daughter Katrin, played by Joan Tetzel, a budding writer. A warmly sentimental glimpse of a close-knit Norwegian clan, Van Druten leavened I Remember Mama’s sentimentality by setting its inherent optimism against an undercurrent of family strife, illness, and death as Mama, the play’s title character, emerges as an iconic representation of familial love, compassionate tolerance, and self-sacrifice. The long run of I Remember Mama is explained, in part, by its timing. As World War II drew to a close, audiences sought escape into a rose-colored vision of the past. I Remember Mama proved remarkably durable, spawning a 1948 film starring Irene Dunne as Mama, a long-running 1950s television series featuring Peggy Wood as Mama, and a failed 1979 musical with a score by Richard Rodgers starring Liv Ullmann as Mama. A staple of stock and community theatres, I Remember Mama was frequently performed in the decades following its premiere. IBSEN ON THE U.S. STAGE.† The social problem plays of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) inspired American writers and actors in the first three decades of the 20th century, but between 1882 and 1930 only a small group of actors and companies produced Ibsen’s plays in the United States. Audiences and some critics were hostile to Ibsen’s plays for their unprecedented frankness and for what was perceived as the author’s promotion of women’s rights. From Helena Modjeska’s 1882 production of A Doll’s House, retitled Thora, to Blanche Yurka’s production of The Vikings, which she both directed and starred in, the most important Ibsen productions appeared through the willingness of particular actresses to risk critical scorn. These included Minnie Maddern Fiske, Ethel Barrymore, Nance O’Neil, Mary Shaw, and Alla Nazimova, some of whom continued to appear in Ibsen’s plays throughout their careers. Perhaps the most significant effort came from Eva Le Gallienne, who made Ibsen’s plays, along with other modernist classics, central to her Civic Repertory Theatre, which opened its first season in 1925 with productions of The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Le Gallienne was the most visible presence in Ibsen’s plays via her productions of The Master Builder (1934, 1939), Hedda Gabler (1934, 1939, 1948), A Doll’s House (1934), Rosmersholm (1935), John Gabriel Borkman (1946), and Ghosts (1948). As

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late as the 1960s, Le Gallienne staged a national tour of Hedda Gabler starring Signe Hasso. In the post-World War II era, Ibsen’s plays were more frequently seen on university stages as the result of increasing scholarly interest, which led to a range of new translations. In the 1950s, Arthur Miller adapted Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1950) and Lee Strasberg staged Peer Gynt (1951). The Phoenix Theatre also produced Peer Gynt (1960), following their earlier production of The Master Builder (1955). In this period, occasional adaptations of Ibsen’s plays were presented on television, including a notable 1959 live hour-long production of A Doll’s House with Julie Harris, Christopher Plummer, Jason Robards, Hume Cronyn, and Eileen Heckart. As had always been the case with Ibsen’s plays in the United States, actresses propelled productions of his masterworks. Along with several English-language film versions of Ibsen’s plays, important European actresses brought successful productions of the plays to Broadway. Claire Bloom appeared in acclaimed productions of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler in 1971, Liv Ullmann starred in A Doll’s House in 1975 and Ghosts in 1981, Glenda Jackson played Hedda in 1975 and Susannah York in 1981, and Vanessa Redgrave assayed The Lady from the Sea in 1976. More importantly, Ibsen became a staple for regional repertory theatres around the country from the early 1960s as those theatres sprang up in most major cities. The founding of the Ibsen Society of America in 1979 encouraged interest in Ibsen’s work and from the 1980s experimentation and new production concepts were frequently seen, from A Doll’s Life, a 1982 musical sequel to A Doll’s House written by Adolph Green and Betty Comden to Charles Ludlam’s transgender performance as Hedda Gabler at the American Repertory Theatre in 1984. Post-1980, Austin Pendleton directed a Circle in the Square production of John Gabriel Borkman starring E. G. Marshall and Irene Worth in 1980, Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre presented Earle Hyman in The Master Builder in 1992, the Roundabout Theatre staged Hedda Gabler with Kelly McGillis, English actress Janet McTeer won plaudits in A Doll’s House in 1997, Kate Burton appeared in Hedda Gabler for the Shubert organization in 2001, and the Roundabout Theatre produced Hedda Gabler with Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Cerveris in 2009. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES; WOMEN/FEMININITY. ICEMAN COMETH, THE. The last new play by Eugene O’Neill produced on Broadway during his lifetime, this towering drama probing the human need for illusion in an isolating modern world was completed by the reclusive and ailing O’Neill in 1939, but it was not produced until 9 Octo-

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ber 1946 at the Martin Beck Theatre for a disappointingly short run of 136 performances. Weaknesses in the production, particularly the leading performance of James Barton, caused reviewers to find the lengthy play inferior to O’Neill’s earlier achievements. Critical rejection and audience apathy obscured its merits until an acclaimed 1956 revival at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre directed by José Quintero, who had scored a notable success directing O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Day’s Journey into Night shortly before. The Iceman Cometh has come to be regarded as an O’Neill masterpiece, and it has been revived on Broadway in 1973, 1985, and 1999, and was filmed twice, for television in 1960 (with cast members from the 1956 Off-Broadway revival) and on the big screen in 1973. Set in Harry Hope’s “last chance” saloon in New York City in the summer of 1912, the down-and-out habitués of the bar delude themselves about their past failings and the possibility of restoring lost fortunes, dreams, relationships, and shattered confidence. In the meantime, the lost souls drink to oblivion and are only aroused by the imminent arrival of Theodore Hickman, known to all as “Hickey,” a fifty year-old hardware salesman who regales them with tall stories and buys endless rounds of drinks. This time, however, Hickey arrives with a missionary’s zeal to force them to face the hard truths of their lives and give up their “pipe dreams.” Ultimately, the misfits all fail to face their fears, Hickey’s own hypocrisies are revealed and the tragedy of his life shocks all, and, in the end, the characters are able to go on living only when some shard of their individual illusions survive. O’Neill’s intense drama undoubtedly seemed too desperate in outlook for Broadway audiences in the immediate aftermath of World War II. O’Neill, deeply disappointed in what he considered the play’s failure, was further disappointed by the out-of-town closing of his last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), the following year, and there were no further Broadway productions of his plays during the remaining years of his life. IDIOT’S DELIGHT. Robert E. Sherwood’s three-act comedy opened on 24 March 1936 for 299 performances at the Shubert Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize and critical approval for the play and its stars, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Set in the Hotel Monte Gabrielle in a once-Austrian mountain town ceded to Italy after World War I, a group of guests face uncertainties about the possibility of another war. A third-rate vaudevillian, Harry Van (Lunt), arrives with a group of chorus girls. Van realizes that a Russian Countess (Fontanne), who is married to a munitions manufacturer, is actually a former stage performer with whom he had an affair in Omaha. As the dreaded war begins, Van and the Countess reignite their old affair and plan a new mind-reading act. A lavish 1939 film version starred Clark Gable

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and Norma Shearer, and a 1951 Broadway revival starring Lee Tracy and Ruth Chatterton, flopped. I’M NOT RAPPAPORT. Herb Gardner’s Tony Award-winning comedy opened on 19 November 1985 for 891 performances at the Booth Theatre, following its original presentation at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, with scene design by Tony Walton, the cast featured Judd Hirsch as an elderly Jewish radical, Nat, and Cleavon Little as his aging African American friend, Midge. The two old men share a park bench, where they battle the infirmities of age and explore the subjects of society’s treatment of the aged, relationships of the elderly with their adult children, the troubled urban landscape, and the eternal struggles of politics. Hirsch returned in a 2002 Broadway revival, this time costarring with Ben Vereen, but this production managed only 53 performances. A 1996 film version, directed by Gardner, starred Walter Matthau, Ossie Davis, and Amy Irving. IMPOSSIBLE YEARS, THE. Bob Fisher and Arthur Marx collaborated on this two-act comedy for comedian Alan King which opened on 13 October 1965 for 670 performances at the Playhouse Theatre. King played Dr. Kingsley, a renowned psychiatrist writing a book on raising children, but in his own home he has difficulty managing his two strong-willed, precocious daughters. King won praise for his performance and the play mildly reflected the changing values of the 1960s. A 1968 film version starred David Niven. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. Neil LaBute’s first important play premiered at his alma mater, Brigham Young University, in 1993, establishing his often disturbing depictions of human nature. In this case, two misogynist businessmen, Chad and Howard, collaborate to woo and reject a deaf woman, Christine. Actor Aaron Eckhart, a former classmate of LaBute’s, appeared in the play, which LaBute adapted into a film in 1997, directed by LaBute and featuring Eckhart, Matt Malloy, and Stacy Edwards. The film won LaBute the Independent Spirit Award and nominations for several other awards. IN THE SUMMER HOUSE. Jane Bowles’s two-act drama opened on 29 December 1953 for 55 performances at the Playhouse Theatre produced by the Playwrights’ Company and Oliver Smith. The play featured Judith Anderson as Gertrude, an oppressively demanding mother focused on controlling her daughter’s life. Mildred Dunnock played an alcoholic who has been abandoned by her family. She finds comfort in her drinking, while Gertrude is lost when ultimately abandoned by her daughter who musters the

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will to leave. The play was revived in 1993 with Dianne Wiest and Frances Conroy, but failed to fine an audience. INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX, THE. Israel Horovitz’s one-act play opened Off-Broadway at the Astor Place Theatre on 17 January 1968 for 177 performances. The play focuses on Gupta, a young man who arrives in New York City from his native India. While waiting at a bus stop, Gupta, who barely speaks English, is accosted by two street toughs whose taunts turn violent. The original cast included Al Pacino and John Cazale, and the play won Obie Awards for them and the play. John Malkovich directed a Steppenwolf Theatre production in Chicago in 1976 starring Terry Kinney and Gary Sinise. INDIANA REPERTORY THEATRE (IRT). The Athenaeum, established in Indianapolis in the 1850s as a center for encouraging German American culture, and was used for a variety of performances (German-language and otherwise), became the first home of the IRT when it was established in 1972. Founded by Benjamin Mordecai, Edward Stern, and Gregory Poggi, the IRT presents annual seasons of plays (their first production was the 1890s’ farce Charley’s Aunt). The goal of producing a range of classic and contemporary plays was enhanced when Tom Haas became artistic director in 1980. Haas oversaw the move into the renovated Indiana Theatre, which provided two stages: a 610-seat proscenium space and a 314-seat thrust. A small cabaret was also included. When Haas died after being struck by a car in 1991, Libby Appel had a brief tenure as artistic director before being succeeded by Janet Allen, who had been the theatre’s business manager. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. INDIANS. The Nederlander organization produced Arthur Kopit’s Tony Award-nominated play on 13 October 1969 for 96 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, featuring Stacy Keach. Set in Buffalo Bill* Cody’s Wild West Show, the play explores the contradictions of Cody’s— and America’s—interaction with Native Americans. Keach won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for his performance, and the supporting cast included Manu Tupou, Tom Aldredge, Kevin Conway, Charles Durning, Raúl Juliá, and Sam Waterston. A 1976 film adaptation directed by Robert Altman retitled Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, starred Paul Newman. INGE, WILLIAM (1913–1973). Born William Motter Inge in Independence, Kansas, Inge was a gentle and sensitive child taunted by bullies. He

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retreated into artistic and literary pursuits with his mother’s encouragement. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1935. His theatrical career essentially began when he acted in tent shows in rural Kansas beginning in 1932. He completed an M.A. in English at George Peabody College for Teachers before taking a job teaching English at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, in 1938. His interest in theatre was heightened when he became a close friend of legendary stage actress Maude Adams,* who also taught at Stephens. Attempting to confront his homosexuality and struggle with alcoholism, Inge began Freudian analysis, a foundation on which Inge constructed his characters when he began writing plays and, coupled with his admiration for Tennessee Williams, who encouraged him, Inge wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1945), which, with Williams’s help, was produced by Margo Jones’s Theatre 47 in Dallas, Texas. Inge’s major theatrical breakthrough came with Come Back, Little Sheba in a 1950 Broadway production starring Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer, winning Inge the George Jean Nathan Award. His next play, Picnic, about the unsettling impact of a virile drifter on three generations of women living in a small Kansas town, was directed by Joshua Logan and won the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Donaldson Award. Inge followed Picnic with Bus Stop (1955), a comedy-drama featuring Kim Stanley as the “chanteuse” Cherie, who spends a night trapped in a roadside café in Kansas with a group of travelers, improbably finding love with a rowdy cowboy. Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), directed by Elia Kazan and featuring a cast including Teresa Wright, Pat Hingle, and Eileen Heckart, focused on a 1920s’ Oklahoma family, especially the young son who is afraid of the closed, dark attic in the family home. Inge’s impressive string of successes ended with A Loss of Roses (1959), which closed after a mere 25 performances on Broadway. Inge won acclaim for his screenplay for his drama The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, released in 1960, followed by Splendor in the Grass, a hugely popular movie scripted by Inge which won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; and Bus Stop were all filmed in the 1950s and were popular with audiences and well-received by most critics. In the 1960s, Inge continued to battle his demons through psychoanalysis, but found only occasional success with screen versions of his plays, including The Stripper (1963; adapted from A Loss of Roses) and Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965; adapted from an Inge one-act play of the same name), as well as adaptations of works by other writers, including All Fall Down (1962), adapted from James Leo Herlihy’s novel. Inge’s later plays, Natural Affection (1963) and Where’s Daddy? (1966), were met by a chorus of critical disap-

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proval. Beginning in 1968, Inge began occasional stints teaching theatre arts at the University of California, Irvine, while working on two unsuccessful novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971). Depression over the failures of his recent plays and novels, his continuing struggle with alcoholism, and inner conflicts about his sexuality led him to take his own life. INHERIT THE WIND. This three-act historical drama by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based on the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, opened on 21 April 1955, at the National Theatre for 806 performances. Produced by Herman Shumlin and Margo Jones, the play explored the collision between faith and science inherent in the Scopes trial, in which a small-town Tennessee school teacher, Bertram Cates, was charged for violating state law prohibiting teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Paul Muni played Chicago lawyer Henry Drummond, based on Clarence Darrow, who arrives to defend Cates with the help of journalist E. K. Hornbeck, a character inspired by H. L. Mencken* and played by Tony Randall, while the prosecution is carried out by Matthew Harrison Brady, based on William Jennings Bryan and portrayed by Ed Begley. Cates’s trial devolves into a media carnival, and Drummond and Brady indulge in a fierce debate. Cates is found guilty, but only fined $100, which Brady feels is a defeat, and he dies from the strain of the trial. Drummond has truly prevailed over the religious fundamentalist Brady who, in Drummond’s words, sought “God too high up and far away.” A 1960 screen version memorably starred Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, with Gene Kelly in support, and the film was nominated for four Academy Awards, while Broadway has seen two revivals. The first, in 1996, starred George C. Scott and Charles Durning, but despite excellent reviews was cut short when Scott became ill, and the second, in 2007, starred Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy. Scott appeared opposite Jack Lemmon in a television film version in 1999, which followed two previous television adaptations (1965, 1988). See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. INNAURATO, ALBERT (1947– ). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Innaurato graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, he collaborated with Christopher Durang on three plays, I Don’t Normally Like Poetry But Have You Read Trees (1972), Gyp, The Real-Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor, and The Idiots Karamazov (1974). His first important play, Gemini (1976), was staged at Playwrights Horizons, winning an Obie Award before transferring to Broadway for a remarkable 1,819 performances, especially since the play’s subjects included

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homosexuality and expressed the tensions between generations of an Italian American family. The play became a musical in 2006 called Gemini: The Musical. Innaurato’s The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie (1973) won an Obie and praise for its star, James Coco. Other Innaurato plays include Ulricht (1971), Earth Worms (1974), Ulysses in Traction (1977), Passione (1980), Coming of Age in Soho (1984), Gus and Al (1987), Magda and Callas (1988), and Dreading Thekla (1997). Innaurato adapted Puccini’s La Rondine at Lincoln Center and has written for television and films. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL’S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES, THE. Tony Kushner’s three-act drama, inspired, in part, by the plays of Arthur Miller, premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2009 during a Guthrie-sponsored festival celebrating Kushner’s work. Set mostly in the home of a retired New York longshoreman, Gus Marcantonio, played by Michael Cristofer, who struggles with his past, his grown children, including a gay son, and their significant others, and a sister, while grappling with the importance of belonging, whether it be to a family, a set of beliefs, a relationship, and/or life itself. The Guthrie cast, under the direction of Michael Grief, included Linda Emond, Stephen Spinella, and Kathleen Chalfant. The Signature Theatre and the New York Public Theatre in a joint production expect to give the play its New York premiere during the 2010–2011 season. INTERART THEATRE. A theatre program established by the not-forprofit Women’s Interart Center in 1971 by Marjorie De Faxio, Alice Rubenstein, Jane Chambers, and Margot Lewitin. Presenting both innovative and traditional theatre under the guidance of artistic director Lewitin, Interart Theatre also encourages dance, music, visual art, and video work created by women or on women’s issues. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; WOMEN/ FEMININITY. INTERNATIONAL ARTS RELATIONS, INC. (INTAR). One of the longest-running Latino theatre companies producing in English in the United States, International Arts Relations, Inc. (INTAR) has made a priority of providing Latino artists a forum, nurturing the growth and development of plays and performing arts. Under the artistic directorship of playwright Eduardo Machado, INTAR stresses “theatre without borders,” and has been instrumental in the development of such dramatists as José Rivera and Nilo Cruz. Founded in the mid-1960s, INTAR had commissioned over 175 new

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works by Latino writers by 2010. See also CHICANO THEATRE; ETHNIC THEATRE. INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES. During and after World War I, and through the 1920s, many foreign companies appeared in New York and, at times, in other cities across the United States, including Israel’s Habimah, England’s D’Oyly Carte, Russia’s Moscow Art Theatre* and Chauve-Souris, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, Austrian director Max Reinhardt’s company, and France’s Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. A serious decline in such visits occurred with the beginning of the Great Depression until the 1960s, although individual actors and directors from various countries appeared or emigrated to the United States permanently. Beginning in the 1960s, such foreign theatres as the Moscow Art Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the D’Oyly Carte, the Comédie-Française, the Piraikon Theatre of Athens, the Schiller Theatre, the Bavarian State Theatre, the Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Japan, the Grand Kabuki, the Jewish Theatre of Poland, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Compagnie due Théâtre de la Cité Villeurbanne, and the Polish Laboratory Theatre have performed residencies in the United States, and numerous plays by foreign authors have been produced in New York, often on Broadway, and in theatres throughout the United States and many international directors and designers have worked in the United States. Various arts festivals around the country have adopted an international approach, attracting various foreign companies and performers to participate. Actors’ Equity Association and other theatrical unions resisted international incursions on the American stage, and after 11 September 2001 (9/11), the government occasionally blocked entry to the country by troupes and individual artists from what were considered unfriendly nations. This was not a new problem—for example, Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright and actor Dario Fo, whose leftist politics were deemed dangerous, was blocked by President Ronald Reagan’s conservative administration from traveling to the United States for a visit in the early 1980s. Only a significant outpouring of protests from the artistic community permitted Fo to eventually come to America. See also CENSORSHIP. INTIMAN THEATRE. Founded in Seattle, Washington, by Margaret Booker in 1972 and established as a not-for-profit theatre in 1973, the Intiman (Swedish for “intimate”) was modeled on August Strindberg’s small Stockholm theatre. The company performed in various theatres prior to 1987 when it found a permanent space in the Seattle Center Playhouse. Under several

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artistic directors, the Intiman emerged in the mid-1990s as a major regional theatre, producing Robert Schenkkan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Kentucky Cycle (1992) and was the first regional theatre to stage both parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1994–1995. The Intiman received the Tony Award as outstanding regional theatre in 2006. INTIMATE APPAREL. Lynn Nottage first gained notice as a dramatist with this play set in 1905 concerning a young African American woman who gains independence through work as a seamstress. Commissioned by Baltimore’s Center Stage and California’s South Coast Repertory Theatre (SCR), the play opened at Center Stage on 2 February 2003 under Kate Whoriskey’s direction. The play moved to the SCR in April of that year and opened Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre on 17 March 2004 under Daniel Sullivan’s direction with a cast, including Viola Davis, who won a Drama Desk Award for her performance as Esther, the central character. Intimate Apparel won the 2004 Steinberg Play Award. IRISH REPERTORY THEATRE, THE (IRT). Founded by Ciarán O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore in 1988, this company established since 1995 in Chelsea in a renovated warehouse, states its mission as bringing Irish and Irish American classics and contemporary plays to the stage, providing background on the Irish American experience, and encouraging the development of new plays focusing on the Irish American experience. The theatre has received a special Drama Desk Award, Jujamcyn Theatre Awards, and a Lucille Lortel Award for its body of work. Works by such diverse Irish playwrights as Sean O’Casey, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, George Bernard Shaw, Edna O’Brien, and others have been presented on the IRT stage. See also ETHNIC THEATRE; REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. IRON CLAD AGREEMENT, THE. Founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by Wilson Hutton and Julia Swoyer in 1976 on leaves from the Carnegie Mellon Drama School, this theatre group embarked on Out of This Furnace, a three-act play aimed at mill towns. Later the group produced a cycle of seven original plays about inventors called The Gilded Age of Invention using a minimalist style and aimed at a working-class audience, which was their typical approach. Their final work, Virgins and Dynamos, was produced shortly before the group disbanded in 1983. IRVING, GEORGE S. (1922– ). One of Broadway’s most versatile character actors since the late 1940s, Irving was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, as George Irving Shelasky. He made his first Broadway appearance in a small

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role in the original production of Oklahoma! (1943). He left the show when he was drafted into the service during World War II. Particularly adept in musicals, he nevertheless appeared in all manner of theatre. His most notable Broadway appearances in musicals include Can-Can (1953), Me and Juliet (1953), Bells Are Ringing (1956), Tovarich (1963), The Happy Time (1968), So Long, 174th Street (1976), revivals of The Pirates of Penzance in 1981 and On Your Toes in 1983, A Wonderful Life (2005), and a 2007 revision of So Long, 174th Street renamed Enter Laughing at Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company. He won a Tony Award for his featured role in Irene (1973), was nominated again for Me and My Girl (1987), and won a Drama Desk Award for his acclaimed portrayal of Richard Nixon in Gore Vidal’s An Evening with Richard Nixon and . . . (1972). Other non-musical roles for Irving included The Good Soup (1960), Romulus (1962), A Murderer among Us (1964), Alfie! (1964), a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (1967), Four on a Garden (1971), Who’s Who in Hell (1974), and a revival of Once in a Lifetime in 1978. Irving also appeared in occasional film and television roles and received the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. He frequently worked with his wife, actress Maria Karnilova, and they were married for 53 years. IRVING, JULES (1924–1979). Best known as director of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center in the 1960s and 1970s, Irving was born in New York City. He married actress Priscilla Pointer and they had three children, including actress Amy Irving. With Pointer, Herbert Blau, and Beatrice Manley, Irving founded the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. Among his productions for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Irving directed revivals of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1966, The Alchemist in 1966, An Enemy of the People in 1971, Mary Stuart in 1971, and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1973, among others. He also staged the American premieres of Harold Pinter’s Landscape and Silence in 1971. IRWIN, BILL (1950– ). Born in Santa Monica, California, this entertainer, director, and actor emerged as part of the New Vaudeville movement following his education at the University of California at Los Angeles, Oberlin College, the Ringling Bros. Clown College, and working with the Pickle Family Circus. His postmodern approach to clowning incorporated the existential foundation of plays by Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, as well as silent film comedians (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd), circus, vaudeville,* various aspects of popular culture, and his own extraordinary physical dexterity. He made his Broadway debut in Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1984), but won critical acclaim (and a Tony Award

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nomination) with his own work, The Regard of Flight (1987), Largely New York (1989), and Fool Moon (1993). He made a seemingly effortless transition to non-physical roles, stepping into Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in 2002, and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for an acclaimed revival of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2005, which also brought him a Tony, and a 2009 Broadway revival of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (he had previously appeared in this play at Lincoln Center in 1988). In late 2009, he played the role originated by Paul Lynde in a Roundabout Theatre revival of the musical Bye Bye Birdie. ISAACS, EDITH (1878–1956).† Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as Edith Juliet Rich Isaacs, she attended Downer College. This American theatre critic and editor wrote for the literary section of the Milwaukee Sentinel until 1904, when she began freelancing in New York before becoming drama critic for Ainslee’s Magazine in 1913. She went to work for THEATRE ARTS in 1918 and from 1922–1946 edited the publication, guiding it to seminal status to theatre professionals and theatergoers and converting it from a quarterly publication to a monthly. She actively promoted the idea of an American national theatre and was involved in the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935–1939) and other organizations. She also edited Theatre: Essays on the Arts of the Theatre (1927), Plays of American Life and Fantasy (1929), and wrote The Negro in the American Theatre (1947). See also PERIODICALS. ISRAEL, ROBERT (1939– ). A scene and costume designer who studied fine arts, Israel has worked mostly in opera and ballet, designing over 70 productions at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the national operas in London and Tokyo, the Paris Opera, and others. He also designed four premieres of operas by Philip Glass and collaborated with Martha Clarke on Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited) (2002) and designed King Lear (2009) for Baltimore’s Center Stage and several productions for the American Repertory Theatre. ISHERWOOD, CHARLES (1964– ). California-born and educated at Stanford University, Isherwood began his career writing for Variety as its West Coast critic. He rose to senior editor and chief theatre critic in 1998 before moving to the New York Times in 2004 to replace Margo Jefferson as the second-string drama critic. IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. This “Living Newspaper” production of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), written by John C. Moffitt and Sinclair Lewis, had the unique distinction of opening simultaneously in 20 or more

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locations on 27 October 1936, including Broadway’s Adelphi Theatre, where it ran for 95 performances. Based on Lewis’s novel, the play imagines the rise of a dictator in America, inspiring both sides of the political divide to imagine the play as either pro or con on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Among the productions of the play there were demonstrations of variety, including an all-black cast and a Yiddish theatre production. Vincent Sherman, later a noted film director, staged the Broadway production of a work that would contribute to the debate over the political leanings of the FTP. ITALIAN ACTORS UNION (IAU). Established in 1937 in affiliation with the AFL-CIO, the IAU (also known as the Guild of Italian American Actors) continues with goals typical of most unions, to protect the interests of their membership in the profession. In this case, the IAU also lobbies to end stereotypical casting of Italian actors and actively promotes a positive image of Italian American culture. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. IVES, DAVID (1950– ). This Chicago-born playwright who studied theatre at Northwestern University and Yale School of Drama found success with collections of absurdly comic one-act plays, Mere Mortals (1990), Long Ago and Far Away (1993), and All in the Timing (1993), the last presented at Primary Stages and ultimately running for a remarkable 600 performances. Among his other works are Don Juan in Chicago (1995), Polish Joke (2003), Roll Over, Beethoven (2005), and Venus in Fur (2010), which New Yorker critic Hilton Als described as “wildly intelligent and sometimes frightening” when it opened in a Classic Stage Company production under Walter Bobbie’s direction. Ives has adapted musicals for the City Center Encores! Series and adapted the script of Wonderful Town for its 2003 revival. IVEY, DANA (1941– ). A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Ivey studied at Rollins College and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before appearing in notable Canadian productions. She developed a reputation for versatility and received Drama Desk Award nominations for Present Laughter (1982), Quartermaine’s Terms (1983), and Driving Miss Daisy (1987), winning one for The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997). She received Obie Awards for Driving Miss Daisy and Quartermaine’s Terms and was also nominated for Tony Awards for her performances in Heartbreak House (1983), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), The Last Night of Ballyhoo, The Rivals (2005), and Butley (2007). She made her Broadway debut as a witch in the Philip Anglim Macbeth (1981) and appeared in Pack of Lies (1985) and revivals of The Marriage of Figaro (1985), Waiting in the Wings (1999), Major Barbara (2001), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (2003), and

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Henry IV (2003). Ivey has also appeared in many films, including The Color Purple (1985), and many television shows, including Ugly Betty (2010). In 2008, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. IVEY, JUDITH (1951– ). Born in El Paso, Texas, as Judith Lee Ivey, she studied at Illinois State University before beginning a distinguished career as an actress and occasional director. She won two Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for Steaming (1983) and Hurlyburly (1985) and was nominated for a Tony for Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1992). Ivey’s other Broadway credits include Piaf (1981), Precious Sons (1986), a revival of Blithe Spirit in 1987, Voices in the Dark (1999), and a revival of Follies (2001). In 2009, she appeared in The Glass Menagerie at the Long Wharf Theatre, winning plaudits for her performance. Ivey has also appeared in numerous films, including Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) and Washington Square (1997), and numerous television shows, including a recurring role on Designing Women in 1992–1993 and she was nominated for an Emmy Award for the TV movie What the Deaf Man Heard (1997). IZENOUR, GEORGE (1912–2007). A native of New Brighton, Pennsylvania, Izenour attended Wittenburg College, after which Hallie Flanagan tapped him to be lighting director for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). In 1939, he designed the theatre at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Following military service during World War II, Izenour worked closely with Ed Kook on designing lighting innovations for Century Lighting. He consulted on designs for numerous American and international theatre structures, pioneering multipurpose designs for spaces to be used for drama and music with adjustable acoustics, taught at Yale University, and authored three books, Theater Design (1977), Theater Technology (1988), and Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity (1992).

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J J.B. God played Broadway when poet Archibald MacLeish’s two-act drama opened at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Theatre on 11 December 1958 for 364 performances, winning the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award as Best Play. Directed by Elia Kazan, the distinguished cast included Raymond Massey, Christopher Plummer, and Pat Hingle as the title character based on Job. The allegorical plot set in a circus ring essentially followed the Bible tale of Job’s refusal to deny God despite the loss of everything dear to him. In 1974, Neil Simon revisited the Job story on Broadway in his farcical comedy, God’s Favorite. See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. JACKER, CORINNE (1933– ). A Chicago native, Jacker began writing plays in her childhood, claiming to have adapted Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull by age 12. Her plays, many of which have first been staged by the Circle Repertory Theatre, include Project Omega: Lillian (1971), Taking Care of Harry (1974), Harry Outside (1975), Bits and Pieces (1975), My Life (1977), Terminal (1977), Night Thoughts (1977), Later (1978), The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (1979), Rites of Passage (1983), and Domestic Issues (1983). She has also written for film and television. Of her work, Jacker has said, “ I really believe if I wasn’t a playwright, I’d be called a schizophrenic— I keep hearing voices. I hear the characters talking in my head.” JACKSON, ANNE (1926– ). Anna June Jackson was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, before seeking theatrical training at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and The Actors Studio. Her performance in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night (1956) brought her a Tony Award nomination. Her numerous Broadway credits since her 1944 debut include several revivals, including The Cherry Orchard in 1945, John Gabriel Borkman in 1946, Yellow Jack (1947), Major Barbara in 1956, The Waltz of the Toreodors in 1973, Café Crown in 1989, and The Flowering Peach in 1994, as well as Summer and Smoke (1948), Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), Rhinoceros (1961), Luv (1964), and Inquest (1970). Jackson also replaced Irene Worth

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in the Broadway production of Lost in Yonkers (1991). Off-Broadway, she appeared in Brecht on Brecht (1961), a double bill of The Tiger and The Typist (1962), and Twice Around the Park (1982). She teaches at New York’s HB Studio, has appeared in films and television, and since 1948 she has been married to actor Eli Wallach, with whom she frequently acts. JACOBI, LOU (1913–2009). Often cast as Jewish Americans, this familiar character actor of stage, film, and television was born in Toronto, Canada. His Broadway credits include The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), The Tenth Man (1959), Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Fade Out-Fade In (1964), Don’t Drink the Water (1966), Norman, Is That You? (1970), Unlikely Heroes (1971), Cheaters (1978), and he replaced Sam Levene in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys (1972) and appeared in London revivals of Guys and Dolls (1953) and Pal Joey (1954). Jacobi’s many film appearances include The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Irma La Douce (1963), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), and My Favorite Year (1982). JACOBS, LOU (1904–1992). Born Ludwig Jacob in Bremerhaven, Germany, he moved to America in 1923 to work as a tumbler in circus, carnival, and vaudeville.* He made his mark with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a white-faced clown in a colorfully gaudy costume and tiny hat on a pointed, cone-shaped head. From 1926 to 1988, he often partnered with his dog, Knucklehead, adding a tiny car to his act in 1946. JAMPOLIS, NEIL PETER (1943– ). A New York-born scene and lighting designer and director, Jampolis made his first mark designing lights on Broadway for Borstal Boy (1970), but gained prominence when he won the Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his lighting of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of Sherlock Holmes* in 1975. He was subsequently Tony-nominated three more times, for The Innocents (1977), Black and Blue (1989), and a revival of Orpheus Descending (1990). Along with his designs for several opera companies, Jampolis has created sets and/ or lighting designs for over 40 Broadway productions, including Les Blancs (1970), Wise Child (1972), Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope (1972), Butley (1972), Crown Matrimonial (1973), Brief Lives (1974), The American Clock (1980), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1981), The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985), and the Dustin Hoffman revival of The Merchant of Venice (1989), among others. OffBroadway, he designed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1971), among others.

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JANIE. This innocuous three-act comedy by Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 10 September 1942 in a Brock Pemberton production under Antoinette Perry’s direction for a whopping 642 performances. The title character, an impulsive, scatterbrained teenager (Gwen Anderson) with a high school boyfriend, becomes infatuated with a soldier, the son of her mother’s friend. While her parents are away, Janie allows a party of soldiers to take place at the family home. The soldiers ship out and Janie makes amends with her boyfriend. Even more remarkable than the play’s runaway success was the fact that Warner Bros. released a popular 1944 film version that spawned a sequel, Janie Gets Married in 1946. JANUS. Carolyn Green’s three-act comedy opened on 24 November 1955 at the Plymouth Theatre in an Alfred de Liagre, Jr., production for 251 performances. A slight comedy, it was elevated by an expert cast including Margaret Sullavan, Claude Dauphin, and Robert Preston. Even though they are married to others, Jessica and Denny spend every summer at a New York apartment where they secretly write novels under the pen name, Janus. This well-guarded secret is revealed when intrusions from Jessica’s husband, Denny’s agent, and a tax collector cause chaos. JAY, RICKY (1948– ). Born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn, New York, he is an actor, writer, and magician. Some of his own stage shows, including Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (1994), which won an Obie Award, and Ricky Jay: On the Stem (2002), for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, have been staged at New York’s Second Stage by David Mamet. Jay has also appeared in several of Mamet’s films. He is considered a scholar of unique forms of entertainment and has written several books on the subject since his first, Cards as Weapons (1977). JEAN COCTEAU REPERTORY. Eve Adamson founded this company as an Off-Off-Broadway theatre in 1971. Its earliest performances were given in a Lower East Side storefront before the company established itself at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in 1974. Initially, the theatre articulated a goal of producing classics, and although the company continues to do so, the emphasis has shifted over the years to a focus on ensemble acting. In 2002, the theatre became an Equity company and in 2006, due to financial issues and internal problems, the company merged with New Orleans’s EgoPo Productions after the latter lost its theatre in Hurricane Katrina. Following this merger, under the guidance of resident director Ernest Johns, the theatre has renewed its mission to produce classics. See also REPERTORY THEATRE.

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JEFFERS, ROBINSON (1887–1962). Born John Robinson Jeffers in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, he attended Occidental College and the University of Southern California before winning acclaim as a poet in the 1920s. His most enduring theatrical work is his modern adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (1947), which won Broadway kudos for Judith Anderson in the title role and Zoe Caldwell in a 1983 revival. He also adapted elements from Aeschylus’s The Oresteia and Euripides’ Electra for The Tower beyond Tragedy (1950), again starring Anderson, but with less success. Washington’s Arena Stage produced Jeffers’s retelling of the Phaedra legend, The Cretan Woman, in 1954. JEFFERSON, MARGO (1947– ). Chicago, Illinois-born critic of postmodern theatre and American culture, Jefferson attended Brandeis University and Columbia University before becoming an associated editor at Newsweek in 1973. She has written for numerous publications, including Vogue and 7 Days, and has taught at New York University and Columbia. Since 1993, she became cultural critic for the New York Times, serving briefly as Sunday theatre critic before becoming critic-at-large in 1996, which permits her to write about theatre, books, and other arts. Charles Isherwood replaced her as the Times’s second-string drama critic in 2004. JEFFREY. Paul Rudnick’s satiric play opened at the WPA Theatre on 31 December 1992 under the direction of Christopher Ashley and featuring John Michael Higgins as the title character, an optimistic thirty-something gay man whose varied experiences in present-day America satirize attitudes about homosexuality, moral values, and love. Widely heralded as the first AIDS-era gay comedy, Jeffrey was filmed in 1995 with Steven Weber in the lead. See also SEXUALITY. JENKIN, LEN (1941– ). Dramatist, director, novelist, screenwriter, and educator often praised for his experimentation with language and form in his plays, Jenkin was educated at Columbia University. His more than 20 plays, most produced Off-Broadway under his direction include Kitty Hawk (1972), Grand American Exhibition (1973), The Death and Life of Jesse James (1974), Mission (1975), Gogol: A Mystery Play (1976), Kid Twist (1977), Limbo Tales (1980), Five of Us (1981), Dark Ride (1981), My Uncle Sam (1983), American Notes (1986), Poor Folk’s Pleasure (1987), Pilgrims of the Night (1991), Careless Love (1993), Ramona Quimby (1994), Like I Say (2003), The Dream Express (Out Takes) (2004), Margo Veil (2005), and Port Twilight, or The History of Science (2007). He has also written several films and television shows, and three novels. He is a three-time Obie Award winner.

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JENKINS, GEORGE (1908–2007). A native of Baltimore, Maryland, born George Clarke Jenkins, he attended the University of Pennsylvania before working with scene designer Jo Mielziner in the late 1930s. Beginning with Early to Bed (1943), Jenkins designed many Broadway productions and was nominated for Tony Awards for The Happiest Millionaire (1957), Too Late the Phalarope (1957), The Miracle Worker (1960), and 13 Daughters (1961), and received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Sly Fox (1977). Other Broadway shows for which he designed sets and/or lighting include Mexican Hayride (1944), I Remember Mama (1944), Dark of the Moon (1945), Lost in the Stars (1949), The Curious Savage (1950), Bell, Book and Candle (1950), The Bad Seed (1954), Two for the Seesaw (1958), Tall Story (1959), Jennie (1963), and Wait Until Dark (1966). He also did art direction for films, including The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Miracle Worker (1962), 1776 (1972), and Sophie’s Choice (1982), winning an Academy Award for All the President’s Men (1976). JESURUN, JOHN (1951– ). Born in Battle Creek, Michigan, he studied sculpture at Yale University before establishing himself as a playwright, director, and designer. He merges narrative and visual elements (including film) in his work, most notably in his groundbreaking Chang in a Void Moon (1982), a “serial” play that has had over 60 episodes at the Pyramid Club on New York’s Lower East Side. He won a 1986 Obie Award for his media trilogy Deep Sleep and has directed and/or designed over 25 productions, including Faust/How I Rose (2004), Philoktetes (2005), and Firefall (2006). Early in his career, he worked in television, an experience that has greatly influenced his work, and in 1996 he won a MacArthur Fellowship. JEWISH REPERTORY THEATRE (JRT). Ran Avni founded this company in 1974 with the goal of producing Jewish classics and new works, making use of various performance venues in New York. Their production of Kuni-Leml (1984) won three Outer Critics Circle Awards, and the JPT won another in 1989 for continued outstanding productions. Financial concerns have undermined the JRT’s work since 2003 and the theatre has no permanent venue. A similarly named group in Buffalo, New York, established in 2002, pursues similar goals. See also ETHNIC THEATRE; REPERTORY THEATRE; YIDDISH THEATRE. JILLETTE, PENN (1955– ) AND TELLER, RAYMOND (1948– ). As the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller, these two performers have spent much of their career on Las Vegas stages, but also Off-Broadway, where in 1985 their stage show won critical kudos. Jillette is the speaking member

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of the act, adopting the persona of a cynical raconteur and con man, while Teller is more akin to a silent mime and is often the butt of Jillette’s barbs and tricks. Penn and Teller have twice appeared on Broadway (1987 and 1991) and appear frequently on television and occasionally in films. The duo first performed together in the 1970s as part of a threesome (with Weir Chrisimer) called Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. Penn Fraser Jillette was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and studied at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. Raymond Joseph Teller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was educated at Amherst College before teaching high school English and Latin. JITNEY. An early entry in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Jitney was written in 1979 and first performed in 1982 at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Repertory Theatre. Set in 1977 in Pittsburgh, the plot focuses on Becker, owner of a jitney/car service, and his relationship with his son, Booster, recently released from a 20-year prison sentence for killing a wealthy white girl after she falsely accused him of rape. The play has had numerous productions in regional theatre and was revived Off-Broadway at the Second Stage in 2000 and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Jitney was revived at the Kennedy Center in 2008. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. JOAN OF LORRAINE. Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse historical drama, which opened on 18 November 1946 at the Alvin Theatre for 199 performances, won a Tony Award for Ingrid Bergman in the title role. Directed by Margo Jones, with designs by Lee Simonson, this play-withina-play finds an acting troupe staging a play about Joan of Arc, rife with conflict between the leading lady and the director. As their work moves forward, Joan’s story is revealed and the actress and director resolve their differences. Bergman repeated her performance in the 1948 film version, retitled Joan of Arc, which abandoned the play-within-a-play device. JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE. An entry in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” this play was directed by Lloyd Richards when it opened on 27 March 1988 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 105 performances, following an initial run at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house for blacks in 1911, the play examines issues of race, including discrimination, migration, and identity as seen in the everyday encounters of the boarders. Music features strongly in the play, as is typical of Wilson’s cycle, and the language of the play reflects its period.

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The original production was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award and a Broadway revival opened on 19 March 2009. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. Following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, plans were made to honor his memory with the construction of a performing arts center, housing several theatre spaces of various sizes. The “living memorial” to Kennedy, who was a vocal advocate for the arts, opened in 1971 on the banks of the Potomac, very near the Lincoln Memorial. Since its opening, it has become a center of cultural activity in Washington, presenting new plays by the finest American dramatists, from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, and music and dance events as well. The Kennedy Center hosts visits from international companies, American troupes, and also is the home to the American College Theatre Festival. In 2003, a $650 million dollar budget was established for a 10-year plan of renovations and additions to the center and the former American Film Institute space was converted into the Family Theatre for children’s shows in 2005. JOHN LOVES MARY. Produced by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, this farcical three-act wartime comedy by Norman Krasna opened on 4 February 1947 at the Booth Theatre for 423 performances. The lightweight plot turns on John, a soldier returning from World War II with an English bride. He has only married her to help her get to the United States, causing complications with Mary, his true love, and her family, especially her father, a senator. John tries various deceptions, but eventually the situation is resolved with John and Mary united. A popular 1949 film version, adapted by Henry and Phoebe Ephron from Krasna’s play, starred Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal. JOHNNY BELINDA. Elmer Harris’s three-act drama opened on 18 September 1940 at the Belasco Theatre for 321 performances. Harris, who had been a playwright and librettist since 1909, had his greatest success with this play, which focused on Belinda, an abused and ostracized deaf mute, who is treated kindly by a newcomer doctor, Jack Davidson, who teaches her sign language. Belinda cares for the doctor, but she is pregnant by Locky McCormick, a local bully. When McCormick attempts to take the child from Belinda, she kills him. A trial follows, but Davidson provides her defense and she is acquitted and marries him. A 1948 film version won Jane Wyman an Academy Award in the role Helen Craig played on Broadway.

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JOHNNY JOHNSON. This antiwar play in three acts with music, with text by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill, opened on 19 November 1936 in a Group Theatre production at the 44th Street Theatre for 68 performances. Despite his pacifist beliefs, a young soldier, Johnny Johnson, is wounded in World War I. In a bold gesture, he attacks his commanders with laughing gas and is institutionalized. With fellow inmates, he forms his own League of Nations and once again embraces his pacifism. The extraordinary cast under Lee Strasberg’s direction included Sanford Meisner, Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Luther Adler, and Morris Carnovsky, along with Russell Collins in the title role. At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1971, the play was revived on Broadway under José Quintero’s direction, but managed only a single performance. JOHNSON, ALBERT R. (1910–1967). Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, as Albert Richard Johnson, this innovative scene designer began as a scene painter and studied with Norman Bel Geddes. Most of the first decade of his career was spent designing musicals and revues,* and over 30 productions for Radio City Music Hall. Some of his most noted early productions were The Band Wagon (1931), As Thousands Cheer (1933), The Great Waltz (1934), Jumbo (1935), Leave It to Me! (1938), but by the 1940s, he also designed non-musical works, including The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Proof Through the Night (1942), Dear Judas (1947), Two Blind Mice (1949), Fancy Meeting You Again (1952), Stockade (1954), Cloud 7 (1958), Night Life (1962), and What Did We Do Wrong? (1967). JONES, CHERRY (1956– ). Born in Paris, Tennessee, this versatile actress of stage, film, and television is a graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School for Drama. She won an Obie Award for The Baltimore Waltz in 1991. On Broadway, Jones has won Tony Awards for a 1995 revival of The Heiress and Doubt (2005), and was nominated for Our Country’s Good (1991) and a revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000. She won Drama Desk Awards for The Heiress and Doubt, and nominations for Pride’s Crossing (1998) and The Faith Healer (2006). Other Broadway credits include Stepping Out (1987), Christopher Plummer’s Macbeth (1988), revivals of The Night of the Iguana in 1996 and Major Barbara in 2001, and Imaginary Friends (2002). In 2010, she appeared in a revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession for the Roundabout Theatre Company. Jones also replaced Ellen McLaughlin in the cast of Angels in America (1993). In film, she has appeared in Cradle Will Rock (1999), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2000), and Ocean’s Twelve (2004), and on television she had a continuing role on 24.

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JONES, JAMES EARL (1931– ). Known for his deep, resonant voice by film and television audiences, Jones, who was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, is better known to theatergoers for his extraordinary stage performances in a wide range of roles spanning more than 50 years. The son of an actor, Robert Earl Jones, Jones made his Broadway debut in a small part in Sunrise at Campobello (1958), followed by roles in several flops on Broadway and impressed critics with Shakespearean roles for the New York Shakespeare Festival before scoring a personal triumph in The Great White Hope (1968), winning a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his powerful performance as Jack Jefferson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world. He repeated the role on screen to acclaim, essentially beginning a successful movie and television career, although he has frequently returned to the stage. Jones’s other Broadway credits include Les Blancs (1970), revivals of The Iceman Cometh in 1973 and Of Mice and Men in 1974, the solo piece PAUL ROBESON (1978), A Lesson from Aloes (1980), a revival of Othello in 1982 (he had first played this role Off-Broadway in 1965 and won a Drama Desk Award), and revivals of On Golden Pond in 2005 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008. He won another Tony as Troy Maxson in Fences (1987), picking up a Drama Desk Award for this performance as well. He also won Drama Desk Awards for Les Blancs, Off-Broadway performances in Hamlet and The Cherry Orchard in 1973, and he was nominated for Paul Robeson and was presented with a special Drama Desk Award for career achievement in 2008. In 2005, Jones was nominated for a Tony for On Golden Pond. Despite nearly 200 film and television performances, Jones is most often identified as the voice of Darth Vader from the Star Wars films of the 1980s. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. JONES, MARGO (1913–1955). A producer-director whose name became associated with some of the most important American plays and playwrights of the middle of the twentieth century, Margaret Virginia Jones was born in Livingston, Texas, and attended Texas State College for Women. Her love of theatre led her to the Pasadena Playhouse, where she worked for a time, and found work during the late 1930s in Houston, Texas, as an assistant director for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). She taught at the University of Texas where she experimented with arena-style staging techniques and later secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant to start a repertory theatre in Dallas utilizing an arena approach. Jones’s 1949 book, Theatre-in-the-Round, offers the arena style as a viable option for staging. While awaiting the construction of her theatre, Jones assisted in directing the original production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) and Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine (1946). Her Theatre

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’47 opened that same year and among the productions she staged were William Inge’s Farther Off from Heaven (ultimately renamed The Dark at the Top of the Stairs), Williams’s Summer and Smoke, and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, among others. Lawrence and Lee ultimately established the Margo Jones Award in her memory to support producing managers committed to new works. Other plays produced or directed by Jones on Broadway were Maxine Wood’s On Whitman Avenue (1946) and Owen Crump’s Southern Exposure (1950). JONES, ROBERT EDMOND (1887–1954).† A native of Milton, New Hampshire, and educated at Harvard University, Jones commenced a career as a scene designer in 1911 after spending a year observing Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theatre. Perhaps more than any other artist of the first half of the twentieth century, Jones influenced the evolution of American scene design by introducing techniques emerging in modernist Europe. Influenced by the theories of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, Jones designed his first Broadway production, The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915). Jones aimed for simplified and symbolic visual images, rejecting both photographic realism as well as the painted realism typical to that time. Jones’s influence grew after 1920 with his acclaimed productions of Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922), both starring John Barrymore.* In the early 1920s, Jones began a long association with Eugene O’Neill, first as part of the Provincetown Players, and later designing many of O’Neill’s dramas on Broadway, including The Fountain (1925) and The Great God Brown* (1926), both of which he also directed, and Desire under the Elms* (1924). Firmly established as the dean of American scene designers by 1930, Jones continued to innovate with a wide range of productions, including O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah, Wilderness! (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946), as well as The Green Pastures (1930), Mary of Scotland (1933), Dark Victory (1934), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1939), and a revival of Juno and the Paycock (1940). He adapted and designed Camille (1932) for Lillian Gish, although the production failed, as did Othello (1937) starring Walter Huston. Jones also designed the controversial English drama The Green Bay Tree (1933), a revival of The Sea Gull with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Without Love (1942), and the musical Lute Song (1946). Jones wrote several important books, including Continental Stagecraft (1922; with Kenneth Macgowan) and the highly influential The Dramatic Imagination (1941). JONES, SIMON (1950– ). Born in Charlton Park, Wiltshire, England, this actor and director works regularly in both Great Britain and the United States.

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Along with serving as coartistic director of The Actors Company Theatre, for whom he directed productions of Widower’s House and Flare Path, Jones made his Broadway debut as a replacement actor in The Real Thing in 1984, subsequently appearing in Benefactors (1985), revivals of Getting Married in 1991, The Real Inspector Hound in 1992 and The School for Scandal in 1995, The Herbal Bed (1998), a revival of Ring Round the Moon (1999), and revivals of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings (1999) and Blithe Spirit (2009). Off-Broadway, he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Privates on Parade (1990) and appeared in the premiere of Coward’s Long Island Sound (2002). He also has many credits as actor and director in regional theatre, including his performance in the U.S. premiere of Brian Friel’s The Home Place in 2007, and is well-known to television audiences as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. JORDAN, JULIA (1970– ). This Chicago, Illinois-born playwright and director graduated from Barnard College and Dublin’s Trinity College before moving to New York to work as a painter. Switching to theatre, she studied acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse and playwriting under Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman at the Juilliard School. Her output of plays include St. Paul (1999), Nightswim (2002), St. Scarlet (2003), Summer of the Swans (2003), Boy (2004), Tatjana in Color (2004), Walk Two Moons (2005), and Dark Yellow (2006). She has written a film, The Hat (2000), and wrote for the television soap opera, As the World Turns. JORY, JON (1938– ). The son of character actor Victor Jory, Jory founded the Long Wharf Theatre in 1964 with Harlan Kleiman following their graduation from the Yale School of Drama. From 1969 to 2000, Jory served as producing director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he directed over 125 plays, and where he eventually founded the annual Festival of New American Play Festival (later called ATL’s Humana New Play Festival). It realized Jory’s goal of encouraging new playwrights and experimentation from established dramatists. Under the pseudonym Jane Martin, Jory has written a number of successful plays, including Talking With . . . (1981), Keely and Du (1993), Jack and Jill (1996), Anton in Show Business (1999), Back Story (1999), Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage (2001), Heaven and Hell (On Earth): A Divine Comedy (2001), Bill of (W)Rights (2004), and Flags (2007). Jory has directed in many of the finest repertory theatres in the United States and, after leaving ATL, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington and authored Tips: Ideas for Actors (2000, Tips: Ideas for Directors (2002), and Tips II for Actors (2005).

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JOURNEY OF THE FIFTH HORSE. Produced at the American Place Theatre (APT), this Obie Award-winning play by Ronald Ribman opened in 1965 in a production directed by Larry Arrick. Based on Ivan Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man, Ribman focuses his play around a Russian, Mr. Zorditch, a reader at a publishing firm whose study of literature has led him to examine the power of language and his own worth in the world. Dustin Hoffman had one of his first important roles in the APT production, which was filmed for television in 1966. JUDSON POETS’ THEATRE. For 20 years (1961–1981), this Off-Off Broadway company provided a venue for poets, musicians, and other artists. Beginning in 1958, Rev. Howard Moody made the Judson Memorial Church a haven for the artistic community, allowing such artists as Allen Ginsberg, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allan Kaprow, among others, to create work in the space. In 1961, when Al Carmines became assistant minister, alternative theatre, performance art, and other experimental works with strong sociopolitical viewpoints were developed and performed there during a turbulent era in American culture. Among its most noted theatre events were Maria Irene Fornés and Carmines’s Promenade (1965) and Ronald Tavel’s Gorilla Queen (1967). JUJAMCYN THEATRES. William L. McKnight, CEO of 3M, established this producing organization in 1956, creating its peculiar name by conflating the names of his three grandchildren, Judy, James, and Cynthia. Jujamcyn owns several Broadway theatres (St. James, Al Hirschfeld, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia, and Walter Kerr) and, at times, managed theatres in other major cities. The organization has presented the annual Jujamcyn Award to resident theatre developing new talent and, in 1986, Jujamcyn collaborated in establishing the American Playwrights Project to further encourage new work. Among Jujamcyn’s many major producing credits are Big River (1985), Into the Woods (1987), M. Butterfly (1988), the Steppenwolf Theatre production of The Grapes of Wrath (1990), The Piano Lesson (1990), Angels in America (1993), The Who’s Tommy (1993), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), Proof (2000), The Producers (2001), Take Me Out (2003), Caroline, or Change (2004), Gem of the Ocean (2004), Grey Gardens (2006), Radio Golf (2007), and 33 Variations (2009), as well as several notable revivals. In 2005, Rocco Landesman bought ownership of Jujamcyn’s interest and produced John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play, Doubt (2005).

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JULIÁ, RAÚL (1940–1994). Born into a family of musicians and a restaurant owner father in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcely, Juliá was educated at the Jesuit Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. He attended Fordham University for a year, but completed his education at the University of Puerto Rico. He moved to New York in 1964 and worked in Off-Broadway and alternative theatre on the city’s streets. By 1966, he was in the company of the New York Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp’s guidance and appeared as Edmund in King Lear in 1973, and opposite Meryl Streep in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello in 1979. He received a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award for Two Gentlemen of Verona (1972) on Broadway, followed by notable performances in revivals of Where’s Charley? in 1975, Threepenny Opera in 1976, as well as Nine (1982). His other Broadway credits include The Cuban Thing (1968), Indians (1969), The Castro Complex (1970), Via Galactica (1972), a revival of The Cherry Orchard in 1977, Betrayal (1980), and revivals of Design for Living in 1984, Arms and the Man in 1985, and Man of La Mancha in 1992. He also took over the title role in a revival of Dracula* in 1977, replacing Frank Langella. Juliá also appeared in many films and television shows, most notably Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), until into the early 1990s, when he was diagnosed with cancer. He continued to work until shortly before his death. JUNIOR MISS. A slight three-act domestic comedy by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph A. Fields, Junior Miss, produced by Max Gordon, opened on 18 November 1941 at the Lyceum Theatre for a staggering 710 performances under Moss Hart’s direction. The play centers on precocious Judy Graves (Patricia Peardon), a 13-year-old with a wild imagination. Convinced that her uncle is a criminal and her father is having an affair with his boss’s daughter, Judy and her sidekick, Fuffy (Lenore Lonergan), set out to put the world in order, instead causing mild chaos that ends with Judy preparing for her first date. Considered by critics to be representative of the light situation comedies popular on the commercial Broadway stage during World War II, Junior Miss was deemed one of the better efforts in the genre. A 1945 film version was similarly popular.

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K KACZOROWSKI, PETER (1956– ). A Buffalo, New York, native, Kaczorowski began his career as a lighting designer as assistant to several designers, including John Bury, Beverly Emmons, Thomas Skelton, and Neil Peter Jampolis. Kaczorowski won a Tony Award for The Producers (2001) and received Tony nominations for a 2000 revival of Kiss Me, Kate and Grey Gardens (2006). He won a Drama Desk Award for Contact (2000). His other Broadway credits include a 1991 revival of The Homecoming, A Small Family Business (1992), On the Waterfront (1995), Steel Pier (1997), Honour (1998), Anna in the Tropics (2003), a 2005 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005), Curtains (2007), Young Frankenstein (2007), Is He Dead? (2007), and a 2009 revival of Waiting for Godot, and he has designed Off-Broadway, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Ruined, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and for Lincoln Center Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Playwrights Horizons, among others, and many regional theatres. Kaczorowski has also designed lighting for numerous opera productions with companies throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, and others, as well as international companies. KAHN, MADELINE (1942–1999). A versatile actress and singer born Madeline Gail Wolfson in Boston, Massachusetts, Kahn is most remembered for her broad, quirky performances in Mel Brooks’s film comedies, Blazing Saddles (1974), for which she received an Academy Award nomination, Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), and History of the World, Part I (1981), as well as the wacky farce What’s Up, Doc? (1972), the period comedy Paper Moon (1973), which also brought her an Oscar nomination, and as Martha Mitchell in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). On Broadway, Kahn had more opportunity to demonstrate her range with performances in Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968 (1968), Two by Two (1970), In the Boom Boom Room (1973), which brought her a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination, On the Twentieth Century (1978), for which she was nominated for a Tony, a 1989 revival of Born Yesterday for which she garnered a Tony

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nomination, and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), for which she won a Tony and Drama Desk Award. Kahn won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1987 for an ABC Afterschool Special. KAHN, MICHAEL (1937– ). A Brooklyn, New York, native educated at the High School for the Performing Arts and Columbia University, Kahn began his directing career in Off-Off Broadway theatres, including a production of JeanClaude van Itallie’s American Hurrah (1966) and The Rimers of Eldritch (1976). On Broadway, Kahn has directed Here’s Where I Belong (1968), The Death of Bessie Smith/The American Dream (1968), revivals of King Henry V in 1969, Othello in 1970, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1974, and The Royal Family* in 1975, for which he won a Drama Desk Award. His other Broadway credits include The Night of the Tribades (1977), Whodunnit (1982), and a 1983 revival of Show Boat for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Kahn was artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theatre and Festival from 1969 to 1974, the McCarter Theatre from 1974 to 1979, The Acting Company from 1978 to 1988, was Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division at the Julliard School from 1992 to 2006 and is artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., a post he took on in 1986. KALEM, T. E. (1919–1985). Born Theodore Eustace Kalem in Malden, Massachusetts, he had a long career as drama critic at Time magazine, beginning in 1961, following completion of his education at Harvard University. Kalem’s writing was much admired and among the most oft-quoted of his lines are “He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have damned” and “The heart is the only broken instrument that works.” KALFIN, ROBERT (1933– ). As Robert Zangwill Kalfin, he was born in the Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish parents. He studied at Alfred University and the Yale School of Drama before beginning a directing career Off-Broadway with a 1959 revival of The Golem. Among his Off-Broadway credits are Henry Zeiger’s Five Days (1965), Gordon Porterfield’s The Universal Nigger (1970), and Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (1972). Kalfin staged Mark Rozovsky’s Strider Off-Broadway in 1979, after which its success led to a Broadway production in 1980 for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Kalfin’s 1977 revival of Happy End brought him Tony Award and Drama Desk nominations. He founded the Chelsea Theatre Center (CTC) in 1965, serving as its artistic director until CTC’s closing in 1983, after which he freelanced as a director, including the Broadway musical, Truly Blessed (1990).

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KANIN, FAY (1917– ). Born Fay Mitchell in New York, Kanin is best known for her work in films as a screenwriter, producer, and as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1979 to 1983. Raised in Elmira, New York, she attended all-women Elmira College and was inspired with a love of the theatre after seeing Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Idiot’s Delight. She married writer Michael Kanin in 1942, and they collaborated on various film projects, including their Academy Award-nominated Teacher’s Pet (1959). Kanin’s Broadway work, which emphasizes her interest in women’s rights, achieved its pinnacle with her first play, Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), which was a hit comedy and, in 1951, a successful film. Kanin had less success with subsequent plays, including His and Hers (1945) and Rashomon (1959), which both had relatively short runs, and her book for the musical The Gay Life (1961). Kanin was nominated for a Tony Award for her book for the musical Grind (1985). She won Emmy Awards for Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974) and Friendly Fire (1978) and has received numerous honors from literary and women’s organizations. See also WOMEN/FEMININITY. KANIN, GARSON (1912–1999). Born in Rochester, New York, Kanin began his long career as a playwright, screenwriter, and director as an actor, appearing in vaudeville* and in such plays as Little Ol’ Boy (1933), Spring Song (1934), Ladies’ Money (1934), Three Men on a Horse (1935), The Body Beautiful (1935), and Star Spangled (1936). He turned to directing on Broadway in 1937 with Hitch Your Wagon, followed by Too Many Heroes later that year. He left the stage for Hollywood after working as George Abbott’s assistant director, but returned to direct his close friend Spencer Tracy in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Rugged Path (1945). As a Broadway director and writer, he scored his greatest hit with Born Yesterday (1946), which was adapted to the screen in 1950. Kanin frequently collaborated with his wife, Ruth Gordon, on various projects, and directed her plays, including Years Ago (1946), The Leading Lady (1948), and A Very Rich Woman (1965). He also directed his own, including The Smile of the World (1949), The Rat Race (1949), The Live Wire (1950), The Good Soup (1960), A Gift of Time (1962), Come on Strong (1962), and Dreyfus in Rehearsal (1974), as well the musical Do Re Mi (1960), for which he wrote the libretto and garnered Tony Award nominations for Best Musical and Best Direction. Among Kanin’s other Broadway directing credits, the most notable include The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), for which he received a Tony nomination, A Hole in the Head (1957), Sunday in New York (1961), and Funny Girl (1964). In collaboration with Gordon, Kanin was nominated for the Academy Award three times, for A Double Life (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat and

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Mike (1952), but they gave up writing together, they noted, for the sake of their marriage. Kanin also wrote novels, stories, and a memoir of their friendship with Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. KANSAS CITY REPERTORY THEATRE (KCRT). Founded in 1964 as a summer repertory by Patricia McIlrath, the theatre, named the Missouri Repertory Theatre, grew in its first decade to a year-round operation on the campus of the University of Missouri-Kansas City (although a separate entity) producing up to eight productions annually. McIlrath retired in 1985 and was succeeded by George Keathley, who served as artistic director for 15 years. Keathley was succeeded by Peter Altman in 2000 who, in turn, was succeeded by Eric Rosen in 2007. In 2004, the MRT changed its name to the Kansas City Repertory Theatre and opened a second space, Copaken Stage, in downtown Kansas City in 2007. KAPROW, ALLAN (1927–2006). An Atlantic City, New Jersey, native, Kaprow was an early performance artist most often credited with pioneering “Happenings” during the 1960s. He studied at New York University and Columbia University, first as a painter. He then studied music with John Cage prior to developing his first “Happenings” in 1959. He ultimately staged over 200 productions with an emphasis on a merger of art and theatre, influenced by figures including Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, and others, as well as aesthetic elements from Asian art and theatre. KARAMU HOUSE.† Founded in Cleveland by Rowena* and Russel Jelliffe,* graduates of Oberlin College, Karamu (Swahili for “a place of enjoyment for all”) House remains the oldest active African American theatre in the United States, although it began its life as a multiracial theatre. Established in 1915, the original facility was destroyed by fire in 1939, but a larger space was built and opened after World War II. Initially called the Gilpin Players in honor of noted black actor Charles Gilpin,* Karamu House focused its efforts around inner-city black life in Cleveland, presenting an annual season of as many as 11 productions, including straight drama, musicals, and occasional operas. During the 1920s and 1930s, six Langston Hughes plays premiered there, and in 1981 there was a movement to establish an African American Equity unit, but it provided impossible. KASZNAR, KURT (1913–1979). Born Kurt Servischer in Vienna, Austria, Kasznar emigrated to America in 1937 to appear in Max Reinhardt’s Broadway production of Franz Werfel’s The Eternal Road. After being drafted into the United States Army in 1941, Kasznar received training as a

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cinematographer and was part of a team that filmed the Japanese surrender in 1945. After World War II, Kasznar returned to a successful acting career in theatre, films, and television. On Broadway, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music (1959). His other Broadway appearances include Crazy with the Heat (1941), Army Play-by-Play (1943), Joy to the World (1948), Make Way for Lucia (1948), Montserrat (1949), The Happy Time (1950), Seventh Heaven (1955), a 1955 revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Look After Lulu (1959). He also originated the roles of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot (1956) and Victor Velasco in Barefoot in the Park (1963). Kasznar was married to actress Leora Dana, and he appeared in numerous films and television shows. KAUFFMANN, STANLEY (1916– ). New York-born drama and film critic, Kauffmann was educated at New York University before beginning his work as a film critic with several publications, most notably The New Republic since 1958, serving as their theatre critic from 1969 to 1979. Among his numerous books, most of which are on movies, are a few related to the stage, including Persons of the Drama (1976), Theatre Criticisms (1984), and Distinguishing Features (1994). An erudite critic, Kauffmann raised hackles with a 1966 article in the New York Times in which he anonymously “outed” gay American dramatists Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee, positing that their dramatic depictions of women were actually acts of “transference,” a means by which the playwrights represented homosexual attitudes in the guise of women characters. Kauffmann taught at several schools, including Yale University, Adelphi University, and the City University of New York, and he was honored with the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 1972. KAUFMAN, GEORGE S. (1889–1961).† This man of the theatre was born George Simon Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and worked for newspapers in Washington, D.C. and New York before teaming with playwright Marc Connelly. Their first play Dulcy* (1921) was a hit and they subsequently collaborated on To the Ladies* (1922), Merton of the Movies* (1922), and Beggar on Horseback* (1924), among others. Throughout his career, Kaufman worked with writing partners. In the late 1920s, he collaborated with Edna Ferber on Minick* (1924), The Royal Family* (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936). Kaufman also directed Broadway plays, most notably The Front Page* (1928), and was widely regarded for his varied talents as writer, director, and play doctor, and his barbed wit as a member of the fabled Algonquin Hotel roundtable. In the 1920s, Kaufman cowrote two Marx Brothers* musicals, The Cocoanuts*

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(1925; with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin) and Animal Crackers* (1928; with Morrie Ryskind*), and with Ryskind, wrote librettos for three musicals in collaboration with George and Ira Gershwin. Strike Up the Band (1930) and Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933) were successful, but their Of Thee I Sing (1931) was the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize. Kaufman cowrote June Moon* (1929) with Ring Lardner* and the libretto for the musical The Band Wagon in 1931, but in 1930 Kaufman’s most enduring partnership, with playwright and director Moss Hart, began with Once in a Lifetime. Their You Can’t Take It with You (1936) won a Pulitzer Prize and their other works include Merrily We Roll Along (1934), I’d Rather Be Right (1937), The Fabulous Invalid (1938), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), The American Way (1939), and George Washington Slept Here (1940). From 1930 to the end of World War II, he directed Flying Colors (1932), Irving Berlin’s Face the Music (1933), Dark Tower (1933, coauthored with Alexander Woollcott*), First Lady (1935; coauthored with Katharine Dayton), Of Mice and Men (1937), Mr. Big (1941), The Land Is Bright (1941; coauthored with Ferber), The Doughgirls (1942), The Naked Genius (1943), Over 21 (1944), and While the Sun Shines (1944). After World War II, Kaufman continued to write and direct with distinction. Among his directing credits, My Sister Eileen (1940), Guys and Dolls (1950), and Romanoff and Juliet (1957) were standouts. No longer working with Hart, he wrote The Late George Apley (1944; with J. P. Marquand), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1953; with Howard Teichmann), and librettos for the musicals, Seven Lively Arts (1944; coauthored with Ben Hecht), Hollywood Pinafore (1945), a revival of Of Thee I Sing (1952), and Silk Stockings (1955). A witty raconteur, Kaufman also became a television personality on various talk and game shows in the early 1950s. KAUFMAN, MOISÉS (1963– ). Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Kaufman moved to New York in 1987 and founded the Tectonic Theatre Company for whom he directed and cowrote Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), 33 Variations (2007), and most notably The Laramie Project (2000), this last focused on the hate-crime murder of gay University of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The Tectonic troupe, under Kaufman’s leadership, went to Laramie and interviewed a cross-section of the local citizenry to create the play from their own words. HBO released a film based on the play in 2002. The play won international acclaim and, in October 2009, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, a “sequel” created by the Tectonic Company following a return visit to Laramie, was performed simultaneously by theatres across the United States on the anniversary of the Shepard murder. Kaufman also directed the

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Pulitzer Prize-winning play, I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, in 2004, for which he won an Obie Award and a Tony Award nomination. Among other projects, Kaufman also adapted and directed Tennessee Williams’s short story One Arm in 2004 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. KAZAN, ELIA (1909–2003). This much-honored, and ultimately controversial, director, actor, and writer, was born Elias Kazanjoglou in Kayseri, Turkey, and emigrated to the United States. As an actor with The Group Theatre during the 1930s, Kazan appeared in Men in White (1933), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Johnny Johnson (1936), and Golden Boy (1937). When he turned to directing, Kazan was associated with some of the most important Broadway dramas of the 1940s through 1960s, including The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1960), winning Tony Awards for the last two. Kazan’s Broadway credits also include Casey Jones (1938), Thunder Rock (1939), One Touch of Venus (1943), Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), Harriet (1944), Deep Are the Roots (1945), Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945), Truckline Café (1946), Love Life (1948), Camino Real (1953), Tea and Sympathy (1953), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), J.B. (1958), After the Fall (1964), and But for Whom Charlie (1964). Kazan brought several of his stage projects to the screen, most notably A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. He won two Academy Awards as Best Director for Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954), and received Oscar nominations for A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden (1955), and America, America (1963). When he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by “naming names” in his testimony in 1952, he met with scorn from some members of his profession, including close colleagues like Arthur Miller. When Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1999, there were protesting voices in the Academy membership, although his work was widely admired. KEACH, STACY (1941– ). Born Walter Stacy Keach, Jr. in Savannah, Georgia to parents in the theatre profession, Keach studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before completing an M.F.A. at the Yale School of Drama and a Fulbright scholarship at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. As an actor, Keach scored his first success in the title role of the Off-Broadway production of MacBird! (1966), winning an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award, and in The Niggerlovers (1967). In 1969, he debuted on Broadway as Buffalo Bill Cody in Arthur Kopit’s Indians, winning a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination. He won Obies in

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1971 and 1973, the latter for his first performance as Hamlet (he played the role in two subsequent productions), which also brought him a Drama Desk Award. He received plaudits for his 1971 performance as Jamie Tyrone in a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Promenade Theatre, for which he won a Drama Desk Award, and in several Shakespearean roles, including Macbeth in 1995 at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre and King Lear at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2006. Keach’s other Broadway performances include revivals of Danton’s Death and The Country Wife in 1965, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1966), and as Edmund in King Lear in 1968. He took on the role of Sidney Bruhl as a replacement in Deathtrap in 1978 and also appeared in Solitary Confinement (1992) and The Kentucky Cycle (1993). In films, he has appeared in Fat City (1972), Luther (1974), That Championship Season (1982), and American History X (1998), and on television he won a Golden Globe Award in the title role of Hemingway (1988), which also brought him an Emmy Award nomination. Keach appeared to critical acclaim as the outrageous alcoholic, womanizing father in the situation comedy Titus from 2000 to 2002 and he is a frequent narrator of PBS-TV and other documentary programs. KEELY AND DU. This controversial and much-produced abortion-themed drama by Jane Martin (Jon Jory’s pseudonym) premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival of New American Plays in March 1993, featuring Anne Pitoniak as Du and Julie Boyd as Keely, under Jory’s direction. Written as a long one-act play, the multiscene play tracks the relationship of Keely, a young woman seeking an abortion, who is imprisoned by a fundamentalist Christian antiabortion advocate, who aims to prevent Keely from succeeding at her goal. A 1994 production at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, inspired New York Times critic Alvin Klein to describe the play as a “sizzling” and “joltingly real play” on the divisive topic. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; SEXUALITY. KELLOGG, MARJORIE BRADLEY (1946– ). A talented scene designer born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kellogg attended Vassar College. She began her Broadway career as an assistant to Ming Cho Lee, Santo Loquasto, and Robin Wagner before designing Circle in the Square revivals of Where’s Charley? in 1974 and Death of a Salesman in 1975. She has been nominated for four Drama Desk Awards for Steaming (1983), a revival of Present Laughter in 1983, Extremities (1983), and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1985). Her numerous Broadway credits include Da (1978), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), Spokesong (1979), a revival of The Father in 1981, Solomon’s Child (1982), a revival of The Misanthrope in 1983, Moose

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Murders (1983), revivals of American Buffalo and Heartbreak House in 1983, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1984, and Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986, A Month of Sundays (1987), Lucifer’s Child (1991), revivals of On Borrowed Time in 1991, The Seagull in 1992, Saint Joan in 1993, and Three Men on a Horse (1993), and Any Given Day (1993). Off-Broadway, Kellogg designed Everybody’s Ruby (1999), A Lesson before Dying (2000), and Thief River (2001). Kellogg has also designed scenery for many regional theatres, teaches design at Colgate University, and has written several science fiction and fantasy novels. She has adapted a children’s play, and her original musical, Livin’ in the Garden, was produced by Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 1997. KELLY, EMMETT (1898–1979). Born Emmett Leo Kelly in Sedan, Kansas, this iconic, legendary circus clown whose “Weary Willie” character was inspired by the hobos of the Great Depression, began his career as an aerial artist before switching to clowning in the 1920s, developing his silent, unsmiling clown in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp.” His most famous routine of attempting to sweep up an uncooperative spotlight enhanced the persona he created of a semi-tragic figure facing life’s vicissitudes with resignation and a touch of hope. After appearing with other circuses, he became a star with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1940s and made appearances in films, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and television. KELLY, GEORGE (1887–1974).† George Edward Kelly, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began his theatrical life as an actor and vaudevillian.* His brother, Walter C. Kelly (1873–1939), was a popular variety performer, and while following in his footsteps, Kelly wrote and acted his own sketches. He shifted permanently to playwriting with The Torch-Bearers* (1922), a satire of amateur theatre, which led to three more satiric comedies, The Show-Off* (1924), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Craig’s Wife* (1925), and Daisy Mayme* (1926), all among the most popular plays of the era with both audiences and critics who responded to his solid craftsmanship and keen observation of human foibles. After Kelly wrote sketches for a revue, A la Carte (1927), his plays failed to find favor. These include Behold the Bridegroom* (1927), Maggie the Magnificent (1929), Philip Goes Forth (1931), The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945), and The Fatal Weakness (1946). Kelly’s Reflected Glory* (1936) served as a successful vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead. Kelly was the uncle of actress Grace Kelly. KELLY, GRACE (1929–1982). The niece of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright George Kelly,* she was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a

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wealthy family who resisted her desire to be an actress. She gained her first notice in a 1949 Broadway revival of August Strindberg’s The Father, starring Raymond Massey and Mady Christians, for which she won a Theatre World Award. She next appeared on Broadway in William Marchant’s To Be Continued (1952), a short-lived comedy directed by Guthrie McClintic. She had appeared in numerous television dramas in the early 1950s and a few film roles, including the part of the Quaker wife of Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952). She was nominated for an Academy Award for Mogambo (1953) and won an Oscar for The Country Girl (1954). She made a few other films, including three classics for director Alfred Hitchcock—Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955)—and a musical version of The Philadelphia Story called High Society (1956)— before she retired from acting to become Princess Grace of Monaco when she married Prince Rainier in 1956. KELLY, JOHN (1954– ). A New Jersey-born performance artist who began his career in New York’s East Village clubs in the early 1980s, Kelly trained as a dancer with the American Ballet Theatre and as a visual artist at the Parson School of Design and the Boston’s Museum of the Fine Arts School. Kelly also studied mime in Paris and aerial work with the Pickle Family Circus, as well as voice with Peter Elkus at the Academia Musicale Ottorino Respighi in Assisi, Italy. Kelly has created over 20 performance art pieces since 1984, including The Skin I’m In (2004), which featured elements inspired by Egon Schiele, Maria Callas, Jean Cocteau, expressionistic* films, and mythology. Kelly appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead (2000) and played Cupid in the American Repertory Theatre’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage in 2005. He won Obie Awards in 1987 for Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte and 1991 for Love of a Poet, as well as numerous grants and fellowships. Kelly’s most recent works include caraViaggio (2007), Dargelos at Bar 13 (2008), Songs for a Shiny Hot Night (2009), Paved Paradise Redux (2008), and The Escape Artist (2009). KELTON, PERT (1907–1968). Born in Great Falls, Montana, this Irish American character actress of stage and screen appeared first in vaudeville,* but ultimately in both musicals and comedies on Broadway beginning in the 1920s. She was nominated for Tony Awards for Greenwillow (1960) and Spofford (1968) late in her career, which had begun in a supporting role in the Marilyn Miller musical Sunny (1925). Her other Broadway appearances include The Five O’Clock Girl (1927), The Dubarry (1932), All in Fun (1940), Guest in the House (1942), Lady, Behave! (1943), The Music Man (1957), Come Blow Your Horn (1961), I Was Dancing (1964), and Minor Miracle

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(1965). In the movies, Kelton made her first appearance in Sally (1929), again with Miller, and recreated her Broadway role as Widow Paroo in The Music Man in 1962. She appeared regularly on radio and was briefly the original Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners on television, but the McCarthy-era blacklisting of her husband, Ralph Bell, cost her the role. KENNEDY, ADRIENNE (1931– ). A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kennedy was born Adrienne Hawkins and she grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, prior to attending Ohio State University, Columbia University, and the American Theatre Wing. Her first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962), is perhaps her best-known work and won an Obie Award when produced at the Circle in the Square in 1964. Like much of Kennedy’s work, Funnyhouse of a Negro merges realistic and surreal elements to create a nightmarish sphere depicting a character’s inner turmoil, in this case a young woman contemplating suicide because she cannot accept her mixed racial identity. Kennedy’s subsequent works, many of which are semi-autobiographical and focus on questions of identity for African American women and racial and cultural politics, include The Owl Answers (1965), A Rat’s Mass (1966), The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (1967), A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), A Lancashire Lad (1980), Ohio State Murders (1992), The Alexander Plays . . . Suzanne in Stages (1995). Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1995), coauthored with her son Adam, won an Obie. Also with her son she wrote Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles (2008). At the time of Kennedy’s emergence as a dramatist, New York Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism—LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] and Ed Bullins at times have something different going on but even their symbolism is straightforward stuff—Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry.” KENNEDY, ARTHUR (1914–1990). Born John Arthur Kennedy in Worcester, Massachusetts, he studied at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. He was “discovered” by screen star James Cagney, who encouraged his casting in the film City for Conquest (1940), and subsequently Kennedy built a long career in films and theatre. On Broadway, Kennedy had a long association with the works of Arthur Miller, winning a Tony Award as Biff Loman in the original production of Death of a Salesman (1949), and appearing as Chris Keller in All My Sons (1947), John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and Walter Franz in The Price (1968). His other Broadway roles include Everywhere I Roam (1938), Life and Death of an American (1939),

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An International Incident (1940), See the Jaquar (1952), Time Limit! (1956), The Loud Red Patrick (1956), Becket (1961), and Veronica’s Room (1973). Among his more than 70 films, Kennedy was nominated for Academy Awards for Champion (1949), Bright Victory (1951), which brought him a New York Film Critics Circle Award, Trial (1955), for which he won a Golden Globe Award, Peyton Place (1957), and Some Came Running (1958), and he also appeared in High Sierra (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), The Glass Menagerie (1950), The Desperate Hours (1955), Elmer Gantry (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and Nevada Smith (1966). Kennedy also appeared in numerous television dramas. He was the father of actress Laurie Kennedy. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. See JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. KENNEDY’S CHILDREN. Robert Patrick’s two-act drama, which began its stage life at Playwrights Horizons on 30 May 1973, opened on Broadway on 3 November 1975 at the John Golden Theatre for 72 performances under the direction of Clive Donner, with scene design by Santo Loquasto. Set in 1974 in a bar in New York’s Lower East Side, the six-character play is essentially a series of loosely connected monologues in which the characters express their dashed hopes and dreams in the decade following President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, capturing a lost generation including a drug-addled Vietnam War veteran, a political radical, a vulnerable blonde, and others. Shirley Knight won a Tony Award for her performance, but the play was not fully appreciated in its original production, although it has come to be recognized as a vivid depiction of the turbulence of the 1960s. KENTUCKY CYCLE, THE. Robert Schenkkan’s cycle of nine related one-act plays tracking three Appalachian families between 1775 and 1975 began its stage life with workshops at the Mark Taper Forum (MTF) in 1988 and 1989 prior to a staging at Seattle, Washington’s Intiman Theatre in 1991 and a revised version, again at the MTF, in 1992, where it won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award and a Pulitzer Prize, the first ever given to a play staged outside New York. Following a run at the Kennedy Center, The Kentucky Cycle moved to Broadway on 14 November 1993 for a mere 33 performances at the Royale Theatre. Despite a strong cast including Stacy Keach and Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations as Best Play, along with Tony nominations for cast members Gregory Itzin and Jeanne Paulson, the play failed to find an audience in New York.

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KERR, JEAN (1922–2003). Born Bridget Jean Collins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she attended Marywood College before seeking a Master’s degree at the Catholic University of America, where she met her future husband, Broadway drama critic Walter Kerr. They married in 1943 and raised a family in Larchmont, New York, where in collaboration with her husband she wrote a few unsuccessful plays, including The Song of Bernadette (1946) and Jenny Kissed Me (1948), as well as sketches for musical revues,* including Touch and Go (1949) and John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953). Kerr had a modest success with the farcical satire King of Hearts (1954), which was directed by her husband, and wrote a highly popular semi-autobiographical book lampooning life in the suburbs, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), which was subsequently adapted to the screen starring Doris Day and David Niven in 1960. The following year, Kerr collaborated again with her husband on the libretto for the musical Goldilocks (1958) before branching out on her own to write several successful Broadway plays, most notably the comedy Mary, Mary (1961), which became the longest-running non-musical of the time. Her other less successful plays include Poor Richard (1964), Finishing Touches (1973), and Lunch Hour (1980). KERR, WALTER (1913–1996). This admired drama critic was born Walter Francis Kerr in Evanston, Illinois, where he received both B.A. and M.A. degrees from Northwestern University. While teaching speech and drama at the Catholic University of America, he met his future wife, Bridget Jean Collins, later known as Jean Kerr, and they married in 1943, later collaborating on several theatrical projects including writing sketches for the musical revue* Touch and Go (1949) and the libretto for the musical Goldilocks (1958). Kerr also directed several productions, including his wife’s play, King of Hearts (1954). Kerr wrote dramatic criticism for Commonweal before becoming critic for the New York Herald Tribune in 1951, moving to the New York Times in 1966. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1978 and continued at the Times until 1983. In 1990, Broadway’s Ritz Theatre was renamed in Kerr’s honor. His tastes were largely those of the mainstream Broadway audience of his generation during the post-World War II era, and he was slow to accept changes; for example, he dismissed Stephen Sondheim’s early works. He published several books, including collections of his criticism, such as Journey to the Center of the Theatre (1979). KERZ, LEO (1912–1976). Born in Berlin, Germany, Kerz became a scene and lighting designer after studying with Bertolt Brecht and working as an assistant designer for Erwin Piscator. He fled Berlin at the rise of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s and ultimately emigrated to the United States in

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1942 after working in several European capitals and founding the Pioneer Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa. Once in America, he again worked with Piscator and began designing lighting on Broadway for Flamingo Road (1946) and Christopher Blake (1946), among others, before designing all aspects of Open House (1947). His scenic, lighting, and occasionally costume designs were seen in productions, including Katharine Cornell’s revival of Antony and Cleopatra in 1947, A Long Way from Home (1948), Me and Molly (1948), Bravo! (1948), For Heaven’s Sake, Mother! (1948), The Biggest Thief in Town (1949), Edwina Black (1950), The Sacred Flame (1952), Whistler’s Grandmother (1952), Hit the Trail (1954), Moonbirds (1959), a flop he also produced and directed), Rhinoceros (1961), which he also produced, Hidden Stranger (1963), Dance of Death (1971), and Children of the Wind (1973). He also worked as production designer for several films, including The Goddess (1958) and Middle of the Night (1959). KEY LARGO. Maxwell Anderson’s realistic two-act blank-verse play with a prologue, a departure from a string of Anderson’s historical dramas, set a battle of good against evil in Spain and in a Key West, Florida, resort, where a gangster and his henchman hold several people hostage during a hurricane. The play opened on 27 November 1939 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it ran for 105 performances under Guthrie McClintic’s direction, with scene designs by Jo Mielziner. The play starred Paul Muni as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who deserted under fire and redeems himself by sacrificing his life to defend the family of a true war hero, with José Ferrer, Uta Hagen, and Karl Malden in the large supporting cast. A 1948 film version, starring Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Claire Trevor, and Lionel Barrymore* significantly changed Anderson’s play in a rewrite by director John Huston and Richard Brooks, focusing on the post-World War II era. KILEY, RICHARD (1922–1999). Chicago, Illinois, native Richard Paul Kiley attended Loyola University of Chicago and the Barnum Dramatic School, after which he worked as a radio announcer in New York. Following service in the United States Navy during World War II, Kiley toured as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) prior to appearing on Broadway in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance in 1953, winning a Theatre World Award. He demonstrated his versatility appearing that same year in the musical Kismet (1953). He won two Tony Awards for his performances in the musicals Redhead (1959) and Man of La Mancha (1965), in which he introduced “The Impossible Dream.” Kiley was also nominated for Tonys for Richard Rodgers’s No Strings (1962) and in a 1987

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revival of All My Sons, as well as a Drama Desk Award nomination for a 1976 revival of The Heiress. Kiley’s other Broadway credits include Time Limit! (1956), Advise & Consent (1960), I Had a Ball (1964), Her First Roman (1968), The Incomparable Max (1971), Voices (1972), and Absurd Person Singular (1974). Kiley appeared in numerous films, including The Little Prince (1974), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), and Patch Adams (1998), and on television he won Emmy Awards and Golden Globe Awards for The Thorn Birds (1983) and A Year in the Life in 1988 and an Emmy for Picket Fences in 1994, as well as several nominations, and he frequently narrated TV documentaries. KILLER JOE. Tracy Lett’s two-act comedy-drama about a trailer park family mixed up with a hired killer, opened at Chicago’s Next Lab Theatre in 1993 prior to a 1998 SoHo Playhouse production starring Amanda Plummer and Scott Glenn. The play’s Gothic horror mixed with humor reminded critics of Tobacco Road and the full-frontal nudity and over-the-top violence disturbed some critics and audiences. Despite the controversial elements, the play has been widely produced in the United States and Europe. KILTY, JEROME (1922– ). Born Jerome Timothy Kilty on the Pala Indian Reservation in California, he worked successfully as an actor, director, and playwright, often with his wife, Cavada Humphrey. As an actor, Kilty’s Broadway credits include revivals of The Relapse in 1950, Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1953, and Misalliance in 1953, A Pin to See the Peepshow (1953), The Frogs of Spring (1953), Quadrille (1955), a revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1984, and Mastergate (1989). As a dramatist, his best-known work, Dear Liar (1957), is a two-character play drawn from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Kilty and his wife had toured in the play, but when it came to Broadway Kilty directed Katharine Cornell (in her last stage appearance) and Brian Aherne in the roles. Also for Broadway, Kilty adapted Jean-Claude Carrière’s The Little Black Book (1972) and wrote Look Away (1973), based on a book about Mary Todd Lincoln, but both flopped. In 1991, Kilty won a Joseph Jefferson Award for a revival of The Iceman Cometh at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, and he appeared in several television dramas during the 1950s. KIM, WILLA (1930?– ). Los Angeles, California-born Kim studied at the California Institute of the Arts and became a celebrated costume designer after working as an assistant to Raoul Pène du Bois, winning Tony Awards for Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and The Will Rogers Follies (1991) and Tony nominations for Goodtime Charley (1975), Dancin’ (1978), Song and Dance

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(1986), and Legs Diamond (1989). Kim also won Drama Desk Awards for Operation Sidewinder (1970), the Off-Broadway productions of Promenade (1970) and The Screens (1972). Although many of her designs have been for musicals and ballet (including the American Ballet Theatre, Elliot Feld Ballet, and the Joffrey Ballet), she designed a range of plays on Broadway, including Have I Got a Girl for You! (1963), Malcolm (1966), Hail Scrawdyke! (1966), a 1972 revival of Lysistrata, Jumpers (1974), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Front Page* in 1986, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), Tommy Tune Tonight! (1992), a 1994 revival of Grease, and Victor/Victoria (1995). Kim was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, received the Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, and won a 1981 Emmy Award for Great Performances: Dance in America. KING, BRUCE (195?– ). A Native American of the Turtle clan of the Haudenosaunee-Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, King studied at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, NAES College in Chicago, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Santa Fe Community College. He turned to playwriting following three years in the United States Army in Vietnam. His semi-autobiographical play Dustoff (1982), which premiered at the Westside Mainstage in New York, depicts a young man drafted from an Indian reservation who recounts the atrocities he observed in the Vietnam War but was unable to stop. In more recent years, King has premiered his newest works at the Thunderbird Theatre at the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, including Evening at the Warbonnet (1990) and Threads (2001). KING, DENNIS (1897–1971). Born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England as Dennis Pratt, King appeared in London productions beginning with Monsieur Beaucaire in 1919, but emigrated to the United States in 1921. On Broadway, he appeared in a range of dramas, operettas,* and musicals, often as aristocratic heroes or villains, including Claire de Lune (1921), Back to Methuselah (1922), revivals of Romeo and Juliet in 1923 and Antony and Cleopatra in 1924, Rose-Marie (1924), The Vagabond King (1925), The Three Musketeers (1928), revivals of Peter Ibbetson in 1931 and Show Boat in 1932, Richard of Bordeaux (1934), Petticoat Fever (1935), Parnell (1936), Frederika (1937), a 1937 revival of A Doll’s House opposite Ruth Gordon, I Married an Angel (1938), Lorelei (1938), a 1942 revival of The Three Sisters with Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Judith Anderson, The Searching Wind (1944), Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945), a 1946 revival of He Who Gets Slapped, and The Haven (1946). He replaced John Gielgud in the

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Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Medea in 1948, and appeared in a 1950 revival of The Devil’s Disciple, Billy Budd (1951), a 1951 revival of Music in the Air, The Strong Are Lonely (1953), Lunatics and Lovers (1954), A Day By the Sea (1955), Affair of Honor (1956), Shangri-La (1956), The Hidden River (1957), The Greatest Man Alive (1957), Love and Libel (1960), Photo Finish (1963), Minor Miracle (1965), The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Portrait of a Queen (1968), in which he played Benjamin Disraeli, and A Patriot for Me (1969), which brought him a Tony Award nomination. On screen, the suave King debuted in 1930 recreating his stage role in the operetta The Vagabond King and also appeared with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in The Devil’s Brother (1933), but his appearances were infrequent, including Between Two Worlds (1944), The Miracle (1959), and Some Kind of a Nut (1969). King appeared frequently in television dramas beginning in the late 1940s. He was the father of actors Dennis King, Jr. and John Michael King. KING, WOODIE, JR. (1937– ). A native of Baldwin Springs, Alabama, King graduated from high school in Detroit, Michigan, after which he worked for the Ford Motor Company before founding the Concept East Theatre in Detroit in 1960. He later moved to New York and founded the New Federal Theatre in 1970, producing and directing over 180 productions by black dramatists, including Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Ntozake Shange. King also established the National Black Touring Circuit in 1974. King received a 1997 Obie Award for sustained achievement, the 2003 Paul Robeson Award, and the 2005 Rosetta LeNoire Award, and he wrote several books on black drama in the United States. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. KINGSLEY, SIDNEY (1906–1995). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Kingsley was educated at Cornell University where his interests in theatre inspired him to write one-act plays for the campus dramatic society. He began his professional career as an actor, but within a few years his first major Broadway play, Men in White (1933), a three-act drama about the conflict between an idealistic intern and his wealthy fiancée who fails to appreciate his dedication, was produced by The Group Theatre at the Broadhurst Theatre where it scored a critical and commercial hit. Men in White won a Pulitzer Prize, but it was two years before the methodical, thoughtful Kingsley offered another play. Dead End (1935), which proved to be his most enduring work and is one of the most emblematic plays of the Great Depression. Its highly naturalistic depiction of the impact of the socioeconomic strains of the era on the lives of both rich and poor, Dead End, like

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much of Kingsley’s work, springs from his left-wing political sentiments and his compassionate interest in human intimacies set against the unstoppable flow of cultural change. Kingsley revisited these dominant themes later in his career in the hit drama Detective Story (1949), a realistic portrait of a day in a police station depicting the human toll of a policeman’s overzealous pursuit of justice. Among Kingsley’s subsequent works, he had two costly failures he produced and directed: Ten Million Ghosts (1936), a pacifist drama pitting an idealistic poet against a munitions salesman, and The World We Make (1939), adapted from Millen Brand’s novel, The Outward Room, which focused on the attempts of a mentally ill man to pursue a normal existence. Kingsley’s dramatic fortune recovered with his acclaimed drama, The Patriots (1943), which focused on the political differences of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the formative years of the United States. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was lauded for its exploration of the rise of Jeffersonian democratic values in the midst of World War II. Kingsley won another New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Darkness at Noon (1951), an antiCommunist melodrama* adapted from an Arthur Koestler novel about the execution of a party loyalist for “political divergences.” The character recalls his involvement in Josef Stalin’s purges and, as he goes to his execution, apologizes to those murdered in the name of Communism and repudiates his belief in Marxist principles. Produced by the Playwrights’ Company at the height of anti-Communist fervor in the United States, Darkness at Noon won critical and audience approval. Surprisingly, Kingsley’s next play, Lunatics and Lovers (1954), was a broad comedy about a Broadway operator, and it won modest approval, but his final play, Night Life (1962), which he produced and directed, was a return to naturalistic drama in its presentation of an assortment of characters in a café who reflect on the complications of their lives. Kingsley, a longtime president of the Dramatists Guild, remained active in theatrical matters until late in his life, and although few of his plays are revived, he is remembered as one of the socially conscious dramatists who best captured the collisions of high-minded idealism and the sociopolitical realities of the 1930s. KIRBY, MICHAEL (1931–1997). Born in California, Kirby studied at Princeton University, Boston University, and New York University, becoming a professor of drama at the latter with a deep interest in alternative theatre. He edited The Drama Review from 1969 to 1986, stressing that theatre events, no matter how temporal or visual, should be documented. He authored major books on the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s, including Happenings (1965), The Art of Time (1969), and Futurist Performance (1971).

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KIRKLAND, JACK (1902–1969). Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Kirkland was a Broadway producer and writer. Among his 10 productions, Kirkland had his greatest success with his adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road (1933), which, in its original production, ran for an extraordinary 3,182 performances (eight years) on Broadway. He had a moderate success with I Must Love Someone (1939), coauthored by Leyle Georgie, which fictionalized the phenomenon of the Florodora Girls, a famous double sextet of singing beauties from the 1899 British musical, Florodora. Kirkland was less successful with his other written works, including his adaptation of John Steinbeck‘s Tortilla Flat (1938), Suds in Your Eye (1944), Mr. Adam (1949), and Mandingo (1961). Kirkland also supplied Hollywood with several stories and screenplays, none of particular note. KISS AND TELL. F. Hugh Herbert’s three-act comedy opened on 17 March 1943 at the Biltmore Theatre for 956 performances under George Abbott’s direction. In the play, two teenage girls, Corliss Archer and Mildred Pringle, set their families at odds because they have been selling kisses for charity. When Corliss’s brother, Lenny, a soldier, elopes with Mildred, he compels his sister to keep the secret. When Mildred becomes pregnant, Corliss tries to be helpful and is seen leaving the doctor’s office by Mildred’s mother, who jumps to the wrong conclusion. The comparatively innocent family conflicts amused critics and audiences during the war years. Joan Caulfield and Richard Widmark had their first successes in Kiss and Tell. Shirley Temple played Corliss in the 1945 film version of the play, which proved so popular that it inspired a sequel, A Kiss for Corliss (1949). KISS THE BOYS GOOD-BYE. Clare Boothe’s three-act comedy opened in a Brock Pemberton production on 28 September 1938 at Henry Miller’s Theatre for 286 performances under the direction of Antoinette Perry. The satiric comedy lampooned Hollywood’s highly publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. In the play, movie producers are seeking a new face to play Velvet O’Toole in a Civil War novel, with attention centering on a Georgia Southern belle, Cindy Lou Bethany, played by Helen Claire. In a 1941 film version a young Mary Martin played Cindy Lou. KISSEL, HOWARD (1942– ). Born Howard William Kissel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this drama critic and author was educated at Columbia University and Northwestern University prior to writing for several newspapers, most notably Women’s Wear Daily, for whom he wrote about the arts, including reviews of music, films, books, and theatre beginning in the

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1970s and continuing to 1986, when he became drama critic for the New York Daily News. He compiled and edited Stella Adler: The Art of Acting (2000) and authored David Merrick: The Abominable Showman, The Unauthorized Biography (2000) and New York Theatre Walks: Seven Historical Tours from Times Square to Greenwich Village and Beyond (2007). KITCHEN, THE. Woody and Steina Vasulka founded this not-for-profit arts organization with an interdisciplinary mission in 1971 with the goal of providing a performance space housed originally in the kitchen of New York’s Mercer Arts Hotel for avant-garde and alternative theatre writers, actors, dancer, and performance artists, among whom at various times were Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Vito Acconci, Constance de Jong, Gary Hill, Kiki Smith, Charles Atlas, Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Streb, and Bill T. Jones. KLINE, KEVIN (1947– ). Born in St. Louis, Missouri, as Kevin Delaney Kline, he attended Indiana University and the Juilliard School, where, along with Patti LuPone and David Ogden Stiers, they formed the nucleus of the City Center Acting Company (later known as The Acting Company), which traveled the United States with a repertory of plays, including revivals of The Three Sisters, The Beggar’s Opera, Measure for Measure, Scapin, all in 1973, and the original musical The Robber Bridegroom (1975), and revivals of Edward II and The Time of Your Life, both in 1975, all of which brought him and his fellow players significant acclaim. Branching out on his own beginning in 1976, Kline won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award in the musical On the Twentieth Century (1978). He won both awards again in 1981 for a revival of The Pirates of Penzance, and in 2004 he won a Drama Desk Award and was Tony-nominated for a New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) production of Henry IV. Kline was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award twice for Hamlet in 1986 and 1991 (he also directed the 1991 production, garnering a Drama Desk nomination for his direction), The Tempest in 1996, and Cyrano de Bergerac in 2008 (a PBS-TV broadcast brought him an Emmy Award nomination). Kline’s other Broadway appearances include Loose Ends (1979), revivals of Arms and the Man in 1985 and Ivanov in 1997. Among his performances for the NYSF, Kline appeared in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in 2001, costarring with Meryl Streep, with whom he also appeared in Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children for the NYSF, and in 2007 he was acclaimed in a NYSF revival of King Lear. In films, Kline won an Academy Award for A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and he was nominated

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for Golden Globe Awards for Sophie’s Choice (1982), Soapdish (1991), Dave (1993), In & Out (1997), and De-Lovely (2004). His other movies include The Big Chill (1983), Cry Freedom (1987), I Love You to Death (1990), Chaplin (1992), French Kiss (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Wild Wild West (1999), A Prairie Home Companion (2006), and As You Like It (2006). Kline, who is married to actress Phoebe Cates, was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2004. KLOTZ, FLORENCE (1920–2006). Born Kathrina E. Klotz in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the Parsons School of Design and took a job painting fabrics for Brooks Costumes. In 1951, Klotz began to work as assistant to costume designer Irene Sharaff on the musical The King and I. On her own, she won six Tony Awards, all for Broadway musicals, including Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Grind (1985), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), and a 1995 revival of Show Boat, but she designed all manner of plays, including Never Too Late (1962), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), The Owl and the Pussycat (1964), Paris Is Out! (1970), Norman, Is That You? (1970), Dreyfus in Rehearsal (1974), Harold and Maude (1980), Goodbye Fidel (1980), a revival of The Little Foxes (1981), as well as the musicals Side by Side by Sondheim (1977), A Doll’s Life (1982), Jerry’s Girls (1985), Rags (1986), and City of Angels (1989), the last bringing Klotz a Tony nomination, among others. Klotz was the domestic partner of producer Ruth Mitchell. KOMISARJEVSKY, THEODORE (1882–1954). As Fyodor Fyodorovich Komissarzhevsky, he was born in Venice, Italy, the son of an opera singer. His sister, Vera, became a major Russian actress and he turned to the study of architecture, although he was lured to the theatre by his sister to stage productions at her theatre. He worked closely with theatrical visionary Nikolai Evreinov and evolved a notion of a “theatre of all the arts”—a synthetic approach aimed at merging the play’s “inner rhythm, spirit and ideology.” In 1910, Komisarjevsky established his own studio in Moscow and after the Russian Revolution was appointed director of the Bolshoi Theatre, but within a short time he left Russia for England, where he won acclaim staging Anton Chekhov’s plays. He married actress Peggy Ashcroft and lectured at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, winning further acclaim for his staging of Shakespeare’s plays in the 1930s, most notably Macbeth in 1933 and King Lear in 1936. As early as the 1920s, he worked in the United States, directing three Theatre Guild productions, The Lucky One (1922), The Tidings Brought to Mary (1922), and a revival of Peer Gynt in 1923, and his other Broadway productions

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included Maitresse De Roi (1926), Revenge with Music (1934), Escape Me Never (1935), which he also designed, Russian Bank (1940), Andrea Chenier (1947), and his acclaimed revival of Crime and Punishment in 1947, starring John Gielgud and Lillian Gish. Komisarjevsky also directed the 1928 film Yellow Stockings. He emigrated permanently to the United States in 1939 and established the Komisarjevsky Theatre Studio in New York, taught at Yale University, directed productions for the New York City Opera Company in the late 1940s, and he wrote Theatrical Preludes (1916), Costume of the Theatre (1931), and The Theatre and a Changing Civilization (1935). See also INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES. KONDOLEON, HARRY (1955–1994). Winner of an Obie Award as the “most promising young playwright” in 1983, Kondoleon’s promising career was cut short due to his death from AIDS at age 39. Born in Forest Hills, New York, he attended Hamilton College and the Yale School of Drama. Kondoleon won several fellowships and his highly imaginative plays, sometimes compared to those of Luigi Pirandello, include The Brides (1980), The Cote d’Azur Triangle (1980), Rococco (1981), Self-Torture and Strenuous Exercise (1982), Andrea Rescued (1982), Clara Toil (1982), The Fairy Garden (1982), Christmas on Mars (1983), Slacks and Tops (1983), Linda Her (1984), The Vampires (1984), Anteroom (1985), Play Yourself (1988), The Poet’s Corner (1988), Zero Positive (1988), Love Diatribe (1990), The Houseguests (1992), which won an Obie Award, Half Off (1993), and Saved or Destroyed (1994). Kondoleon also wrote two novels, The Whore of Tjampuan (1988) and Diary of a Lost Boy (1994), and a collection of poetry, The Death of Understanding (1987). At his death, Village Voice critic Charles McNulty wrote that Kondoleon “was a playwright constitutionally incapable of playing by the rules.” KOPIT, ARTHUR (1937– ). As Arthur Lee Kopit, he was born in New York and attended Harvard University, where he wrote his first plays. His Off-Broadway production, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1962) won a Vernon Rice Award. Subsequent plays reflecting the versatility of his writing include three works nominated for Tony Awards: Indians (1969), Wings (1979), and the libretto for the musical Nine (1982). Kopit’s other plays include Don Juan in Texas (1957), Gemini (1957), The Questioning of Nick (1957), On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next (1957), Across the River and Into the Jungle (1958), Aubade (1958), Sing to Me Through Open Windows (1959), Chamber Music (1962), Asylum (1963), The Conquest of Everest (1964), The

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Hero (1964), The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis (1964), What’s Happened to the Thorne’s House (1972), Louisiana Territory (1975), Secrets of the Rich (1976), Good Help is Hard to Find (1981), an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1982, End of the World with Symposium to Follow (1984), Bone-the-Fish (1989), Road to Nirvana (1991), Success (1991), Phantom (1992), High Society (1998), Y2K (1999), Chad Curtis, Lost Again (2001), Because He Can (2006), and Myth America (2007). Kopit has taught at Wesleyan University, Yale University, and the City College of New York. KORDER, HOWARD (1957– ). New York-born playwright and screenwriter Korder studied at the State University of New York at Binghamton before beginning his writing career. In theatre, he is best known for his play Boy’s Life (1988), a cynical coming-of-age drama about contemporary men compared to the works of David Mamet and nominated for a Drama Desk Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His subsequent plays include Search and Destroy (1990), which had a brief Broadway run. Korder’s other plays have been produced Off-Broadway or in regional theatres, including full-length and one-act works such as Night Maneuver (1982), The Middle Kingdom (1985), Lip Service (1985), Episode 26 (1985), Fun (1987), Nobody (1987), The Lights (1993), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and won an Obie Award, and Sea of Tranquility (2004). Korder has also written for film, including The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999), Stealing Sinatra (2003), and Lakeview Terrace (2008), as well as several television scripts, including episodes of the TV series Kate & Allie in 1987. KRAMER, LARRY (1935– ). Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer attended Yale University, where he struggled with a painful “coming out” experience, including a suicide attempt. Upon graduating with an English degree, Kramer began his career rewriting scripts for Columbia Pictures and, later, United Artists, garnering an Academy Award nomination for his script for Women in Love (1969) and he also wrote the screenplay for the musical adaptation of Lost Horizon (1973). Increasing engaged in political activism in the gay community, Kramer’s 1978 novel, Faggots, met with controversy due to its condemnation of what Kramer depicted as the shallow promiscuity of the homosexual community. Kramer’s political activism grew tenfold with the appearance of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, and he was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a major organization with the goal of assisting those stricken with AIDS. Kramer denounced the government and the media for apathy and bureaucratic paralysis, and was equally critical of the gay community for denial of the seriousness of the disease and its potential for

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worldwide catastrophe. His attitudes were expressed vividly in his semiautobiographical drama The Normal Heart (1985), which won both critical acclaim and controversy for militant attacks on government, media, and the medical profession. Kramer founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987 to continue his protest of the slow pace of response to AIDS and other gay issues. Kramer’s satire, Just Say No: A Play about a Farce (1988), which assailed President Ronald Reagan and his family, New York mayor Ed Koch, and other government officials Kramer accused of failing to respond to AIDS, met with critical derision, but Susan Sontag said of it, “Larry Kramer is one of America’s most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice.” Kramer published a collection of his writings on the AIDS crisis called Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist (1989; expanded in 1994) and his The Normal Heart sequel, The Destiny of Me (1992), similarly focused on Kramer the activist. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and continued the story of Kramer’s dramatic alter ego, Ned Weeks, on a personal journey to understand his own past and the roots of his activism. The play won two Obie Awards. More recently, Kramer published The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2004) in response to his anger at the reelection of President George W. Bush, and he continues work on a massive study, The American People, as yet unpublished. Since The Destiny of Me, Kramer has not written again for the theatre, but he was presented with an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. KRAPP, HERBERT J. (1887–1973). This New York-born theatre architect and designer began his career as an apprentice with Herts* & Tallant, where he was involved in designing plans for several Broadway theatre buildings, including the Lyceum, Booth, New Amsterdam, and Longacre theatres before he left the firm in 1915. He had begun working for the Shubert Brothers* in 1912, becoming their primary architect and designing the Shubert Theatre. Krapp’s influence on Broadway architecture is incalculable. He was involved in redesigning the Winter Garden Theatre and the Helen Hayes Theatre and designed such theatres known in 2009 as the Ambassador, the Brooks Atkinson, the Ethel Barrymore, the Biltmore, the Bernard B. Jacobs, the Broadhurst, the John Golden, the Imperial, the Majestic, the Eugene O’Neill, the Richard Rodgers, the Gerald Schoenfeld, and the Neil Simon. He also designed the Morosco Theatre, which was torn down in 1982, and the Ed Sullivan Theatre (previously known as Hammerstein’s Theatre), the Forest Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Folly Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri, as well as the building housing Sardi’s Restaurant on 44th Street in New York.

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KRASNA, NORMAN (1909–1984). Born in Corona, Queens, New York, Krasna completed his education at New York University, Columbia University, and Brooklyn Law School before writing for various newspapers and doing publicity work for Warner Bros. Krasna’s first Broadway play, Louder, Please (1931), won mostly approving response from critics and audiences and it was followed by another moderate success, Small Miracle (1934). Krasna also began writing screenplays in this period and received an Academy Award nomination for Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) starring Spencer Tracy. Krasna’s other 1930s films include The Richest Girl in the World (1934) and The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), both of which garnered him Academy Award nominations for Best Screenplay. Despite other screen successes, Krasna frequently returned to the stage and in 1941 he directed his play The Man with Blonde Hair, which was a moderate success. Two years later he scripted and directed the film Princess O’Rourke (1943), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He continued to write numerous plays and screenplays after World War II, achieving his greatest stage successes with Dear Ruth (1944), a wartime comedy about a teenager who writes letters to a lonely soldier using her older sister’s name and photo, and John Loves Mary (1947), another lighthearted wartime comedy about a soldier marrying his best friend’s English girlfriend in order to bring her to the United States, with the resultant romantic complications. Both plays were also made into popular films scripted by Krasna. His subsequent plays include Kind Sir (1953), Sunday in New York (1961), Love in E Flat (1967), and We Interrupt This Program (1975). KRASS, MICHAEL (1955– ). Connecticut native Krass attended William and Mary College and began his Broadway career as a costume designer with a 1996 Roundabout Theatre revival of The Rehearsal, which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, as did his 1996 Off-Broadway designs for a revival of Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Krass received a 2006 Tony Award nomination for his costumes for a Broadway revival of The Constant Wife, and his other Broadway designs include a revival of A View from the Bridge in 1997, Getting and Spending (1998), revivals of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999, The Lion in Winter in 1999, and Hedda Gabler in 2001, An Almost Holy Picture (2002), revivals of The Man Who Had All the Luck in 2002 and After the Fall in 2004, Match (2004), Reckless (2004), revivals of 12 Angry Men and ’night, Mother in 2004, After the Night and the Music (2005), and After Miss Julie (2009). Krass also designed for the Williamstown Theatre Festival over a 10-year period and has worked closely with particular directors, including Michael Mayer, Mark Brokaw, Scott Ellis, and Nicholas Martin.

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KROLL, JACK (1926–2000). A noted drama critic, Kroll was born in New York as John Kroll, son of a radio personality and an Earl Carroll* showgirl. He graduated from City College of New York and served in the United States Army during the Korean War. He worked as a copy editor for Benton & Bowles Advertising and as an art critic for Art News, which led to his move to Newsweek magazine in 1963, first as art critic and editor before he moved into reviewing drama. He championed certain playwrights, most notably Sam Shepard, and applauded experimentation. Kroll was instrumental in convincing Newsweek to include bylines on arts reviews, which had not been their policy. He won a National Magazine Award in 1973 for an issue of Newsweek devoted to “Arts in America,” which he edited, and he won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 1980. Near the end of his life, Kroll raised hackles with his insistence that video games were not art. His style was simple and direct. On the passing of dancing legend Fred Astaire, Kroll memorably wrote, “Wrap up the 20th century; Fred Astaire is gone.” KRON, LISA (1961– ). Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kron attended Kalamazoo College before becoming a founding member of the Five Lesbian Brothers in 1989. As a solo performer/writer, Kron established herself after 1984 and won critical approval with such works as 101 Humiliating Stories (1993) and 2.5 Minute Ride (1996), semi-autobiographical monologues marked by witty humor, as is her play, Well (2004), which premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre prior to a 2006 Broadway run, which brought Kron a Tony Award nomination. Her dramatic philosophy may be best summed up in her explanation of 2.5 Minute Ride, which merges a trip she took with her German-born father to Auschwitz, where his parents were exterminated, and the annual family trip to a theme park: “Humor and horror are juxtaposed and you might not know for a second whether you are at Auschwitz or an amusement park. The show does not tell you when to laugh and when to become solemn. The response is up to you.” KRONENBERGER, LOUIS (1904–1980). A respected drama critic, Kronenberger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied at the University of Cincinnati. He moved to New York in 1924 and worked as an editor at Boni and Liveright, Alfred A. Knopf, and Fortune magazine before becoming drama critic for Time magazine in 1938, continuing in the post until 1961, and for PM magazine from 1940 to 1948. Noted for his stylish writing, Kronenberger also adapted Jean Anouilh’s Mademoiselle Colombe (1954), which was produced on Broadway. He edited the Best Play series from 1952 to 1961, and he taught at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1970. He wrote or edited numerous books, including his own memoir, No Whippings, No Gold Watches

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(1970), as well as The Thread of Laughter (1952) and edited collections of the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and George Bernard Shaw and a Cavalcade of Comedy (1953) and a 1976 study of Oscar Wilde. KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD (1893–1970).† A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Krutch was educated at the University of Tennessee and completed a Ph.D. at Columbia University. He served in the United States Army during World War I and spent a year traveling in Europe before taking a position teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic. In 1924, he became drama critic for The Nation, remaining in that position until 1952, and he taught at Columbia University from 1937 to 1953, when he moved to Arizona for his health, ultimately becoming a respected naturalist and conservationist. He called for an American drama of greater profundity and style, but felt that during his time only Eugene O’Neill achieved such heights. Krutch wrote several books, including Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (1924) and The American Drama Since 1918 (1939, revised 1957). KUCHWARA, MICHAEL (1947–2010). Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of an airline pilot, and he was attracted to the theatre as a child. He was educated at Syracuse University and the University of Missouri, where he completed a master’s degree in journalism, Kuchwara began working for the Associated Press around 1970. He rose to the position of theatre critic in 1984 and endeared himself to the Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre community for the fairness and insightfulness of his reviews, although his inclinations were toward musicals and lighter fare. He served a stint as president of the New York Drama Critics Circle. KULICK, BRIAN (1963– ). A major force among early twenty-firstcentury New York City directors, Kulick became artistic director of the Classic Stage Company (CSC) in 2003 after serving as artist-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum and as associate artistic director at Trinity Repertory Theatre from 1994 to 1996 and as artistic associate at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT) from 1996 to 2003, for whom he directed critically lauded productions of Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and Timon of Athens. He received a Drama Desk Award nomination for his staging of The Mysteries (2004) at CSC and has also staged Death and the Ploughman (2004), The False Servant (2005), and in collaboration with actor Michael Cumpsty, a modern-dress Hamlet in 2005, Richard II in 2006, and Richard III in 2008, The Tempest in 2008, and Agamemnon and Elektra codirected with Gisela Cardenas in 2009. Kulick directed the 1995 NYSF/ PT production of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of A Dybbuk and several new

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works by Charles L. Mee and Nilo Cruz. He teaches at Columbia University and has directed productions in numerous regional theatres. Of his achievement at CSC, a Village Voice critic wrote that he “has brought a fresh feeling and energy to CSC . . . banishing any doubts about resurrecting adventurous classical theatre in New York.” KURTZ, SWOOSIE (1944– ). A native of Omaha, Nebraska, Kurtz attended the University of Southern California and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and made her television debut introducing her father, a highly decorated World War II pilot, on the To Tell the Truth television show. Kurtz made her stage debut at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and Off-Broadway in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-inthe-Moon Marigolds (1970) prior to her Broadway debut in a 1975 revival of Ah, Wilderness! Kurtz won Tony Awards for Fifth of July (1980) and The House of Blue Leaves (1986), and was nominated for a 1978 revival of Tartuffe, Frozen (2004), and a 2007 revival of Heartbreak House. She also won Drama Desk Awards for A History of the American Film (1978) and Fifth of July, and garnered Drama Desk Award nominations for Uncommon Women and Others (1977), The House of Blue Leaves, and The Mineola Twins (1999). Kurtz’s other Broadway credits include playing Lillian Hellman in Imaginary Friends (2002). Off-Broadway, Kurtz’s credits include Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and The Guys (2002). On screen, Kurtz has appeared in Slap Shot (1977), Oliver’s Story (1978), The World According to Garp (1982), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Reality Bites (1994), Citizen Ruth (1996), Cruel Intentions (1999), and Bubble Boy (2001), and she won an Emmy Award in 1990 for Carol & Company, as well as Emmy nominations for the television series Love, Sidney in 1982 and 1983, The Image (1990), Sisters in 1993 and 1994, And the Band Played On (1993), ER in 1998, and Huff in 2005 and 2006. Kurtz also received a Golden Globe nomination for the TV movie Baja Oklahoma (1988). KUSHNER, TONY (1956– ). Born in New York City, Kushner spent his childhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the son of classically trained musicians who named him after Tony Bennett. During his childhood, Kushner’s mother appeared in semi-professional theatre productions, leaving an indelible impression on her precocious literature, music, and history-loving son. Kushner moved to New York City to study at Columbia University and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he trained as a stage director under the mentorship of Bertolt Brecht specialist Carl Weber and where he confronted his homosexuality. During this period, he also began to write plays. He adapted Goethe’s romantic tragedy Stella, wrote several

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children’s plays, and completed other original plays, including Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne (1987), and a free adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s L’illusion comique, retitled The Illusion (1988). Kushner’s first important play, A Bright Room Called Day (1987), viewed the rise of the Nazis as seen through the eyes of a group of artists and filmmakers in Berlin during the years 1932–1933. Critical response to the first New York production of the play Off-Broadway in 1991 was largely negative, with many reviewers finding the Hitler-Reagan comparison extreme. Critics did a complete about face the following year with Kushner’s Angels in America. A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Comprised of two long plays, Angels confronted the AIDS crisis, the lives and losses of gay men, and a range of issues regarding politics and history, spirituality and religion, popular culture, and other major issues in American life. Part One: Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway. Millennium Approaches was the most acclaimed American play of the 1990s, winning Kushner the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as a Tony Award for Best Play, an Olivier Award for Best Play (during its run at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain), and virtually every critical award. Perestroika, the second Angels play, and like Millennium Approaches, nearly four hours, also won a Tony as Best Play. In 2003, both parts of Angels were filmed for a six-hour film for HBO directed by Mike Nichols and with a stellar cast led by Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson, winning multiple Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. Kushner’s next play, Slavs! Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (1994), is constructed out of characters and two scenes originally intended for Perestroika. In late 2001, Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, a drama about an English family caught up in the tragedies of Afghanistan under the Taliban, seemed prescient when it was already in rehearsals at the New York Theatre Workshop when the attacks of 11 September 2001 occurred. Homebody/Kabul won the Obie Award for Best OffBroadway Play and several critics’ prizes, but Kushner continued to revise it in preparation for a production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in the summer of 2003, under Frank Galati’s direction. In 2003, Kushner adapted libretti for two chamber operas, Brundibar and The Comedy on the Bridge, both designed by Kushner’s close friend Maurice Sendak and produced by the Chicago Opera Theatre in the spring of 2003. He also published a one-act play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy (2004) in The Nation and presented it as a reading in a number of venues. Kushner wrote the libretto for an original opera, Caroline, or Change, which, with music by Jeanine Tesori, opened to good reviews at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT) under

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the direction of George C. Wolfe in late 2003. The production, with slight changes, moved to Broadway in early 2004 where it received six Tony Award nominations. Kushner adapted Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in 2005 for a production by the NYSF/PT, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a festival of Kushner’s work which included a production of Caroline, or Change and a bill of Kushner one-acts. Writing for the screen, Kushner received an Academy Award nomination for Munich (2005).

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L LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE. Film actors Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer founded this theatre in 1947 with an emphasis on actor involvement, but in its current state, La Jolla found its footing as a not-for-profit professional theatre under the leadership of Des McAnuff, who served as artistic director from 1983 to 1994, followed by Michael Greif (1995–1999) and Christopher Ashley, who in 2009 continues to lead the theatre. Many La Jolla productions have transferred to Broadway, reaping over 20 Tony Awards, including the 1993 Tony for outstanding regional theatre. Among the Broadway transfers are Big River (1985), A Walk in the Woods (1988), The Who’s Tommy (1993), How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1995), Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), and Jersey Boys (2006). The Playhouse is housed on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. LA MAMA EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE CLUB. Founded by Ellen Stewart at the dawn of the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement in 1961, La MaMa has presented numerous avant-garde plays as a result of its mission to develop new and original performance work with a commitment to diversity and international work. La MaMa productions have won more than 30 Obie Awards, among others. La MaMa, under Stewart’s leadership, was also significant in nurturing full-time resident companies, including Mabou Mines, the Pan Asian Repertory, and numerous others, as well as such artists as Sam Shepard, Harvey Fierstein, Lanford Wilson, Julie Bovasso, Adrienne Kennedy, Tom O’Horgan, Rochelle Owens, Megan Terry, Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Serban, Ping Chong, Tisa Chang, Hanay Gelogamah, Tom Eyen, Robert Babb, Lee Shapiro, and others. La MaMa has also offered a venue to international artists, including Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Eugenio Barba, and others. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. LA TURISTA. Sam Shepard’s two-act drama (his first move away from the one-act form and only his second play to be published) opened at the American Place Theatre on 4 March 1967 for 29 performances with a

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cast including Sam Waterston, Joyce Aaron, and Michael Lombard under Jacques Levy’s direction. The play’s title, inspired by the common illness that befalls travelers, begins in Mexico, where a couple, Kent and Salem, suffer from dysentery, which some critics viewed as an allegorical representation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The play is most notable in introducing prototypes of the characters, themes, and style explored more fully in Shepard’s later work. LABUTE, NEIL (1963– ). Raised in Spokane, Washington, LaBute was born in Wayne, Michigan, and studied theatre at Brigham Young University where, while a student, he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His theatre productions at Brigham Young were often controversial and sometimes closed by university officials. LaBute later studied at the University of Kansas, New York University, and the Royal Academy of London before teaching at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 1993, Brigham Young University provided the venue for LaBute’s first important play, In the Company of Men, which he subsequently adapted into a film, winning several movie critics awards and nominations. LaBute’s subsequent plays, most of which have been produced Off-Broadway, include Bash (1999), The Shape of Things (2001), The Distance from Here (2002), and The Mercy Seat (2002), one of the first plays set in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 (9/11). Other LaBute works, some of which premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club, include Autobahn (2003), Fat Pig (2004), This Is How It Goes (2005), Some Girls (2005), Wrecks (2005), In a Dark Dark House (2007), reasons to be pretty (2008), Helter Skelter/Land of the Dead (2008), and Some White Chick (2009), among others. His films include adaptation of Bash (2001) and The Shape of Things (2003), as well as Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), Tumble (2000), Nurse Betty (2000), Possession (2002), The Wicker Man (2006), and Lakeview Terrace (2008). LaBute’s plays and films have won admirers, but many critics have criticized the misanthropic viewpoints reflected in his work. LACY, SUZANNE (1945– ). A noted figure in public art, Lacy has established herself in Oakland, California, where she was born, but works with arts organizations around the United States as a performance artist, writer, teacher, and sometime public servant. She emerged in the 1970s, combining political activism with performance art in Three Weeks in May, an event staged on the steps of the Los Angeles City Hall addressing rape and other forms of violence against women. Her emphasis is often on the use of public spaces for performance art works, a viewpoint emphasized when she edited an anthology titled Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1994). Her

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most noted work, The Crystal Quilt (1987), which featured over 400 older women talking about their life experiences, was filmed live in performance in Minneapolis by PBS-TV. Lacy was Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts (1987–1997) and was a founding faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, in 1997. Since 2002, she has been at Otis College of Art and Design, where she established a Master of Fine Arts curriculum in Public Practice in 2007. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; SEXUALITY. LADIES OF THE CORRIDOR, THE. Directed by Harold Clurman with designs by Ralph Alswang, this Dorothy Parker and Arnaud D’Usseau play opened on 21 October 1953 at the Longacre Theatre for 45 performances with a cast including Edna Best, Vera Allen, Margaret Barker, Betty Field, June Walker, Walter Matthau, and Shepperd Strudwick. The play is set in the fictional Hotel Marlowe in New York and spans a year in the lives of the widows and divorcées residing there. Although the original Broadway production was short-lived, a 2005 Off-Broadway production by the Peccadillo Theatre Company won critical approval. LAHR, BERT (1895–1967). This legendary rubber-faced comedian born Irving Lahrheim in New York is most remembered as the Cowardly Lion in the classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939), but he appeared in vaudeville,* burlesque, and musicals, including Delmar’s Revels (1927), Hold Everything! (1928), Flying High (1930), Hot-Cha! (1932), George White’s Music Hall Varieties (1932), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), George White’s Scandals (1935), The Show Is On (1936), Du Barry Was a Lady (1939), and Seven Lively Arts (1944). He branched out and won critical praise as the down-andout burlesque comic in a revival of Burlesque* in 1946, before appearing in the national tour of the revue* Make Mine Manhattan (1948) and starring on Broadway in Two on the Aisle (1951), another revue. Stepping away from the musical stage once again, Lahr won critical acclaim as Estragon in the American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic Waiting for Godot in 1956. He subsequently appeared in several notable plays and musicals, including a Broadway revival of Hotel Paradiso in 1957 and toured in Romanoff and Juliet in 1959 and as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960. He won acclaim playing a variety of roles in The Beauty Part (1962) and made his last Broadway appearance in the short-lived musical, Foxy (1964), although he appeared on television and in movies, including a small role as an aging burlesque comic in his last film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). He was the father of critic John Lahr.

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LAHR, JOHN (1941– ). Son of beloved stage and film comedian/actor Bert Lahr, this much-admired critic for the New Yorker (as senior drama critic since 1992) and author of several books on theatre and film, was born in Los Angeles, California. He studied at Yale University and Worcester College, Oxford, prior to beginning his career as a writer. In 1969, he wrote a highly praised biography of his father, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, and another on the British playwright Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (1978). He has also written books about Frank Sinatra, Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage), and, as of 2010, was working on a major biography of Tennessee Williams. Lahr has also published six collections of his dramatic essays, as well as collections of his New Yorker profiles of major cultural figures. Lahr has been married to British actress/writer Connie Booth since 2000. LAHTI, CHRISTINE (1950– ). Born in Birmingham, Michigan, Lahti studied at Florida State University and the University of Michigan before touring Europe as part of a mime troupe. In New York, she studied with Uta Hagen and William Esper, and appeared in some films, including …And Justice for All (1979) the same year she appeared as a replacement playing Susan in the Broadway production of Loose Ends (1979). She won a Theatre World Award that year for her appearance Off-Broadway in The Woods (1979). Her Broadway appearances include Division Street (1980), Scenes and Revelations (1981), a revival of Present Laughter in 1982, and she stepped into the title role in The Heidi Chronicles on Broadway in 1989. In 1993, she received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in Three Hotels (1993). In late 2009, she played the role of Veronica in the Broadway production of God of Carnage (2009). Lahti is married to director/writer Thomas Schlamme. Lahti was nominated for a Supporting Actress Academy Award and won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Swing Shift (1984) and shared an Academy Award with Jana Sue Memel for directing the short film Lieberman in Love (1995). She also won a 1998 Emmy Award (and three other nominations) for her performance on the television series Chicago Hope. Lahti also won a Golden Globe Award for Chicago Hope in 1997 and for the television film No Place Like Home (1989). LAMOS, MARK (1946– ). A native of Chicago, Illinois, Lamos studied the violin and ballet as a child and pursued his education in music at Northwestern University prior to becoming an actor at the Guthrie Theatre. He appeared in a few short-lived Broadway productions, including The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (1972), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), Cyrano (1973), and a revival of Man and Superman in

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1978, before switching to directing as artistic director of the Hartford Stage in 1980, leading that theatre to a 1989 Tony Award as outstanding regional theatre. He was subsequently nominated for a Tony for his direction of Our Country’s Good in 1991. For Broadway, he also directed a revival of The Deep Blue Sea in 1998, The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm (1999), revivals of The Rivals in 2004, Seascape in 2005, and Cymbeline in 2007, and A. R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner (2010). Lamos also acted in the film Longtime Companion (1990). LANDAU, TINA (1962– ). New York-born Landau was raised in Beverly Hills, California, and educated at Yale University and the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. She won some early success writing the book for and directing the musical Floyd Collins (1996), garnering Drama Desk Award nominations for writing and directing. She joined the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, in 1997, where she directed acclaimed revivals of The Time of Your Life in 2002, The Cherry Orchard in 2004, and The Diary of Anne Frank in 2006, as well as Time to Burn (1996), Berlin Circle (1998), The Ballad of Little Jo (2000), and Theatrical Essays (2003). Landau directed the Broadway revival of Bells Are Ringing in 2001 and her Steppenwolf production of Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts (2007) moved to Broadway in 2009. She has also directed for the Vineyard Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival/ Public Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons. Landau also teaches at Yale University and the Tisch School of the Arts. LANDESMAN, HEIDI ETTINGER (1951– ). Born Heidi Prentice Ettinger in San Francisco, California, she attended Occidental College and the Yale School of Drama. She was married to producer Rocco Landesman when she debuted as a scene and costume designer with ’night, Mother (1983). Ettinger won Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for the musicals Big River (1985) and The Secret Garden (1991) for her scenic designs. She designed the settings and coproduced Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo (1995) and her other Broadway credits include Into the Woods (1987), The Red Shoes (1993), Smokey Joe’s Café (1995), Triumph of Love (1997), a revival of The Sound of Music in 1998, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2001) for which she was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, Dracula,* the Musical (2004), and Good Vibrations (2005). Off-Broadway, she was Drama Desk-nominated for One Shoe Off (1993). LANDESMAN, ROCCO (1947– ). Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Landesman studied at Colby College and the University of Wisconsin before complet-

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ing a doctorate in dramatic literature at the Yale School of Drama, where he taught for four years after completing his degree. In 1987, after a decade operating a private investment fund, he became president of Jujamcyn Productions (purchasing the company in 2005). He was a major Broadway producer before and after assuming control of Jujamcyn, sometimes coproducing with his then-wife, scene designer Heidi Ettinger Landesman. Among Landesman’s most noted productions are Big River (1985), The Grapes of Wrath (1990), The Piano Lesson (1990), The Secret Garden (1991), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), Angels in America (1993), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), Titanic (1997), The Full Monty (2000), The Producers (2001), Take Me Out (2003), Caroline, or Change (2004), Doubt (2005), Grey Gardens (2006), Spring Awakening (2006), and 33 Variations (2009), as well as numerous revivals of musicals and plays. In 2009, Landesman became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, appointed by President Barack Obama. LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY. John Guare’s two-act play opened on 12 October 1977 at the New York Public Theatre following an earlier production that year at the Academy Festival Theatre in Illinois. Directed by John Pasquin, the cast included Shirley Knight and F. Murray Abraham. An episodic work inspired by absurdist theatre, the play moves indiscriminately in time as it focuses on Betty Yearn, the mother of a murdered son. Landscape of the Body was revived at New York’s Second Stage in 1984 under the direction of Gary Sinise and a 2006 Signature Theatre revival was staged by Michael Greif. LANE, NATHAN (1956– ). Born Joseph Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey, this versatile actor has appeared in drama, comedy, and musicals on stage and screen, but with his most notable success on Broadway. When he was unable to afford to stay at college, he moved to New York and began to work as a stand-up comic with a partner, Patrick Stack, prior to acting in OffBroadway and Off-Off Broadway productions at Second Stage, Roundabout Theatre, and the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) before his first Broadway appearance in a 1982 revival of Present Laughter starring George C. Scott, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination. Lane also appeared in Merlin (1983), The Wind in the Willows (1985), Some Americans Abroad (1990), and the national tour of Broadway Bound. A long association with playwright Terrence McNally brought Lane a Drama Desk Award in McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata (1990), and he appeared in McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) at the MTC. He was back on Broadway in a revival of On Borrowed Time in 1991, again with Scott, and Lane received a Tony Award nomination and Drama Desk and

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Outer Critics Circle Awards as Nathan Detroit in a revival of Guys and Dolls in 1992. In 1993, Lane appeared in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor and he won another Drama Desk Award in 1995 for McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! A 1996 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum brought him Tony and Drama Desk Awards, and he starred in another revival, The Man Who Came to Dinner, in 2000. Lane costarred with Matthew Broderick in Mel Brooks’s musical, The Producers (2001), winning Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his performance as unscrupulous Broadway producer Max Bialystock in one of the biggest Broadway hits in years, reprising the role in a 2005 film version. Lane also appeared on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs (2004), revivals of The Odd Couple in 2005 and Butley in 2006, November (2008), a revival of Waiting for Godot in 2009, and the musical The Addams Family (2010). Lane has been nominated for Golden Globe Awards twice, for the films The Birdcage (1996) and The Producers (2005) and was nominated for Emmy Awards guest starring on the series Frasier in 1995 and Mad About You in 1998, and also appeared in such films as The Boys Next Door (1996), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and Swing Vote (2008). LANGELLA, FRANK (1938– ). Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, as Frank A. Langella, Jr., he studied at Syracuse University. He has acted in regional theatre, including a revival of Sherlock Holmes* in 1981 filmed for HBOTV. He debuted Off-Broadway in The Immoralist (1963) and made his first Broadway appearance in a revival of Yerma in 1966. He scored a major success in William Gibson’s A Cry of Players (1968), playing William Shakespeare opposite Anne Bancroft as Anne Hathaway. Langella’s OffBroadway and regional appearances (more than 50) include playing Cyrano de Bergerac in 1971 at the Wiliamstown Theatre Festival, where he also appeared in revivals of The Seagull in 1974 and Ring Round the Moon in 1975, among numerous others. He also appeared in films, scoring successes in The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), which brought him a Golden Globe nomination. Langella won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award in Edward Albee’s Seascape (1975), but gave a highly acclaimed and Tony-nominated performance in the title role in a revival of Dracula* in 1977, a production memorably designed by artist Edward Gorey. Langella subsequently reprised the role in a 1979 film version, playing opposite Laurence Olivier. Langella’s subsequent Broadway roles include Passione (1980), taking over the role of Salieri in Amadeus in 1982, a revival of Design for Living (1984), Hurlyburly (1984), Sherlock’s Last Case (1987), and he won a Drama Desk Award for a revival of August Strindberg’s The Father in

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1996. Langella was Drama Desk-nominated for a revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in 1996 and won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for Fortune’s Fool (2002), was nominated for both awards for Match (2004), and won both again for Frost/Nixon (2007), playing the disgraced 37th president of the United States. Langella also appeared in the title role of a 2008 revival of A Man for All Seasons. In films, Langella was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award reprising the role of Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon (2008) and also appeared in Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980), Dave (1993), Lolita (1997), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and Superman Returns (2006). On television, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for I, Leonardo: A Journey of the Mind (1983). LANGHAM, MICHAEL (1919–2011). Born in Bridgewater, England, he studied law at the University of London and served in the British Army beginning in 1939. He was a prisoner of war for five years during World War II, after which he worked in repertory in England and Canada, including a stint as artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Canada from 1956 to 1967 prior to serving in the same capacity at the Guthrie Theatre from 1971 to 1977. Langham became director of the Juilliard School from 1979 to 1982, returning to this post again from 1987 to 1992. On Broadway, Langham was nominated for a Tony Award for his direction of a revival of Timon of Athens for the National Actors Theatre, directed several revivals, including Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1958, The Seagull in 1992, Saint Joan in 1993, The Government Inspector in 1994, The Flowering Peach in 1994, The Molière Comedies in 1995, and Waiting in the Wings in 1999, as well as such plays as The Broken Jug (1958), Andorra (1963), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968). LANGNER, LAWRENCE (1890–1962).† A native of Wales, Langner worked in London theatre as a young man prior to moving to the United States in 1911. He was a founder of The Washington Square Players* in 1914 and worked with them until the troupe disbanded in 1917. Langner then became one of the founders of The Theatre Guild in 1918, which he comanaged with Theresa Helburn during its most important and productive period. He is credited with supervising as many as 200 Guild productions. Langner pushed for productions of European classics, and he admired the plays of Eugene O’Neill, prevailing upon the Guild to produce O’Neill’s Strange Interlude* (1928), which won the Pulitzer Prize. In collaboration with his wife, Armina Marshall, Langner built the Westport Country Playhouse in 1931, establishing a theatre company there, and he also founded the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut, in the 1950s. In

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1961, he accepted a Tony Award on behalf of The Theatre Guild, acknowledging its importance to the development of the American theatre. LANSBURY, ANGELA (1925– ). As Angela Brigid Lansbury, she was born in London, England, the daughter of actress Moyna MacGill and businessman and politician Edgar Lansbury. After her father’s death and as the Nazis began the blitz and Britain entered World War II, Lansbury and her mother emigrated to the United States, where still in her teens she found almost immediate success in Hollywood films, reaping Academy Award nominations for two of her first three films, Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). Demonstrating an extraordinary versatility that would be evident throughout her long career, Lansbury continued to play a range of roles on screen, garnering another Oscar nomination for The Manchurian Candidate (1962). However, when Lansbury turned her attention to the Broadway stage in the late 1950s, beginning with a revival of Hotel Paradiso in 1957, costarring with Bert Lahr, and continuing with A Taste of Honey (1960), she found even greater success. When Lansbury switched from drama to musicals, she scored a series of remarkable triumphs following an initial failure in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle (1964). Jerry Herman’s hit Mame (1966) brought Lansbury her first Tony Award, followed by wins for Herman’s Dear World (1969), a revival of Gypsy (1974), and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979). She was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award when she took over the lead in a revival of The King and I in 1977 and reaped another Tony nomination for Terrence McNally’s two-character play Deuce (2007). Remarkably, in her 80s, Lansbury won Tony and Drama Desk Awards as the eccentric Madame Arcati in a revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 2009 and was also nominated for both playing Madame Armfeldt in a revival of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in late 2009, costarring with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Lansbury was nominated for numerous Emmy Awards for television appearances, many for her long-running series, Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996) for which she won four Golden Globe Awards. Lansbury also won Golden Globes for the films The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate, and she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 1997. LAPINE, JAMES (1949– ). This notable director and librettist was born in Mansfield, Ohio, and studied at Franklin and Marshall College before working as a photographer, graphic designer, and in architecture. He moved into teaching scene design at Yale University and ultimately moved into writing and directing with Photography of Gertrude Stein (1977). He won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award nomination, and a Drama Desk Award for coauthoring with Stephen Sondheim the musical Sunday in the Park with

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George (1984), which he also directed, winning a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for that contribution. Lapine collaborated again with Sondheim on Into the Woods (1987), winning Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his libretto and repeated this feat, once again in collaboration with Sondheim, for Passion (1994). Lapine also won a Drama Desk Award for his direction of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005). Lapine wrote the plays Table Settings (1978), Twelve Dreams (1978), Luck, Pluck, and Virtue (1994), The Moment When (2000), and Fran’s Bed (2005), and received several award nominations for his direction of a revival of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1997, Dirty Blonde (2000), and Amour (2003). LARAMIE PROJECT, THE. Written by Moisés Kaufman and the members of his Tectonic Theatre Project (TTP), this play culled from dozens of interviews and contemporary reports about the 1997 hate crime murder of gay University of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, it opened at the Ricketson Theatre in a Denver Theatre Center production in February 2000 before moving to New York’s Union Square Theatre in May 2000. It was subsequently performed in Laramie in November 2002. The Tectonic troupe, under Kaufman’s leadership, had traveled to Laramie and interviewed a cross-section of the local citizenry to create the play as much as possible from the words of the Laramie citizens and from the responses of the TTP actors themselves. HBO released a film based on the play in 2002. The play won international acclaim and, in October 2009, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, a “sequel” also created by the Tectonic Company following a return visit to Laramie, was performed simultaneously by theatres across the United States on the anniversary of the Shepard murder. LARKIN, PETER (1926– ). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and following education at Deerfield Academy and Yale University, Larkin moved to New York to work as a scene and lighting designer. He won Tony Awards for his scenic designs for The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), Ondine (1954), No Time for Sergeants (1955), and Inherit the Wind (1955), and was nominated for Tonys for Miss Isobel (1957), Compulsion (1957), Good as Gold (1957), Blue Denim (1958), Greenwillow (1960), and The Rink (1984). Larkin’s other important Broadway designs include Dial “M” for Murder (1952), Peter Pan* (1954), Goldilocks (1958), Wildcat (1960), revivals of The Crucible and The Seagull in 1964, Les Blancs (1970), Twigs (1971), Wise Child (1972), Dancin’ (1978), and Doonesbury (1983), among many others. In the 1980s, Larkin moved into production design for movies, including such films as Tootsie (1982), 3 Men and a Baby (1987), Everybody Wins (1990), Get Shorty (1995), The First Wives Club (1996), Miss Congeniality (2000), and Dinner with Friends (2001).

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LAST MILE, THE. A naturalistic prison drama, The Last Mile opened on 13 February 1930 at the Sam H. Harris Theatre, starring a young Spencer Tracy in the dynamic leading role of John “Killer” Mears, a tough inmate on death row who leads his fellow prisoners in a riot to protest prison conditions. John Wexley’s play won critical acclaim and ran for 289 performances, with subsequent touring productions (including one starring Clark Gable) and film versions in 1932 and 1959. The sensation caused by The Last Mile led to a spate of prison-themed plays and films and, more importantly, to prison reform and heightening debate over the viability of the death penalty. LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO, THE. Alfred Uhry’s Tony Award and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning comedy-drama premiered at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 27 February 1997 for 556 performances. Set in 1939 on the brink of World War II, the play focuses on the Freitag family in Atlanta, Georgia, an assimilated Jewish family who are excited about the upcoming Ballyhoo, an annual cotillion at their exclusive country club, and the local premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. The family and their Jewish friends are forced to confront their own denial of prejudice within their city and their own Jewish American community. Directed by Ron Lagomarsino, with scene design by John Lee Beatty and costumes by Jane Greenwood, the cast featured Dana Ivey, Paul Rudd, Jessica Hecht, Celia Watson, Terry Beaver, Stephen Largay, and Arija Bareikis. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS. Neil Simon’s three-act comedy about a dissatisfied fish market owner contemplating an affair brought acclaim to James Coco in the title role when it opened on 28 December 1969 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre for 706 performances. Directed by Robert Moore, with scene design by Oliver Smith and costume design by Donald Brooks, Coco was supported by Linda Lavin, Doris Roberts, and Marcia Rodd as the three women his character, Barney Cashman, attempts, unsuccessfully, to have an affair with, making use of his mother’s apartment while she is away. Barney confronts his dissatisfactions with life with a hard-bitten cynic, a marijuanasmoking girl, and a middle-aged customer from his fish market. The play, Coco, Lavin, and Moore were all nominated for Tony Awards. A 1972 film version, directed by Gene Saks, starred Alan Arkin, Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss, and Renée Taylor. LATE GEORGE APLEY, THE. John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman collaborated on this three-act (plus epilogue) comedy based on Marquand’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It was produced by Max Gordon at the Lyceum Theatre, where it opened on 21 November 1944 for 385

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performances. Set in Boston in 1912, the play focuses on a well-established Boston snob, George Apley, played by Leo G. Carroll, whose comfortable arid life is upset by his daughter’s relationship with a Greenwich Village intellectual radical and his son’s broken engagement with the daughter of a wealthy businessman. The daughter, Eleanor (Joan Chandler), marries her bohemian boyfriend, to George’s consternation, but in the play’s epilogue, set in 1924, George has died and his son has replaced him as a rigid snob. The cast also included Janet Beecher,* Percy Waram, Margaret Phillips, and Howard St. John. Ronald Colman starred in a 1947 film version directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. LATINO THEATRE. See CHICANO THEATRE. LAUGHTON, CHARLES (1899–1962). This much-admired actor of stage and screen was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, and educated at Stonyhurst College. Following military service during World War I, he appeared in amateur theatre and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He acted in several London productions, impressing critics in both classical and contemporary roles before debuting on Broadway in the thriller Payment Deferred (1931), followed by The Fatal Alibi (1932). For 15 years, Laughton appeared in a range of Hollywood film classics, not returning to Broadway until a short-lived production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, which Laughton had adapted himself. He also appeared in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 1950, the same year he became an American citizen, and he scored a major success in Don Juan in Hell (1951), which he directed and was taken from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. Laughton subsequently adapted and directed John Brown’s Body (1953), directed The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), appeared in and directed Shaw’s Major Barbara (1956), and played the title character in King Lear in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. Although he was bisexual (or possibly gay) Laughton was married to actress Elsa Lanchester from 1929 until his death, and they frequently appeared together in films. Among his most notable screen appearances are his Academy Award-winning performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), followed by subsequent Oscar nominations for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and noted appearances in The Old Dark House (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Les Misérables (1935), Rembrandt (1936), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Canterville Ghost (1944), The Paradine Case (1947), Hobson’s Choice (1954), Spartacus (1960), and Advise & Consent (1962). See also INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

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LAURENTS, ARTHUR (1918– ). Playwright, librettist, and director Laurents was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Cornell University. He was drafted into the United States Army during World War II and wrote training films and radio broadcasts. After the war, Laurents wrote his first major play, Home of the Brave (1945), an exposé of anti-Semitism in the military, which had a brief Broadway run. Laurents’s next play, The Bird Cage (1950), failed, but he scored a success with The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), which ran a season with Shirley Booth as star. Laurents garnered Tony Award nominations for his books for the musicals West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), and won a Tony for his libretto for Hallelujah, Baby! (1967). He won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for his direction of a 1974 revival of Gypsy. Laurents contributed librettos for Anyone Can Whistle (1964), which he also directed, Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), based on his play The Time of the Cuckoo, The Madwoman of Central Park (1979), which he also directed, and Nick & Nora, which he also directed. Laurents won a Best Director Tony for staging La Cage aux Folles (1983) and was Tony-nominated directing the 2008 revival of Gypsy. His other plays include The Enclave (1973), Jolson Sings Again (1995), The Radical Mystique (1995), My Good Name (1996), Claudia Lazlo (2001), Attacks on the Heart (2003), and 2 Lives (2003). At age 91, Laurents directed a 2009 revival of West Side Story. Laurents also received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his screenplay for The Turning Point (1977), and wrote screenplays for Rope (1948), Anastasia (1956), The Way We Were (1973), and his own play, Home of the Brave in 1949. LAVIN, LINDA (1937– ). Born in Portland, Maine, Lavin graduated from the College of William and Mary and began an acting career with the Compass Players in the late 1950s. On Broadway, she debuted in bit roles in the musical A Family Affair (1962), won a 1965 Theatre World Award for the Off-Broadway production of Wet Paint, but scored a personal success singing “You’ve Got Possibilities” in the musical “It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman (1966). She also scored Off-Broadway in The Mad Show (1966) and fluctuated between Broadway and Off-Broadway for a series of plays and musicals, including On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1967), Little Murders (1969), which brought her a Drama Desk Award, Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), for which she was nominated for a Tony Award, Paul Sills’ Story Theater (1970), and The Enemy Is Dead (1973), among others. From 1976 to 1985, Lavin starred in the title role of the situation comedy Alice on CBS-TV, appeared in several films, and did not return to the Broadway stage until 1986 in Broadway Bound (1986), winning a Tony and a

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Drama Desk Award. She was Drama Desk-nominated for the Off-Broadway production of Death Defying Acts (1995) and reaped Tony and Drama Desk nominations for a revival of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1998 and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000). Lavin’s other Broadway appearances include taking over the lead from Tyne Daly in a revival of Gypsy in 1990, The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), Hollywood Arms (2002), and a 2010 revival of Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories, which brought her a Tony nomination. Off-Broadway, Lavin won a Drama Desk Award for Paul Rudnick’s The New Century (2008). In 2004, Lavin began performing in cabaret in a show called Songs to Remember When. Lavin has been married three times, including to actors Ron Liebman and Kip Niven. LAWRENCE, GERTRUDE (1898–1952). A native of London, England, the now-legendary actress and singer was born Gertrud Alexandra Dagman Klasen. As a child performer, Lawrence toured with her mother, debuting in the West End in Babes in the Wood (1910). In this period, she developed a lifelong friendship with actor-playwright-composer Noël Coward, frequently performing with him throughout her career. Lawrence made her first New York appearance in Charlot’s Revue (1924) and followed this success with several notable performances in both musicals and straight plays, including appearing with Coward in one of her most emblematic roles, Amanda Prynne, in Coward’s comedy Private Lives (1931). She also appeared with Coward in his revue Tonight at 8:30 (1936) and scored dramatic successes in Samson Raphelson’s Skylark (1939) and Rachel Crothers’s Susan and God (1943). She appeared in a 1948 revival of Pygmalion and a revival of Tonight at 8:30 that same year, although this time without Coward. Lawrence’s appearances in musicals include originating the roles of Liza Elliott in Lady in the Dark (1941) and Anna Leonowens in The King and I (1951), winning a Tony Award in the latter. Unfortunately, Lawrence fell ill with cancer during the run of The King and I and died shortly thereafter. Lawrence made very few films, including about a half-dozen at the dawn of the sound era, but made notable appearances in two movies: Rembrandt (1936) and as Amanda Wingfield in the first film version of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1950). Lawrence also appeared in a few early live television performances, including reprising her role in Skylark in 1951. Late in life, Lawrence was married to producer Richard Stoddard Aldrich, who wrote a laudatory biography of her, but to balance the scales, it has long been believed that Lawrence was the inspiration for the predatory, amoral Lorraine Sheldon in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). See also INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

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LAWRENCE, JEROME (1915–2004) AND ROBERT E. LEE (1918– 1994). This team of playwrights created several Broadway successes beginning in the 1950s. Lawrence was born Jerome Schwartz in Cleveland, Ohio, and worked as a journalist before partnering with Lee, who was born in Elyria, Ohio, to write the radio show Favorite Story. Ultimately collaborating on nearly 40 works, Lawrence and Lee had major successes with Inherit the Wind (1955), a drama based on the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of the 1920s, and which starred Paul Muni and Ed Begley (and was filmed in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March). They also adapted Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame into a notable 1956 Broadway hit starring Rosalind Russell (who also appeared in the 1958 screen version) and serving as the source for the musical Mame (1966). Among their other works were the books for the musicals Look Ma, I’m Dancin’ (1948) and Shangri-La (1956), The Gang’s All Here (1959), Only in America (1959), A Call on Kuprin (1961), Diamond Orchid (1965), The Incomparable Max (1969), the book for the musical Dear World (1969), The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1970), and First Monday in October (1978). Lawrence and Lee founded the American Playwrights’ Theatre in 1965 with the intention of aiding playwrights in circumventing the commercial nature of Broadway in developing new plays, and they established the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, Lawrence’s alma mater, in 1986. LAWSON, JOHN HOWARD (1895–1977). A New York native, Lawson attended Williams College, where he began writing plays with a strong Marxist bent. His leftist politics led him to develop a dramatic approach he labeled “political vaudeville,”* a style first seen on Broadway in his short-lived Roger Bloomer* (1923), but Lawson’s next play, Processional* (1925), was produced by The Theatre Guild and won critical kudos. His next three plays failed, but Success Story (1932), produced by The Group Theatre, won approval. His subsequent works, The Pure in Heart (1934), Gentlewoman (1934), and Marching Song (1937), eked out short runs, although a 1937 Federal Theatre Project (FTP) revival of Processional managed 81 performances. Lawson wrote a book, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936), but when sound films began he spent much of his time writing screenplays until he was blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten” during the McCarthy era. LE GALLIENNE, EVA (1899–1991).† A distinguished actress and director, Eva Le Gallienne was the daughter of noted writer Richard Le Gallienne. Born in London, she was trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. After a few years in undistinguished roles, she scored a triumph

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in Liliom (1921). Le Gallienne’s most significant achievement was the founding of the Civic Repertory Theatre (CRT), a bold attempt to establish the repertory system on Broadway with the goal of bringing the classics of international drama to American audiences at bargain prices. Founded in 1926, the CRT ran for six seasons before financial strains exacerbated by the Great Depression ended the experiment, although Le Gallienne herself gave well-received performances (and direction) in a range of CRT productions. She continued acting in New York and on tour, most successfully as Lettie in Thomas Job’s Uncle Harry (1942). After World War II, in partnership with Cheryl Crawford and Margaret Webster, Le Gallienne attempted once again to establish a New York repertory company. Their American Repertory Theatre began operations in 1946, but like the CRT, it failed commercially. Her last major triumph came in 1975 as Fanny Cavendish, matriarch of an eccentric theatrical clan modeled on the Barrymores, in a lavish revival of The Royal Family.* Her final stage appearance was in a 1982 revival of her adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, which had first been done at the CRT. Le Gallienne appeared in occasional films, but her true métier was the stage. She might easily have rivaled Katharine Cornell or Helen Hayes had she chosen to pursue a more commercial career, but she preferred experimenting with the classics and serious modern drama, especially the plays of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw. LEACH, WILFORD (1929–1988). Born Carson Wilford Leach in Petersburg, Virginia, he made his first theatrical mark as artistic director of New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. He was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for his scene designs for revivals of All’s Well That Ends Well in 1979 and The Pirates of Penzance in 1981, for which he won a Tony Award for Best Direction. He also won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his direction of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985). He also directed The Human Comedy (1984) at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT), and it transferred to Broadway. Leach’s eclectic approach to directing drew on multimedia influences, opera, puppetry, and vaudeville,* elements seen in his NYSF/PT production of Mandragola in 1977, The Taming of the Shrew in 1978, Othello in 1979, and Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980. Leach taught theatre at Sarah Lawrence beginning in 1958 and, collaborating with Brian DePalma and Cynthia Munroe, he wrote and directed the film The Wedding Party (1969). LEAGUE OF AMERICAN THEATRES AND PRODUCERS. The League of New York Theatres was established in 1930, but changed its name

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in 1985. Among its functions as a trade organization, the League operates the annual Antoinette Perry Tony Awards. The League’s director, Harvey B. Sabinson, was presented with a special Tony Award in 1995 for his long service and was replaced by Jed Bernstein and, more recently, by Charlotte St. Martin. In recent years, the League has been known as the Broadway League. LEAGUE OF HISTORIC AMERICAN THEATRES (LHAT). Established by 42 charter theatre members in 1976, LHAT serves as a network of over 250 operating historic theatres in the United States and Canada, emphasizing the preservation, restoration, and use of iconic theatres. Since 2005, LHAT has worked toward increasing community engagement with historic theatres and developing means to sustain these spaces. LEAGUE OF RESIDENT THEATRES (LORT). This administration body for major not-for-profit theatres in the United States has 76 member theatres and arranges contracts with the major theatrical unions, Actors’ Equity Association, the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers, and United Scenic Artists. LORT, which was founded in 1965 by Peter Zeisler of the Guthrie Theatre, is also a clearinghouse for information for member theatres with the goal of promoting the welfare of regional theatres in the United States. LECOMPTE, ELIZABETH (1944– ). Born Elizabeth Alice LeCompte in New Jersey, she studied at Skidmore College, and worked in a coffeehouse where she began performing in plays with Spalding Gray. They moved together to New York and worked with The Performance Group beginning in 1970, with LeCompte serving as designer. She eventually became involved with actor Willem Dafoe and she took over the company in 1979, renamed The Wooster Group, an experimental acting troupe considered at the forefront of the New York avant-garde of the period. Among the productions she cowrote and/or directed are a trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island, including Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick Road (1977), and Nayatt School (1978), as well as Route 1 & 9 (1981), L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) (1984), The Temptation of St. Anthony (1987), Brace Up! (1991), and a radical reinterpretation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* in 1997 in collaboration with Kate Valk (this production was revived in 2006), and featuring the controversial use of blackface* and cross-gender casting. Among many awards and grants, LeCompte received a 1995 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2007 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a grant from United States Artists. She is also the recipient of several Obie Awards and a National Endowment of

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the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement, among other acknowledgments. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. LEE, CANADA (1907–1952). New York native Lionel Cornelius Canegata was born to West Indian parents and studied music, but changed his name when he became a professional boxer. An eye injury ended his work in the fight ring and after a stint as a nightclub orchestra leader and as a laborer, he was cast in a Central Park production of Brother Moses (1934). He became a member of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), and he was cast as Banquo in Orson Welles’s celebrated FTP production of the “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936), as it became known, which eventually led to his being cast in Mamba’s Daughters (1939), Big White Fog (1940), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941), also directed by Welles, winning Lee plaudits from critics who labeled him the finest black actor of the era. He developed a strong passion for socially relevant theatre, and most of his stage roles reflected his politics. Among his subsequent Broadway roles, Lee appeared in Anna Lucasta (1944), a revival of The Tempest in 1945, On Whitman Avenue (1946), a revival of The Duchess of Malfi (1946), and Set My People Free (1948). Lee also appeared in films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) and his last, Cry, the Beloved Country (1952), and had been called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era, but died of a heart attack before he could testify. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. LEE, EUGENE (1939– ). Prior to becoming one of Broadway’s leading scene designers, Lee was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Yale School of Drama. He won a Drama Desk Award for an Off-Broadway design for Alice in Wonderland (1971) and another, as well as a Tony Award, for a 1974 revival of Candide. Lee also won Tonys for Sweeney Todd (1979) and Wicked (2004) and was nominated for Ragtime (1998). He also designed non-musicals, including a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth in 1975, Some of My Best Friends (1977), Agnes of God (1982), The Hothouse (1982), On the Waterfront (1995), revivals of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000 and The Homecoming in 2007. He also frequently designed for Trinity Repertory Theatre and was head of design at the Dallas Theatre Center for seven years. Lee married and often worked with costume designer Franne Lee, but they divorced. LEE, FRANNE (1941– ). Born Franne Newman (and known as “Bud”) in the Bronx, New York, she studied art at the University of Wisconsin at

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Madison. She won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for her costume designs for a revival of Candide in 1974 and won a Tony for Sweeney Todd (1979). On Broadway, Lee also designed costumes for revivals of Love for Love in 1974 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1975, Some of My Best Friends (1977), Gilda Radner: Live from New York (1979), The Moony Shapiro Songbook (1981), Rock’N’Roll! The First 5,000 Years (1982), and a revival of Camelot in 1993. Lee was also costume designer for the television series Saturday Night Live from 1975–1979, garnering two Emmy Award nominations for her work. For a time, Lee was married to and frequently worked with scene designer Eugene Lee. LEE, GYPSY ROSE (1911–1970). Born in Seattle, Washington, as Rose Louise Hovick, this burlesque performer, actress, and television host began her career in vaudeville* as a child, performing with her sister Ellen June, later known as June Havoc, under the management of her mother, Rose. When her sister left the act during the declining days of vaudeville, Lee began performing as a stripper (“ecdysiast,” as H. L. Mencken* famously described her) in burlesque, emerging as a major star at Minsky’s Burlesque by combining striptease with humor, adding witty repartee to her act. She also appeared in secondary roles in a few Hollywood films and appeared in small parts in the Broadway shows Hot-Cha! (1932) and Melody (1933). She was a featured performer in the Ziegfeld* Follies of 1936, replaced Ethel Merman in Du Barry Was a Lady (1939), and starred in Star and Garter (1942), a revue.* In 1941, she wrote The G-String Murders, a mystery set behind the scenes of a burlesque theatre, and it became a film, Lady of Burlesque (1943), starring Barbara Stanwyck. Lee also wrote a shot-lived play, The Naked Genius (1943), and published a memoir, Gypsy, in 1957 that became the basis for a classic Broadway musical of the same name starring Ethel Merman as Lee’s mother in 1959. Lee became a host of a television talk show in the late 1960s, but died of cancer soon afterward. LEE, MING CHO (1930– ). A native of Shanghai, China, Lee moved to the United States in 1949 and attended Occidental College. Five years later, he became the assistant of Broadway’s leading scene designer, Jo Mielziner. Lee’s own minimalist, symbolic style departed from Mielziner’s more realistic approach, and he branched out on his own with a revival of Electra at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT) in 1964. Lee won Drama Desk Awards for the Broadway production Billy (1969), which also garnered him a Tony Award nomination, and Off-Broadway for Invitation to a Beheading (1969). Other Broadway credits include La Strada

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(1969), Gandhi (1970), Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), a revival of All God’s Chillun Got Wings* in 1975, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976), revivals of Romeo and Juliet and Caesar and Cleopatra in 1977, The Shadow Box (1978), and Angel (1978). Lee won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for K2 (1983) and was Drama Desknominated for Execution of Justice (1986). Lee also designed The Grand Tour (1979) and 1975 and 1983 revivals of The Glass Menagerie, among others. He has designed over 20 productions of Shakespeare’s plays for the NYSF/PT and his designs for Annie Warbucks (1993) and A Perfect Ganesh (1993) appeared in New York, but much of Lee’s work since the mid-1980s has been in regional theatre, opera, and university theatre. Lee has taught at the Yale School of Drama since 1969 and was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2002. Lee was also awarded a Sustained Achievement Obie Award. LEE, ROBERT E. See LAWRENCE, JEROME. LEFT BANK, THE. Elmer Rice’s three-act drama, which he also produced and directed, opened on 5 October 1931 at the Little Theatre for 242 performances with a cast headed by Katherine Alexander. The play dealt with American expatriates in Europe and reflected Rice’s disaffection with materialistic attitudes in the United States. LEGUIZAMO, JOHN (1964– ). Born to a Puerto Rican father and Colombian mother in Bogotá, Colombia, Jonathan Alberto Leguizamo emigrated to the United States as a small child and was educated at New York University. After some experience as a stand-up comic, and in bit roles in film and television, Leguizamo wrote Mambo Mouth (1991), a solo performance in which he also appeared as seven different characters to critical acclaim. The show brought him an Obie Award and, in 1993, he created another one-person show, Spic-O-Rama. Leguizamo’s first Broadway show, Freak (1998), reaped two Tony Award nominations and an Emmy Award for the television adaptation of it, and he returned to the solo approach for the fourth time with Sexaholix . . . A Love Story (2001). He began to appear more frequently in movies and television in the 1990s, reaping a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). Leguizamo’s other film roles include Carlito’s Way (1993), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), and also starred in a recurring role on the television series ER. See also CHICANO THEATRE.

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LEIGHT, WARREN (1957– ). A New York-born playwright and screenwriter, Leight majored in journalism at Stanford University prior to writing the horror film Mother’s Day (1980) and a 1982 documentary on the silent filmmaker Edwin S. Porter. He won a Best Play Tony Award for his play Side Man (1999), about the lives of jazz musicians, and his other plays include the book for the musical Mayor (1985), Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine (2001), and No Foreigners beyond This Point (2005), which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination. Leight writes many television scripts, including for the series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2008–2009) and In Treatment (2009). LEIGHTON, MARGARET (1922–1976). An actress noted for a refined and sophisticated demeanor on stage and screen, Leighton was born in Barnt Green, Worcersteshire, England, and made her British stage debut in Laugh with Me (1938) and joined the Old Vic, acting with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, with whom she appeared in a 1946 Broadway production of Henry IV, her American debut. In between numerous film roles, Leighton appeared on stage in London and on Broadway. She won two Best Actress Tony Awards, for two roles in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1957) and as Hannah Jelkes in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1961), as well as Tony nominations for a 1960 revival of Much Ado about Nothing and Sidney Michaels’s Tchin-Tchin (1963). Leighton’s other Broadway appearances include revivals of Uncle Vanya, Oedipus Rex, and The Critic on tour with the Old Vic in 1946, The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), Slapstick Tragedy (1966), and a revival of The Little Foxes in 1967. She was nominated for an Academy Award for The Go-Between (1970), and her other films include Under Capricorn (1949), The Astonished Heart (1950), Waltz of the Toreadors (1962), The Best Man (1964), 7 Women (1966), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), and Galileo (1975). Leighton also won a 1970 Emmy Award for a Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Hamlet. See also INTERNATIONAL STARS AND COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES. LEMMON, JACK (1925–2001). One of the most respected film actors of the post-World War II era who occasionally appeared on Broadway, John Uhler Lemmon III was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University. Following service in the United States Navy, he studied acting with Uta Hagen and began to work as an actor on stage, films, and early television. He won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Mister Roberts (1955) and a Best Actor Oscar for Save the Tiger (1973), as well as Oscar nominations for Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days

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of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1980), and Missing (1982), among his many screen appearances. Lemmon also appeared on television, winning Emmy Awards for ‘S Wonderful, ‘S Marvelous, ‘S Gershwin (1972) and Tuesdays with Morrie (1999), and four other nominations. His first Broadway appearance in a revival of Room Service, in 1953, brought him little attention, and he had a flop with Face of a Hero (1960), but his other two appearances, in Bernard Slade’s Tribute (1978) and in a revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1986, reaped him Tony Award nominations. LEND ME A TENOR. Ken Ludwig’s popular farce premiered in London on 6 March 1986 at the Globe Theatre for a successful run, followed by a Broadway production, directed by Jerry Zaks with scene design by Tony Walton and costumes by William Ivey Long, at the Royale Theatre, where it opened on 2 March 1989 and ran for 476 performances. The expert cast featured veteran actors Philip Bosco (who won a Tony Award), Victor Garber, Ron Holgate, Tovah Feldshuh, and Jane Connell. The plot focuses on egomaniacal tenor Tito Merelli, known to his fans as “Il Stupendo,” who is scheduled to sing Otello at a Cleveland Opera Company benefit in 1934. When Merelli’s tempestuous wife thinks (incorrectly) that he is having an affair, she angrily leaves, causing him to accidentally overdose on tranquilizers, with the result that several characters become engaged in trying either to revive Merelli or go onstage in his place. In the long tradition of farce, Lend Me a Tenor is filled with mistaken identities, wild coincidences, sexual innuendo, and surprise plot twists. The play received a Tony nomination as Best Play prior to seemingly endless productions by regional, university, and community theatres. Lend Me a Tenor was revived in 2010 at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre starring Anthony LaPaglia, Tony Shalhoub, and Justin Bartha under Stanley Tucci’s direction. LENOIRE, ROSETTA (1911–2002). This highly respected African American stage and film actress, producer, and casting agent, was born in New York as Rosetta Olive Burton. As a child suffering from rickets, she strengthened her legs by dancing with the encouragement of her godfather, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. She debuted on Broadway in support of Robinson in The Hot Mikado (1939) before becoming a familiar face (if not a well-known name) on stage, in films, and later in television. On Broadway, she appeared in Anna Lucasta (1944), a revival of Finian’s Rainbow in 1955, Destry Rides Again (1959), Sophie (1963), Tambourines to Glory (1963), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), I Had a Ball (1964), The Great Indoors (1966), A Cry of Players (1968), revivals of Lost in the Stars in 1972 and A Streetcar Named

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Desire in 1973, God’s Favorite (1974), and revivals of The Royal Family* in 1975 and You Can’t Take It With You in 1983. LeNoire founded the AMAS Repertory Theatre Company in 1968, an early interracial company with the goal of encouraging multi-ethnic productions. The company’s success led to Actors’ Equity Association establishing the Rosetta LeNoire Award for those contributing to the diversification of theatre casting. She was presented with a special Theatre World Award in 1993. LENYA, LOTTE (1898–1981). Born in Vienna, Austria, as Karoline Blamauer, Lenya performed as a singer and actress in Berlin, where she met and married Kurt Weill and appeared in his and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928). With the rise of the Nazis, Lenya and Weill emigrated to the United States and she debuted on Broadway in Franz Werfel’s The Eternal Road (1937). She won a Tony Award for a revival of Threepenny Opera and was nominated for another for the musical Cabaret (1966). She also appeared on Broadway in Candle in the Wind (1941), The Firebrand of Florence (1945), and Barefoot in Athens (1951), as well as Off-Broadway productions, including Brecht on Brecht (1961). LEONARD, ROBERT SEAN (1969– ). A native of Jersey City, New Jersey, and born Robert Lawrence Leonard, he attended Fordham University and Columbia University prior to winning critical plaudits in the film Dead Poets Society (1989), as well as Much Ado About Nothing (1993), The Age of Innocence (1993), In the Gloaming (1997), and others, but also devoted considerable attention to the stage. He won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (2001) and was nominated for revivals of Candida in 1993 and Long Day’s Journey into Night in 2003. Leonard’s other Broadway appearances include replacing Matthew Broderick in Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Breaking the Code (1987), The Speed of Darkness (1991), a revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994, Arcadia (1995), a revival of The Iceman Cometh in 1999, replacing Craig Bierko in a revival of The Music Man in 2000, and The Violet Hour (2003). He has continued to appear in movies and on television where, since 2004, he has been a regular on the series House. LESBIAN THEATRE. See GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. LETTS, TRACY (1965– ). Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the son of an actor/ teacher father and a writer mother, Letts was educated at Southern Methodist University and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he began his career as an actor in 1988 working at Steppenwolf Theatre, Famous Door, and as the

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founder of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theatre. His 1991 play, Killer Joe, was acclaimed in productions in Chicago, Off-Broadway, and international theatres. Letts’s subsequent plays, Man from Nebraska (2003) and Bug (2004), were well-received, but his searing family comedy-drama, August: Osage County (2007), won a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Drama Desk Award for Best Play, and a film version was in development in late 2009. Superior Donuts (2008), Letts’s next play, dealt with the subject of contemporary race relations and premiered at the Steppenwolf before moving to Broadway in 2009. He also adapted Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in 2009. His acting resume includes leading roles in Steppenwolf productions of Three Days of Rain in 1999, Glengarry Glen Ross in 2001, Homebody/ Kabul in 2003, and The Pillowman in 2006, among others. Letts has also appeared in film and television roles. As an actor, Letts won kudos in 2010 as George in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Steppenwolf Theatre. LEVE, SAMUEL (1908–1999). Born in Russia, Leve emigrated to the United States with his family in 1920, settling in New York City. He began his career as a scene and lighting designer with the Federal Theatre Project (FTP)’s Mercury Theatre unit, designing, among other productions, Orson Welles’s acclaimed 1937 FTP revival of Julius Caesar. On Broadway, Leve also designed revivals of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1938 and three Gilbert and Sullivan operettas* (The Gondoliers, The Mikado, and The Pirates of Penzance) in 1940, and The Beautiful People (1941). He also designed for Maurice Schwartz’s* Yiddish Art Theatre* and designed the 1941 Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson Macbeth. Leve’s numerous other Broadway credits include Wallflower (1944), It’s a Gift (1945), a revival of The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1948, Clutterbuck (1949), The Fifth Season (1953), and Jack Benny’s Broadway stage show in 1963. LEVENE, SAM (1905–1980). Born Samuel Levine in Russia, he debuted on Broadway in the melodrama* Wall Street (1927) and had an over 50year career on stage and screen, often playing gamblers, hoods, and New York Jewish characters. His Broadway appearances include leading roles in the original productions of Dinner at Eight (1932), Three Men on a Horse (1935), Room Service (1937), Light Up the Sky (1948), and as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (1950). He also acted in Make a Million (1958), a 1959 revival of Heartbreak House, The Devil’s Advocate (1961), for which he received his sole Tony Award nomination, Let It Ride (1961), Seidman and Son (1962), Café Crown (1964), The Last Analysis (1964), Paris Is Out! (1970), and played Al Lewis in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys (1972).

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Levene stepped into the lead of The Impossible Years (1965) during its run and appeared in the all-star Broadway revival of The Royal Family* in 1975. Shortly before his death, he appeared in the flop Horowitz and Mrs. Washington (1980). Levene also appeared opposite Ruth Gordon in the London production of The Matchmaker. In films, Levene played numerous character roles, including reprising his stage performance in Three Men on a Horse (1936), Golden Boy (1939), Crossfire (1947), Designing Woman (1957), . . . And Justice for All (1979), and numerous television shows, including a 1977 broadcast of The Royal Family. LEVIN, IRA (1929–2007). A playwright and novelist, Levin was born in New York and had a successful stage career writing diverse plays, including the comedies No Time for Sergeants (1955) and Critic’s Choice (1960), the musical Drat! The Cat! (1965), and the thrillers Dr. Cook’s Garden (1967), Veronica’s Room (1973), and Deathtrap (1978), which was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award, had a long run, and was filmed in 1982. His last play produced on Broadway, the comedy Break a Leg (1979), was a flop, but many of his novels made successful films, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and A Kiss before Dying (1991), as well as his plays No Time for Sergeants in 1958 and Critic’s Choice in 1963. LEWIS, ROBERT (1909–1997). A native of Brooklyn, New York, Lewis, often billed as Bob Lewis as a young actor, emerged as a leading actor, director, and teacher of acting during his long career. He began barely out of his teens as an actor with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in a production of The Living Corpse (1929), appeared in the ensembles of several musicals, and became a member of The Group Theatre in 1931, appearing in Group productions Night Over Taos (1932), Men in White (1933), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), Johnny Johnson (1936), and Golden Boy (1937), directing the tour of the last. Lewis shifted more toward directing in the 1940s, staging the Group’s production of William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939). During World War II, Lewis spent time as a character actor in Hollywood films, but in 1947 he returned to New York and cofounded The Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford. Unresolved differences with Kazan and Crawford led Lewis to break away from the Studio and he directed a series of major Broadway plays and musicals, including Brigadoon (1947), Regina (1949), The Happy Time (1950), a 1950 revival of An Enemy of the People,

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The Grass Harp (1952), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), Witness for the Prosecution (1954), Jamaica (1957), revivals of The Shadow of a Gunman in 1958 and Strange Interlude* in 1963, Foxy (1964), and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). In 1957, Lewis delivered a series of lectures in New York expressing his ideas of “method acting” as based on concepts of Constantin Stanislavsky and challenging the views of other acting teachers of the time. He established the Robert Lewis Theatre Workshop and taught several generations of actors. LIE OF THE MIND, A. Sam Shepard’s searing three-act drama of two families joined by an unhappy marriage opened Off-Broadway on 5 December 1985 at the Promenade Theatre under Shepard’s direction and with a cast, including Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Aidan Quinn, Geraldine Page, James Gammon, Ann Wedgeworth, Will Patton, and Karen Young. The play begins in the aftermath of a tragic incident of domestic abuse when Jake beats his wife, Beth, to the point of brain damage and hospitalization. The play explores issues of deep family dysfunction and the nature of love as the two families cope with their individual issues and face Beth’s uncertain future. The musical group the Red Clay Ramblers memorably provided live music to accompany the play. A London production of A Lie of the Mind opened on 14 October 1987 at the Royal Court Theatre and a New York revival appeared in January 2010, produced by the New Group under the direction of Ethan Hawke, who acted in it as well, along with Keith Carradine, Laurie Metcalf, Frank Whaley, Marin Ireland, and Karen Young from the 1985 cast. LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. David Edgar’s nine-hour stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1838 comic novel opened in a Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production in London at the Aldwych Theatre on 5 June 1980 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Olivier Award as Best Play under the direction of Trevor Nunn. The production met with a similarly rhapsodic response when it opened on Broadway on 4 October 1981 at the Plymouth Theatre. The production won the Tony Award as Best Play and director Nunn, scene designers John Napier and Dermot Hayes, and leading actor Roger Rees also won Tonys. Rees played the title character who is forced, by circumstance, to support his mother and sister following the death of his father and vying with his Uncle Ralph, who believes Nicholas is worthless. A 1982 television film of the production was show on British and American television, winning an Emmy Award for Best Miniseries. The RSC revived the play in 1986, and it again transferred to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony for Best Revival.

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LIFE WITH FATHER. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse based this warm family comedy, produced by Oscar Serlin, on Clarence Day’s serialized stories of Gilded Age New York first published in the New Yorker. The play opened on Broadway, with Lindsay in the title role, on 8 November 1939 at the Empire Theatre and became Broadway’s longest-running play racking up an unprecedented 3,224 performances (the production was moved to the Bijou Theatre and the Alvin Theatre during its long run). The nostalgic comedy, directed by Bretaigne Windust, depicted a rosy American past and seemed to soothe World War II-era audiences who enjoyed the affectionate efforts of Mother, played by Lindsay’s wife, Dorothy Stickney, to temper the autocratic ways and short-temper of her husband. The play became a popular film starring William Powell and Irene Dunne in 1947, the same year the play finally closed on Broadway. Lindsay and Crouse were inspired to write a sequel, Life with Mother (1948), which did not find the success of the original play, although it ran a season. A television series based on the play ran for three seasons, beginning in 1953, starring Leon Ames and Lurene Tuttle. LIGHT UP THE SKY. Moss Hart’s witty comedy of the out-of-town tryouts of a new cutting-edge play opened on 18 November 1948 at the Royale Theatre for 214 performances. Hart directed the comedy, which featured a cast of seasoned actors including Sam Levene, Barry Nelson, Glenn Anders, Audrey Christie, and Phyllis Povah. The play, which has found frequent productions in stock, community theatres, and university theatres, involves the chaos in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite in Boston as the production of a new allegorical play meets with the egos and commercial considerations of a preBroadway tryout. The producer, director, playwright, and leading actress, along with their entourages, comically struggle toward the play’s ultimately successful opening. LIGHTING DESIGN. See DESIGN/DESIGNERS. LINCOLN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. Constructed on over 16 acres in the Lincoln Square area of New York City, this arts complex was begun under the initiative of John D. Rockefeller III during an era of urban renewal spearheaded by Robert Moses. President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for the complex in 1959, and it was completed during the early 1960s after nearly a decade of fund-raising and planning. The center includes three theatres, the David H. Koch Theatre (originally called the New York State Theatre), the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, and the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, as well as venues for music, dance, and film, including the Metropolitan Opera House, Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Walter Reade

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Theatre, and other spaces, with a number of organizations using the facilities. Over the years, several theatre organizations have taken up residence at the center and Broadway productions are now frequently featured in the major theatre spaces. LINDSAY, HOWARD (1889–1968).† Born in Waterford, New York, Lindsay proved to be a versatile theatre man, with notable successes as a playwright, actor, director, and producer. Educated at Harvard University, he also attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which he worked as an actor and wrote his first play, Billeted (1917). During the 1920s, Lindsay directed and acted in numerous Broadway plays, including Dulcy* (1921). After 1930, Lindsay’s prolific output included directing Cole Porter’s musical Gay Divorcee (1932), Daniel Kussel’s The Party’s Over (1933), his own comedy She Loves Me Not (1933), and the flop By Your Leave (1934). That same year, he collaborated with Russel Crouse for the first time on the libretto for Porter’s hit musical Anything Goes, which he also directed. Lindsay also collaborated with Damon Runyon on A Slight Case of Murder (1935) and had another hit with Crouse with Porter’s musical Red, Hot, and Blue (1936) and a moderate success with Hooray for What! (1937). In 1939, Lindsay and Crouse adapted Clarence Day’s popular stories about a late-nineteenth-century New York family into one of the longestrunning comedies in Broadway history, Life with Father (1939), which starred Lindsay as the lovably irascible patriarch, and Lindsay’s wife Dorothy Stickney, whom he had married in 1927, played opposite him. Life with Father ran for over 3,200 performances, became a staple of stock and community theatres, and spawned a successful sequel, Life with Mother (1948). Lindsay and Crouse produced another long-running hit, Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), with rumors circulating that the team “doctored” Kesselring’s play into a hit. Lindsay and Crouse continued to collaborate through the 1940s and their output includes Strip for Action (1942) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning State of the Union (1945), a comedy about a presidential candidate and his estranged wife. The team also wrote Remains to Be Seen (1951), The Prescott Proposals (1953), and The Great Sebastians (1956) starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, produced several important plays including John Patrick’s The Hasty Heart (1945) and Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story (1949), and returned to writing musicals with Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1950), Happy Hunting (1956), Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (1959), and Berlin’s last musical, Mr. President (1962). Lindsay and Crouse were given a special Tony Award in 1959 and also won a Tony for The Sound of Music in 1960.

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LINDSAY-ABAIRE, DAVID (1969– ). The son of a blue-collar family from South Boston, Massachusetts, born as David Abaire, he majored in theatre at Sarah Lawrence College and studied playwriting at the Juilliard School with Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman. He first drew critical attention with Fuddy Mears (1999), a play about an amnesiac, and his other plays include The L’il Plays (1997), A Devil Inside (1997), Dotting and Dashing (1999), Snow Angel (1999), Kimberly Akimbo (2000), Wonder of the World (2000), and the book for the musical High Fidelity (2006). LindsayAbaire won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award nomination for his play Rabbit Hole (2006), about a married couple dealing with the accidental death of their child. He also wrote screenplays for Robots (2005), Inkheart (2008), and Spider-Man 4 (2011), as well as Rabbit Hole (2010). LINNEY, LAURA (1964– ). The daughter of celebrated dramatist Romulus Linney and Miriam Perse, a nurse, she was born Laura Leggett Linney in New York. This dignified, patrician actress was educated at Brown University and the Juilliard School before embarking on an acting career on stage and screen. Much acclaim has accompanied her film work, for which she is best known, but she has consistently appeared on New York stages, making her Broadway debut as a replacement in Six Degrees of Separation (1990). Linney won critical approval in Sight Unseen (1992), which brought her a Theatre World Award in its Off-Broadway production, as well as Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations for its 2005 Broadway staging. She was also Tony-nominated for a revival of The Crucible in 2002. Her other appearances include revivals of The Seagull in 1992, Hedda Gabler in 1994, and Holiday* in 1995, Honour (1998), revivals of Uncle Vanya in 2000 and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 2008, and Time Stands Still (2010). Linney has been nominated for three Academy Awards, for You Can Count on Me (2000), Kinsey (2004), and The Savages (2007), among many other film appearances, and she won an Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award playing Abigail Adams in the HBO-TV miniseries, John Adams (2008), as well as the TV-movie Wild Iris (2001 and for a guest appearance on the situation comedy Frasier in 2004. LINNEY, ROMULUS (1930–2011). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as Romulus Zachariah Linney IV, he was educated at Oberlin College and the Yale School of Drama. A prolific writer whose work has been produced mostly in regional theatres, universities, and occasionally Off-Broadway, where he won an Obie Award for his play, Tennessee (1979), Linney has written numerous full-length plays, including The Sorrow of Frederick (1967), The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (1972), Holy Ghosts

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(1976), Childe Byron (1978), Laughing Stock (1984), Woman without a Name (1985), Pops (1986), Three Poets (1989), Unchanging Love (1991), 2: Göring at Nuremberg (1992), Oscar Over Here (1995), Gint (1998), A Lesson before Dying (2000), Klonsky and Schwartz (2005), and others, as well as numerous one-act plays. He was the first playwright-in-residence at the Signature Theatre in 1991 (where a season of his plays were produced), and he was presented with an Obie for Sustained Excellence in 1992. Linney was the father of actress Laura Linney. LION IN WINTER, THE. James Goldman’s comedy-drama set at the court of England’s King Henry II opened under the direction of Noel Willman on 3 March 1966 at the Ambassador Theatre for 92 performances starring Robert Preston as the King and Rosemary Harris (who won a Best Actress Tony Award) as his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Set in 1183, intrigue abounds as Henry and Eleanor match wits over which of their three sons, Richard the Lionhearted, Geoffrey, or John, will succeed Henry to the throne of England. The play’s short run belied its durability; it was successfully filmed in 1968 starring Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn (who won an Academy Award), and Anthony Hopkins (a second film, in 2003, starred Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close), and it has had frequent revivals, including a 1999 staging at Criterion Center Stage Right starring Laurence Fishburne and Stockard Channing (in a Tony-nominated performance). LIPS TOGETHER, TEETH APART. Terrence McNally’s play about two straight couples spending the 4th of July weekend in the gay enclave of Fire Island opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) on 25 June 1991 under the direction of John Tillinger. The Drama Desk Award-nominated play starred Christine Baranski (who won a Drama Desk Award), Nathan Lane, Anthony Heald, and Swoosie Kurtz. In the MTC production, Kurtz played Sally Truman, whose brother has recently died of AIDS, and the two couples spend a weekend of isolation during which they reveal their attitudes and fears about gay life, the times in which they live, and their relationships. A revival, directed by Joe Mantello, and featuring Megan Mullally, Patton Oswalt, Lili Taylor, and David Wilson Barnes, opened at the Roundabout Theatre in 2010. LITHGOW, JOHN (1945– ). Born in Rochester, New York, as John Arthur Lithgow to an actress mother and a father who ran New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre, he studied at Harvard University and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright Scholarship. His Broadway debut in David Storey’s The Changing Room (1973) brought him a Tony Award

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and a Drama Desk Award. Lithgow’s theatre work has been sporadic, interrupted by many film and television appearances. Lithgow’s other Tony nominations came for Requiem for a Heavyweight (1985), which won him a Drama Desk Award, M. Butterfly (1988), and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005) and he won a Tony for the musical Sweet Smell of Success (2002). He was also nominated for Drama Desk Awards for M. Butterly and the OffBroadway production, Mrs. Farnsworth (2004). His other Broadway credits include My Fat Friend (1974), revivals of Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1975, A Memory of Two Mondays in 1976, Secret Service* in 1976, and Boy Meets Girl in 1976, Comedians (1976), revivals of Anna Christie* in 1977 and Once in a Lifetime in 1978, Spokesong (1979), Division Street (1980), Beyond Therapy (1982), a revival of The Front Page* in 1986, The Retreat from Moscow (2003), and a revival of All My Sons in 2008. On screen, Lithgow has been nominated for Academy Awards for The World According to Garp (1982) and Terms of Endearment (1983), and has won four Emmy Awards, three for his long-running television comedy series, 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996–2001), which also brought him a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2006, Lithgow was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. LITTLE FOXES, THE. The frequently revived The Little Foxes, which opened on Broadway on 15 February 1939 at New York’s National Theatre for an impressive 410 performance run, is, on its surface, a cautionary tale of unchecked capitalism and the avariciousness created by an American dream of materialism. Author Lillian Hellman’s title is taken from the biblical Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes,” and it reflects the dilemma of the extended Hubbard family. Producer Herman Shumlin directed, with scenery by Howard Bay and costumes by Aline Bernstein. Regina Giddens (Tallulah Bankhead), a Southern aristocrat, struggles to gain her own wealth in early twentieth-century America, where a daughter sees her father’s fortune left to the sons, in this case Regina’s greedy, manipulative brothers, Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid). She is also attempting to break free of a loveless marriage to ailing Horace Giddens (Frank Conroy)—her dream is the high life in fashionable Chicago, but Horace prevents her from participating in Ben and Oscar’s deal-making with a Northern businessman. Hellman’s depiction of Regina’s mounting desperation—and her willingness, and ability, to do anything it takes to have her way—is the evocation of the metaphorical title—foxes like Regina (and Ben and Oscar) spoil the vines (the family and community) and the vines have produced tender grapes, namely Regina and Horace’s daughter, Alexandra

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(Florence Williams), a lovely, gentle girl in her father’s mold, and Leo (Dan Duryea), the amoral son of Oscar and his unhappy, alcoholic wife, Birdie (Patricia Collinge), who he has only married in order to acquire her family’s vast cotton fields. Hellman devotes most of the play’s attention to the machinations of Regina, at various times in highly charged conflicts with Horace or Ben and Oscar, but it is Alexandra whose soul is at risk. Oscar would like to see Leo and Alexandra wed, an appalling thought even to Regina, and once Horace dies (when Regina stoops even to murder, standing silently by while he struggles out of his wheelchair to get his medicine), Alexandra becomes the only morally sound member of this rapacious family. Without subtlety, Hellman emphasizes the human cost of the family’s unbridled greed—and when Regina succeeds in prevailing financially, the cost for her is the loss of her daughter’s love and respect. Regina cannot be redeemed, but Alexandra, Hellman hopefully posits, can rid herself of the spoiled vines threatening her salvation. As she pointedly notes near the play’s end, “There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.” The flamboyant Bankhead scored a major personal success as Regina, although a 1941 film version replaced her with Bette Davis, but featured most of the original cast. The much-revived play was adapted as an opera in 1949 by composer Marc Blitzstein, retitled Regina, and other Broadway revivals featured noted actresses, including Anne Bancroft in 1967, Elizabeth Taylor in 1981, and Stockard Channing in 1997. In 2010, the New York Theatre Workshop staged a revival Off-Broadway directed by Ivo van Hove. The critical and commercial success of The Little Foxes led Hellman to return to its characters and its indictment of capitalism in Another Part of the Forest (1946), a prequel of sorts examining the previous generation of the rapacious Hubbard family, with Regina, Ben, Oscar, and Birdie seen as their youthful selves. LITTLE MURDERS. Jules Feiffer’s absurdist black comedy opened on 25 April 1967 at New York’s Broadhurst Theatre in an Alexander H. Cohen production for a mere seven performances. A July 1967 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staging of the play was more successful, as was a 1969 OffBroadway production at the Circle in the Square directed by Alan Arkin for a 400 performance run. Little Murders is a bitter and often touching satiric work on the tribulations of urban life in the 1960s, exploring the nature of marriage, violence and law, and morality through the experiences of the family of Carol Newquist and his wife, whose daughter is killed on her wedding day by a bullet fired randomly. Arkin also directed a 1971 screen version

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starring Elliot Gould and Marcia Rodd, and the play has had numerous regional and university theatre productions. LIVING NEWSPAPER. A documentary theatre employed most notably by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) during the 1930s, these productions focused on a single newsworthy issue (international, national, or local) using a variety of stage techniques to present factual material on the central topic. Several Living Newspaper productions by FTP’s “805” unit included Ethiopia (1936), dealing with the war in Abyssinia, which never officially opened due to pressures from the State Department fearing offending Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Other productions included Triple-A-Plowed Under (1936), 1935 (1936), Injunction Granted (1936), It Can’t Happen Here (1936), Power (1937), One Third of a Nation (1938), and Life and Death of an American (1939). LIVING THEATRE, THE (LT). Established by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in 1948, The Living Theatre initiated the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the post-World War II era. Many similar theatres were relatively short-lived, but The Living Theatre had a long life and became a significant force in New York theatre during the turbulent 1960s. Beck and Malina stressed that the experimentation with avant-garde work done by the Living Theatre was intended to reflect a changing American society. Among their most noted works were plays by Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Luigi Pirandello, Paul Goodman, Jean Cocteau, and Bertolt Brecht. Until 1959, The Living Theatre performed in a variety of spaces, but that year they scored one of their earliest successes with Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959), followed by Brecht’s Man Is Man in 1962 and Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963). From 1964 to 1968, the LT performed in European cities, experimenting with improvisation and collective techniques, a period that culminated in their most emblematic production, Paradise Now (1968). After a period of performing again in the United States, Beck and Malina returned to Europe, then to Brazil, continuing experimentation with collective theatre creation. The LT reestablished itself in New York in 1984, but Beck died the following year. Malina continues to direct LT in collaboratin with Hanon Reznikov and, in 2007, they revived The Brig. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. LLOYD, NORMAN (1914– ). A native of Jersey City, New Jersey, Lloyd began his stage career as a member of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, after which he joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), appearing notably as Cinna,

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the poet, in Welles’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1937. He also appeared in FTP productions of Power (1937) and The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1938). Lloyd’s other Broadway roles include playing the Fool to Welles’s Lear in a 1950 revival of King Lear, Medicine Show (1940), Liberty Jones (1941), Village Green (1941), Ask My Friend Sandy (1943), Madam, Will You Walk (1953), which he also directed, and revivals of Measure for Measure in 1957 and The Taming of the Shrew, both in 1957. Lloyd directed the Broadway musical The Golden Apple (1954) and worked more frequently in films beginning in the early 1940s, appearing most memorably in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Spellbound (1945). He produced, directed, and acted in television with regularity after 1950 and was a regular on the TV drama series, St. Elsewhere, from 1982–1988, and was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for producing the series The Name of the Game (1968) and the special presentation of the play Steambath (1973). At age 90, Lloyd appeared in the film In Her Shoes (2005). LOBEL, ADRIANNE (1955– ). Daughter of children’s book author Arnold Lobel, she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where she trained with Ming Cho Lee. Lobel has won recognition as a cutting-edge scene designer, working often on radically postmodern operatic productions with Peter Sellars in major international opera houses. Lobel also designed the Royal National Theatre’s revival of Lady in the Dark in 1997, and for many regional theatres, where she has designed premiere works by many leading American dramatists. Her Broadway career began when she assisted scene designer Tom Lynch on Tintypes (1980) and she won a 1984 Obie Award for her designs of The Vampires and All Night Long, before being nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Passion (1994) and receiving a Tony Award nomination for A Year with Frog and Toad (2003), which was based on her father’s books. Her other Broadway designs include My One and Only (1983), and revivals of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1997 and On the Town in 1998. Lobel is married to actor Mark Linn-Baker. LOGAN, JOHN (1961– ). A native of San Diego, California, who also spent part of his youth in New Jersey, John David Logan was the son of Irish immigrants. His plays have tended to focus on historical persons or incidents, as in the case of his earliest plays, Hauptman (1992), about the executed kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, and Never the Sinner (1998), about the Leopold and Loeb case; the latter brought Logan an Outer Critics Circle Award. He scored his most noted stage success with Red, a drama about the artist Mark Rothko, which won kudos in its initial production at

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London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2009, and a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award when the production moved to Broadway in 2010. For television, Logan wrote RKO 281 (1999), for which he garnered an Emmy Award nomination, and for films, he contributed screenplays for Gladiator (2000), The Time Machine (2002), Star Trek Nemesis (2002), The Aviator (2004), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, Sweeney Todd (2007), and Coriolanus (2011). LOGAN, JOSHUA (1908–1988). Born in Texarkana, Texas, as Joshua Lockwood Logan III, he studied at Princeton University, befriending several noted actors, including James Stewart and Henry Fonda, while working with Princeton’s Triangle Club and University Players. Logan began his distinguished Broadway career as an actor in the flop Carry Nation (1932) and followed up with several others until 1938 when he had a hit as a director, staging the original production of On Borrowed Time (1938). From there he directed numerous successful plays and musicals, including I Married an Angel (1938), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Stars In Your Eyes (1939), Morning’s at Seven (1939), Higher and Higher (1940), a revival of Charley’s Aunt in 1940, By Jupiter (1942), and This Is the Army (1942). During World War II, Logan’s career was interrupted by his time in the service, but at the war’s end, he returned to Broadway more successful than he had been before. In collaboration with Thomas Heggen, Logan wrote and directed Mister Roberts (1948), winning Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Author, and Best Direction. In 1949, Logan collaborated with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to adapt James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific into the musical South Pacific, sharing in a Pulitzer Prize and Tonys in multiple categories, including for his direction. He won another Tony directing William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic (1953). He was nominated again as director for All American (1962). On Broadway, Logan also directed Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Happy Birthday (1946), The Wisteria Trees (1950), which he adapted from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Wish You Were Here (1952), Kind Sir (1953), Fanny (1954), Middle of the Night (1956), Blue Denim (1958), The World of Suzie Wong (1958), There Was a Little Girl (1960), Mr. President (1962), Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962), Ready When You Are, C.B.! (1964), Look to the Lilies (1970), and Horowitz and Mrs. Washington (1980), the last two being rare flops for Logan, one of the most astute showmen of Broadway’s post-World War II era. Logan also directed several notable films and garnered Academy Award nominations for Picnic (1955), for which he won a Golden Globe Award, Sayonara (1957), and Fanny (1961). For the movies, his directing was centered on moving

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stage plays and musicals to the screen with Bus Stop (1956), South Pacific (1958), Tall Story (1960), Ensign Pulver (1964), a sequel to Mister Roberts, Camelot (1967), and Paint Your Wagon (1969). Logan was married twice, to actresses Barbara O’Neil and Nedda Harrigan, the daughter of Edward Harrigan.* LONERGAN, KENNETH (1962– ). A New York native trained as a playwright and director at Wesleyan University and New York University, Lonergan joined the Naked Angels, a theatre troupe willing to produce his first plays and he also began writing for the screen, which brought him his first major success, You Can Count On Me (2000), followed by the movies Analyze This (1999), The Gangs of New York (2002), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and Margaret (2007). Off-Broadway, Lonergan scored a critical success with This Is Our Youth (1998), which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, followed by The Waverly Gallery (2000) and Lobby Hero (2001), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and Olivier Award, and The Starry Messenger (2009). He is married to actress J. Smith-Cameron. LONG, WILLIAM IVEY (1947– ). A native North Carolinian, Long studied at the College of William and Mary, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Yale School of Drama prior to embarking on a distinguished career as a costume designer on Broadway, in films, and in regional theatre. He won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his costumes for Nine (1982), The Producers (2001), and Hairspray (2003), Drama Desk Awards for Lend Me a Tenor (1989) and a 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls, and Tonys for Crazy for You (1992) and Grey Gardens (2007), as well as numerous other nominations for both. For Broadway, he has also designed Mass Appeal (1981), Eastern Standard (1989), Six Degrees of Separation (1990), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), Smokey Joe’s Café (1995), The Civil War (1999), Swing! (1999), Contact (2000), Seussical (2000), 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), The Boy from Oz (2003), The Frogs (2004), Curtains (2007), Young Frankenstein (2007), and 9 to 5 (2009), as well as many Broadway revivals of plays and musicals. Long has also designed OffBroadway (winning an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence), in regional theatres, and for rock artists and dance companies. LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. This play is the fullest realization of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical proclivities, although much of the play is fiction, and the recurrent themes of the final phase of his work as a dramatist. Written between 1939 and 1941, this four-act play was neither

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published nor produced until three years after O’Neill’s death in 1953, although his stated desire was that this intense, deeply personal drama be held back until 25 years after his passing. The original Broadway production opened on 7 November 1956 at the Helen Hayes Theatre for 390 performances, and was directed by José Quintero, and featured Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards, Jr., and Bradford Dillman. The play reaped a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for O’Neill (his fourth) and initiated a critical reassessment of his work. After nearly two decades of neglect, his reputation was restored by this production and revivals of his earlier plays, insuring his predominance among twentieth-century American playwrights. With this grim, realistic family tragedy, O’Neill abandoned the bold experimentation of his plays of the 1920s–1930s to focus intently on the complexities and contradictions within the psyches of his central characters, the “four haunted Tyrones.” A stark, unrelenting exorcism of his own family’s dynamics, but woven with compassion by a playwright at the peak of his estimable abilities, Long Day’s Journey into Night is considered by many critics and scholars to be the greatest American play to date. Set in the summer of 1912, the play focuses on celebrated romantic actor James Tyrone (March), his wife Mary (Eldridge), and their adult sons Jamie (Robards) and Edmund (Dillman), summering at the family’s modest Connecticut cottage. Mary is convalescing from a battle with morphine addiction that began when she gave birth to Edmund. The men exude hope that Mary is finally free of drugs, the source of a long family nightmare that has deeply affected all of them. However, Mary’s precarious “recovery” is threatened by the illness of Edmund, who has been unable to shake what she stubbornly refers to as a “summer cold.” Nervously awaiting the results of a medical tests, the men are ruefully convinced that Edmund has tuberculosis, and they endeavor to keep the truth from Mary for as long as possible. Mary’s deep fears for Edmund, coupled with the demons of her life, slowly erode her resolve. To escape her profound fears, she secretly begins taking morphine again as the men continue to hope. As the agonizing day wears on, James, Jamie, and Edmund realize that their hopes for Mary are dashed, and they sink into alcoholic despair and a cycle of guilt, accusations, and misery. Long Day’s Journey into Night won recognition as O’Neill’s greatest achievement in the aftermath of its original production, and it is frequently revived, including a notable British staging in 1971 starring Laurence Olivier as Tyrone and Constance Cummings as Mary, subsequently filmed for television in 1973, and in an acclaimed 1962 screen version featuring Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Dean Stockwell, and Robards reprising his stage performance as Jamie. Robards also appeared in a 1988 revival as Tyrone, costarring with Colleen Dewhurst as Mary (with the play in reper-

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tory with O’Neill’s rose-colored family comedy, Ah, Wilderness! [1933]). An all-black cast starring Earle Hyman as Tyrone and Ruby Dee as Mary was filmed for television in 1982, and a 1986 Broadway revival starred Jack Lemmon as Tyrone and Kevin Spacey as Jamie (this version was filmed for television in 1987). In 2003, a revival brought critical accolades to Vanessa Redgrave as Mary, costarring with Brian Dennehy as Tyrone, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund. LONG TIME SINCE YESTERDAY. P. J. Gibson’s play opened on 10 October 1985 at the Henry Street Settlement in a Woodie King, Jr., production directed by Bette Howard. The play examines the relationships of five diverse African American women, former college friends, who come together for the funeral of a sixth member of their group who has killed herself. The women variously express their individual problems in a variety of confrontations. Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, described the play as “a black, female, lesser version of The Big Chill.” LONG WHARF THEATRE (LWT). Established by two Yale School of Drama alumni, Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman, in 1965, to serve the New Haven, Connecticut, community as a professional resident theatre company, the LWT opened its doors with a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The theatre has emerged as one of the outstanding regional theatres in the United States. Particularly under the leadership of Arvin Brown (1967–1996), the LWT functions in two performance spaces and emphasizes American and international plays focused on human relationships. Over 30 LWT productions have transferred to Broadway or Off-Broadway, including The Changing Room (1972), Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1974), Streamers (1976), The Shadow Box (1977), The Gin Game (1977), Broken Glass (1994), and Wit (1999), along with revivals of Ah, Wilderness! in 1975, Watch on the Rhine in 1980, A View From the Bridge in 1983, American Buffalo in 1983, All My Sons in 1987, and Hughie in 1996. The Long Wharf won a 1978 Regional Theatre Tony Award. LOOK BACK IN ANGER. John Osborne’s realistic “kitchen sink” drama, a seismic event in the history of the British stage ushering in the era of the “angry young man” playwright, opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956 in an English Stage Company production directed by Tony Richardson, generating controversy over its disaffected, abusive title character. Jimmy Porter (Kenneth Haigh), a young man from the mean streets of London, is married to an upper-class wife, Alison (Mary Ure), and lives with her and their lodger, the easygoing Cliff, a young Welshman. Jimmy rants

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about life, politics, and other matters, attempting, often cruelly, to prod reactions from the impassive Alison. Jimmy becomes involved with Alison’s best friend, Helena, whose arrogance and air of superiority both attract and repel him. Alison leaves and Helena moves in with Jimmy and Cliff. Eventually, Helena faces her moral lapse, leaves Jimmy, and reconciles with Alison, who in turn reconciles with Jimmy who is surprised to learn of Alison’s pregnancy and subsequent loss of the baby. The Broadway production of Look Back in Anger, also directed by Richardson and produced by David Merrick, opened with most of its English cast at the Lyceum Theatre on 1 October 1957 for 407 performances. It garnered a Tony Award nomination for Best Play, and Ure was nominated for her acting as well. A 1958 film version, featuring Ure with Richard Burton as Jimmy, was also directed by Richardson; Malcolm McDowell and Lisa Banes appeared in a 1980 remake, and Judi Dench directed Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in a 1989 television film version. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Ketti Frings adapted Thomas Wolfe’s novel into a three-act drama, winning the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play opened on 28 November 1957 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 564 performances. The production received several Tony Award nominations, including Best Play. Set in Altamont, North Carolina, in 1916, Look Homeward, Angel is a tense family drama focused on young Eugene Gant, a sensitive young man seeking intellectual and artistic fulfillment within the stifling confines of his mother Eliza Gant’s boarding house. Eliza rules with an iron hand and battles persistently with Eugene’s alcoholic father, W. O., and Eugene’s dissolute, dying brother, Ben. The strong cast included Hugh Griffith, Jo Van Fleet, Anthony Perkins, and Arthur Hill. The play was filmed for television in 1972, and a 1978 musical, retitled Angel, had a brief Broadway run. LOOKINGGLASS THEATRE COMPANY (LTC). Founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1988 by a group of university students, LTC has devoted itself to a development process for new works (with the core values of collaboration, transformation, and invention guiding their practices) and in slightly over 20 years, produced 50 world premieres. Their first production, Through the Looking Glass (1988), was adapted from Alice in Wonderland, and many of their productions similarly adapted literary and theatrical works. These include The Odyssey (1989), Eurydice (1991), The Arabian Nights (1992), The Idiot (1997), and their most successful production, Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphosis (1999), which has had numerous revivals at LTC and moved to Broadway. More recent productions include Hard Times (2002), Hillbilly

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Antigone (2004), The Old Curiosity Shop (2005), Around the World in 80 Days (2007), and Fedra: Queen of Haiti (2009). LOOSE ENDS. Michael Weller’s satiric play of the changing times of the 1970s opened on 6 June 1979 at the Circle in the Square Theatre for 270 performances under the direction of Alan Schneider and with a cast including Kevin Kline and Roxanne Hart. Kline’s character, Paul, seeks to find his place in the world, and in his relationship with Susan, which begins on a beach in Bali, but his quest is largely defeated by his own passivity and the disillusioning times in which he lives. Approving critics found the play Chekhovian, and it was revived in 1988 at Second Stage, directed by Irene Lewis. LOQUASTO, SANTO (1944– ). A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Loquasto studied at the Yale School of Drama prior to beginning a prolific career as a scene and costume designer for Broadway and films. He won a Drama Desk Award for his design of David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones (1972) and was Tony Award-nominated for Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning That Championship Season (1972) at the start of his career, which has included over 60 Broadway designs. He has impressed critics with his skills at highly realistic designs, as well as more theatrical, symbolic approaches, and he has moved easily between straight plays and musicals. Loquasto won a Tony for Café Crown (1989), and Grand Hotel (1989), and his other Tony nominations include What the Wine-Sellers Buy (1974), American Buffalo (1977), The Suicide (1981), Ragtime (1998), revivals of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2003 and Glengarry Glen Ross in 2005, Three Days of Rain (2006), and revivals of A Touch of the Poet in 2006 and Inherit the Wind in 2007. Loquasto also won Drama Desk Awards for a revival of The Cherry Orchard in 1977, American Buffalo, Café Crown, Italian American Reconciliation (1989), Grand Hotel, and Glengarry Glen Ross, and numerous Drama Desk nominations. Loquasto has worked closely with filmmaker Woody Allen and his art direction and costumes for Allen’s movies have earned him three Academy Award nominations for Zelig (1983), Radio Days (1987), and Bullets over Broadway (1994). LORTEL, LUCILLE (1900–1998). A New Yorker by birth, Lortel was educated at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before traveling to Germany, where she studied under Max Reinhardt. Upon her return to the United States, she acted in stock and appeared in small roles on Broadway in four short-lived productions, Two By Two (1925), The Dove (1925), One Man’s Woman (1926), The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1932). In the

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early 1930s, Lortel married Louis Schweitzer and abandoned her career until 1947 when she established the White Barn Theatre at her Westport, Connecticut, home, which, until 2002, provided young performers and playwrights with a venue for summer work. In 1955, Lortel acquired New York’s Theatre de Lys where she produced a revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, starring Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, and it scored a surprise hit, running for 2,611 performances (until late 1961). Lortel expressed affection for lesser-known works by major international dramatists and new works by young talents with current themes, including such playwrights as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Marsha Norman, Larry Kramer, Lanford Wilson, William M. Hoffman, and others. Lortel’s nickname as the “Queen of Off-Broadway” amply demonstrated her varied and essential contributions, but she also aided several Broadway productions, including a 1973 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, Angels Fall (1983), As Is (1985), a 1985 revival of Blood Knot, Sarafina! (1988), and A Walk in the Woods (1988). In 1986, the Off-Broadway community established the Lucille Lortel Awards to recognize excellence. Lortel herself was the recipient of numerous awards recognizing her contributions, including the first Margo Jones Award in 1961, a special 1985 Theatre World Award, and a 1993 Drama League Unique Contribution to Theatre Award. LOS ANGELES THEATRE CENTER (LATC). Established by Ralph Waite and Diane White in 1975 as the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, the LATC aimed to provide the West coast with a venue not unlike New York’s Public Theatre. After a decade and over 200 premiere productions, in 1985 with a name change and new spaces in downtown Los Angeles, the theatre began to regularly produce a season of 14 plays, including new works by Luis Valdéz, Anna Deavere Smith, and David Henry Hwang. LATC expanded its mission to include greater diversity, supporting special wings such as the Latino Theatre Lab, the Black Theatre Artists Workshop, the Asian American Theatre Project, the Women’s Project, and the Young Conservatory. The organization closed in 1991, but the Latino Theatre Lab struggled to save the facilities at 514 S. Spring Street and raise the necessary funds to keep it afloat. In 2008, they reestablished the theatre with a full season of multi-disciplinary programs. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE; CHICANO THEATRE; ETHNIC THEATRE; FEMINIST THEATRE. LOST IN YONKERS. Neil Simon won a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Drama Desk Award for this comedy-drama that also brought Tonys and Drama Desk Awards to the play’s leading actors, Irene Worth, Mercedes Ruehl, and Kevin Spacey. The play opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

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on 21 February 1991 for 780 performances. Set in 1942, the progeny of stern, bitter Grandma Kurnitz (Worth) are a troubled lot. One of her sons is a smalltime hood on the lam and the other, a struggling widower, comes to her as a last resort, to plead with her to care for his two young sons while he accepts a job far away. The boys are terrified of Grandma, but find an unlikely protector in their mentally challenged Aunt Bella (Ruehl), who ultimately finds courage in herself to stand up to her domineering mother. Worth and Ruehl repeated their performances in a 1993 screen version also starring Richard Dreyfuss and directed by Martha Coolidge. LOUDON, DOROTHY (1933–2003). A versatile singer, actress, and comedian, Loudon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent more than a decade performing in all manner of show business prior to winning a Theatre World Award in the short-lived Broadway musical Nowhere to Go But Up (1962). This led to a stint (1962–1964) on television’s The Garry Moore Show, a variety hour which showcased Loudon’s versatility. She also appeared frequently in nightclubs, stock, and Broadway shows, including Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato (1968), The Fig Leaves Are Falling (1969), which brought her a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination, and revivals of Three Men on a Horse in 1969 and The Women in 1973. Loudon scored a major triumph as the comically evil orphanage matron Miss Hannigan in the musical Annie (1977), winning a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. Loudon starred in the musical Ballroom (1979), which brought her Tony and Drama Desk nominations, although the production had a comparatively brief run. She replaced Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd (1979) and starred with Katharine Hepburn in The West Side Waltz (1981). She shared in a Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble for the British farce Noises Off (1983), and also appeared on Broadway in Jerry’s Girls (1985) and a revival of Dinner at Eight in 2002. Loudon starred in a short-lived television situation comedy, Dorothy (1979), but other than variety shows, she made relatively few television appearances and only a couple of films, although she won critical plaudits as Serena Dawes in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). LOUISVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE. Sara Spencer Campbell, founder of Anchorage Press, and Mary Tyler Dick established this theatre in 1946 with Anne Gordon Brigham, associate director of The Neighborhood House, which had performed children’s theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, prior to World War II. The LCT incorporated in 1948 and hired its first professional director, Katherine Kollmer, in 1950. In 1956, the LCT took up residence at the Belknap Playhouse at the University of Louisiville, but

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moved to Spalding College in 1967. The LCT changed its name to Stage One and became an Equity Theatre in 1980 with a resident acting company and continues its mission of producing high-quality children’s theatre and developing new works for young audiences. LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! Terrence McNally’s Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Obie Award-winning comedy-drama opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club and Jujamcyn Theatres production under the direction of Joe Mantello on 14 February 1995 for 248 performances at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Set in the mid-1990s at a Dutchess County lakeside house owned by a gay choreographer Gregory, who invites a group of close gay friends for relaxing weekends during which the characters struggle with personal relationships, the specter of AIDS, and other vicissitudes of life. The characters include two English brothers, John and James (both played by John Glover in a Tony-winning performance), a Broadway musical fanatic, Buzz, played by Nathan Lane in a star-making and Drama Desk Award-winning performance, and assorted others, including a young Latino dancer who threatens Gregory’s longtime relationship with a young blind man, Bobby, played by Justin Kirk. A 1997 screen version, also directed by Mantello, featured Jason Alexander stepping into Lane’s role and most of the other cast members from Broadway. A 1995 London production won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. LUBIN, BARRY (1953– ). One of the rare American clowns to break through from circus to mainstream show business, Lubin was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he aimed to become a television director. He attended the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College and developed the character “Grandma,” inspired by his own grandmother and elderly women he observed walking Atlantic City’s boardwalk. He joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” in 1974. He later teamed with Dick Monday and performed variety comedy shows on tour and Off-Broadway, including A Couple of Guys Who Gotta Do a Show and Pass the Popcorn. Lubin joined the Big Apple Circus, a New York-based one-ring circus, in 1982. LUCAS, CRAIG (1951– ). Adopted by a Pennsylvania family (after he was found in an abandoned car in Atlanta, Georgia), Lucas attended Boston University, where he was encouraged as a writer by Anne Sexton. Lucas appeared as an actor in the Broadway musicals Shenandoah (1975), Rex (1976), On the Twentieth Century (1978), and Sweeney Todd (1979), but turned to playwriting with Blue Window (1984), followed by Three Post-

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cards (1987), and Marry Me a Little (1988), a musical featuring songs by Stephen Sondheim. Lucas rose to prominence as a dramatist with Prelude to a Kiss (1990), which brought him Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations. His subsequent plays include Missing Persons (1995), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, God’s Heart (1997), The Dying Gaul (1998), Stranger (2001), The Thing of Darkness (2002), written in collaboration with David Schulner, Reckless (2004), Small Tragedy (2004), The Singing Forest (2004), the libretto for The Light in the Piazza (2005), which brought him a Tony nomination, and Prayer for My Enemy (2007). For films, Lucas wrote the AIDS-themed Longtime Companion (1990), adapted his own Prelude to a Kiss (1992), Reckless (1995), and The Dying Gaul (2005), which he also directed, and The Secret of Dentists (2002), for which he was awarded a New York Film Critics Circle Award. Lucas also directed the film Birds of America (2008). Lucas is artistic director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington, and won an Obie Award for directing Harry Kondoleon’s Saved or Destroyed in 2001. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. LUCE, CLARE BOOTHE. See BOOTHE, CLARE. LUCE, WILLIAM (1941– ). Portland, Oregon, native Luce has developed his own unique corner of contemporary American drama as the author of a series of solo plays about celebrated historical figures, beginning with The Belle of Amherst (1976), in which Julie Harris (in a Tony Award-winning performance) portrayed Emily Dickinson. None of Luce’s subsequent singleactor shows has been quite as successful, but all have had a stage life, often due to the presence of a major actor. His plays, four of which have appeared on Broadway, include Lillian (1986), with Zoe Caldwell as Lillian Hellman, The Last Flapper (1987; Zelda Fitzgerald), Brontë (1988; Charlotte Brontë), Bravo, Caruso! (1991; Enrico Caruso), Lucifer’s Child (1991; Isak Dinesen), Barrymore (1997; John Barrymore*), which brought Christopher Plummer a Tony, Nijinsky (2000), and Baptiste: The Life of Molière (2001). LUCILLE LORTEL AWARDS. See LORTEL, LUCILLE. LUDLAM, CHARLES (1943–1987). Born in New York City and raised in Northport, Long Island, Ludlam received a degree in dramatic literature from Hofstra University in 1964. When he became a member of John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous, a small Off-Off-Broadway company, Ludlam found his unique theatrical style. With Vaccaro’s company, Ludlam saw his earliest plays, Big Hotel (1967) and Conquest of the Universe (1967), produced, introducing the theatrical flamboyance, outrageous camp humor, and

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gay-themed travesties and popular culture satires that made him a fixture of New York’s Off-Broadway theatre scene for 20 years. Despite his initial successes with Vaccaro, artistic differences led Ludlam to form his own troupe, The Ridiculous Theatre Company, and under this banner, and for the remainder of his career, Ludlam perfected his style as both a playwright and an actor, combining elements of high camp, art, Grand Guignol, melodrama,* and classic movies with often shocking humor in a range of plays inspired by opera, literature, and mainstream American theatrical and cinematic forms. A particularly characteristic touch was Ludlam’s use of female impersonation as he usually took on the leading role in his own plays, portraying such diverse fictional characters as Marguerite Gautier and Hedda Gabler, as well as genuine icons, including Greta Garbo and Maria Callas. From among Ludlam’s canon of over 20 plays, the most critically appreciated are Bluebeard (1970), Camille (1973, revived 1990), Stageblood (1975), Professor Bedlam’s Punch and Judy Show (1975), Der Ring Gott Farblonjet (1977), Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde (1982), and The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), the last being perhaps the most enduring of his numerous stage works. As both leading actor and dramatist, these plays brought Ludlam six Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and the Rosamund Gilder Award. Ludlam also made a few film appearances, the most significant of which were released in the year he died: The Big Easy (1987) and Forever, Lulu (1987), and he also improbably made a few television guest appearances. Ludlam also made two silent films with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company called The Sorrows of Dolores and Museum of Wax; these were thought unfinished at the time of his death, but were pieced together and shown in a Queer/Art/ Film series at the IFC Center in New York in 2010. Ludlam was also an important theatrical theorist and, five years after his death, publication of his diverse essays on theatrical art, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly—The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam, brought a fuller appreciation of his achievement as an actor and playwright. At the time of Ludlam’s death, he was preparing a play called A Piece of Pure Escapism in which he intended to portray the legendary early twentiethcentury magician Harry Houdini. The Ridiculous Theatre Company dealt openly with homosexuality well before the subject became commonplace in American drama, a fact that gained poignance when Ludlam died of complications from AIDS. LUDWIG, KEN (1950– ). Playwright and librettist with a penchant for farce, Ludwig was born in York, Pennsylvania, and studied at Haverford College, Cambridge, and Harvard University Law School. He abandoned law to write for the theatre, scoring a success with his broad backstage farce Lend

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Me a Tenor (1989), which was nominated for a Best Play Tony Award, and has continued in a similar vein with Moon Over Buffalo (1995), Shakespeare in Hollywood (2003), Leading Ladies (2004), and Be My Baby (2005). He also revised the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur comedy Twentieth Century when it was revived on Broadway in 2004. Ludwig has also written the books for the musicals Crazy for You (1992), which brought him a Tony nomination, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2001). LUNT, ALFRED (1892–1977).† Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Alfred David Lunt attended Carroll College with plans of becoming an architect, but instead he became an actor, appearing in stock with the Castle Square Theatre in Boston and touring with Lillie Langtry* and Margaret Anglin.* He won acclaim in Clarence* (1919). When he married Lynn Fontanne in 1922, they began working together almost exclusively, appearing in a revival of Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923), but scoring their first dual triumph in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman (1924). Lunt was also well-received in a few solo efforts, including Outward Bound* (1924), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), and Marco Millions* (1928). In the mid-1920s, Lunt and Fontanne began a long string of critical and commercial successes establishing them as the greatest acting couple of their generation in the American theatre, admired for their individual gifts and the skill with which they worked together. Their major joint appearances in the 1920s included Arms and the Man (1925), At Mrs. Beam’s (1926), The Brothers Karamazov (1927), The Second Man* (1927), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1927), Caprice (1928), and Meteor* (1929). After 1930, the reputations of the Lunts, individually and together, only grew with distinguished performances in Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Robert E. Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (1931), Noël Coward’s Design for Living (1933) and Point Valaine (1935), Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1935), Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Idiot’s Delight (1936), Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 (1937), Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1938), Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night (1940), S. N. Behrman’s The Pirate (1942), Terrence Rattigan’s O Mistress Mine (1946), Behrman’s I Know My Love (1949), Coward’s Quadrille (1954), Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s The Great Sebastians (1956), and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1958). Lunt also directed some of their vehicles and won a Tony Award as Best Director for Ondine (1954), after which he won another as Best Actor for Quadrille. Lunt also directed Candle in the Wind (1941) and First Love (1961). Lunt and Fontanne were respected for their exacting professionalism and for the exhausting tours they did of many of their productions, bringing

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the finest plays and acting of the period to all corners of the United States. Jointly, the Lunts were presented with a special Tony in 1970. LUPONE, PATTI (1949– ). Born in Northport, New York, LuPone was trained for the stage at the Juilliard School and, with classmate Kevin Kline, was instrumental in the establishment of John Houseman’s The Acting Company, a touring troupe of young Juilliard actors. She appeared in a variety of classical, musical, and contemporary roles for the Company between 1972 and 1976, She debuted on Broadway in the Company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in 1973. Her most honored work has been in musical theatre, but LuPone has had an uncommonly varied career, including film and television work, as well as the stage. On Broadway, she has won Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for Evita (1979) and a revival of Gypsy in 2008, and was nominated for Tonys for The Robber Bridegroom (1976) and revivals Anything Goes in 1988 and Sweeney Todd in 2006. LuPone also won a Drama Desk Award for Anything Goes and was Drama Desk-nominated for The Robber Bridegroom, The Old Neighborhood (1998), and Sweeney Todd. She also appeared on Broadway in The Water Engine/Mr. Happiness (1978), Working (1978), a revival of Oliver! in 1984, Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1984), and a revival of Noises Off in 2001. She also replaced Zöe Caldwell in Master Class (1995). LuPone was nominated for an Emmy Award for a guest appearance on the television situation comedy Frasier in 1998 and a Daytime Emmy for The Song Spinner (1995). LuPone appeared as Libby Thacher on the TV drama series Life Goes On from 1989–1993 and her films include 1941 (1979), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Summer of Sam (1999), and State and Main (2000). LUV. Murray Schisgal’s two-act, three-character comedy opened on 11 November 1964 in a Shubert Organization production at the Booth Theatre for an impressive 901 performances. Directed by Mike Nichols, who won a Tony Award, and starring Peter Falk, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson, Luv was nominated for a Best Play Tony. Oliver Smith’s set was a bridge (with lighting by Jean Rosenthal and costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge) where a wacky threesome battles out their complicated relationships. Tinged with absurdist elements mixed with broad comedy, Schisgal’s satiric edge reveals the absurdities of love and marriage. Luv was adapted as a musical, Love, in 1984, and revised as What about Luv? in 1991. LYNCH, THOMAS (1953– ). An Asheville, North Carolina, native, he studied at the Yale University and has done much of his work as a scene designer in regional theatres, most notably Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and

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the Seattle Repertory Theatre, and with various opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera. Lynch has been nominated for Tony Awards for his Broadway designs of The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and a 2000 revival of The Music Man and Drama Desk Award nominations for both Broadway and Off-Broadway designs for Little Footsteps (1986), The Heidi Chronicles, Contact (2000), Old Money (2001), See What I Wanna See (2006), and Happiness (2009). Lynch’s Broadway designs also include Tintypes (1980), Rose (1981), The Speed of Darkness (1991), My Favorite Year (1992), The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1994), Having Our Say (1995), The Young Man from Atlanta (1997), Swing! (1999), Thou Shalt Not (2001), and several revivals. He also worked on the television drama Six Feet Under (2003–2005).

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Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater 1930–2010 Volume 2: M–Z

James Fisher

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2011

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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by James Fisher All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisher, James, 1950– Historical dictionary of contemporary American theater, 1930–2010 / James Fisher. p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8108-5532-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7950-8 (ebook) 1. Theater—United States—History—20th century—Dictionaries. 2. Theater—United States—History—21st century—Dictionaries. 3. American drama—20th century— Dictionaries. 4. American drama—21st century—Dictionaries. I. Title. PN2266.3.F575 2011 792.0973'0904—dc22 2010048180

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Volume 1 Editor’s Foreword

Jon Woronoff

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Reader’s Note

xi

Acronyms and Abbreviations

xiii

Chronology

xvii

Introduction

1

THE DICTIONARY: A–L

19

Volume 2 THE DICTIONARY: M–Z

488

Bibliography

895

About the Author

941

iii

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M M. BUTTERFLY. David Henry Hwang’s drama, directed by John Dexter, opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on 20 March 1988 for 777 performances, winning a Best Play Tony Award, the first won by an Asian American. The play also won a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award, with Dexter and lead actor B. D. Wong also winning Tony and Drama Desk Awards. The play covers 20 years between the 1960s and 1980s, reversing the operatic tale of Madame Butterfly in the story of an affair between a French diplomat, René (John Lithgow), and Beijing’s leading Chinese Opera actress, who turns out to be a Maoist male spy. The play explores love, deception, the nature of art, and the realm between fantasy and reality. MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM. August Wilson’s play, part of his 10play cycle on African American life in the twentieth century, opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre under the direction of Lloyd Richards in 1982, following performances at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. When the production moved to Broadway under the aegis of the Shubert Organization, where it opened at the Cort Theatre on 11 October 1984 for 276 performances, it won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, as well as Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations. In the play, legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, played by Theresa Merritt (Tony-nominated), rules a Chicago recording studio with an iron fist in 1927. She recognizes that outside the studio she is a black woman with no power, inside the studio her talent has worth and gives her power, including command over Levee (Charles S. Dutton, who won Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards, and a Tony nomination), a trumpeter in her band whose ambitions are frustrated, leading to a violent act. The play was revived on Broadway at the Royale Theatre, where it opened on 6 February 2003 for 68 performances, reaping Thomas Jefferson Byrd a Theatre World Award for his performance as Levee. MABOU MINES. New York Times drama critic Frank Rich described this avant-garde theatre company as the “most incendiary” of its kind. In

488

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1970, Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech, who were working in Paris, were persuaded by Philip Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis, and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, to start Mabou Mines with the goal of experimenting with new ideas in the merging of language, literature, music, performance (movement, non-Western techniques, film), and visual arts in the making of theatre. Actor David Warrilow distinguished himself in the ensemble’s productions of the work of Samuel Beckett, which drew critical attention. Mabou Mines won a 1974 Obie Award for general excellence and another in 1986 for Sustained Achievement, and, for particular productions, including Dressed Like an Egg (1977), Southern Exposure (1979), A Prelude to Venice (1980), Dead End Kids (1981), and Peter and Wendy (1997), and multiple awards for actors, directors, and designers involved in Mabou Mines productions. MACARTHUR, CHARLES (1895–1956).† Born the son of a minister in Scranton, Pennsylvania, MacArthur worked as a Chicago newspaper where his eccentricities added colorful stories to the extraordinary life in the Windy City of the 1920s. He had his first theatrical success collaborating with established dramatist Edward Sheldon* on Lulu Belle* (1926), a lurid drama about a black prostitute (which caused controversy when the leading role was played by white actress Lenore Ulric* in blackface). Collaborating with Sidney Howard, MacArthur wrote Salvation (1928), an unsuccessful fictionalization of the life of Aimee Semple McPherson. MacArthur’s enduring theatrical fame came through collaborations with another Chicago journalist, Ben Hecht. With their hugely successful comedy-melodrama* about Chicago corruption and yellow journalism, The Front Page* (1928), Hecht and MacArthur became a celebrated team, scoring subsequent successes with Twentieth Century (1932), a comedy about a faded Hollywood director’s attempt to lure his tempestuous leading lady back to the screen, and with their libretto for the musical Jumbo (1935), with a score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Later collaborations with Hecht, including Ladies and Gentlemen (1939), a murder mystery written as a vehicle for MacArthur’s wife Helen Hayes, and the melodramatic Swan Song (1946), both failed. On his own, MacArthur also had a failure with Johnny on a Spot (1942), a political satire, but he had a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. MACBIRD! Barbara Garson’s 1960s counterculture satire, inspired by Macbeth, generated controversy with its accusation that President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson conspired in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It opened Off-Broadway on 22 February 1967 at the Village Gate Theatre for 386 performances. Gerald Freedman directed a cast including Stacy

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Keach (who won an Obie Award) and Rue McClanahan as the MacBirds, supported by Paul Hecht, William Devane, John Pleshette, John Clark, and Cleavon Little (in his stage debut). MACGOWAN, KENNETH (1888–1963).† One of the most influential producers and drama critics between the world wars, Macgowan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and worked as a dramatic critic for the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger before becoming the drama critic for the New York Globe in 1919, a position he held until 1923. Macgowan also wrote reviews for Vogue and THEATRE ARTS. In 1924, Macgowan became a producer when he joined Robert Edmond Jones and Eugene O’Neill in managing the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. Macgowan’s friendship with O’Neill was particularly significant, not only because he produced several of O’Neill’s early plays (All God’s Chillun Got Wings,* Desire under the Elms,* The Fountain,* and The Great God Brown*) when they and Jones operated the Greenwich Village Theatre (1925–1927), but because he encouraged O’Neill’s inclination to move beyond realism in his plays. Macgowan presented the first Broadway production of August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata in 1924, as well as a hit revival of Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1924). He also produced Broadway productions of Young Love (1928), These Modern Women (1928), Children of Darkness (1930), a revival of Twelfth Night starring Jane Cowl in 1930, Art and Mrs. Bottle (1930), which featured one of Katharine Hepburn’s first appearances, Lean Harvest (1931), The Lady with a Lamp (1931), and Springtime for Henry (1931). For movies, Macgowan served as producer or associate producer for a number of classic films, including Topaze (1933), Little Women* (1933), Becky Sharp (1935), In Old Chicago (1937), The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Stanley and Livingstone (1939), Tin Pan Alley (1940), and Lifeboat (1944), films that often involved theatre actors in significant roles. He also won an Academy Award as producer of the short film, La Cucaracha (1934). Macgowan’s books on theatre, including The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921), Continental Stagecraft (1922, with Jones), Masks and Demons (1923, with Herman Rosse), and Footlights Across America (1929), did much to encourage acceptance of modernist production practices emanating from Europe’s stages and ushering in the New Stagecraft. MACHADO, EDUARDO (1953– ). Cuban-born playwright Eduardo Oscar Machado emigrated to the United States from Havana with his brother in

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• 491

1961 and remains a Cuban citizen. He studied acting with David Alexander and playwriting with Maria Irene Fornés before moving to New York in 1981, working as a dramatist, director, and teacher at New York University. Since 2004, he has held the post of Artistic Director at the International Arts Relations, Inc. Theatre (INTAR). Among his nearly 50 plays, the best known include Broken Eggs (1988), Havana is Waiting (2000), and The Cook (2003). Others include Once Removed (1987), Don Juan in N.Y.C. (1988), In the Eye of the Hurricane (1991), Kissing Fidel (1997), My Sister (2004), and That Night in Hialeah (2008). He has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Grants and a Rockefeller Foundation Playwriting Award, among others. See also CHICANO THEATRE. MACKAY, CONSTANCE D’ARCY (1887–1966).† At the turn of the century, Mackay, who was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, was an advocate for community pageantry as a way of bringing diverse populations together. She had studied at Boston University, where she wrote her first plays and became a leading exponent of children’s theatre. Mackay published over 30 volumes of plays for children in addition to handbooks for amateur productions and a 1917 classic, Little Theatre in the United States. During World War I, Mackay served as director of pageantry and drama for the War Camp Community Service and continued until 1921. During the 1920s, along with her playwriting, she wrote many articles about producing children’s plays in community theatres and, in 1926, she married Roland Holt, son of publisher Henry Holt. Following Holt’s 1931 death, Mackay, who had directed many productions, scaled back her efforts, but her masque, The Sun Goddess, was adapted as an opera in 1934, and her 1948 play, Ladies of the White House, was published. She wrote librettos for three children’s operas, Cockrow (1955), The Magic Mirror (1955), and The Gooseheard and the Goblin (1958). MACKINTOSH, CAMERON (1946– ). A notable British producer born in London, Cameron Anthony Mackintosh attended Prior Park College. Interested in theatrical producing from childhood, Mackintosh has produced numerous productions in London and on Broadway, virtually all musicals. The biggest hits Mackintosh produced, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, had record-breaking runs and won multiple awards. MACKINTOSH, ROBERT (1925–1998). Known as a bon vivant, costume designer Robert Mackintosh studied at the Parsons School of Design and began his career designing costumes for the Ice Capades. His costume designs

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were seen in a range of straight plays and musicals on Broadway, including Wish You Were Here (1952), Anniversary Waltz (1954), The Boy Friend (1954), Silk Stockings (1954), Mr. Wonderful (1956), Saratoga (1959) Mame (1966), Butterflies Are Free (1969), and the 1974 revival of Gypsy, among others. He also designed garments for numerous noted actresses, including Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, Marilyn Monroe, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Ginger Rogers, and others, not to mention drag artist and playwright Charles Busch. Mackintosh also authored two novels and coauthored pianist Bobby Short’s memoirs. MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD (1892–1982). A native of Glencoe, Illinois, MacLeish studied at Yale University and Harvard University Law School prior to military service in World War I. He completed his law studies at the war’s end and moved to Paris as part of a group of American writers and artists who spent much of the 1920s there. In 1928, he returned to the United States and from then until the late 1930s was a writer and editor for Fortune magazine before becoming librarian of the Library of Congress. During the 1930s, he also wrote plays, including the musical Union Pacific (1934) and a tragedy, Panic (1935). Neither was successful and MacLeish turned his attention to working for several antifascist organizations and for the War Department during World War II. He joined the faculty of Harvard in the 1950s, during which time he won a Pulitzer Prize and a Best Play Tony Award for his play J.B. (1958), a modernized version of the story of Job set in a contemporary circus. MacLeish subsequently adapted Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, as Scratch (1971), which failed on Broadway, although the play has had a life in regional, stock, and university theatres. MACY, WILLIAM H. (1950– ). Born in Miami, Florida, to a World War II-hero father and “Southern Belle” mother, Macy attended Goddard College, where he met David Mamet, whose plays won him success as an actor on both stage and screen. Macy did much of his early stage work in Chicago, appearing in the original 1976 production of Mamet’s American Buffalo, for which he was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award. He was nominated subsequently for Chicago productions of one of the plays from A Texas Trilogy, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia in 1976, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in 1977, and Holiday* in 1979. In 1985, with Mamet, Macy founded New York’s Atlantic Theatre Company. On Broadway, he appeared in a 1988 revival of Our Town, and he replaced Jeremy Piven in the 2009 revival of Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Off-Broadway, Macy was nominated for his direction of Boy’s Life (1988). In films, Macy was

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• 493

nominated for an Academy Award for Fargo (1966) and he won an Emmy Award for the television miniseries Door to Door (2002), and is a regular on the cable series Shameless (2011). Macy’s other film credits include Oleanna (1994), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1996), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Pleasantville (1998), Psycho (1998), Magnolia (1999), State and Main (2000), Thank You For Smoking (2005), and numerous others. Macy is married to actress Felicity Huffman. MAGIC THEATRE, INC., THE (MT). A theatre company with a name inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, San Francisco’s Magic Theatre was established in 1967 when a University of California at Berkeley graduate student, John Lion, directed Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson in a bar. Lion remained a guiding force in the first decades of MT, directing one of their most famous productions, Michael McClure’s The Beard, in 1974. In 1975, Sam Shepard joined Lion to serve as playwright-in-residence, with Martin Esslin, signing on as dramaturg in 1977—and the theatre produced Shepard’s Buried Child (which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979) in 1978 and Shepard’s collaboration with Joseph Chaikin, Tongues that same year. Shepard’s True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983) also premiered there. In 1982, MT won the regional theatre Tony Award and continues to present premieres of new works by cutting-edge dramatists, including Lynne Kaufman, Tom Strelich, Murray Mednick, Alan Bowne, Anne Bogart, Elaine May, and others. In 2008, Loretta Greco became artistic director. MAHER, JOSEPH (1933–1998). Irish-born actor educated in Ireland by the Christian Brothers, Maher became a versatile character actor in both classical and contemporary plays on Broadway and in films. He was nominated for Tony Awards for his performances in Spokesong (1979), Night and Day (1980), and Loot (1986), for which he won a Drama Desk Award. Maher also appeared on Broadway in The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), revivals of King Henry V in 1969 and Mary Stuart in 1971, There’s One in Every Marriage (1972), Who’s Who in Hell (1974), revivals of The Royal Family* in 1975 and Days in the Trees in 1976, and 84 Charing Cross Road (1982). Maher appeared in numerous films, including Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980), Under the Rainbow (1981), Sister Act (1982), and In & Out (1997), and television shows. MAINBOCHER (1890–1976). This name became the label of the vaunted Paris fashion house founded by Main Rousseau Bocher, who had been born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Following military service during World War I,

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Bocher spent time in Paris, where he edited the French edition of Vogue. As a successful couturier, he provided gowns for major Hollywood and Broadway stars beginning in the late 1920s, including Mary Pickford, Helen Hayes, Miriam Hopkins, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, and others. In 1937, Bocher designed the wedding gown and trousseau for Wallis Simpson when she married the Duke of Windsor, generating front-page news. By the 1940s, he supplied costumes for leading ladies in a number of Broadway productions, particularly when elegance was required, including Blithe Spirit (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), Over 21 (1944), Foolish Notion (1945), Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945), The Leading Lady (1948), a 1948 revival of Private Lives, The Smile of the World (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), Point of No Return (1951), Not for Children (1951), Wonderful Town (1953), The Prescott Papers (1953), Kind Sir (1953), The Great Sebastians (1956), which brought him a Tony Award nomination, The Sound of Music (1959), Tiny Alice (1964), and Applause (1970), among others. MAJORITY OF ONE, A. Leonard Spigelgass’s three-act comedy of multicultural understanding opened in a Theatre Guild/Dore Schary production at the Shubert Theatre on 15 February 1959 for 556 performances, under the direction of Schary (who was nominated for a Tony Award), with scene and lighting designs by Donald Oenslager (who won a Tony) and costumes by Motley. The play starred radio and television star Gertrude Berg (“Molly Goldberg”), who won a Tony as Mrs. Jacoby, a Jewish American widow bitter about the Japanese because her son was killed during the war. She meets and becomes involved with Kolchi Asano, played by Cedric Hardwicke (Tony-nominated), a Japanese millionaire, on a sea voyage and is changed by the encounter to the point of considering marriage, to the shock of her daughter. The cast also included Ina Balin (Theatre World Award winner), Barnard Hughes, and Mae Questel. A 1961 film version starred Alec Guinness and Rosalind Russell, who won a Golden Globe Award for her performance. MALE ANIMAL, THE. Elliott Nugent and James Thurber collaborated on this comedy about a mild-mannered man who must learn to fight for his wife’s affections. It opened at the Cort Theatre on 9 January 1940 for 243 performances, produced and directed by Herman Shumlin with scene design by Aline Bernstein. Nugent himself played Professor Tommy Turner, who must confront his wife Ellen’s former boyfriend (and one-time football great), Joe Ferguson (Leon Ames). Gene Tierney appeared in the cast as the campus beauty. Nugent also appeared in a popular 1942 revival, with Robert Preston as Joe. A 1942 screen version directed by Nugent starred Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, and Joan Leslie.

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MALECZECH, RUTH (1939– ). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, as Ruth Reinprecht, this avant-garde actress partnered with Lee Breuer while a student at the University of California at Los Angeles. She studied with Ronnie Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and spent some time observing the Berliner Ensemble and theatres in other international capitals. With Breuer, Maleczech founded Mabou Mines, one of New York’s major experimental theatres where, among many other roles, in 1990 she played King Lear as a Southern grande dame. At the time, Maleczech said, “I’m not drawn to roles usually, but I was drawn to Lear’s language. And I couldn’t figure out any reason why a woman couldn’t say those words as a woman.” Earlier, in 1984, Maleczech caused controversy appearing in Through the Leaves, simulating sexual intercourse onstage in the role of an abused woman. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. MALINA, JUDITH (1926– ). German by birth, Malina has spent much of her career working in New York as one of the founders and the perennial leader of The Living Theatre (LT). She cofounded the theatre with her husband Julian Beck, who she met in 1947 following a period of study at the New School of Social Research under Erwin Piscator. The Beck’s unconventional “open” marriage mirrored the avant-garde, experimental approach of the LT. They collaborated on virtually all of the LT’s productions, including We, The Living (1970), Paradise Now (1971), Frankenstein (Venice Version) (1972), and others. Following Beck’s death in 1985, LT company member Hanon Reznikov, Malina’s lover, co-led the theatre with Malina, but after his death in 2008 Malina continued on her own. She has appeared in a few Hollywood films, including Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Addams Family (1991), and acted in an episode of the HBO-TV series, The Sopranos. See also ALTERNATE THEATRE. MALKOVICH, JOHN (1953– ). Born John Galvin Malkovich in Christopher, Illinois, he acted in school productions as a child and majored in theatre at both Eastern Illinois University and Illinois State University. In 1976, Malkovich and fellow actors Joan Allen, Gary Sinise, Glenne Headley, and others established Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and he moved to New York in 1980 to appear Off-Broadway in the Steppenwolf’s production of True West, costarring Sinise, for which he won an Obie Award and a Theatre World Award. He codirected the Steppenwolf’s 1984 revival of Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, winning both an Obie and a Drama Desk Award. That same year, Malkovich debuted on Broadway as Biff in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman, winning a Drama Desk Award. The production was filmed for television in

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1985 and Malkovich won an Emmy Award for his performance. Malkovich also appeared on Broadway in revivals of Arms and the Man in 1985 and The Caretaker in 1986, directing both. Wilson wrote Burn This (1987) with Malkovich in mind, and he appeared on Broadway in it, garnering a Drama Desk nomination. As a major film star, Malkovich has been nominated for Academy Awards for Places in the Heart (1984) and In the Line of Fire (1993), and he has appeared in such movies as The Glass Menagerie (1987), Empire of the Sun 1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Shadows and Fog (1992), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Ripley’s Game (2002), The Libertine (2004), Klimt (2006), and Burn After Reading (2008), and he appeared in Being John Malkovich (1999), which made use of his persona as part of its story. MALPEDE, KAREN (1945– ). Born Karen Sophia Malpede in Wichita Falls, Texas, to a Jewish mother and an Italian father, she was educated at Columbia University, where she received an M.F.A. from the School of the Arts. Greatly influenced by the political avant-garde and antiwar movements of the 1960s, Malpede’s plays have often been produced by New York’s Classic Stage Company and include A Lament for Three Women (1974), Rebeccah (1975), The End of War (1976), A Monster Has Stolen the Sun (1981), Sappho & Aphrodite (1983), Better People (1986), US (1987), Going to Iraq (1992), Kassandra (1992), The Beekeeper’s Daughter (1994), I Will Bear Witness: The Holocaust Diaries of Victor Klemperer (2001), Iraq: Speaking of War (2005), and Prophecy (2007). Of her most recent play focusing on the legacies of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Malpede has said, “Nothing in my play is exposing anything that isn’t known, but I’m trying to get people to feel it. In a way I’m trying to use the theatre as a place of witness. The great thing about the theatre is that people are sitting there together and the people on the stage are alive so it brings people together.” MAMBA’S DAUGHTERS. DuBose and Dorothy Heyward adapted his 1929 novel for the stage, featuring songs by Jerome Kern, and under the direction of Guthrie McClintic with scene designs by Perry Watkins. Starring Ethel Waters and with a large cast, including Fredi Washington, Canada Lee, José Ferrer, J. Rosamund Johnson, Helen Dowdy, Alberta Hunter, and Anne Brown, it opened at the Empire Theatre on 3 January 1939 for 162 performances. The episodic play set in South Carolina focuses centrally on an uneducated black woman who intends a better life for her daughter. The central character, Hagar (Waters) must give over her daughter to her mother to rear, but later when the daughter, who is educated and a successful singer,

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runs into difficulty, Hagar must make a significant sacrifice for her benefit. Target Margin Theatre revived the play in 1998. MAMET, DAVID (1947– ). Chicago was the birthplace and the setting for many of the plays written by David Alan Mamet, son of a lawyer and a teacher. His theatrical career began inauspiciously as a busboy at Chicago’s The Second City, but his approach to his art was more likely shaped at Vermont’s progressive Goddard College. Following college and in New York, Mamet became a founding member of the Atlantic Theatre Company, where his earliest major plays drew significant critical attention, including three plays produced in 1976: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo, the last nominated for a Drama Desk Award. He has also received Drama Desk nominations for his plays The Water Engine/Mr. Happiness (1978), Edmond (1983), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed-the-Plow (1988), Oleanna (1993), and The Cryptogram (1995). Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, which also brought him a Best Play Tony Award nomination. When Glengarry Glen Ross was revived in 2005, it won a Tony as Best Revival. Other Broadway revivals of Mamet plays include American Buffalo and Speed-the-Plow in 2008 and Oleanna in 2009. Mamet’s other plays produced on Broadway include The Old Neighborhood (1997), November (2008), and Race (2009). Mamet’s plays have also brought him two Obie Awards (1976, 1983) and two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (1977, 1984). Mamet’s other plays include A Life in the Theatre (1977), Oh Hell (1990), some collections of short plays, and adaptations of Anton Chekhov’s plays. Mamet received Academy Award nominations for his screenplays for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997), among the several films he has scripted. Since the late 1980s, he has directed films, many written or adapted by him, sometimes from his own plays, including House of Games (1987), Oleanna (1994), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), The Winslow Boy (1999), State and Main (2000), Catastrophe (2000), Redbelt (2008), and several episodes of the television series The Unit (2006–2008), among others. Aside from his dramatic works and screenwriting, Mamet has written a novel about Leo Frank and books on the practice of theatre and film, including Writing in Restaurants (1987), On Directing Film (1992), True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (1999), Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (2000), and Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (2008). He has also written The Wicked Son (2006), an examination of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. Mamet was married to actress Lindsay Crouse and fol-

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lowing their divorce he married actress Rebecca Pidgeon, who has appeared in several of his plays and films. MAMOULIAN, ROUBEN (1897–1987). Son of an actress, Mamoulian was born in Russia, and studied law at the University of Moscow. He abandoned his legal pursuits to study at Eugene Vakhtangov’s Studio Theatre. He directed The Beating on the Door (1922) in London, then headed George Eastman’s Theatre in Rochester, New York, from 1923–1926. In 1926, Mamoulian joined the staff of The Theatre Guild as a teacher, and in 1927, he directed Dubose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy.* In 1928 alone, Mamoulian directed six Broadway productions, including Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions* and Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s* Wings Over Europe. His other productions in this period range from a revival of Karel Cäpek’s R.U.R. (1929) to Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1930). After 1930, Mamoulian continued to direct for the stage with some frequency, including such seminal and commercially successful musicals as Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), St. Louis Woman (1946), and Lost in the Stars (1949). Lesser efforts included a 1930 revival of Marco Millions, Solid South (1930), Sadie Thompson (1944), Leaf and Bough (1949), and Arms and the Girl (1950). With the arrival of sound motion pictures, Mamoulian also turned his attentions to directing movies, several of which are now regarded as classics, including Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Becky Sharp (1935), Golden Boy (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), Laura (1944; uncredited), Summer Holiday (1948), and Silk Stockings (1957), among many others. MAN FROM NEBRASKA. Despite being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004, Tracy Letts’s comedy-drama has not found the critical approval of his other plays, despite several productions beginning at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where it opened on 20 November 2003 under Anna D. Shapiro’s direction. The play deals with the strained marriage of Ken and Nancy, strained mostly by a deep crisis of faith Ken is experiencing. He runs away to London where, ultimately, he is drawn back to Nancy. Man from Nebraska was produced in 2006 by Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory with a cast including Brian Kerwin and Kathy Baker under William Friedkin’s direction, and it was also staged by San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre in October 2009. MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, THE. This George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy scored a major success in a Sam H. Harris production directed by Kaufman when it opened on 16 October 1939 for 739

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performances. The plot of this improbable Broadway classic grew out of an actual incident involving a weekend visit by flamboyant critic Alexander Woollcott* to Hart’s home. On his departure, Woollcott left behind a rudely complaining note. A bewildered Hart recounted this incident to Kaufman, wondering what it would be like to put up with Woollcott for a longer visit and that nightmare is what the playwriting team imagined in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Satirizing Woollcott, and for good measure, other 1930s celebrities in thinly veiled caricatures of Broadway and Hollywood celebrities, including Gertrude Lawrence, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, not to mention Albert Einstein, Kaufman and Hart set these eccentrics against narrow-minded middle-class values of pre-World War II America. Critics were largely won over by the play’s infectious humor even as they acknowledged a lack of plot or evidence of a theme. Following a formula developed in their Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 comedy You Can’t Take It with You, Kaufman and Hart proved that a delightful play could rest merely on pitting a band of non-conformist eccentrics against the self-appointed exemplars of propriety and normalcy. Above all, the razor-sharp, affectionate satirizing of Woollcott (in the guise of Sheridan Whiteside, played memorably by Monty Woolley) as a confirmed hedonist and self-centered ego maniac, reaped one of the American theatre’s most enduring comedies. Woolley repeated his performance in the largely faithful 1942 Warner Bros. film version costarring with Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Jimmy Durante, and Mary Wickes. Television adaptations appeared in 1947, 1972 (with Orson Welles as Whiteside in a misguided updating of the play), and 2000, and the play was revived on Broadway in 1980 with Ellis Rabb as Whiteside and again in 2000 with Nathan Lane. Before his death, Woollcott himself played Whiteside in a stock production (and both Kaufman and Hart did), merging reality and illusion. MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB (MTC). Established in 1970 with the goal of bringing theatre to a wide audience via an annual season of plays, the MTC has moved many of its most successful productions to Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres. The MTC’s first home was a three-story space on East 73rd Street. Lynne Meadow became artistic director in 1972. With the help of grants and innovative producing ideas, the MTC premiered new plays, including Terrence McNally’s Obie Award-winning Bad Habits. McNally was one of several playwrights who works have been premiered at the MTC, including Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Crimes of the Heart (1980) by Beth Henley, Proof (2000) by David Auburn, Doubt (2005) by John Patrick Shanley, Rabbit Hole (2006) by David Lindsay-Abaire, and Ruined (2009) by Lynn Nottage. Other playwrights whose works have premiered at

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MTC include John Guare, Arthur Miller, Edward Bond, Richard Greenberg, Brian Friel, Alan Ayckbourn, Donald Margulies, and Sam Shepard. Making use of New York’s Biltmore Theatre and the New York City Center, both in the heart of the Broadway district, the MTC otherwise functions much like a not-for-profit regional theatre, drawing audiences to new works and revivals with big-name casts, directors, and designers. Such noted actors as Laura Linney, Holly Hunter, Nancy Marchand, Swoosie Kurtz, Barnard Hughes, Christine Baranski, Bernadette Peters, Diane Weist, James Coco, Kevin Bacon, Glenn Close, Stockard Channing, Nathan Lane, Brian Murray, Peter Friedman, Julie Andrews, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathleen Chalfant, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Mary-Louise Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Michael Cerveris, and Donna Murphy, among others, have appeared in MTC productions. MANN, DANIEL (1912–1991). Born Daniel Chugerman in Brooklyn, New York, he became an actor as a child and attended New York’s Professional Children’s School and The Neighborhood Playhouse before acting in film and working as a director. Most of his work was in films, but he directed a few notable Broadway productions, including Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Paint Your Wagon (1951), The Immortalist (1954), and A Loss of Roses (1959). He won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the screen version of Come Back, Little Sheba filmed in 1952 and for films he also directed The Rose Tattoo (1955), I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Butterfield 8 (1960), Five Finger Exercise (1962), Our Man Flint (1966), and Lost in the Stars (1974). MANN, EMILY (1952– ). The daughter of noted historian Arthur Mann, Emily Betsy Mann was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and began her professional directing work in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the mid-1970s. She worked as a director in regional theatre for nearly 15 years. Since 1990, Mann has served as artistic director and resident playwright of Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre, Mann has guided over 85 productions, including premieres of plays by Christopher Durang, Theresa Rebeck, Steven Dietz, Anna Deavere Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. For Broadway, Mann has directed her own plays, Execution of Justice (1986) and Having Our Say (1995), which was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Play, and she staged Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics (2003). Off Broadway, Mann’s Still Life (1981) was produced at the American Place Theatre to positive critical response. Of her theatrical mission, Mann has said, “I feel the need to tell people’s stories and reflect what

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I see and what I hear. . . . I think it is important, in the end, for me, to be, in a way, invisible. I give voice to the voiceless, I give voice to the people who are often not heard of, or heard from.” MANN, THEODORE (1924– ). Brooklyn, New York, native Theodore Goldman became a leading theatre producer through his founding and long association with the Circle in the Square Theatre, beginning in 1951. At Circle in the Square, Mann produced a range of new works and revivals, including The Dark of the Moon (1951), The Grass Harp (1953), and notable revivals of Summer and Smoke in 1952 and The Iceman Cometh in 1956. Mann produced the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) and received a special Tony in 1976 for “twentyfive continuous years of quality productions.” Many Circle in the Square productions staged under Mann’s leadership were nominated for Tony and/ or Drama Desk Awards. These include The National Health (1975) and Coastal Disturbances (1987), and revivals of Tartuffe in 1977, Major Barbara in 1980, Present Laughter (1982), The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in 1983, Heartbreak House in 1983, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1988, Juno and the Paycock in 1988, Sweeney Todd in 1989, The Miser in 1990, On Borrowed Time in 1991, Wilder, Wilder, Wilder in 1993, and The Rose Tattoo in 1995, among numerous others. Mann published his memoirs, Journeys in the Night: Creating a New American Theatre with Circle in the Square (2007). Of the state of Broadway in the early twenty-first century, Mann stated, “Audiences are starved for the language. We need drama. Musicals are wonderful, but they shouldn’t dominate. You need drama to understand life.” MANTEGNA, JOE (1948– ). Born to an Italian American family in Chicago, Illinois, as Joseph Anthony Mantegna, Jr., he studied at the Goodman School of Drama, making his stage debut in a 1969 production of Hair and he coauthored Bleacher Bums (1977), which premiered at Chicago’s Organic Theatre Company. In New York, Mantegna made his first Broadway appearance in Working (1978). He began working in films and television in the 1970s and has moved easily between stage and screen. Mantegna won a 1984 Tony Award for his performance as Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he also shared in a Drama Desk Award Outstanding Ensemble Award, and he appeared as Bobby Gould in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988), along with other Mamet works in Chicago. In films, Mantegna has appeared in The Money Pit (1986), House of Games (1987), The Godfather: Part III (1990), and Bugsy (1991), and on television he was nominated for Golden Globe and Emmy Awards for the TV-film The Rat Pack (1998), playing singer Dean Martin. Mantegna also received Emmy

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Award nominations for The Last Don (1997) and The Starter Wife (2007), and is a regular on the television series Criminal Minds (2007–2011). MANTELLO, JOE (1962– ). An actor and director born in Rockford, Illinois, Mantello attended the North Carolina School of the Arts and, in partnership with writer Peter Hedges and actress Mary-Louise Parker, he founded New York’s Edge Theatre. As an actor, Mantello made an auspicious Broadway debut, winning a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination as Louis Ironson in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America: Part One: Millennium Approaches (1993), continuing in that role in the second Angels play, Perestroika (1993), which ran on Broadway in repertory with part one. Despite this success, he moved toward directing with the flop What’s Wrong with This Picture (1993), but more successfully with Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), reaping Tony and Drama Desk nominations, and he directed the 1997 film version. Mantello won Tonys for his direction of Take Me Out (2003) and a 2004 revival of Assassins, and was Tony-nominated for a 2005 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross. Mantello won a Drama Desk Award for Wicked (2004) and was Drama Desk-nominated for Mizlansky/Zilinsky or “Schmucks” (1998), Take Me Out, A Man of No Importance (2003), Assassins, Glengarry Glen Ross, and 9 to 5. Mantello also directed Proposals (1997), a 2001 revival of Design for Living, An Evening With Mario Cantone (2002), Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2002), Laugh Whore (2004), a 2005 revival of The Odd Couple, Three Days of Rain (2006), a 2007 revival of The Ritz, November (2008), and revivals of Pal Joey in 2008 and Lips Together, Teeth Apart in 2010, all on Broadway. Off-Broadway in 2010, Mantello directed Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, a time-traveling study of gay men. MARBER, PATRICK (1964– ). Born in London, England, as Patrick Albert Crispin Marber, he attended Wadham College, Oxford, and began his career writing and performing in radio and television. He has acted, directed, and written for both film and theatre. His earliest plays include Dealer’s Choice (1995) and After Miss Julie (1995), the latter appearing on Broadway in late 2009 starring Sienna Miller, Jonny Lee Miller, and Marin Ireland. Marber is best known for his 1997 play Closer, a comedy about betrayal in sex and love, which won the Olivier Award. Closer was filmed starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen under the direction of Mike Nichols in 2004. Marber’s subsequent plays include Howard Katz (2001), The Musicians (2004), and Don Juan in Soho (2006), which was adapted from Molière. Marber received an Academy Award nomination for writing Notes on a Scandal (2006).

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MARCH, FREDRIC (1897–1975). This versatile stage and film actor was born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine, Wisconsin. March attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as a banker in New York before deciding to begin a career as an actor. His early Broadway appearances were in undistinguished plays, including The Melody Man (1924), Puppets (1925), Harvest (1925), The Half-Caste (1926), and Devil in the Cheese (1926). He had played bit roles in a few silent films, but with the dawn of the sound era, March quickly emerged as a leading film star and won two Best Actor Academy Awards for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and was nominated for Oscars for The Royal Family* of Broadway (1930), A Star Is Born (1937), and Death of a Salesman (1951), the last bringing him a Golden Globe Award. March’s films were frequently adaptations of stage plays or works of literature, including Design for Living (1933), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), The Dark Angel (1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), Susan and God (1940), Another Part of the Forest (1948), The Desperate Hours (1955), Middle of the Night (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), and The Iceman Cometh (1973). As his movie career burgeoned, March returned to Broadway in the failed comedy Yr. Obedient Husband (1938), but fared better in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The American Way (1939), and he won Tony Awards for Years Ago (1947) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) and was Tony-nominated for Gideon (1962). His other appearances were in Hope for a Harvest (1941), as Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), A Bell for Adano (1944), Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (1950), as Dr. Stockmann in Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1950, and The Autumn Garden (1951). March married actress Florence Eldridge in 1927, and they often worked together on stage and screen. The marriage endured until March’s death. MARCHAND, NANCY (1928–2000). A tall, striking actress of great versatility, Marchand was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of a doctor and a pianist. Her numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include her role as Ida in the Drama Desk Award-winning ensemble of a 1980 revival of Morning’s at Seven, and she received Drama Desk nominations for her performances in The Octette Bridge Club (1985), The Cocktail Hour (1989), and The End of the Day (1992). Marchand was also nominated for a Tony Award for White Liars & Black Comedy (1993). She began her Broadway career in the early 1950s in supporting roles in Shakespeare and in Miss Isobel (1957). Other credits include 3 Bags Full (1966), revivals of The

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Alchemist and Yerma in 1966, After the Rain (1967), a 1968 revival of Cyrano de Bergerac, Forty Carats (1968), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), a 1971 revival of Mary Stuart, Enemies (1972), a 1973 revival of The Plough and the Stars, Veronica’s Room (1973), and revivals of The Glass Menagerie in 1975 and Awake and Sing! in 1984. On television, Marchand won four Emmy Awards on the long-running series Lou Grant (1977–1982) and was nominated twice for the HBO-TV series The Sopranos (1999–2000), which brought her a Golden Globe Award as Tony Soprano’s devious mother, Livia. Marchand’s television work dated back to the golden age of live television, which included her performances on numerous dramatic anthology series, including the award-winning drama Marty (1953). Marchand’s films include Me, Natalie (1969), The Bostonians (1984), The Naked Gun (1988), Sabrina (1995), and others. MARGIN FOR ERROR. Clare Boothe’s two-act melodrama* opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 3 November 1939 and ran for 264 performances under the direction of Otto Preminger with scene design by Donald Oenslager. The cast included Preminger as Karl Baumer, a German consul in New York sympathetic to the Nazis and an altogether loathsome character. When a Jewish cop (Sam Levene) is assigned as Baumer’s guard, and Baumer is subsequently killed, the cop is compelled to consider his own ambivalence about the death and to seek the true killer, who turns out to be an American Nazi. Preminger directed a 1943 film version, repeating his role opposite Milton Berle as the cop. MARGOLIN, DEB (1953– ). Playwright, performance artist, and founding member of Split Britches Theatre in 1980, Margolin is the author of numerous full-length solo performance pieces. She is the recipient of a 1999 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance and also won a Joseph Kesselring Prize for her play Three Seconds in the Key (2002). She also received the 2008 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award. Margolin’s other works include Lesbians Who Kill (1992), Of Mice, Bugs, and Women (1994), Carthieves! Joyrides! (1995), Bearing Witnesses (1996), Critical Mass (1997), Bringing the Fishermen Home (1999), Why Cleaning Fails (2002), Index to Idioms (2003), The Rich Silk of It (2005), Time Is the Mercy of Eternity (2006), Clarisse and Larmon (2006), and O Yes I Will (2006). Margolin, who teaches at Yale University, has said, “Performance is a theatre of inclusion—anyone can do it.” See also FEMINIST THEATRE; WOMEN/ FEMININITY. MARGOLIS, KARI. See BROWN, TONY.

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MARGULIES, DONALD (1954– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Margulies grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island housing project. Educated at Purchase College, Margulies is a professor of English at Yale University. He has written a few acclaimed plays produced in New York and regional theatres, most notably Dinner with Friends (2000). Other Margulies plays include Sight Unseen (1991), The Loman Family Picnic (1994), Collected Stories (1996), The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself) (2007), and Time Stands Still (2009), among others. His 1998 play, The Model Apartment, won an Obie Award. MARK TAPER FORUM. This 739-seat thrust theatre is part of the Los Angeles Music Center and named for a real estate tycoon, Mark Taper. Designed in the new formalist style by Welton Becket, the theatre has become a hub of live theatre activity, particularly of the more adventurous nature, in Los Angeles, California, and it was renovated in 2008. The theatre opened with a production of John Whiting’s controversial The Devils (1967) and has also hosted the world premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1992 and August Wilson’s 10-play cycle of African American life, including the final play of the cycle, Radio Golf (2005), among many others. MAROWITZ, CHARLES (1934– ). New York-born playwright and critic, Marowitz began his career as a director in London, staging such works as Loot (1966), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1968), and Macbett (1973), among others, and worked closely with Peter Brook on a “Theatre of Cruelty” season of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964. In the United States, he directed in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also wrote plays, including Sherlock’s Last Case (1974), produced on Broadway, and other works including Artaud at Rodez (1975) and adaptations of plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Shakespeare. Marowitz has published several collections of his dramatic criticism and written for such diverse publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, and the Drama Review, as well as several British periodicals. MARRE, ALBERT (1925– ). Born in New York City, Marre began his career as an actor, appearing in the 1950 Broadway revival of The Relapse, but rose to prominence as a director and sometime producer. As a director, he was nominated for a Tony Award for The Chalk Garden (1956) and won a Tony for the musical Man of La Mancha (1966). His diverse directing credits include classics and contemporary plays, as well as musicals, including Kismet (1953), Shangri-La (1956), a 1956 revival of Saint Joan, Good as Gold (1957), Time Remembered (1957), Rape of the Belt (1960), The

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Conquering Hero (1961), Milk and Honey (1961), a 1963 revival of Too True to Be Good, A Rainy Day in Newark (1963), Never Live Over a Pretzel Factory (1964), Cry for Us All (1970), Home Sweet Homer (1976), A Meeting by the River (1977), and Chu Chem (1989). MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO, THE. Christopher Durang’s Obie Award-winning semi-autobiographical play inspired by the marriage of his parents opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre on 16 May 1985 under the direction of Jerry Zaks, with scenery by Loren Sherman, costumes by William Ivey Long, and lighting by Paul Gallo. The cast included Joan Allen and Graham Beckel as the title characters, with Mercedes Ruehl, Olympia Dukakis, and Durang himself. In 33 short scenes, the mordantly comic play satirized contemporary family life, the Catholic Church, and the rituals of marriage. Durang’s character, Matt, narrates the tale of a troubled marriage and the interference of family members and the family priest. MARSHALL, E. G. (1910–1998). Born Edda Gunnar Marshall in Owatonna, Minnesota, Marshall debuted on Broadway in Jason (1942) and in the original production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), playing the Stage Manager. His most notable Broadway role was undoubtedly playing Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (1956). His other stage appearances were in a 1943 revival of The Petrified Forest, Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), Beggars Are Coming to Town (1945), Woman Bites Dog (1946), The Iceman Cometh (1946), The Survivors (1948), Six O’Clock Theatre (1948), Hope’s the Thing (1948), The Gambler (1952), The Crucible (1953), Red Roses for Me (1955), The Gang’s All Here (1959), a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, Nash at Nine (1973), a 1980 revival of John Gabriel Borkman, and he stepped in as replacements for the stars of Plaza Suite (1968) and The Gin Game (1977). Marshall won two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance as Lawrence Preston, a lawyer of great integrity, in the television series The Defenders (1961–1965). Marshall had worked frequently in TV drama beginning in 1949 and continued for nearly 50 years. He also appeared in films including, late in his career, Nixon (1995) as disgraced Attorney General John Mitchell and Absolute Power (1997). MARTIN, ERNEST H. (1919–1995). In partnership with Cy Feuer, Martin, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and educated at the University of California at Los Angeles, began his career as an actor, but became one of the leading Broadway producers in the decades following World War II. With Feuer, Martin produced such Tony Award-winning musicals as Guys and

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Dolls (1950) and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961), which also won a Pulitzer Prize. Other Feuer and Martin shows nominated for Tonys were Little Me (1962), Skyscraper (1966), and Walking Happy (1967). Although they predominantly produced musicals, including Where’s Charley? (1951), Can-Can (1953), The Boy Friend (1954), Silk Stockings (1955), and The Act (1977), they also produced Arturo Ui (1963), the Richard Burton revival of Hamlet in 1964, and The Goodbye People (1968), as well as Marlene Dietrich’s 1967 Broadway appearance. MARTIN, JANE. This pseudonym of Jon Jory, longtime artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, has been attached to a series of plays, including Keely and Du (1994), which won an American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Martin’s other plays include Talking With . . . (1983), Anton in Show Business (2000), Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage (2001), and others. MARTIN, MARY (1913–1990). Born in Weatherford, Texas, this legendary musical star who won Tony Awards for her performances in South Pacific (1949), Peter Pan* (1954), and The Sound of Music (1959), also occasionally appeared in non-musicals, including Kind Sir (1953), a 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, and Do You Turn Somersaults? (1978). Martin was the mother of actor Larry Hagman. MARVIN’S ROOM. Scott McPherson’s drama, which centered around the estrangement of two sisters caring for their incapacitated father, opened on 15 November 1991 at Playwrights Horizons, winning a Drama Desk Award as Best Play. The tragicomic play centers around the relationship of Bessie and Lee, the two sisters, and Hank, Lee’s troubled son. Laura Esterman played Bessie in the original production, a role taken on by Diane Keaton in the 1996 film version, which also starred Meryl Streep, Hume Cronyn, Robert De Niro, Gwen Verdon, and Leonardo DiCaprio. MARY, MARY. Jean Kerr’s brisk three-act comedy about a renewed romance between a divorced couple opened at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 8 March 1961 for 1,572 performances under the direction of Joseph Anthony, with scene design by Oliver Smith and costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge. Barbara Bel Geddes, in a Tony Award-nominated performance, played the acerbic title character, a witty young woman who must meet with exhusband, Bob (Barry Nelson), about tax problems. He is a successful author and their marriage ended, in large measure, due to Mary’s sarcasm. She is being courted by movie star Dirk (Michael Rennie) and his flagrant flirtations

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with Mary ultimately convince Mary and Bob of their true feelings. Debbie Reynolds took on the title character in a 1964 screen adaptation, with Nelson reprising his role. MARY OF SCOTLAND. Maxwell Anderson’s three-act blank verse tragedy about the doomed cousin of Queen Elizabeth I opened at the Alvin Theatre in a Theatre Guild production on 27 November 1933 for 248 performances under the direction of Theresa Helburn, with scene and costume designs by Robert Edmond Jones. Helen Hayes starred as Mary, whose existence threatens Elizabeth’s throne. In a major departure from the historical record, Anderson depicts the two queens (Elizabeth was played by Helen Menken*) in a dramatic face-to-face showdown at the play’s climax. The supporting cast featured Philip Merivale* as the Earl of Bothwell, George Coulouris, and Edgar Barrier. A 1936 film version directed by John Ford starred Katharine Hepburn as Mary, with Frederic March as Bothwell and Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth. MASON, JACKIE (1931– ). Born Yacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Mason spent most of his youth in New York, picking up the linguistic rhythms of Jewish American city life, which served him well as an enduringly popular, if controversial, stand-up comedian. He graduated from the City College of New York and was ordained as a rabbi, following in his father’s footsteps. However, the rabbinical life was not for Mason, and he quit to become a comedian. He rose to the top rank of show business, but a highly publicized disagreement with television host Ed Sullivan, as well as changing tastes, seriously undermined his career. He continued to work, but he made an extraordinary comeback on Broadway beginning in the 1980s with a series of solo performances beginning with Jackie Mason’s The World According to Me! (1986), a show in which Mason’s use of ethnic humor, political commentary, and reflections on contemporary life were offered with his characteristic rapid-fire delivery. This first of these productions, which opened on 22 December 1986, racked up a remarkable 367 performances and brought Mason a special Tony Award. After a tour, the show returned to Broadway in May 1988 for 206 additional performances. Mason’s subsequent returns to Broadway included Jackie Mason: Brand New (1990), Jackie Mason: Politically Incorrect (1994), Love Thy Neighbor (1996), Much About Everything (1999), Prune Danish (2002), Jackie Mason’s Laughing Room Only (2003), and Jackie Mason: Freshly Squeezed (2005). Mason also wrote and starred in a failed 1969 comedy, A Teaspoon Every Four Hours. MASON, JUDI ANN (1955–2009). An African American playwright, producer, and television writer, Mason was born in Shreveport, Louisiana

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and was educated at Grambling University. When she began writing, she won the Norman Lear Award for comedy writing from the Kennedy Center for her play Livin’ Fat (1976), which was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company. Her next play, A Star Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hole in Heaven (1977) brought Mason the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Mason acknowledged the influence of Tennessee Williams on her writing. She was hired by Norman Lear to write for his television series Good Times (1974–1979), making her one of the first black women to write for television. She subsequently wrote for other series and was a writer for the films Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993) and the Emmy Award-nominated Sophie and the Moonhanger (1996). Mason’s other plays include Daughters of the Mock (1978), Jonah and the Wonder Dog (1986), Indigo Blues (1992), and The Cornbread Man (2006). MASON, MARSHALL W. (1940– ). A native of Amarillo, Texas, Mason studied theatre and directing at Northwestern University, after which he moved to New York and found work in Off-Off-Broadway theatres, including Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and Judson Poets’ Theatre. He made his OffBroadway debut as a director with his production of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf in 1964, followed by Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead (1965), with which he began a long collaboration with Wilson, directing some of Wilson’s most acclaimed plays. With Wilson, Mason established the Circle Repertory Company (CRC), which, in 1974, was presented the Drama Desk Award, the Vernon Rice Award and, in 1979 Mason received a special Theatre World Award as founder and artistic director of the CRC. Mason’s first directing assignment on Broadway, for Jules Feiffer’s Knock Knock (1976), brought him a Tony Award nomination, as did his direction of Talley’s Folly (1980), Fifth of July (1981), Angels Fall (1983), and As Is (1985). Mason was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Gemini (1977), Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, As Is, and Reckless (1989). On Broadway, Mason also directed Murder at the Howard Johnson’s (1979), Passion (1983), Burn This (1987), Solitary Confinement (1992), a 1992 revival of The Seagull, and Redwood Curtain (1993). Off-Broadway, he won an Obie Award for directing The Hot L Baltimore (1973) and directed notable productions of The Mound Builders (1975), Serenading Louie (1976), a 1998 revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2007). Mason has also directed for many of America’s leading regional theatres. MASSEY, RAYMOND (1896–1983). Raymond Hart Massey was born to a wealthy family in Toronto. He attended Upper Canada College, transferred to Appleby College, but finally graduated from the University of Toronto. As a soldier in the Canadian Army during World War I, he suffered from

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shellshock and was stationed at Yale University to instruct American officers. He was sent to Siberia in 1918 and participated in entertaining the troops. In combat in France, he was seriously wounded and sent home. By 1922, he was an actor in London and, in the late silent era, began appearing in films. After 1930, Massey’s career was spent in the United States. He played Hamlet on Broadway in 1931 and also appeared in The Shining Hour (1934), Ethan Frome (1936), and scored a notable success playing Abraham Lincoln in Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), which also brought him an Academy Award nomination when he reprised the role on screen in 1940. Massey also appeared on Broadway in revivals of The Doctor’s Dilemma in 1941 and Candida in 1942, costarring with Katharine Cornell, and played Henry Higgins to Gertrude Lawrence’s Eliza Doolittle in a 1945 revival of Pygmalion. He also acted in Lovers and Friends (1943), How I Wonder (1947), a 1949 revival of The Father, John Brown’s Body (1953), and J.B. (1948). Massey frequently played Lincoln in movie and television productions, including How the West Was Won (1962), and he appeared in the films Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Prince of Players (1955), and East of Eden (1955). Massey also played the role of Dr. Gillespie in the popular television series, Dr. Kildare (1961–1966). He was the father of actors Anna Massey and Daniel Massey. MASTER CLASS. Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning Best Play about a master class taught by opera diva Maria Callas opened at the John Golden Theatre on 5 November 1995 for 598 performances under the direction of Leonard Foglia. The play’s ruminations on music, performance, and the personal costs of creativity were significantly enhanced by the Tonywinning performances of Zoe Caldwell as the turbulent, brilliant Callas, and Audra McDonald as her most challenging student. Karen Kay Cody, as another pupil, won a Theatre World Award. Screen star Faye Dunaway played Callas in the national tour. MASTROSIMONE, WILLIAM (1947– ). Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Mastrosimone studied at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He first won attention with his play The Woolgatherers (1980), about a manipulative woman who collects wool sweaters as trophies for her love affairs, and Extremities (1982), a controversial drama about a target of rape wreaking revenge on her attacker. It won an Outer Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Mastrosimone’s other plays include A Tantalizing (1982), Shivaree (1983), The Undoing (1983), Nanawatai (1985), Tamer of Forces (1985), Cat’s Paw (1986), The Understanding (1987), Like Totally Weird (1998), Heaven and Hell (On Earth): A

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Divine Comedy (2001), Afghan Woman (2003), and Dirty Business (2008), and he won a Daytime Emmy Award for Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (2002) and was nominated for Emmy Awards for The Burning Season (1994) and the television series Into the West (2005). MATALON, VIVIAN (1929– ). A British-born theatre director who directed in both London and on Broadway, Matalon won Tony Awards for a 1980 revival of Morning’s at Seven, which also brought him a Drama Desk Award, and the musical The Tap Dance Kid (1984). His other Broadway productions include After the Rain (1967), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), P. S. Your Cat Is Dead! (1975), a 1980 revival of Brigadoon, The American Clock (1980), a 1983 revival of The Corn Is Green, and Souvenir (2005). Matalon served as director of the Hampstead Theatre for three years and directed West End productions starring Lee Remick, Keir Dullea, Raymond Massey, and others. MATCHMAKER, THE. Thornton Wilder’s nostalgic two-act comedy set in the 1880s opened in a Theatre Guild and David Merrick production at the Royale Theatre on 5 December 1955 for 486 performances, starring Ruth Gordon, in a Tony Award-nominated performance, as Dolly Gallagher Levi, a widow and professional marriage broker. Under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie (who won a Tony), Gordon played the vivacious and resourceful Dolly, who sets her cap for tight-fisted Yonkers, New York, merchant, Horace Vandergelder (Loring Smith), who has hired Dolly to find him a wife. After extraordinary machinations, reflections on the nature of life and love, and the pairing up of some younger characters, Dolly succeeds in winning Horace’s heart—and his wealth, which will allow her to become a benefactress to all. The strong supporting cast included Eileen Herlie, Arthur Hill, Robert Morse, and Prunella Scales. Wilder based this play on his poorly received 1938 comedy The Merchant of Yonkers, which had been inspired by Johann Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux Will Sich Machen. The Matchmaker was filmed in 1958 starring Shirley Booth as Dolly and Paul Ford as Horace, and it was the source for the hit 1964 Jerry Herman musical, Hello, Dolly! which, for a time, reined as Broadway’s longest-running musical (although Wilder did not like it) and was filmed in 1969 with Barbra Streisand as Dolly opposite Walter Matthau’s Horace. MATTHAU, WALTER (1920–2000). This beloved, rubber-faced actor, particularly adept in comedy, although he appeared in varied plays and films, was born in New York. He was nominated for a Tony Award for Once More with Feeling (1958), but won two Tonys, first as a featured actor in A Shot

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in the Dark (1961) and then for his most memorable stage performance as sports-loving slob Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965), a role he reprised in the 1968 film version. Matthau’s earlier Broadway roles included playing small parts as a replacement in Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), The Liar (1950), Twilight Walk (1951), Fancy Meeting You Again (1952), One Bright Day (1952), In Any Language (1952), The GreyEyed People (1952), The Ladies of the Corridor (1953), The Burning Glass (1954), a 1955 revival of The Wisteria Trees, a 1955 revival of Guys and Dolls, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), Once There Was a Russian (1961), and My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963). Matthau never returned to Broadway after The Odd Couple, but appeared continually in films, winning an Academy Award for The Fortune Cookie (1966) and Oscar nominations for Kotch (1971) and The Sunshine Boys (1975), the latter bringing him a Golden Globe Award. His other films include A Face in the Crowd (1957), Charade (1963), Hello, Dolly! (1969), Cactus Flower (1969), Plaza Suite (1971), Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), The Front Page* (1974), The Bad News Bears (1976), Hopscotch (1980), First Monday in October (1981), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and I’m Not Rappaport (1996). MAXWELL, JAN (1956– ). Born in Fargo, North Dakota, to a judge and a lawyer, Maxwell studied at Moorhead State University prior to beginning a Broadway career as an understudy in the musical City of Angels (1989). A versatile performer, Maxwell has moved comfortably between straight plays and musicals, garnering four Tony Award nominations for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2005), Coram Boy (2007), and 2010 revivals of Lend Me a Tenor and The Royal Family,* the latter winning her a Drama Desk Award, as did Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Maxwell received Drama Desk nominations for My Old Lady (2003), Sixteen Wounded (2004), a 2006 revival of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Coram Boy, and Scenes from an Execution (2009). She has also appeared on Broadway in Dancing at Lughnasa (1991), revivals of A Doll’s House in 1997 and The Sound of Music in 1998, The Dinner Party (2000), and To Be or Not to Be (2008). Maxwell has also appeared in several television dramas. MAY, ELAINE (1932– ). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-born Elaine Berlin began performing as a child with her parents in Yiddish theatre. She studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya and attended the University of Chicago. May worked with Playwrights Theatre and the Compass Players, during which time she met Mike Nichols, and they developed an improvisatory comedy act. Their performances became so popular in nightclubs and television that they appeared on Broadway in An Evening with Mike Nichols

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and Elaine May (1960). A recording of this show won a Grammy Award for the duo. Eventually, Nichols and May ended their collaboration, but reteamed in 1980 to appear in a Long Wharf Theatre production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? May rarely performed after the breakup of Nichols and May, but she wrote and directed plays and films. In 1969, May won a Drama Desk Award for her play Adaptation, and on Broadway, her plays Taller than a Dwarf (2000), Extra (2002), and After the Night and the Music (2005), were produced. May was twice nominated for the Academy Award for her scripts of Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Primary Colors (1998) and received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in A New Leaf (1971), which she also directed. MAYER, MICHAEL (1960– ). Born in Bethesda, Maryland, Mayer attended New York University and began his career as an actor, but soon switched to directing. On Broadway, Mayer has won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Spring Awakening (2007) and Drama Desk Awards for a 1998 revival of A View from the Bridge, Side Man (1998), and Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002). His other Tony nominations include the aforementioned A View from the Bridge, a 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and his other Drama Desk nominations include America Dreaming (1995), You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and a 2000 revival of Uncle Vanya. Mayer’s additional Broadway productions include Triumph of Love (1997), a 1999 revival of The Lion in Winter, An Almost Holy Picture (2002), revivals of ’night, Mother and After the Fall in 2004, and Everyday Rapture (2010). Mayer also directed the national tour of Angels in America in 1994, and he has directed the films A Home at the End of the World (2004) and Flicka (2006). MA-YI THEATRE COMPANY. Founded in 1989 by artistic director Chito Jao Garces and several like-minded artists as a not-for-proft Asian American Theatre company in New York. Ralph Peña became artistic director in 1996 and the company has increasingly focused its attention on Filipino American plays. The Ma-Yi’s 2006 production of Warren Leight’s No Foreigners Beyond This Point received a Drama Desk Award nomination, and its production of Lonnie Carter’s The Romance of Magno Rubio (2002), based on a short story by Carlos Bulosan, won an Obie Award. The company established the Ma-Yi Writers Lab in 2004 to encourage new works by Asian American writers. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. MAYRHAUSER, JENNIFER VON (1948– ). Born in Ithaca, New York, as Jennifer Bergin, she graduated from Northwestern University and began

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her career as a costume designer in 1964 as an apprentice at the Theatre in the Rink in New Haven, Connecticut. Within a few years, she designed the Off-Broadway production of Press Cuttings (1972). Mayrhauser’s first Broadway production, Knock Knock (1976), led to such productions as Da (1978), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly (1980), Censored Scenes from King Kong (1980), Hide and Seek (1980), revivals of John Gabriel Borkman in 1980 and The Father in 1981, Special Occasions (1982), Eminent Domain (1982), Solomon’s Child (1982), Beyond Therapy (1982), The Wake of Jamey Foster (1982), Steaming (1982), Angels Fall (1983), Passion (1983), Baby (1983), revivals of Awake and Sing! in 1984 and Hay Fever in 1985, Execution of Justice (1986), The Boys in Autumn (1986), The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940 (1987), a 1988 revival of The Night of the Iguana, The Heidi Chronicles (1989), Crazy He Calls Me (1992), a 1996 revival of A Thousand Clowns, Rabbit Hole (2006), and a 2008 revival of Come Back, Little Sheba. Mayrhauser has provided costume designs for several films, including Mystic Pizza (1988), Lean on Me (1989), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), I’m Not Rappaport (1996), and The Private Life of Pippa Lee (2009), and was nominated for a 1999 Emmy Award for the television series Law & Order. MCANUFF, DES (1952– ). A Canadian American born in Princeton, Illinois, as Desmond McAnuff, he studied with Basya Hunter, a drama coach based in Toronto, after which he moved to New York and cofounded the Dodger Theatre Company in 1978 and directed his first production, Gimme Shelter. McAnuff subsequently directed for several regional theatres before becoming artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse in 1983, leading the theatre through a highly productive and successful era, with many transfers to Broadway, reaping Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations. He won a Tony for his direction of the musical Big River (1985) and a Tony and Drama Desk Award for The Who’s Tommy (1993). He was also nominated for Tonys for the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and Jersey Boys (2006). On Broadway, he also directed A Walk in the Woods (1988), Dracula,* the Musical (2004), 700 Sundays (2004), The Farnsworth Invention (2007), and a 2009 revival of Guys and Dolls. In 2007, McAnuff moved to the artistic directorship of Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival. MCCANN, ELIZABETH (1931– ). Born Elizabeth Ireland McCann in New York, she studied at Manhattanville College and Columbia University, also earning a law degree from Fordham University. She worked as a lawyer for a time, before joining the Nederlander organization and turning to

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producing in partnership with Nelle Nugent. She was president of McCann & Nugent Productions for a decade (1976–1986), after which she served as executive director of the Big Apple Circus. As a producer for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in London’s West End, McCann has been responsible for bringing numerous new plays and revivals to the stage. Among these, several won Tony Awards as Best Play or Best Revival, including a revival of Dracula* in 1978, The Elephant Man (1979), a revival of Morning’s at Seven in 1980, Amadeus (1981), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982), a 1998 revival of A View from the Bridge, Copenhagen (2000), and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), and a 2009 revival of the musical Hair. McCann’s Tony-nominated productions include The Dresser (1982), revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing in 1985, Leader of the Pack (1985), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1987), revivals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1996 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2005, Passing Strange (2008), and a 2009 revival of Waiting for Godot. McCann, who has produced most of Edward Albee’s plays, also produces the annual Tony Awards presentation. MCCARTER THEATRE. Founded in 1930 as an offshoot of Princeton University’s Triangle Club, the McCarter Theatre is named for Thomas N. McCarter, an 1888 Princeton alumnus. The theatre’s first production, The Golden Dog, featured Joshua Logan and James Stewart in the cast. During the 1930s, the McCarter housed Broadway tryouts, including the first performances of You Can’t Take It With You (1936) and Our Town (1938). With a steady decline of out-or-town tryouts for new Broadway plays, the McCarter leaned more toward an educational purpose in the 1960s under Milton Lyon, who was appointed the theatre’s first executive producer. Lyon established a company including Rosemary Harris, Donald Moffat, Frances Sternhagen, and Edward Asner, among others, and by 1973 Princeton transferred the operation of the theatre to the McCarter Theatre Company. Lyon’s successors included Arthur Lithgow, Michael Kahn, Nagle Jackson, and Emily Mann. In 1994, the McCarter received the Tony Award as outstanding regional theatre. MCCARTHY, KEVIN (1914–2010). As son of a wealthy Irish Catholic family and brother of writer Mary McCarthy, McCarthy was born in Seattle, Washington, and attended the University of Minnesota, where he acted in a production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, which led to an acting career. His first notable role, playing Biff in the original London production of Death of a Salesman opposite Paul Muni in 1949, launched his career and he appeared in the role in the 1951 film version, winning a Golden Globe

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Award and an Academy Award nomination. Much of his career was spent in films, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Misfits (1961), The Best Man (1964), and television, but he appeared on Broadway with some regularity, including in Winged Victory (1943), Truckline Café (1946), Joan of Lorraine (1946), The Survivors (1948), Bravo! (1948), revivals of Anna Christie* in 1952 and Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1953, Red Roses for Me (1955), The Day the Money Stopped (1958), Advise & Consent (1960), Something About a Soldier (1962), a 1964 revival of The Three Sisters, A Warm Body (1967), Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1967), Poor Murderer (1976), and Alone Together (1984). He also stepped into the lead of Cactus Flower (1965) during its run. MCCLINTIC, GUTHRIE (1893–1961).† Born in Seattle, Washington, McClintic studied at Washington University and the American Academy of Drama Arts, beginning his career as an actor. Scant success led him to stage management and work as casting director for Broadway producer Winthrop Ames.* He ultimately turned to directing with The Dover Road (1921). McClintic, a gay man in a deeply closeted time, married actress Estelle Winwood, but their marriage ended in divorce, after which he married Katharine Cornell, who was a lesbian. This “lavender” marriage produced a string of Broadway successes, with McClintic effectively directing Cornell in such plays as The Green Hat (1925), The Letter* (1927), Dishonored Lady (1930), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), Alien Corn (1933), a revival of Romeo and Juliet in 1934, The Old Maid (1935), a revival of Saint Joan in 1936, Candida (1937), No Time for Comedy (1939), revivals of The Doctor’s Dilemma in 1941, The Three Sisters in 1942, Antigone in 1946, and Antony and Cleopatra in 1947, The Dark Is Light Enough (1955), and Dear Liar (1960), among others. Without Cornell, McClintic also directed numerous Broadway productions, including The Shanghai Gesture* (1926), Saturday’s Children* (1927), Fallen Angels (1927), Jezebel (1933), Winterset (1935), Ethan Frome (1936), John Gielgud in a revival of Hamlet in 1936, High Tor (1937), Key Largo (1939), Mamba’s Daughters (1939), and Judith Anderson in a revival of Medea in 1949. In 2010, McClintic was played by Boyd Gaines in A. R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner, a play about Cornell starring Kate Burton. MCCRANEY, TARELL ALVIN (1980– ). Born in Liberty City, Florida, McCraney difficult childhood included the loss of his mother, a crack addict who died of AIDS, and after his home was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew, he moved as a teen to live with his father in a crime-ridden Miama, Florida, housing project. Following his education at DePaul University and the Yale

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School of Drama, McCraney was named the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)/Warwick International Playwright-in-Residence in 2008. As a result of his collaboration with Tina Landau, McCraney joined Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and he has worked with Peter Brook and David Cromer, among others. He is best known for The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy of three works, In the Red and Brown Water (2007), Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (2006), and The Brothers Size (2007), set in the Louisiana and is inspired by Yoruba mythology. His other plays include The Breach (2006), a response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and Wig Out! (2007), about a gay black drag queen. For the RSC, McCraney adapted Hamlet for young audiences in 2010. In a New York Times interview, McCraney stated, “Ever since I was young, I was writing plays, sometimes little ones, that were basically about how you fit with people, how they fit with you and how you fit in the world. These were questions that I always thought about growing up. And I’m still having a conversation with myself about them.” MCCULLERS, CARSON (1917–1967). Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, she studied writing with Dorothy Scarborough at Columbia University and Sylvia Chatfield Bates at New York University while she worked at odd jobs to get by in New York. Categorized as a Southern Gothic writer, McCullers wrote novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and two plays, including The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), in which she explored her relationship with her suicidal ex-husband. In the area of theatre, however, McCullers was best represented by adaptations of her novels and stories. She adapted her 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding (1950) into an acclaimed Broadway play, which was filmed in 1952 with the original cast, and in 1963 Edward Albee adapted her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963). Her 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in 1968, and The Ballad of the Sad Café became a film in 1991. Tennessee Williams, McCullers’s close friend, dedicated his 1948 play Summer and Smoke to her, and described her recurring themes as “the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.” MCDONALD, AUDRA (1970– ). Despite being born in Berlin, Germany, as Audra Ann McDonald, she grew up in Fresno, California, and became interested in acting and music at an early age. She performed with the Good Company Players and studied voice with Ellen Faull at the Juilliard School prior to demonstrating her remarkable range by winning four Tony Awards, for a 1994 revival of the musical Carousel (also winning a Theatre World, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama Desk Awards), Master Class (1995), Ragtime (1998), and a 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun (which also

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brought her Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards), within the first few years of her career. McDonald won a Drama Desk Award for a 2007 revival of 110 in the Shade, for which she was also nominated for a Tony; in 1999, Tony and Drama Desk nominations came to her for Marie Christine. McDonald began her Broadway career as a replacement in The Secret Garden (1991) and appeared in a 2003 revival of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. McDonald has also appeared frequently in opera, on the concert stage, and in the recording studio, where she won two Grammy Awards for an album of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. She is a regular on the television series Private Practice (2007–2009) and has twice been nominated for an Emmy Award for television films of Wit (2001) and A Raisin in the Sun (2008). McDonald’s film work includes the television movies Having Our Say (1999) and Annie (1999). See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. MCGUIRE, DOROTHY (1918–2001). This dignified, graceful actress was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and appeared at the Omaha Community Theatre beginning as a teenager, and there she met a lifelong friend, Henry Fonda. McGuire made her first Broadway appearance replacing Martha Scott as Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town (1938), followed by roles in Swingin’ the Dream (1939), Medicine Show (1940), and a 1940 revival of Kind Lady before scoring a major hit in the title role of Rose Franken’s comedy Claudia (1941). McGuire spent the next decade starring in a string of Hollywood films before returning to Broadway in Legend of Lovers (1951). She also appeared in Winesburg, Ohio (1958) and a 1976 revival of The Night of the Iguana, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. On screen, McGuire was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), and also appeared in the 1943 film version of Claudia, The Enchanted Cottage (1945), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Spiral Staircase (1945), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Friendly Persuasion (1956), A Summer Place (1959), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). McGuire also appeared in television dramas, garnering three Emmy Award nominations, and worked frequently in stock. MCMARTIN, JOHN (1929– ). A native of Warsaw, Indiana, McMartin grew up in Minnesota. He debuted Off-Broadway in the spoof musical Little Mary Sunshine (1959) and won a Theatre World Award. His first Broadway appearance in The Conquering Hero (1961) began a long stage career, with occasional film and television appearances. His Broadway credits include his Tony Award-nominated role as Oscar in Sweet Charity (1966), a role he reprised in the 1969 screen version. McMartin was also nominated

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for Tonys for revivals of Don Juan in 1973, Show Boat in 1995, High Society in 1998, and Into the Woods in 2002. He won Drama Desk Awards for Don Juan and a 1973 revival of The Great God Brown,* and he was nominated for Grey Gardens (2006). McMartin moved easily between drama and musicals and his other Broadway credits include Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole (1961), Children from Their Games (1963), A Rainy Day in Newark (1963), Follies (1971), revivals of The Visit in 1973, Chemin de Fer in 1973, Love for Love in 1974, and The Rules of the Game in 1974, Happy New Year (1980), Solomon’s Child (1982), A Little Family Business (1982), Artist Descending a Staircase (1989), and Is He Dead? (2007). McMartin also appeared notably Off-Broadway in revivals of The Misanthrope in 1977 and Julius Caesar in 1988, and Indian Blood (2006). McMartin was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2009. MCNALLY, TERRENCE (1939– ). Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, McNally had a lonely childhood in which he escaped into favorite radio programs. His parents encouraged his interests in music and theatre. They took him on a visit to New York when he was six years old to a Broadway performance of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, an experience he never forgot, and on subsequent trips he saw as much theatre as possible. He studied journalism at Columbia University and his first play, The Roller Coaster (1960), was published in the Columbia Review. In 1961, he sent writing samples to Molly Kazan, wife of director Elia Kazan and a playwright herself, who recognized his potential. She secured him a position as a stage manager at The Actors Studio, and he was entranced by his experiences there. He became personally involved with Edward Albee, who he met there, though their relationship did not last. During the 1960s, critics frequently noted the influence of Albee’s style on McNally’s early plays, although within a decade McNally had developed his own distinct characteristics as a dramatist. One of McNally’s earliest short plays, There Is Something Out There (1962), was revised as And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1964), but it failed. His fortunes improved with Sweet Eros and Witness, two 1968 oneacts produced Off-Broadway. Other one-acts followed, with Next (1969), a particular success. During the 1960s and 1970s, McNally wrote numerous one-act and full-length plays, several of which were failures, although his Bad Habits (1974) won an Obie Award. He had a popular success with the gay-themed farce The Ritz (1974), but subsequent plays found little success until The Lisbon Traviata (1979), a work merging gay themes and McNally’s love of classical music. He wrote the book for the musical The Rink (1984) for Broadway, but many of his plays of the 1980s, including It’s Only a Play (1984) and Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), were staged

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Off-Broadway. The 1980s and early 1990s were a prolific period for McNally, with the well-received Drama Desk Award-winning AIDS-themed comedy-drama Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play in which two middle-aged women face personal tragedies during a trip to India, and his book for the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), which brought him a Tony Award. These successes were followed by McNally’s Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk Award-winning play, Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), a bittersweet comedy about the close friendships of eight gay New Yorkers who spend three holiday weekends at the countryside farmhouse home of one of them. The play explores topics ranging from issues of commitment in relationships, the tragedies of the AIDS pandemic, the meaning of the past, and living life to the fullest in the face of terrible loss, all recurrent McNally themes. A film version of Love! Valour! Compassion! was released in 1997. This success was followed by another with the Tony and Drama Desk Award-winning Master Class (1995), starring Zoe Caldwell in an acclaimed performance as opera diva Maria Callas teaching at the Juilliard School. Following Master Class, McNally produced some one-act plays, after which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for his libretto for the musical Ragtime (1998). McNally’s other musical books include the Tony-nominated The Full Monty (2000), The Visit (2001), A Man of No Importance (2002), and Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (2005). The mere mention of McNally’s next play, Corpus Christi (1998), which features a cast of gay men putting on a passion play about Jesus Christ’s life, set off a furor of criticism from various Catholic organizations when the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) announced it as part of their 1998 season. Despite protests—and the MTC briefly dropping the play from its season in response to bomb threats—the play was successfully performed, although it received mixed reviews. McNally’s more recent works include The Stendahl Syndrome (2004), Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams (2005), Some Men (2006), Deuce (2007), Unusual Acts of Devotion (2008), and Golden Age (2010). He has also written for films and television, most notably the Emmy Award-winning Andre’s Mother (1990), based on one of his short plays, and Common Ground (2000). MCNEIL, CLAUDIA (1917–1993). Baltimore, Maryland-born daughter of an African American father and Apache Indian mother, McNeil was raised in New York where she subsequently became a librarian, although she was drawn to vaudeville* theatres and nightclubs, where she worked as a singer. Ethel Waters encouraged her to pursue an acting career, which began when she played Tituba in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s

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The Crucible (1953). She won praise in Langston Hughes’s Simply Heavenly (1957), appeared in Winesburg, Ohio (1958), and was nominated for a Tony Award originating the role of Lena Younger (Mama) in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). She reprised her performance in the 1961 screen version, which brought her a Golden Globe Award nomination. McNeil was Tony-nominated again for Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962) and also appeared on Broadway in Something Different (1967), Her First Roman (1968), and The Wrong Way Light Bulb (1969). On television, McNeil appeared in The Nurses (1962), garnering an Emmy Award nomination for her guest role. She sang in nightclubs and also appeared in a television adaptation of The Member of the Wedding in 1958, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1972), and Roots: The Next Generation (1979). MEADOW, LYNNE (1946– ). Born Lynne Carolyn Elizabeth Meadow in New Haven, Connecticut, she graduated from Bryn Mawr and the Yale School of Drama. As artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) since 1972, she has produced and/or directed over 400 shows. Under Meadow’s leadership, the MTC produced major new works by Beth Henley, including Henley’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Crimes of the Heart (1981), Terrence McNally, Richard Greenberg, and others. Meadow directed numerous MTC productions, including The Water (1974), Ashes (1976), Vikings (1980), Close of Play (1981), Sally and Marsha (1982), Park Your Card in Harvard Yard (1984), Principia Scriptoriae (1986), Bloody Poetry (1987), Woman in Mind (1988), which brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination, Eleemosynary (1989), Absent Friends (1991), The Loman Family Picnic (1993), Nine Armenians (1996), for which she reaped another Drama Desk nomination, Captains Courageous: The Musical (1999), Gone Home (2002), and Rose’s Dilemma (2003). On Broadway, Meadow directed A Small Family Business (1992) and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000). MEDNICK, MURRAY (1939– ). A New York-born playwright with Jewish American roots, Mednick was raised in Brooklyn and the Catskill Mountains before moving to Los Angeles, California, in 1974. He established the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop in 1978 and is credited with influencing such writers as Sam Shepard, Eduardo Machado, and David Scott Milton. His plays include The Box (1965), Guideline (1966), The Mark of Zorro (1966), The Hawk (1967), Sand (1967), The Hunter (1968), Willie the Germ (1968), The Shadow Ripens (1969), The Deer Kill (1970), Cartoon (1971), Are You Lookin’? (1973), Black Hole in Space (1975), Taxes (1976), The Coyote Cycle (1978), Solomon’s Fish (1979), The Actors’ Delicatessen (1984), Scar (1985), Zohar (1985), The Pitch (1985), Face (1986), Heads

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(1987), Shatter ’N Wade (1990), Joe and Betty (1994), which won the 2002 American Theatre Critics Association Best New Play Award, Fedunn (1994), and Baby Jesus! (1995). MEDOFF, MARK (1940– ). Born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, Medoff attended the University of Miami and Stanford University prior to teaching at the Capitol Radio Engineering Institute in Washington, D.C. While there, he wrote his first play The Wager (1966), although his first play produced in a major New York production Off-Broadway was When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1974), which won Drama Desk and Obie Awards for Medoff. His most acclaimed play, Children of a Lesser God (1980), won Tony, Drama Desk, and Olivier Awards for Medoff. This play, which focuses on the relationship of a deaf woman and her teacher, was filmed in 1986 starring Marlee Matlin, in an Academy Award and Golden Globe Awardwinning performance, and William Hurt, and brought Medoff an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. Few of Medoff’s other plays have proven as successful, including The Last Chance Saloon (1979), The Majestic Kid (1981), Gila (1996), Tommy J and Sally (2000), The Same Life Over (2002), and Prymate (2003). MEE, CHARLES L. (1938– ). A native of Evanston, Illinois, Mee dealt with polio as a child, but recovered and attended Harvard University. He moved to Greenwich Village in 1960 and his plays found productions at such Off-Off-Broadway venues as La MaMa, Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, and the Ontological at St. Mark’s. For a time, he was employed at the American Heritage Publishing Company and edited several publications. This job and his involvement in anti-Vietnam War politics took him away from theatre for several years. In 1985, he contributed the libretto for Martha Clarke’s Vienna: Lusthaus, which brought him an Obie Award. His writing style often features a collage approach that radically reconstitutes existing texts. Mee organizes his works into categories ranging from comedies and romances to dance theatre pieces. His numerous plays include The War to End War (1993), Big Love (2000), which won an Obie, and Fetes de la Nuit (2005). Mee has received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. MEISNER, SANFORD (1905–1997). New York-born actor and acting teacher, Meisner was the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. After the death of his brother, an event that he considered seminal in his life and which shattered his family, Meisner became interested in music and studied at the Damrosch Institute of Music. He found work as an extra in the Broadway

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production of They Knew What They Wanted* (1924), which led him to pursue a career in acting. Initially, after receiving a Theatre Guild scholarship, he played minor roles, as in Processional* and Garrick Gaieties, both in 1925, a 1927 revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma, Marco Millions* (1928), and others, but he joined The Group Theatre after meeting Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman. Meisner played roles in several of the important Group productions, including 1931- (1931), Night Over Taos (1932), American Dream (1933), Men in White (1933), Gold Eagle Guy (1934), Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), Johnny Johnson (1936), Rocket to the Moon (1938), and Night Music (1940), and he directed Waiting for Lefty (1935), but Meisner came to share the misgivings Robert Lewis and Stella Adler had about Strasberg’s interpretation of Constantin Stanislavsky’s theories, particularly in regard to emotional memory, which, he felt overemphasized the need for an actor to delve into his or her own painful memories and omitted the necessary element of the actor’s imagination. When the Group disbanded in 1940, Meisner became director of The Neighborhood Playhouse and worked to perfect his “Meisner Technique” for actors which has been described as a method aimed at making the actor “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Among his acting students were Gregory Peck, Grace Kelly, James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Jon Voight, and Tony Randall, and directors Sidney Lumet and Sydney Pollack, as well as writers Arthur Miller and David Mamet, who studied with him as well. Meisner rarely returned to Broadway, but appeared in Embezzled Heaven (1944), The Whole World Over (1947), and The Cold Wing and the Warm (1958), along with a few flops, and occasionally appeared in films, including The Story on Page One (1959) and Tender Is the Night (1962), and on television. Meisner once said, “The seed to the craft of acting is the reality of doing.” MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE. Carson McCullers’s three-act play, adapted from her novel of the same name, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for its story of a lonely 12-year-old girl and her relationship with her six-year-old cousin and her family’s African American cook. It opened at the Empire Theatre on 5 January 1950 for 501 performances under the direction of Harold Clurman. Set in 1945, the play was enhanced by its three leading actors, Ethel Waters as Berenice Sadie Brown, the cook, Julie Harris as the unhappy Frankie, and Brandon de Wilde as John Henry West. Frankie’s companionship with Berenice and John Henry are her only solace—and her unhappiness is deepened when she learns that she cannot accompany her soldier brother on his honeymoon. The sensitive treatment

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of Frankie’s coming-of-age, as she faces the loss of John Henry, who dies of meningitis, and Berenice, who leaves to marry, made a major stage star of Harris and revived Waters’s career. The three actors reprised their roles in a highly faithful 1952 screen version, which brought Harris an Academy Award nomination. The play was unsuccessfully revived on Broadway in 1975, with Marge Eliot and Mary Beth Hurt, and there have been two television film versions: one starred Pearl Bailey and Dana Hill, and the other featured Alfre Woodard and Anna Paquin. MEN/MASCULINITY. Mainstream American theatre has been dominated by male dramatists from its beginnings, around the time of the American Revolution, until well into the twentieth century. European drama via visiting touring troupes appeared in North America as early as the sixteenth century, but the first noted United States dramatist, Royall Tyler (1758–1826), did not appear until the late eighteenth century. Tyler captured the traditional essence of American maleness in The Contrast (1787), a comedy comparing the decadence of Europeans to the new American male: crude, but good-natured; uneducated, but clever; clumsy, but ultimately heroic. In the romantic melodramas* of the hurly-burly nineteenth-century stage such types are nearly always present, but the earliest American actors of stature, Edwin Forrest (1806–1872) and Edwin Booth* (1833–1893), played loftier and more poetic males in virile and dignified productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies. With the predominance of melodrama in this period, the masculine image was usually that of a one-dimensional hero or villain. Heroes rescued damsels in distress and villains threatened the survival of virtue, but except for creating a stereotypical image of the rough-and-ready man of action, these works featured characters with precious little psychological development even if they varied much more than this description suggests. From actor Frank S. Chanfrau’s (1824–1884) Bowery fireman “Mose” to George M. Cohan’s (1878–1942) wisecracking jingoistic patriots, these types prevailed for a century, altered only by touches of local color or current fashion. Thinly veiled caricatures of maleness in American drama took a more serious turn after World War I, largely due to the steady encroachment of European modernism and, in theatrical terms, realism, but, more importantly, with the emergence of Eugene O’Neill, who radically transformed the Broadway drama with his experimental and epic plays. O’Neill’s earliest works feature complex psychological depictions of men in profoundly personal battles with the forces of fate, as in his most classically inspired works like Beyond the Horizon* (1918), Desire under the Elms* (1924), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). O’Neill’s finest plays, written

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late in his career, focus on man in a more internalized conflict with his own inner demons as in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–1941), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Following O’Neill, dramatists Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, and others, offered richer portraits of American maleness in the modern era. Among them, Thornton Wilder, a novelist who also wrote several important plays, employs a traditionally paternalistic image of the family to raise universal questions about the nature of life and death, as in Our Town (1938), and in the guardedly optimistic portrait of man’s cyclical propensity for building worlds only to destroy them in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Whereas O’Neill and Wilder, and their contemporaries, drew more dimensioned and serious images of masculinity, the leading playwright of the next generation, Tennessee Williams, brought a potent and frank sensuality to the Broadway stage. For the first time in American drama, male (and female) sexuality was openly revealed within the lyrically poetic symbolism of Williams’s emotive plays. In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Williams examines the animalistic sensuality of the male with Stanley Kowalski, a sexual predator described by his prey, Blanche du Bois, as a “brute.” In his first important drama, The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams looks back in painful memory at a fatherless family and the poetic longings of its protagonist, Tom Wingfield, a young man based on Williams himself. Tom drifts through life yearning to break free of the invisible bonds of familial responsibility and guilt to realize himself as an artist. Poetic and sensual men appear often in other Williams plays like Orpheus Descending (1957) and in the works of Williams’s admirers, including William Inge, who depicts a man whose very presence unleashes the sexual longings of a small-town community of women in Picnic (1953). The openly gay Williams is often celebrated for his ability to portray sympathetic characterizations of women, but he also introduces the subject of homosexuality into many of his early plays (even if the gay characters are frequently left offstage). He dealt more frankly with this topic in such later dramas as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). Williams paved the way for other gay dramatists to delve into gender matters with greater purpose, as in the politicized dramas of Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner, or in the outrageous camp and cross-dressing of Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch. Recalling the epic stature of O’Neill and Wilder, Kushner’s two-play “gay fantastia” Angels in America (1993) includes only homosexual male characters on personal journeys of self-discovery set against the staggering complexities of political, moral, and human issues at the end of the twentieth century.

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Family remains a central focus throughout American drama of the last 100 years, but visions of paternal failure and dysfunction, in the O’Neillian vein, increasingly emerge after 1950. Arthur Miller focuses on the necessity for moral clarity in the relations between fathers and sons in his first successful play, All My Sons (1947), but it is in his modern tragedy Death of a Salesman (1949) that he most effectively views the destruction of the father-son relationship in a materialistic society that has distorted the dreams and values of its citizens. Miller’s Willy Loman, the down-on-his-luck salesman, is a theatrical embodiment of the male careerist lost in search of material success. However, as his dream of financial security slips away, Willy’s world crumbles. He desperately reaches out to his sons, but they fail him because they, too, are imbued with the values their father has worshipped. Miller uses the historic sixteenth century Salem, Massachusetts, “witch trials” as a metaphor for the McCarthy Communist scare of the first decade following World War II in The Crucible (1953). The echoes of this time still reverberate in Kushner’s Angels plays, both of which fictionally employ McCarthy lawyer Roy Cohn to exemplify the moral corruption of U.S. politics and repressed views of sexuality and maleness in the last decades of the twentieth century. Few African American dramatists succeeded in breaking into mainstream American theatre prior to the 1960s, but links between maleness and racial issues are in evidence as early as mid-nineteenth-century melodramas like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and The Octoroon (1859), with the latter featuring the suicide of a half-caste woman who fears “tainting” the heroic white man she loves. O’Neill introduced significant black male characters in a few of his plays, most notably The Emperor Jones* (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1923), the later dealing with interracial marriage. Lorraine Hansberry brought well-dimensioned images of black characters to the Broadway stage in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), in which she offers a portrait of a typical African American family—and the adult son at the center of it—in pre-civil rights America. Emphasizing the agonizing struggle of the family’s grown son to achieve his manhood in the face of social oppression and broken dreams, Hansberry’s play opened the door for subsequent black dramatists. Later African American writers from Amiri Baraka to August Wilson examine the effects of racial oppression on the black male’s spirit. In a variety of highly controversial works, Jones argues that the black man will not fully realize his potential until he completely breaks free of white oppression, while Wilson takes a familial approach in Fences (1987), exploring the impact of the frustrated longings of an embittered garbage man on his son. Issues of family dysfunction are especially prevalent after 1960, as in Edward Albee’s scalding dramas, particularly his savage Who’s Afraid of

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Virginia Woolf? (1962), which features a middle-aged harridan and her ineffectual husband playing out their aggressions and fears over cocktails with a younger couple. The crumbling American family and the macho myth of the Wild West are merged in the plays of Sam Shepard, who uses cowboy mythology to expose the inherent violence in man in True West (1980). Here a modern Cain and Abel lock horns in an animalistic sibling rivalry in their mother’s pristine kitchen while wolves howl on an unseen desert. In Fool for Love (1979) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), as in many of his plays, Shepard describes the ways in which the sins of an absent, brutal, and/or morally challenged father bring chaos (in the form of incest, violence, and disconnection) to the lives of his children. Possibly the most commercially successful Broadway playwright in history, Neil Simon, wrote a series of hit comedies centered on male camaraderie, most notably The Odd Couple (1965), while also presenting a trilogy of semi-autobiographical plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1984), and Broadway Bound (1986), depicting his own painful coming-ofage as a young Jewish male in a troubled family from the Great Depression through the end of World War II. Other writers of comedies in this period tended to follow Simon’s model. In the same period, darker images of male relationships were captured by David Mamet in the minimalist, cynical dramas American Buffalo (1977) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), the latter presenting a no-holds-barred combat for survival among real estate salesmen in a brutal and heartless American landscape of dead-end capitalism. In Mamet’s controversial Oleanna (1992), he brings the battle of the sexes to its apotheosis in a primal power game played out between an untenured male college professor and a young woman student who has accused him of sexual harassment. The play generated shouting matches in theatres as audience members debated the meaning of the play’s violent ending. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, August: Osage County (2007), Tracy Letts introduces the patriarch of the family, a witty alcoholic writer, in the first scene, but the character’s suicide sets off a power struggle between the surviving women of what is revealed to be a deeply troubled family fueled by alcohol and drugs. The male figure on the American stage began with one-dimensional heroes of melodramas and comedies who evolved over two centuries into psychologically complex and often paternalistic men striving to contribute to moral order, both within society and within their own homes. By the early twentyfirst century, male characters in American drama are often depicted as either disoriented, violent sexists or as decent, flawed beings struggling to make sense of a troubled world and changing relationships with women (whose depictions in drama changed even more radically after World War I).

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MEN IN WHITE. Sidney Kingsley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning three-act drama set behind the scenes of the medical profession opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 26 September 1933 for 351 performances in a production of The Group Theatre directed by Lee Strasberg. The cast included most of The Group’s major figures, including Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Ruth Nelson, Clifford Odets, Art Smith, Phoebe Brand, and others. Alexander Kirkland played George, an idealistic young doctor whose wealthy, pampered fiancée (Margaret Barker) cannot understand his single-minded devotion to his career. When she learns that he has had an affair and that the woman has died following an abortion, the relationship ends and George departs to study medicine in Vienna. A 1934 film version starred Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. MERCURY THEATRE, THE (MT). Founded in 1937 by Orson Welles and John Houseman, this theatre company produced work for the New York stage in tandem with the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and for radio and, ultimately, films. The Mercury Theatre company included Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Hans Conreid, Paul Stewart, Will Geer, George Coulouris, Olive Stanton, and Everett Sloane, not to mention Welles himself who both directed and acted in many Mercury productions. On Broadway, the theatre won acclaim for an inventive adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy. Other FTP-sponsored productions included, most famously, Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock (1938), which inspired a major controversy with Welles and his production being padlocked out of the theatre. In response, Welles and company decamped for the vacant Venice Theatre and presented this satire of labor relations without scenery and costumes. Also in 1938, the MT produced The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Heartbreak House, Too Much Johnson, and Danton’s Death. Another controversy emerged when The Mercury Theatre of the Air presented a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds in a pseudodocumentary style, causing panic in some listeners who believed an alien invasion of New Jersey was actually under way. Welles was signed by RKO Studios, where under the MT banner, he directed, cowrote, and starred in his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), which was nominated for several Academy Awards and also caused controversy because it was seen as a veiled exposé of the life of powerful newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles followed this with another MT production, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which, like Citizen Kane, featured many of the MT company. The film was re-edited by RKO after Welles departed to South America to make another film and his association with the studio ended and, to a great extent,

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so did the MT as many of the actors involved developed individual careers in movies, radio, and on Broadway. MERCY SEAT, THE. Neil LaBute’s drama opened on 18 December 2002 for a successful limited run at the Manhattan Theatre Club. One of the first plays to feature the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center, the play featured Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver as an adulterous couple, Ben and Abby. Ben, who worked in the World Trade Center, was with Abby when the attacks happened, and he contemplates running away with her in the aftermath, using the tragedy to abandon his previous life. MEREDITH, BURGESS (1908–1997). Born in Cleveland, Ohio as Oliver Burgess Meredith, he attended but dropped out of Amherst College before joining Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, appearing in supporting roles in the CRT’s revivals of Romeo and Juliet in 1930, The Green Cockatoo in 1930, Liliom in 1932, and Alice in Wonderland (1932). Meredith also appeared in the first (and short-lived) Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera in 1933. Meredith’s roles grew in importance by the mid-1930s, and he appeared with distinction opposite Katharine Cornell in revivals of The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1935 and Candida in 1942), as well as such varied plays as She Loves Me Not (1933), Winterset (1935), repeating his role in a 1936 film version, High Tor (1937), The Star-Wagon (1937), and revivals of Liliom in 1940, costarring with Ingrid Bergman, and The Playboy of the Western World in 1946, the latter bringing him back to the stage after service in the Air Force during World War II. His other postwar Broadway appearances included The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1953) and a revival of Major Barbara in 1956. Meredith also stepped in to replace the original stars in The Fourposter (1951) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953). In addition to acting, Meredith directed on Broadway with some frequency, winning a special Tony Award in 1960 for his staging of A Thurber Carnival, and he was nominated for a Tony for his direction of Ulysses in Nighttown (1974). Among his other directing credits are Season in the Sun (1950), Lo and Behold! (1951), The Frogs of Spring (1953), God and Kate Murphy (1959), Midgie Purvis (1961), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), and Of Love Remembered (1967). On screen, Meredith was twice nominated for an Academy Award for The Day of the Locust (1975) and Rocky (1976), and he won an Emmy Award for the television film Tail Gunner Joe (1977). Among his many film credits, Meredith memorably appeared in Of Mice and Men (1939), Advise & Consent (1962), In Harm’s Way (1965), and as Jack

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Lemmon’s 95-year-old father in Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel (1995). He appeared in dozens of television programs, from anthology drama series to situation comedies, including playing a memorable Penguin on the camp TV version of Batman in the 1960s. Meredith was married to screen actress Paulette Goddard from 1944 to 1950. MERRICK, DAVID (1911–2000). David Lee Margulois was born to Jewish American parents in St. Louis, Missouri, and, after studying at Washington University, entered law school at St. Louis University. He practiced law for a time, but gave it up in 1940 to become one of the most prolific and successful Broadway producers in the decades following World War II. A listing of just the shows he produced that won or were nominated for Tony Awards suggests the diversity of his interests, which included drama, comedy, musicals, and international stars and plays: Romanoff and Juliet (1958), Look Back in Anger (1958), Jamaica (1948, Epitaph for George Dillon (1959), La Plume de Ma Tante (1959), Take Me Along (1959), Becket (1961), Do Re Mi (1961), Irma La Douce (1961), Ross (1962), Carnival (1962), Oliver! (1963), Stop the World—I Want to Get Off (1963), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Luther (1964), The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd (1965), Oh, What a Lovely War! (1965), Inadmissable Evidence (1966), Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1966), Marat/Sade (1966), I Do! I Do! (1967), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968), The Happy Time (1968), How Now, Dow Jones (1968), Promises, Promises (1969), Child’s Play (1970), The Philanthropist (1971), Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1972), Sugar (1973), Mack & Mabel (1975), Very Good Eddie (1976), Travesties (1976), 42nd Street (1980), and Loot (1986). Merrick was presented with special Tonys in 1961 and 1968. A flamboyant and often difficult personality, Merrick was an expert manipulator of publicity. He once gave free tickets to seven New Yorkers with the same names as the major newspaper critics—and published their enthusiastic assessments of his show as though they were quotes from reviews, sparking outrage among the critical community. He also created controversy on opening night of the musical 42nd Street when he announced the death earlier that day of Gower Champion, the show’s director and choreographer, to the shock and dismay of the cast. Many thought him ruthless in his pursuit of success, and employees often found him cantankerous and ungenerous. Despite this, Merrick’s name became synonymous with quality productions on Broadway between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s. Merrick was married six times and spent the last 17 years of his life living with the indispositions resulting from a stroke suffered in 1983 that left him in a wheelchair and unable to speak, though he continued producing on occasion.

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MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act play with the novel device of telling its story in reverse opened on 29 September 1934 for 155 performances, with Kaufman directing and with scene design by Jo Mielziner. Beginning in the present, it depicts a successful playwright partying with similarly successful old friends who reflect on their past as the play moves in reverse to show the characters at different junctures, losing their dreams and integrity to gain success, taking them all the way back to their idealistic beginnings in 1916. Critics and audiences were tepid about the play, which had a shorter run than became typical for Kaufman and Hart productions in the 1930s. With an adapted book by George Furth, Stephen Sondheim wrote music and lyrics for a 1981 musical inspired by the play, but it failed, although it has become a cult classic to Sondheim admirers. METCALFE, STEPHEN (1953– ). Known mostly for his film work, Metcalfe has also written several plays, including Vikings (1980), Strange Snow (1982), which he adapted for the screen as Jacknife (1989), Emily (1988), Pilgrims (1995), and Loves and Hours (2003), most of which have been produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California. MIDDLE AGES, THE. A. R. Gurney, Jr.’s two-act comedy first produced in a Mark Taper Forum Lab workshop in January 1977 and in 1978 at Stamford, Connecticut’s Hartman Theatre opened Off-Broadway at the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church in March 1983 under David Trainer’s direction. Gurney depicts a fading way of life in a series of scenes set in the trophy room of a men’s club where a romance between Barney and Eleanor blooms. New York Times critic Leah D. Frank, in reviewing the play, labeled Gurney as “a contemporary Philip Barry.” MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Paddy Chayeksky’s two-act “love story,” as it was billed, opened at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Playhouse on 8 February 1956 for 477 performances, produced and directed by Joshua Logan, with scene and lighting design by Jo Mielziner (who was nominated for a Tony Award) and costumes by Motley. Edward G. Robinson, in a Tony-nominated performance, played a wealthy businessman and widower romantically involved with his much-younger divorced receptionist (Gena Rowlands), setting off opposition from their families. Anne Jackson (in a Tony-nominated performance), Martin Balsam, and June Walker also appeared in the ANTA cast.

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MIELZINER, JO (1901–1976).† Born in Paris, but educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, Mielziner became perhaps the most important scene designer on Broadway after Robert Edmond Jones. He began his career acting and designing for the Jessie Bonstelle* stock company in Detroit and for The Theatre Guild where, in 1924, he won critical approval for his design of Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. His remarkable output from then until his retirement spanned every form of drama, from the classics to contemporary works, from musicals to the heaviest dramas. In his early years, Mielziner worked in both the realistic and expressionistic* styles pioneered by others, but as he developed he moved toward a poetic, painterly simplicity achieved, in part, through skeletal settings and sensitive lighting, an area in which he pioneered new lighting techniques in collaboration with designer Edward F. Kook. In his earliest years, he designed settings for Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Strange Interlude* (1928) and Elmer Rice’s Street Scene* (1929), but most of his major work was done after 1930 and included such classic American plays and musicals as Of Thee I Sing (1931), Winterset (1935), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), Pal Joey (1940), The Glass Menagerie (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Mister Roberts (1948), Death of a Salesman (1949), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), The King and I (1951), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Gypsy (1959), and 1776 (1969), among many others. He also worked as a theatrical consultant, including on the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. MILLER, ARTHUR (1915–2005). Arthur Asher Miller, the quintessential sociopolitical American dramatist of the post-World War II era, was born to a middle-class Jewish American family in Manhattan, New York. Miller’s father, Isidore, owned a successful women’s clothing manufacturing business, and his mother was a homemaker. At the age of eight, Miller attended his first Broadway play, an experience that implanted an interest in the stage that would ultimately lead to a singular 60-year career as a playwright. In October 1929, the stock market crashed, setting off the Great Depression, and this social catastrophe hit the Miller family with particular force, an economic misfortune that established a set of thematic concerns for Miller which ultimately became central to his dramatic art and would be most vividly articulated in what is arguably his greatest dramatic achievement, the 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Death of a Salesman. In his finest dramas, Miller seemed compelled by the dilemmas facing the generation of his parents; the impact of his father’s business failure in the Depression would be

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given voice throughout his career, from his earliest successes, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman, and as late as The American Clock (1980). As he came of age, Miller initially majored in journalism at the University of Michigan, where he studied classical drama, and the plays of Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, and the current dramas of Clifford Odets who, for many critics, is the obvious precursor of Miller’s politically engaged style. Miller began to dabble in playwriting, completing his first work, No Villain (1936), which won the Avery Hopwood* Award. The Grass Still Grows (1938) won him a $1,200 Theatre Guild National Award during this time. Miller graduated from the University of Michigan in 1938 with a B.A. degree in English and several completed plays to his credit. That same year, despite an offer to write screenplays for Twentieth Century-Fox, Miller signed on to the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Before Miller’s first play could be produced, a conservative United States Congress, believing the FTP to be a hotbed of Communist infiltration into American life, voted it out of existence. This turn of events forced Miller to take a job as a laborer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, although he also earned income writing radio scripts. Miller’s prodigious output of radio plays supported his family as he completed The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), his first play produced on Broadway. It won Miller a Theater Guild National Award, but despite critical approval, the production closed after a mere four performances. This commercial failure forced Miller to continue with radio script writing while he tried his hand at a novel, Focus (1945), with little critical or popular success. In 1947, Miller’s All My Sons, in a highly praised production directed by Elia Kazan, opened on Broadway and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Donaldson Award, and two Tony Awards. The play dealt with the tensions of family life within the moral considerations of the post-World War II era, which were to be central to his finest works. Death of a Salesman, also directed by Kazan, followed All My Sons and confirmed Miller’s predominance among postwar American playwrights, with only Tennessee Williams as a peer. The play won the Tony as Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize, and sold in excess of 200,000 copies when it was published. The triumph of Death of a Salesman was remarkable on several counts, not least is that its depiction of the dark side of capitalism—or, at least, the illusions it can create in those who view material success (the vaunted “American dream”) as fulfillment—was in stark contrast to America’s post-World War II economic boom. In every respect, Death of a Salesman seemed to counter the contemporary currents of American life—on the surface, more a play about the Great Depression of the 1930s, Death of a Salesman still managed to speak to its audience in 1949, perhaps as a cautionary tale.

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Miller next completed a modern adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1950), but in 1952, he was drawn into historical events. His friend, Elia Kazan, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and, under fear of being blacklisted from Hollywood, named eight people from The Group Theatre he knew to be members of the Communist Party. Their friendship and working relationship was seriously damaged, and Miller addressed these events in his next major play, The Crucible (1953), a historical drama about the witch trials with undeniable allegorical undercurrents, as the accusation of witchcraft ruins multiple lives in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts. When The Crucible opened, critics and audiences were generally disinterested, with the contemporary echoes generating some controversy, but The Crucible has since become regarded as one of Miller’s most enduring accomplishments. His next play, A View from the Bridge (1955), was originally a long one-act play presented on a double bill with his A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), a drama focused on the anti-Semitism he met with as a young man working in a factory. In 1956, Miller, who had divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, married movie star Marilyn Monroe and he himself was called before HUAC, but he refused until it was agreed that he would not be required to “name names,” as Kazan had done. However, in a turnabout, HUAC changed its mind about and succeeded in getting a federal district court to convict Miller of contempt of Congress. He was given a one-month suspended sentence and fined $500. As a result of this battle, and Miller’s rocky marriage to Monroe, his work as a dramatist was severely undermined. He lost a certain amount of momentum in his work, from which he never fully recovered, although he continued writing until shortly before his death at age 89. Miller’s later works include the film The Misfits (1960), which he wrote for Monroe, although they were estranged by the time the film was completed and divorced in 1962, after which he married photographer Inge Morath. Miller’s next major play, After the Fall (1964), brought together myriad strands of his professional and personal life. Although Miller tended to downplay the autobiographical elements, it was clear to critics and audiences that the play was a dramatization of his marriage to Monroe and critics condemned it on those grounds. That same year, his play Incident at Vichy (1964) was produced, returning to issues of anti-Semitism during World War II. His next major play, The Price (1968), which returned to themes of family tensions and the impact of the Great Depression, was his most successful later work. Miller’s first comedy, The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), did not fare as well as The Price, and most of his later plays, including The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977), The American Clock, Two-Way Mirror (1982), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1992), Broken

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Glass (1994), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998), Resurrection Blues (2002), and Finishing the Picture (2004), failed or found scant approval, although he won acclaim for his teleplay, Playing for Time (1980), which dealt with the Holocaust. For Miller, a playwright is a moral spokesperson and he spoke through his characters, making this point most vividly in All My Sons when Chris Keller says, “Once and for all you must know that there’s a universe of people outside, and you’re responsible for it.” MILLER, GILBERT HERON (1884–1969).† The son of actors Henry Miller* and Bijou Heron, Miller was born in New York City and sent to schools in Europe. After a stint as company manager for his father’s 1907 tour of The Great Divide,* Miller managed all of his father’s productions until 1915. He went to London in 1916 to produce Daddy-Long-Legs* and acquired two London theatres during his six years there, in addition to Henry Miller’s Theatre on Broadway. Specializing in high comedy, Miller produced a total of 99 shows in New York and London, most of which he underwrote without seeking additional backers. Under other producers, Miller directed The Czarina (1922) and The Constant Wife (1926), but he produced (and sometimes directed) numerous important plays, including Her Cardboard Lover* (1927), Journey’s End (1929), Dishonored Lady (1930), Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), The Animal Kingdom (1932), The Late Christopher Bean (1932), The Petrified Forest (1935), Victoria Regina (1935), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Moon Is Blue (1951), Witness for the Prosecution (1954), The Rope Dancers (1957), Under Milkwood (1957), Look After Lulu (1959), and The Caretaker (1961), among many others. The jovial but hot-tempered bon vivant was credited with discovering Audrey Hepburn, whom he imported for Gigi in 1951. In 1965, he received the Tony Award for his distinguished career of nearly 50 years in theatre. MILLER, JASON (1940–2001). Born John Anthony Miller in Long Island City, New York, son of an electrician and a teacher, Miller moved with his family to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he attended the University of Scranton. Miller also studied at the Catholic University of America. 1973 proved to be a remarkable year for Miller when his play, That Championship Season, won a Pulitzer Prize, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting performance in The Exorcist. He occasionally acted in films, including The Ninth Configuration (1980), Toy Soldiers (1984), The Exorcist III (1990), and Rudy (1993), but he preferred to work in regional theatres. He played the lead in his one-man show, Barrymore’s* Ghost (1998), on tour and Off-Broadway, and his other plays include Nobody Hears a Broken Drum (1970) and Lou Gehrig Did Not Die of Cancer (1971).

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MILLER, PENELOPE ANN (1964– ). A native of Los Angeles, California, born Penelope Andrea Miller, she was the daughter of a television actor and producer and a costume designer. Following high school, she moved to New York to study acting. Miller first won attention for her Broadway debut as Daisy Hannigan in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues (1985), a role she repeated in the 1988 screen version. Miller won acclaim and garnered Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations for her performance as Emily in a 1988 revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (repeating her performance in a 1989 television version), and she also appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of On the Waterfront (1995). Miller also appeared Off-Broadway in a 1987 revival of Michael Weller’s Moonchildren at the Second Stage Theatre. Her numerous film roles include Big Top Pee-wee (1988), The Freshman (1990), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Other People’s Money (1991), Chaplin (1992), Carlito’s Way (1993), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination, The Shadow (1994), The Relic (1997), and others, as well as numerous television shows, and became a regular on Men of a Certain Age in 2009. MILLER, TIM (1958– ). Born in Pasadena, California, Miller studied theatre and dance while in high school and moved to New York in his teens to continue his dance studies with Merce Cunningham. In 1980, Miller established the performance space P.S. 122, with Charles Moulton and Charles Dennis (in 1987, he founded a similar space, Highways, in Santa Monica, California). As a performance artist, Miller’s works often focus on his gay identity, with particular emphasis on marriage equality and immigration issues (the latter inspired by his longtime relationship with Australian Alistair McCartney). Miller gained notoriety when he became one of four artists whose controversial works caused their 1990 National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grants to be vetoed by NEA chair John Frohnmayer during the “culture wars” of the era—they subsequently became known as the “NEA Four”). Among Miller’s works are Live Boys (1981), created in collaboration with John Bernd, Postwar (1982), Cost of Living (1983), Democracy in America (1984), Buddy Systems (1985), a collaboration with Doug Sadownick, Some Gold States (1987), Stretch Marks (1989), Sex/Love/Stories (1991), My Queer Body (1992), Naked Breath (1994), Fruit Cocktail (1996), Shirts & Skin (1997), Glory Box (1999), Body Blows (2002), Us (2003), and 1001 Beds (2006). See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE; CENSORSHIP. MILNER, RON (1938–2004). Son of a laborer and a waitress, Ronald Milner was born in Detroit, Michigan, and studied briefly at the Detroit Institute of Technology before beginning his writing career with an unfinished 1962

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novel, The Life of the Brothers Brown, before switching to playwriting with a short children’s theatre play, The Greatest Gift (1963). On Broadway, Milner’s plays, What the Wine-Sellers Buy (1974), which was the first play by an African American produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Checkmates (1988), starring Paul Winfield and Denzel Washington, had brief runs, and his wrote and directed the musical revue* Don’t Get God Started (1987). Milner’s other plays include the family drama Who’s Got His Own (1965), The Warning: A Theme for Linda (1969), The Monster (1969), M(ego) and the Green Ball of Freedom (1971), Season’s Reasons (1976), Jazz-Set (1980), Urban Transition: Loose Blossoms (1996), and Defending the Light (2000). MILTON, DAVID SCOTT (1934– ). Born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the height of the Great Depression, Milton worked as a truck driver and a baker, which inspired his play Bread (1974), which was performed at the American Place Theatre. He joined Theatre Genesis, an avant-garde company, and several of his plays were produced Off-OffBroadway, including Metaphysical Cop (1967) and Scraping Bottom (1968). His play, Skin (1981), produced at the Odyssey Theatre for nearly a year, won the Neil Simon Playwrights Award. Milton, who has also acted on stage and in films, ultimately moved more toward writing novels, short stories, and screenplays, and he taught at the University of Southern California. MILWAUKEE REPERTORY THEATRE (MRT). Founded in 1954 by Mary Widrig John with the plan of creating a professional theatre for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John’s efforts led to the building of the Fred Miller Theatre and, in 1963, the naming of the company as the MRT. In 1968, the MRT moved to the Todd Wehr Theatre in a new performing arts center in downtown Milwaukee where it operated until 1987, when it moved to the Patty and Jay Baker Theatre Complex across from Milwaukee’s City Hall. The MRT came into its own under the guidance of artistic director Nagle Jackson during the early 1970s, creating an annual tradition of performing A Christmas Carol. Jackson was replaced by John Dillon in 1977, and Dillon promoted new play development, thus providing opportunities for local playwrights, including Larry Shue, whose comedies found popularity in American theatres, such as The Nerd (1981), The Foreigner (1983), and Wenceslas Square (1988). By 2010, the MRT was producing up to 16 productions per year, with occasional tours and a continued commitment to new plays. MIME.† The traditions of mime and pantomime* date back to ancient times, but in American were seen vividly in various eighteenth- and nineteenth-

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century entertainments, particularly in the work of great clowns from the British stage and such American-born figures as George L. Fox, whose HumptyDumpty (1868), popularized the white-faced, silent clown, and the performers of the popular Hanlon-Lees* troupe in the 1880s–1890s, who merged pantomimic techniques with visual spectacle and stage tricks. The birth of the silent cinema in the 1890s created a fertile field for great pantomimists such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and many others, but with the dawning of sound film in the late 1920s, the art of mime declined significantly in the United States until after World War II. In 1952, Paul J. Curtis founded the American Mime School in New York and his efforts to provide training were enhanced by appearances of European mimes, most notably Marcel Marceau in 1956, whose skills prompted a revival of interest in mime training among American actors. Despite spawning silent mimes, the aspect of improvisational acting related to mime kept the form alive in the work of politically inspired companies, such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and others. From the 1980s, mime and improvisation flourished in the work of a generation of “new vaudevillians” such as Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, and others trained in various techniques from the traditions of commedia dell’arte to silent film comedy and vaudeville,* mime inspired by Marceau, Étienne Decroux, Jacques Lecoq, the political improvisations of Nobel Prize-winning dramatist/actor Dario Fo, circus and carnival, and other elements. See also BROWN, TONY; MONTANARO, TONY; STEIN, DANIEL. MINT THEATRE COMPANY (MTC). Kelly Morgan founded this unique company in 1992 with the goal of reviving “neglected” plays from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European canon. In 1994, Jonathan Bank became artistic director and the MTC won a special Obie Award in 2001 and a special Drama Desk Award in 2002 for their body of productions. Among these have been applauded revivals of such American plays as George L. Aiken’s adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1997, Clyde Fitch’s* adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in 1998, Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House in 1999, Zona Gale’s* Miss Lulu Bett* in 2000, John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle in 2001, S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy in 2002, Rachel Crothers’s Susan and God in 2006, Rose Franken’s Soldier’s Wife in 2006, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column in 2008. European playwrights revived include Harley Granville-Barker, Cecily Hamilton, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Schnitzler, St. John Hankin, John Galsworthy, Leo Tolstoy, and others.

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MINTZ, ELI (1904–1988). Born in Lvov, Poland as the son of a tailor, Edward Satz began acting as a child and changed his name to Eli Mintz when he came to the United States in 1927 and began appearing in New York’s Yiddish theatre. Mintz’s major break came when Menasha Skulnik recommended him for the role of Uncle David in the Broadway production Me and Molly (1948), Gertrude Berg’s stage adaptation of her long-running radio series, The Goldbergs. Following the Broadway run, Berg’s radio show made the transition to television in 1949 and Mintz continued in the role. After The Goldbergs ended, Mintz appeared in a few other Broadway productions, including The 49th Cousin (1960), I Was Dancing (1964), Catch Me If You Can (1965), and Jimmy Shine (1968), and he was nominated for an Emmy Award for a guest appearance on the soap opera All My Children in 1970. For his final Broadway appearance, Mintz again played Uncle David in the musical Molly (1973) inspired by The Goldbergs. MIRACLE WORKER, THE. William Gibson’s Tony Award-winning three-act drama about the relationship of Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 19 October 1959 for 719 performances. Director Arthur Penn and star Anne Bancroft won Tony Awards for their efforts and 13-year-old Patty Duke, as Keller, won a Theatre World Award. Set in the 1880s, the play emphasizes the young Keller’s awakening from the oblivion of deafness and blindness; unable to communicate or comprehend her surroundings, Helen is liberated by her devoted teacher, who faces the daunting task of teaching the child a means of communication. Bancroft and Duke reprised their roles in the 1962 film version, both winning Academy Awards, and Duke eventually played Annie Sullivan in a 1979 television version. Another television film version appeared in 2000 and a 2010 Broadway revival at the Circle in the Square starred Abigail Breslin and Alison Pill. MISSOURI REPERTORY THEATRE. See KANSAS CITY REPERTORY THEATRE. MISTER ROBERTS. Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Tony Awardwinning two-act comedy-drama about a self-sacrificing navy lieutenant protecting his hapless crew from a tyrannical captain opened at the Alvin Theatre on 18 February 1948 for 1,157 performances in a Leland Hayward production. Hayward won a Tony Award as Best Producer, with Tonys going to Heggen and Logan as authors (Logan also won a Tony for his direction) and to star Henry Fonda.

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Lt. Doug Roberts, played by Fonda, is locked in a battle of wills with lazy, self-centered Captain Morton (William Harrigan) on a navy cargo ship during World War II. Roberts longs for action at the front, but the captain will not allow him to transfer. Roberts protects the crew from the captain’s cantankerous ways, particularly the feckless Ensign Pulver, who idolizes Roberts and is afraid of the captain. In gratitude to Roberts after a series of misunderstandings, the grateful crew tricks the captain into providing the necessary transfer for Roberts to a post on a battleship. Some weeks later, the crew learns that Roberts has been killed. In response, Pulver finally learns to stand up to the captain in Roberts’s absence. The play’s success was due in part to memorable performances from Fonda and David Wayne as Pulver. Fonda repeated his performance in a 1955 film version, with James Cagney as the captain and Jack Lemmon in an Academy Award-winning performance as Pulver. The film’s three stars appeared live in two keys scenes from the play on television’s The Ed Sullivan Show at the time of the movie’s release. Mister Roberts inspired a short-lived 1964 television series, a 1964 movie sequel called Ensign Pulver, and a 1984 television film. MITCHELL, BRIAN STOKES (1958– ). Born in Seattle, Washington, this versatile singer/actor is known mostly for his appearances in musicals, including his Tony Award-nominated roles in Ragtime (1998) and a revival of Man of La Mancha in 2003, as well as his Tony-winning performance in a 2000 revival of Kiss Me, Kate. He has also appeared in straight plays, including the title role in August Wilson’s King Hedley II (2001), which also brought him a Tony nomination. He has appeared in numerous Encores! musical concert revivals, including a concert version of South Pacific filmed for PBS-TV in 2006. Mitchell also serves as president of the Actors’ Fund. MITCHELL, DAVID (1932– ). A native of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, Mitchell studied at Penn State University and Boston University before beginning his work as a scene designer with the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) in 1965. He continued with the NYSF for several years, branching out to design for regional theatres, including the Goodman Theatre, and the Berkshire Theatre Festival, among others. For Broadway, Mitchell won Tony Awards for the musicals Annie (1977) and Barnum (1980), and reaped Tony nominations for Trelawny of the “Wells” (1976), Working (1978), Can-Can (1981), Foxfire (1983), and The Boys in Winter (1986), and he won a Drama Desk Award for Short Eyes (1974). His numerous other Broadway designs include How the Other Half Loves (1971), The Incomparable Max (1971), I Love My Wife (1977), The Gin Game (1977), a 1979

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revival of The Price, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), a 1983 revival of Private Lives, La Cage aux Folles (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), Tru (1989), and Dream (1997). MITCHELL, JOHN CAMERON (1963– ). Born in El Paso, Texas, and raised on military bases with his father, a United States Army general, and his mother, a schoolteacher, Mitchell began acting in childhood and studied theatre at Northwestern University in the early 1980s. He debuted in an Organic Theatre production of Huckleberry Finn staged at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. This role led to a move to New York, where he appeared as Huck Finn again in the musical Big River (1985). Mitchell also received Drama Desk Award nominations in the musicals The Secret Garden (1991) and Hello Again (1993), and he won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination for The Destiny of Me (1992). Mitchell also appeared in Six Degrees of Separation (1990). Mitchell is a cofounder of the Drama Department Theatre Company for whom he directed and adapted Tennessee Williams’s Kingdom of Heaven. In 1998, Mitchell collaborated with composer Stephen Trask on the Obie-winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which he starred in (and reaped a Drama Desk nomination), after which he acted in and directed the film version in 2001, garnering a Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance. He directed the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning David Lindsay-Abaire play Rabbit Hole (2010) and Shortbus (2006). MITCHELL, LOFTEN (1919–2001). A pioneering figure in African American theatre from the 1950s, Mitchell was born in Columbus, North Carolina, but was raised in Harlem. Playwriting was his emphasis while studying at City College, Talladega College, and Columbia University. A few of his plays were produced on a small scale in Harlem, but his dramatic plea for desegregation of public schools, A Land beyond the River (1957), was produced Off-Broadway with Diana Sands and Robert Graham Brown in the cast. Mitchell coauthored the libretto of the Off-Broadway musical Ballad for Bimshire (1963) and the pageant Ballad for the Winter Soldiers (1964), but moved to Broadway as librettist for Bubbling Brown Sugar (1976), which brought him a Tony Award nomination. Described by actor/ playwright Ossie Davis as the “heart and soul” of theatre in Harlem, Mitchell captured the recollections of other seminal African American artists of the post-World War II era in his book Voices for the Black Theatre (1975), as well as Black Drama (1967), an historical text. MITCHELL, THOMAS (1895–1962). Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Mitchell became one of the most beloved motion picture character actors

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in scores of films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in Stagecoach (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), among others. His roots were in the theatre, where he debuted with Ben Greet’s company in 1913 and toured in Shakespeare with Charles Coburn’s troupe. Mitchell scored popular successes in Marc Connelly’s comedy The Wisdom Tooth* (1926) and in Little Accident* (1928), which he coauthored with Floyd Dell.* He won a Tony Award for the musical Hazel Flagg (1953), and his other Broadway appearances include Fly Away Home (1935), Stick-in-the-Mud (1935), An Inspector Calls (1947), he replaced Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman (1949), The Biggest Thief in Town (1949), and Cut of the Axe (1960). He also directed several productions, including Forsaking All Others (1933) and Something Gay (1935). MIXED BLOOD THEATRE COMPANY, THE (MBTC). Founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1976 as a professional multi-racial company with emphasis on encouraging cultural pluralism and individual equality in its performances, MBTC, under the longtime artistic directorship of Jack Reuler, employs culture-conscious casting and aims to reach a non-traditional theatre audience, in part by supplying a forum for artists of color. Beginning in 1980, MBTC established annual tours of their work through the Midwest. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. MOELLER, PHILLIP (1880–1958).† Born in New York, Moeller attended New York University and Columbia University prior to an auspicious beginning to his theatrical career as one of the founders of the Washington Square Players* and, after World War I, The Theatre Guild, for whom he staged their first production, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest (1919). Moeller was widely admired for his skill at directing comedy, but he also staged many of the most important dramas of the 1920s and 1930s. He referred to himself as an “inspirational” director, using improvisation to achieve his effects. In the 1920s, Moeller’s impressive directorial credits include The Guardsman (1924), They Knew What They Wanted* (1924), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), The Second Man* (1927), and Strange Interlude* (1928). After 1930, Moeller continued to direct for the Guild and many of the plays were the most important on Broadway, including Philip Barry’s Hotel Universe (1930), Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen (1930) starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Eugene O’Neill’s towering tragic trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), S. N. Behrman’s Biography (1932), O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1933) starring George M. Cohan, and Behrman‘s End of Summer (1936), among others. He also directed films, but essentially retired by the late 1930s.

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MOFFAT, DONALD (1930– ). A British-born actor trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art following military service, Moffat has worked successfully on both London and New York stages and in film. His many Broadway appearances include his Tony Award-nominated performances in revivals of Right You Are If You Think You Are in 1966 and The Wild Duck in 1967 and his Drama Desk Award-nominated roles in Play Memory in 1984 and a 1986 revival of The Iceman Cometh. His other Broadway credits include Under Milk Wood (1957), a 1959 revival of Much Ado about Nothing, The Tumbler (1960), Duel of Angels (1960), A Passage to India (1962), The Affair (1962), revivals of You Can’t Take It with You in 1965 and The School for Scandal in 1966, War and Peace (1967), revivals of The Cherry Orchard in 1968, Cock-A-Doodle Dandy in 1969, and Hamlet in 1969, Father’s Day (1971), and a revival of The Heiress in 1995. Since the mid-1950s, Moffat has appeared in numerous films and television shows. MOISEIWITSCH, TANYA (1914–2003). This London-born theatre designer came from a family of musicians and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts before becoming a founding designer of the Canadian Stratford Festival and designed theatres as well as theatre productions in England and on Broadway. She won a Drama Desk Award for her costume design of The House of Atreus (1969), directed by Tyrone Guthrie, and was Tony Award-nominated in two categories in 1975, for both scene and costume designs for a revival of The Misanthrope. Her other Broadway designs include revivals of Uncle Vanya and The Critic in 1946, The Matchmaker (1955), a 1958 revival of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Broken Jug (1958). MOLINA, ALFRED (1953– ). Born of Spanish and Italian heritage as Alfredo Molina in London, Molina is mostly known for his film work, but has occasionally appeared on Broadway and Off-Broadway. He won a 1996 Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for his performance in Molly Sweeney Off-Broadway and won a Drama Desk Award as Yvan in Yasmina Reza’s Art (1998). He also received Tony Award and Drama Desk nominations for a 2004 revival of the musical Fiddler on the Roof. In 2010, Molina reaped a Tony nomination and critical plaudits in John Logan’s play Red, playing artist Mark Rothko, following a successful 2009 engagement in the play at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Among his many movies, Molina won kudos as Kenneth Halliwell, the lover and murderer of playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and as Diego Rivera in Frida (2002). On television, Molina became a regular on Law & Order: Los Angeles in 2010.

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MONK, MEREDITH (1942– ). New York-born Meredith Jane Monk is a multitalented artist—actor, director, singer, filmmaker, and choreographer— whose multidisciplinary creations merge aspects of theatre, dance, and music. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and, in 1968, established The House, a company committed to her interdisciplinary style, and created “opera epic” pieces such as Vessel (1971) and Quarry (1975), but otherwise spent the early 1970s collaborating with Ping Chong on a series, Paris, Chacon, Venice/Milan, and an “archaeology” series. Late in the 1970s, Monk’s work moved toward more emphasis on music, but by the early 1980s, she created Specimen Days (1981) and The Games (1983), two multimedia theatre productions. The continuing evolution of Monk’s exploration moved back toward “opera epic” with Atlas (1991) and the performance pieces Facing North (1991), Volcano Songs (1994), The Politics of Quiet (1996), and Impermanence (2004). She has also composed symphonic works and directed films, including Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988), and her music has been featured in films by the Coen Brothers. MONTANARO, TONY (1927–2002). Born in Paulsboro, New Jersey, Montanaro studied at Columbia University and began his acting career in stock. Deeply impressed by Marcel Marceau’s 1956 New York appearance, Montanaro moved to Paris to study mime with Marceau and Étienne Decroux. Back in the United States, Montanaro founded the Celebration Barn in South Paris, Maine, a theatre and school of mime, storytelling, improvisation, and other performance traditions. With his wife, Karen Hurll, he toured widely in The Montanaro-Hurll Theatre of Mime and Dance, and together they authored Mime Spoken Here (1995), a practical guide to mime techniques. MONTANO, LINDA (1942– ). Despite being raised in a Roman Catholic family in Saugerties, New York, where she was born, Montano emerged as a major contemporary feminist performance artist. Educated at the College of New Rochelle, Villa Schiffanois (Italy), and the University of Wisconsin, Montano collaborated with Tehching Hsieh on a year-long project, Art/Life, One Year Performance (1983–1984), in which they were bound together by a rope for 24 hours a day. She is inspired in her work by a range of spiritual traditions, from her own Catholicism to Buddhism, Zen, Hinduism, and other religions, to such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, and Allan Kaprow. Among her other creations are Handcuffed to Tom Marioni for Three Days (1973), Mitchell’s Death (1977), Fourteen Years of Living Art (1984–1998), Attention to CHAKRAS (1991–1995), and Blood Family Art and Dad Art (1997–2010).

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MONTRESOR, BENI (1926–2001). Best known in the United States as a designer of scenery for operas, this native of Bussolengo, Italy, also illustrated children’s books and was an artist. He worked closely with Gian Carlo Menotti. He worked occasionally on Broadway, designing costumes for a 1964 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions* and designing sets and costumes for Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965) and The Marriage of Figaro (1985), as well as scene designs for the musical Rags (1986). MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, A. Eugene O’Neill’s three-act sequel of sorts to his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1939), is set in 1923 outside a rundown Connecticut farmhouse owned by Jamie Tyrone, the alcoholic elder son of the prior play, and run by a boozy, twofisted Irish tenant, Phil Hogan. A Moon for the Misbegotten depicts the dying Jamie’s relationship with Josie, Hogan’s daughter, an outwardly powerful woman who is deeply vulnerable, particularly to Jamie. Josie sadly comes to realize that although he cares deeply for her, Jamie is a lost cause and has come to her only for absolution of his sins. She takes comfort in the realization that she has brought him comfort on his inevitable path to death and bids him a poignant farewell: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep, soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.” A Moon for the Misbegotten was O’Neill’s final play and although critical appreciation of it has grown, it closed out of town in 1947 during its pre-Broadway tryout. The play finally made it to Broadway in 1957, but closed after a mere 68 performances despite a Tony Award-nominated performance by Wendy Hiller. Finally, in 1973, an acclaimed revival directed by José Quintero starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst unearthed the play’s undeniable merits, running 313 performances. Dewhurst, supporting actor Ed Flanders, and Quintero won Tonys for their work, and the production was filmed for television in 1975, reaping several Emmy Award nominations and a Supporting Actor Emmy for Flanders. There have been three subsequent Broadway revivals of the play. In 1984, Kate Nelligan was nominated for a Tony as Josie in a revival directed by David Leveaux. A 2000 revival spawned at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre brought Tony nominations to Gabriel Byrne and Cherry Jones, with a Tony going to Roy Dotrice as Hogan, when it moved to Broadway. Eve Best as Josie won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award, along with a Tony nomination, in a 2007 revival costarring with Kevin Spacey directed by Howard Davies. MOON IS BLUE, THE. F. Hugh Herbert’s three-act romantic comedy opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 8 March 1951 for 924 performances.

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The long run of this lightweight play is explained only by its somewhat liberated view of sexuality and the threatened loss of virginity of its heroine, Patty O’Neill (Barbara Bel Geddes). Patty and rising architect Donald Gresham (Barry Nelson) meet in the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Donald is engaged, but so enamored of Patty that he breaks off his engagement, setting off a series of encounters with his ex-fiancée’s father, Patty’s father, and others. The play ends with Donald and Patty back at the Empire State Building contemplating a future together. The Moon Is Blue, which became a stock favorite, was directed on screen by Otto Preminger and set off a challenge to the Hollywood production code due to its use of the word “virgin.” MOONCHILDREN. Michael Weller’s two-act comedy-drama was produced by David Merrick and directed by Alan Schneider at the Royale Theatre, where it opened on 21 February 1972 for a mere 16 performances. Despite its Broadway failure, the play was done Off-Broadway where it ran for 394 performances under the Obie Award-winning direction of John Pasquin. The play had little plot and centers on a group of college students (played by Kevin Conway, Maureen Anderman, Edward Herrmann, Christopher Guest, Stephen Collins, Jill Eikenberry, James Woods, and Cara DuffMacCormick) in the turbulent days of 1965–1966 who face several personal situations, including the death of a parent of one of the group, and participate in protest demonstrations. Moonchildren has emerged as a vivid document of its era. MOORE, ROBERT (1927–1984). Born in Detroit, Michigan, he directed with success on stage and screen. On Broadway, he moved comfortably from dramas to musicals, winning a Drama Desk Award for The Boys in the Band (1968) and Tony Award nominations for Promises, Promises (1969), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1970), Deathtrap (1978), They’re Playing Our Song (1979), and Woman of the Year (1981). On Broadway, he also directed The Gingerbread Lady (1970), Lorelei (1974), and My Fat Friend (1974). For films, Moore directed Murder By Death (1976), The Cheap Detective (1978), and Chapter Two (1979), as well as various television programs and the TV film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1976 starring Laurence Olivier. Moore also acted, appearing on Broadway as the understudy for The Owl and the Pussycat (1964) and in Cactus Flower (1965) and Everything in the Garden (1967), as well as in the Liza Minnelli film, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), and on several television programs. MOOREHEAD, AGNES (1900–1974). The daughter of a clergyman and a singer, Agnes Robertson Moorehead was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, and

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was devoutly religious throughout her life. She was educated at Muskingum College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Moorehead had a rocky start to her acting career, finally finding work in radio before Orson Welles added her to The Mercury Theatre, first on the radio and then in films including Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), both directed by Welles, which launched her into a distinguished screen career as a character actress of rare versatility. She occasionally appeared on stage, most notably in Don Juan in Hell (1951), the third act of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, costarring with Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Charles Laughton. After a Broadway run and a single performance at Carnegie Hall, the production returned to Broadway for several more performances in 1952. Moorehead also appeared in a 1973 revival, this time costarring with Paul Henreid, Ricardo Montalban, and Edward Mulhare. Her other Broadway roles include Miss Swanson in S. N. Behrman’s Lord Pengo (1962) and Aunt Alicia in the musical Gigi (1973). Moorehead received four Academy Award nominations for her film work in The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Parkington (1944), Johnny Belinda (1948), and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), winning Golden Globe Awards for Mrs. Parkington and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte and a New York Film Critics Award for The Magnificent Ambersons. She also appeared memorably in The Big Street (1942), Jane Eyre (1944), Since You Went Away (1944), The Seventh Cross (1944), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Raintree County (1957), and How the West Was Won (1962). On television, Moorehead was nominated for six Emmy Awards for the role of Endora in the long-running TV-series, Bewitched (1964–1972), and won an Emmy for an appearance on the series The Wild Wild West (1967). MORAGA, CHERRIE (1952– ). Born in Whittier, California, with a Mexican American heritage and educated at Immaculate Heart College and San Francisco State University, Moraga emerged as a writer focused on issues related to Latino lesbians. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (1996), won the Kennedy Center New Plays Award, and with Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, she founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, distinguishing herself as an editor of anthologies of feminist writing. See also CHICANO THEATRE; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. MOREHOUSE, WARD (1899–1966). A native of Savannah, Georgia, Morehouse began his career as a reporter in Savannah and Atlanta prior to moving to New York in 1919. He wrote for a few New York newspapers before taking a job at the New York Sun in 1926, becoming their drama critic. He worked at the Sun for nearly 25 years, but when the paper ceased

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publishing in 1950, he moved over to the New York World-Telegram and Sun. He also wrote three moderately successful Broadway plays, Gentlemen of the Press (1928), Miss Quis (1937), and U.S. 90 (1941), and a few films, including Central Park (1932), Big City Blues (1932), and It Happened in New York (1935). Morehouse was a fixture at Sardi’s Restaurant and loved travel, including spending part of World War II on a navy destroyer. He also wrote the first major biography of theatrical legend George M. Cohan in 1943 as well as collections of his reviews and interviews. MORENO, RITA (1931– ). A versatile actress, dancer, and singer on stage and screen, Moreno was born Rosita Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico, to a farmer and a seamstress. She debuted on Broadway as a teenager in Skydrift (1945) and ultimately won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in the Terrence McNally farce, The Ritz (1975), also appearing in the 1976 film version. She received another Drama Desk nomination for her She Loves Me in a 1977 Off-Broadway revival. Her other Broadway appearances include The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), as a replacement in Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), Gantry (1970), The National Health (1974), Wally’s Café (1981), and in the female version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple in 1985, which brought her a Sarah Siddons Award when the production toured to Chicago. Moreno won an Academy Award (and a Golden Globe Award) for West Side Story (1961), becoming the first Latina performer to win an Oscar, and she was nominated for Golden Globe Awards for The Ritz and the television series 9 to 5 in 1982. Moreno’s films also include Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The King and I (1956), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and The Four Seasons (1981), but her television work has been more fruitful, including Emmy Awards for appearances on The Muppet Show in 1977 and The Rockford Files in 1978, as well as four other nominations for primetime Emmys and four nominations for daytime Emmys. Moreno also received a Grammy Award for The Electric Company Album in 1972. In 2006, Moreno played Amanda Wingfield in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. See also CHICANO THEATRE. MORFOGEN, GEORGE (1933– ). A New York native educated at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Morfogen studied acting with Eva Le Gallienne and spent 16 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival playing a wide range of roles. On Broadway, he appeared in The Fun Couple (1962), a 1980 revival of John Gabriel Borkman, Kingdoms (1981), revivals of Arms and the Man in 1985 and An Inspector Calls in 1994, Fortune’s Fool (2002), and a 2008 revival of A Man for All Seasons. He is on the Board of

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Advisors of the Mint Theatre Company and has appeared in many films and television programs, winning kudos as Bob Rebadow in the long-running series Oz (1997–2003). MORGAN, ROGER (1938– ). Trained at Carnegie Mellon University and as assistant to Jo Mielziner, Morgan moved into lighting design with over 30 Broadway productions to his credit. Morgan won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his lighting design for The Crucifer of Blood (1979) and also received Drama Desk nominations for Saturday Sunday Monday (1974) and an Edward Gorey-inspired revival of Dracula* (1977). Morgan’s other lighting designs were seen in productions of First Monday in October (1978), Gorey Stories (1978), I Remember Mama (1979), Gilda Radner: Live from New York (1979), Nuts (1980), It Had to Be You (1981), Agnes of God (1982), Almost an Eagle (1982), The Octette Bridge Club (1985), Me and My Girl (1986), Mort Sahl on Broadway! (1987), a revival of The Visit in 1992, and Colin Quinn: An Irish Wake (1998). Morgan has also designed over 50 Off-Broadway productions and works in interior design as well. MORNING’S AT SEVEN. Paul Osborn’s three-act comedy centered on the small town lives of four aging sisters opened at the Longacre Theatre in a Dwight Deere Wiman production on 30 November 1939 for 44 performances. The four sisters, played by veteran actresses Jean Adair, Kate McComb, Effie Shannon,* and Dorothy Gish, and their husbands, live close by each other. The lives of all are suddenly upset by the impending marriage of Homer, the middle-aged son of one of the sisters, who intends to marry Myrtle, who he has courted for many years. Set in the Midwest in 1922, the play’s sensitively drawn character studies and eccentric humor has attracted fine actors to it, despite the failure of its original production. In 1980, a Broadway revival starring Teresa Wright, Nancy Marchand, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Elizabeth Wilson, ran for 564 performances and won a Tony Award as Best Revival, reaping Tonys for actor David Rounds as Homer and Vivian Matalon’s direction. Another revival in 2002 garnered several Tony nominations and starred Elizabeth Franz, Piper Laurie, Estelle Parsons, and Frances Sternhagen. MORSE, ROBERT (1931– ). This versatile actor of stage and screen was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and, following service in the United States Navy during the Korean War, Morse debuted on Broadway as Barnaby Tucker in the original production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955), reprising his performance in the 1958 film version. Morse won a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination for the musical Say,

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Darling (1958) and another Tony nomination for Take Me Along (1959). He won a Tony for the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1962), again reprising his role in a 1967 screen version. He won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for the musical Sugar (1972) and won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for Tru (1990), a solo play in which he played writer Truman Capote (a role that also brought him an Emmy Award when it was filmed for PBS-TV’s American Playhouse). Morse also appeared in the failed musical So Long, 174th Street (1976) and has numerous film credits, including The Loved One (1965), Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1967), and A Guide for the Married Man (1967), and television appearances, including soap operas and a recurring role in the series Mad Men (2007–2010), which brought him an Emmy Award nomination. MOSES, GILBERT, III (1942–1995). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Moses had an isolated childhood as a child in a special class for bright children in which he was often the only African American. Educated at Oberlin College, the Sorbonne, and New York University, Moses worked in journalism prior to directing, both on Broadway and Off-Broadway. His career began auspiciously, first directing Amiri Baraka’s Slaveship (1969) Off-Broadway, after which he was nominated for a Tony Award and won a Drama Desk Award for Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1972). His only other Broadway credit, for codirecting and choreographing the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), was a flop. Among his other Off-Broadway credits are Charlie Was Here and Now He’s Gone (1971), The Duplex (1972), and The Taking of Miss Janie (1975), along with many regional theatre, film, and television productions. Moses also assisted in the creation of the musical The Wiz (1975), which starred his then-wife Dee Dee Bridgewater. MOSHER, GREGORY (1949– ). New York-born and trained at Ithaca College and the Juilliard School (as the school’s first directing student), Mosher took a post as assistant to William Woodman, the Goodman Theatre head, and was selected to manage Goodman Stage 2 until Woodman’s resignation, when Mosher took over management of the Goodman, redirecting its mission toward producing new works. Mosher’s leadership revitalized the Goodman and, after seven years, he left to attempt the same with the floundering theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center. He succeeded in raising funds through innovative approaches to marketing and programming, with an emphasis on producing new works, often by well-established playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Stephen Sondheim, and others, and bold revivals of classic works. He is the recipient

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of a special 1989 Drama Desk Award and Tony Award-nominated as a director for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). On Broadway, Mosher also directed Speed-the-Plow (1988), a 1988 revival of Our Town that won a Tony as Best Revival, and revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1992 and A View from the Bridge in 2010, starring Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson. MOSTEL, ZERO (1915–1977). Born Samuel Joel Mostel in Brooklyn, New York, this rotund but dynamic actor survived blacklisting during the McCarthy era and an undistinguished film and television career in the 1940s and 1950s to become a leading Broadway star of surprising versatility between the mid-1950s and his death. Mostel won Tony Awards for his performances in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1961), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), as well as a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award for Ulysses in Nighttown (1974). As a young comic performer, Mostel had appeared in vaudeville*-style revues* Keep ’Em Laughing (1942), Top-Notchers (1942), and Concert Varieties (1945), but he moved into musicals and straight plays after World War II with Beggar’s Holiday (1946), Flight into Egypt (1952), a revival of The Good Person of Setzuan in 1956, Good as Gold (1957), and The Good Soup (1960) before his late stardom. Mostel was appearing in the out-of-town tryout of The Merchant, Arnold Wesker’s adaptation of Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, when he died suddenly. The acclaim of his late stage work led to a few notable film roles, including the opportunity to recreate his stage role in the screen version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968), which provided his most emblematic role as hilariously corrupt Broadway producer Max Bialystock, which brought him a Golden Globe Award nomination. MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN. One of Bertolt Brecht’s greatest plays, Mother Courage and Her Children has been produced on Broadway in 1963 starring Anne Bancroft and in 1967 with Ida Kaminska. Both productions had short runs. The most notable production resulted from a new American adaptation by Tony Kushner. Under George C. Wolfe’s direction, it premiered in a New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre during the summer of 2006 starring Meryl Streep in the title role, with Kevin Kline playing the Cook. MOTLEY. This theatrical costume design establishment, founded in 1932 by Elizabeth Montgomery, Margaret Harris, and Sophia Harris, was among the most sought-after costume designers until the 1970s. Motley demonstrated versatility, providing much-admired designs for classical plays and period

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pieces, contemporary dramas and comedies, and musicals. They won Tony Awards for costume designs for The First Gentlemen (1957) and Becket (1961) and were Tony-nominated for Look Homeward, Angel (1957), a 1957 revival of The Country Wife, Look Back in Anger (1957), Shinbone Alley (1957), Kwamina (1962), a revival of Mother Courage and Her Children (1963), and Baker Street (1965). The other 60 Broadway productions designed by Motley, which prove their versatility, include numerous revivals, as well as A Bell for Adano (1944), You Touched Me (1945), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), South Pacific (1949), Miss Liberty (1949), Paint Your Wagon (1951), The Grand Tour (1951), Can-Can (1953), The Immoralist (1954), Peter Pan* (1954), Middle of the Night (1956), The Most Happy Fella (1956), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), A Majority of One (1959), A Man for All Seasons (1961), Tovarich (1963), 110 in the Shade (1963), The Devils (1965), Don’t Drink the Water (1966), and The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967). MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA. Produced by The Theatre Guild, Eugene O’Neill’s five-hour-long classically inspired trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra opened on 26 October 1931 at the Guild Theatre, where it ran for 157 performances. A modern reinvention of Aeschylus’s Oresteia set at the end of the American Civil War, Mourning Becomes Electra follows Aeschylus structurally, divided into three separate plays. In the first play of the trilogy, “Homecoming,” O’Neill focuses on Christine Mannon, modeled on Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and played to critical acclaim by Alla Nazimova. No longer in love with her husband, Ezra Mannon, a general in the Union army and the play’s Agamemnon figure, Christine dreads his imminent return from the war. Christine has indulged in an affair with Mannon’s cousin, Captain Adam Brant (inspired by Aeschylus’s Aegisthus), a bastard and, as such, disowned by the Mannons. Lavinia, the Mannons’ 23-year-old daughter and the play’s Electra (notably acted by Alice Brady in the original production), has feelings for Brant, a fact deepening her resentment toward Christine, who, in turn, has always reserved her love for her son, Orin, the play’s Orestes. When Mannon returns from war, ailing and exhausted, he confronts the duplicitous Christine, who convinces him that she has been faithful. The Mannons spend the night together, but Christine finally confesses her affair with Brant, causing Mannon to suffer a heart attack, and his death is brought on when Christine administers poison. She tries to make his sudden demise appear natural, but Lavinia is not fooled, particularly when she finds the discarded poison box. Longing for vengeance, Lavinia is unable to act.

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The second play, “The Hunted,” begins with Orin’s arrival home from the war. He does not want to believe Lavinia’s account of events. Christine skillfully manipulates Orin, although he remains plagued by doubts, particularly regarding the rumors about Brant. Locked in complex Freudian relationships, the Mannons find themselves tangled in guilt, desire, and despair. Orin pays respects at his father’s bier, and when Christine appears, she recoils in horror when she sees that Lavinia has placed the evidence of her murderous act, the discarded poison box, on Mannon’s chest. Now convinced of Christine’s guilt, Orin rushes away to kill Brant as O’Neill propels all three characters toward the abyss. Orin’s killing of Brant triggers haunted visions of the deaths he observed during the war and within his family, a powerful undercurrent for O’Neill and his generation, who reckoned with the horrific death toll of World War I. Unhinged, Orin kills Christine while still longing for her love and forgiveness. In the final play, “The Haunted,” set a year after the events of “The Hunted,” O’Neill brings Orin and Lavinia to a full tragic reckoning. Orin shoots himself, unable to face living with the guilt he feels, and Lavinia is left to mourn her dead, shutting herself away in the family mansion to live alone for the rest of her life in atonement. In this harrowing conclusion, O’Neill connects this Americanized Greek tragedy to the deep pains of his own life, depicted most overtly in his final plays, especially Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939), in which himself, his brother, and his parents are bound together in a cycle of despair and mutual recrimination, grief-stricken and fated to fail each other and themselves, even in death. Mourning Becomes Electra returned to Broadway in 1932 for a brief revival and a 1947 screen version suffered from significant cuts necessitated to bring its length down to that of a conventional Hollywood film, but a 1971 revival by the American Shakespeare Festival moved to the Circle in the Square in 1972 in a well-received production subsequently filmed for public television. MULATTO: A PLAY OF THE DEEP SOUTH. Langston Hughes’s twoact tragic play of rural black life in the South opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on 24 October 1935 for 373 performances. African American housekeeper Cora Lewis, played by Rose McClendon,* has several children by her boss, white plantation owner Colonel Norwood. Two of the children, Sally and Robert, are sent north to be educated. Robert outrages his father by demanding to be treated like a white man despite his mixed-race heritage. When he is about to face a lynch mob, Robert commits suicide, and Sally is raped by the colonel’s overseer. Despite the fact that Hughes intended the play as a

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portrait of miscegenation, its producer, Martin Jones, sensationalized the play by adding the rape scene, which led some critics, particularly in the African American community, to criticize it for its stereotypical elements. MUNI, PAUL (1895–1967).† A native of Lemberg, Austria, Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund emigrated with his parents, Yiddish theatre actors, to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1902. He made his debut in Yiddish theatre in 1908, often cast as a female or old man, but in 1920 Muni was hired as leading man by the Yiddish Art Theatre to appear in Sholom Aleichem’s Hard to Be a Jew. Muni began acting on Broadway in 1930, appearing in two failures, This One Man (1930) and Rock Me, Julie (1931), before scoring a major success as Jewish lawyer George Simon in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law (1931), after which he embarked on a distinguished Hollywood career in such classic motion pictures as Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Muni returned to the stage periodically, notably as army deserter King McCloud in Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo (1939) and as Henry Drummond, the character based on Clarence Darrow, in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind (1955). MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL. T. S. Eliot’s two-part (with interlude) poetic drama concerning the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, was first performed in England in 1935, but opened on 20 March 1936 at the Manhattan Theatre for 38 performances. The play, written during the rise of European fascism, is not unlike a classical tragedy, with a chorus setting the scene and foreshadowing the play’s tragic events, which occurred after Becket reflects on his expected martyrdom and the nature of power. The play was revived on 16 February 1938 at the Ritz Theatre for 21 performances in a Gilbert Miller and Ashley Dukes production, directed by E. Martin Browne, who also played the Fourth Templar and Knight. Robert Donat appeared in a 1953 Old Vic production, and there have been other numerous revivals and television productions. MURRAY, BRIAN (1939– ). This much-honored actor/director was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he debuted as a child in a production of The Browning Version in 1950, but has spent most of his career working in British and American theatre. By the early 1960s, Murray was in the Royal Shakespeare Company and also appeared in the West End productions of Visit to a Small Planet (1960), Roger the Sixth (1960, and Wait Until Dark in 1966. On Broadway beginning in The Knack (1964), Murray shared a Drama Desk Outstanding Ensemble Award with the cast of Michael Frayn’s

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farce, Noises Off (1984), and also won for his performance in a 1997 revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. He was also nominated for Tony Awards for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968), the aforementioned revival of The Little Foxes, and a 2002 revival of The Crucible, and garnered Drama Desk nominations for Da (1978), A Small Family Business (1992), and a 2000 revival of Uncle Vanya. Among his other notable Broadway appearances, Murray stepped into the role of Milo during the long run of Sleuth (1970) and also appeared in White Liars & Black Comedy (1993), Racing Demon (1995), and revivals of Twelfth Night in 1998, The Rivals in 2004, and Mary Stuart (2009). As a director, Murray staged well-received Broadway revivals of The Waltz of the Toreadors in 1973, Hay Fever in 1985, Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986, Blithe Spirit in 1987, The Circle in 1989, and The Show Off* in 1992. Murray has also appeared in films and television since 1960 and with some regularity in regional theatre. MUSICAL THEATRE.† The origins of the American musical are obscure at best—and there are multiple origin theories. Music and theatre have been inextricably linked since the dawn of theatre history, but the American Broadway musical as it came to be recognized in the twentieth century undoubtedly emerged from a range of nineteenth-century cultural traditions including, but not limited to, folk music, minstrel shows,* vaudeville,* burlesques, and European opera and operetta.* By 1930, musical comedy and the revue* were well-established forms and in 1927, one of the leading producers of musicals and revues, Florenz Ziegfeld,* staged the prototype for a more thematically serious musical with fully dimensioned characters and a musical score well-integrated with plot and character. Show Boat, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel by Oscar Hammerstein II with a score by Kern and lyrics by Hammerstein, presented an uncommonly cohesive book exploring race relationships and the life of itinerant performers between 1880 and the 1920s. However, its success did not inspire immediate imitators. Into the 1940s, most musicals remained lighthearted, loosely constructed entertainments. But the era between the two world Wars produced an extraordinary generation of composers and lyricists, some of whom would perfect and expand on the musical, including composer George Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, and others. Their contributions, as well as the continued achievements of Kern, Hammerstein, and others, initiated a Golden Age of American musicals post-1930. The Gershwins, in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, offered a novel musical satirizing American politics, Of Thee I Sing (1931), and it became the first musical awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other composers and lyricists, including the team of Rodgers

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and Hart, added innovations, as in On Your Toes (1936), a musical featuring a greater integration of dance into the form, but their Pal Joey (1940), truly broke new ground in its frank study of a nightclub singer and self-professed heel who heartlessly uses a rich woman bored with her high society life and a naïve young performer to further his goals of stage stardom. Pal Joey met with mixed critical response and had a short run in its original production, but it was a harbinger of more serious musicals to come. Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart teamed to create Lady in the Dark (1941), starring the legendary Gertrude Lawrence as a modern working woman dealing with the pressures of her job and romance, revealed in dream sequences in which her various dilemmas were played out, most effectively in a circus sequence in which she is put on trial for her inability to make up her mind via the song “The Saga of Jenny.” The influence of this show was seen almost immediately when Richard Rodgers partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II to adapt Lynn Rigg’s play Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) into a musical originally titled Away We Go. The show’s greater integration of character and plot with music and dance was most fully evident in a “Dream Ballet” staged by choreographer Agnes de Mille, in which the heroine’s psychological dilemma was depicted in an unprecedented 20-minute-long ballet in a show ultimately called Oklahoma! (1943): Oklahoma! became one of the longest-running hit musicals of the era. Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to experiment with the form, adapting Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom (1909) into the musical Carousel (1945), an uncommonly dark musical in which the hero, Billy Bigelow, abuses his adoring wife and dies in a failed robbery attempt, leaving his young widow with a troubled child. Rodgers and Hammerstein, along with co-librettist and director Joshua Logan, created the second Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, South Pacific (1948), based on James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Set in the Pacific theatre of war during World War II, the musical featured two romances, one between a middle-aged French widower with two Polynesian children by his late wife and a young navy nurse and another between a navy lieutenant and a Tonkinese girl. The nurse and the lieutenant are faced with their deep-seated racist views as they contemplate their futures—and the young lieutenant sings “You Have to Be Carefully Taught,” in which he offers a scathing view of the ways people are trained to feel prejudice. As in the case of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, the 1940s was the era of the “book musical,” in which the full integration of story, song, and character emerged. Even those creators more firmly tied to earlier eras moved into this new style of musical, as seen in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948), two of the major hits of the late 1940s. New musical talents appeared, including the team of composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist/

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librettist Alan Jay Lerner with their musicals Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), and most notably, My Fair Lady (1956), based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) and one of the long-running Broadway successes of the 1950s. This era saw a continued perfection and streamlining of the book musical, but major innovations were rare. The arrival of rock’n’roll music in the mid-1950s did not immediately alter the musical theatre, but by the 1960s, the vast cultural changes of the era had a profound impact. Composer/lyricists like Jerry Herman held to the traditional book musical in such long-running hits as Hello, Dolly! (1964), based on Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955), and Mame (1966), adapted from Patrick Dennis’s novel Auntie Mame (1955), but rock musicals by new talents not schooled in musical theatre traditions appeared, most notably the James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot musical Hair (1968). Despite the popularity of Hair and its score (including the much-performed “Age of Aquarius”) and a few imitators of its approach, successful rock musicals were comparatively rare. The period between the late 1960s and the 1980s was a fallow one for Broadway musical theatre due, in large measure, to the increasing costs of producing lavish productions and the dearth of new composers and lyricists with the exception of a few British figures such as Andrew Lloyd-Webber, whose Cats (1981) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986), were long-running hits in London’s West End and on Broadway. The singular innovator of Broadway musicals in this period was composer/ lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who had begun his career (guided by friend Oscar Hammerstein II) as a lyricist for such 1950s’ classics as West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959). He wrote his first successful musical as both composer and lyricist with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), but his true innovations began with the failure of his 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle, in which his attraction to serious themes was matched by the ways in which he challenged his audience with a more complex musical idiom. His first triumph, Company (1969), teamed him with playwright George Furth to take on contemporary marriage and sexual mores, while Follies (1971), used the traditions of musical theatre as a means of exploring the discontents and failings of “the greatest generation” in the postwar era. Sondheim next composed a score made up entirely of waltzes for a musical adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) renamed A Little Night Music (1973), a score including the out-of-the-theatre hit song “Send in the Clowns.” The adult themes and musical innovations of Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music paled in comparison to Sondheim’s subsequent works, including Pacific Overtures (1976), in which he made use of Asian musical influences, and elements of musical hall and Grand Guignol merged in Sweeney Todd (1979), his adaptation of a nineteenth-century

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British melodrama. Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (1981), based on the 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play of the same name, was a quick failure, despite a score that produced “Not a Day Goes By.” Sondheim’s fortunes improved with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George (1984), based on the life and work of French painter Georges Seurat, and with Into the Woods (1987), an adult look at classic fairy tales. Sondheim’s later work, including Assassins (1990), probing the psyches of presidential killers, and Passion (1994), a heart-wrenching tale of possessive love and romantic manipulation, took the musical to an integration of music, character, and story so total that the lines between the “book” and the “songs” was fully obscured. Such total integration was evident in the more innovative musicals between 1990 and 2010, including such works as the Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens, and Terrence McNally adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s novel, Ragtime (1998), and the Jeanine Tesori-Tony Kushner collaboration, Caroline, or Change (2003). In this period, however, the Broadway musical stage survived on a steady diet of “Disney musicals,” stage adaptations of the numerous animated musical films the Walt Disney studio produced during the era (most notably, the highly acclaimed The Lion King, designed and directed for Broadway by Julie Taymor in 1997). Musical adaptations of popular films, such as Legally Blonde (2007) and 9 to 5 (2009), predominated, as well as occasional hit musicals from the English stage and increasingly frequent revivals of musicals from the 1930s to the 1960s, and a spate of jukebox musicals containing hit songs from various groups or singers from the past, as well as chamber-sized musicals like The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway in 2005. Many of these succeeded in securing long runs, but few provided innovations, and the future of the Broadway musical in 2010 seemed as obscure as its origins. MUSSER, THARON (1925–2009). One of Broadway’s most honored lighting designers was born Tharon Myrene Musser in Roanoke, Virginia, the daughter of a minister. She attended Berea College and Yale University, where she received an M.F.A. in Design in 1950. Of her work, Musser said she “painted with light” and won Tony Awards for doing so, including for her designs of the musicals Follies (1971), A Chorus Line (1975), and Dreamgirls (1982). Musser was also Tony-nominated for Applause (1970), A Little Night Music (1973), The Good Doctor (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), The Act (1978), Ballroom (1979), 42nd Street (1981). Musser designed more than 120 Broadway productions, many for some of the most important plays and musicals of the second half of the twentieth century, including Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), The Entertainer (1958), J.B. (1958), The Lion

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in Winter (1966), Everything in the Garden (1967), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), The Sunshine Boys (1972), Scapino (1974), Mack & Mabel (1974), The Wiz (1975), Same Time, Next Year (1975), Chapter Two (1977), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1979), Children of a Lesser God (1980), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), The Real Thing (1984), Biloxi Blues (1985), Broadway Bound (1986), Lost in Yonkers (1991), and The Secret Garden (1991), as well as numerous revivals. Two nights after Musser’s death, Broadway theatres dimmed their lights in her honor. MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS. William Saroyan’s play, with a title inspired by Scottish poet Robert Burns, opened at the Guild Theatre on 13 April 1939 for 44 performances in a production of The Group Theatre directed by Robert Lewis, with music by Paul Bowles. Philip Loeb, Sidney Lumet, and Art Smith were among the cast of a tale of a struggling poet and his son who survive by sharing poems with the local grocer and reflecting on life’s vicissitudes, World War II, ethics, and death. MY SISTER EILEEN. Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s popular comedy opened at the Biltmore Theatre on 26 December 1940 for 864 performances in a Max Gordon production directed by George S. Kaufman with scene designs by Donald Oenslager. This lightly romantic tale of two Ohio sisters seeking careers in New York City and finding romance, featured Shirley Booth and Jo Ann Sayers as the sisters, with support from a cast including Morris Carnovsky, Gordon Jones, and Richard Quine. A 1942 film version starred Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair, but Russell scored a greater success winning a Tony Award for Wonderful Town, a Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green musical based on the play, which also won a Best Musical Tony (Donna Murphy appeared in a 2003 revival). A different musical version with the play’s original title was filmed in 1955 and featured a cast including Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, and Bob Fosse. A 1960 television series based on the play starred Elaine Stritch. MYERS, RICHARD (1901–1977). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-born Richard [Son] Myers began his career as a songwriter for Broadway musicals, including The Greenwich Village Follies (1925, 1926), Garrick Gaieties (1930), Earl Carroll’s* Vanities (1932), and The Ziegfeld* Follies (1934, 1957). He later switched to producing with successful Broadway mountings of Tide Rising (1937), Margin for Error (1939), My Dear Children (1940), Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), revivals of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1949 and The Devil’s Disciple in 1950, The Moon Is Blue (1951), The Love of Four Colonels (1953), and a revival of Hotel Paradiso (1957).

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MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP, THE. Produced by Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this two-act “penny dreadful” play, perhaps the best known by Ludlam, won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award. Merging of elements from Victorian melodrama,* Hollywood films, farce, and cross-dressing camp, it opened Off-Off-Broadway in September 1984 in Greenwich Village and ran for 18 months. Two actors (Ludlam himself was one in the original production, along with Everett Quinton) play all the roles. The play is set at Mandacrest Estate, the home of Lord Edgar, who brings his new wife, Lady Enid, to the home he shared with this first wife, Irma, where strange events abound, mostly through the efforts of the mansion’s staff, a maid, and a swineherd. The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Westside Theatre in September 1998, starring Quinton and Stephen DeRosa, winning the Lucille Lortel Award. The play has been widely produced in the United States, as well as in international productions. See also FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION.

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N NAKED ANGELS THEATRE COMPANY (NATC). A New York-based theatre collective established in 1986, NATC takes its name from John Tytell’s book about the Beat Generation writers and has as its goal the creation of a welcoming environment for innovative theatre work. The company stages plays, as well as radio and television, and mounts readings of new screenplays. In 1999, NATC set up an educational wing for actors and writers. NATHAN, GEORGE JEAN (1882–1958).† Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as the son of wealthy parents, Nathan graduated from Cornell University in 1904 before spending a year studying at the University of Bologna. As a reporter for the New York Herald, he published his first theatre reviews in 1906. Following stints reviewing for Outing and The Bohemian, Nathan became drama critic of The Smart Set in 1909, working closely with H. L. Mencken.* They coedited the publication for a decade, from 1914–1924, and cofounded The American Mercury, for which Nathan wrote dramatic criticism until 1932. Nathan and Mencken also wrote two unsuccessful plays, The Artist (1912) and Heliogabulus (1920), but, more importantly, Nathan championed modernist theatre in his writings, emphasizing the significance of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and August Strindberg. He assailed the quality of American theatre prior to the emergence of Eugene O’Neill, whose plays Nathan actively promoted. In 1932, Nathan founded the American Spectator with the aid of O’Neill and others, and he edited it until 1935, after which he wrote criticism for an array of publications, including Puck, Judge, Vanity Fair, the Saturday Review of Literature, Newsweek, Theatre Arts, and Esquire. Nathan’s many books, some of which collected his criticisms, include Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Popular Theatre (1918), Comedians All (1919), The Theatre, The Drama, The Girls (1921), The Critic and the Drama (1922), The Testament of the Critic (1931), Since Ibsen (1933), The Theatre of the Moment (1936), and Encyclopedia of the Theatre (1940). Beginning in 1943, he published an annual, The Theatre Book of the Year, which ended with his death. Nathan married actress Julie Haydon in 1955

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and endowed an annual George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. After World War II, his influence declined as he was slow to recognize the significance of figures like Tennessee Williams. See also PERIODICALS. NATIONAL ACTORS THEATRE (NAT). Founded and largely funded by actor Tony Randall in 1991, first at the Belasco Theatre and later at the Lyceum Theatre, the NAT aimed to approximate a national theatre like those in England and in other nations with the overarching goal of providing productions of international and American classic plays with “name” actors at affordable prices on Broadway. Its productions often met with critical derision, but also received Tony Award nominations for its revivals of Saint Joan in 1993, Timon of Athens in 1994, Inherit the Wind in 1996, and The Gin Game in 1997. The NAT’s most recent production was Judgment at Nuremberg in 2001, but the organization seemed to lose steam following Randall’s death in 2004. NATIONAL ASIAN-AMERICAN THEATRE COMPANY (NAATC). Mia Katigbak and Richard Eng established the NAATC in 1989 with the goal of creating opportunities for Asian American performers to act in plays and musicals from the canon of Western dramatic literature, including works by Shakespeare, Pierre Marivaux, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Federico García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. In more recent years, NAATC has also staged new plays by Asian American dramatists, including Michael Golamco’s Cowboy v. Samurai (2005), but has largely remained true to its original mission. NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE (NBT). Now known as Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre Institute of Action Arts, the NBT began as the NBT in 1968 as a not-for-profit organization for research and development called the National Black Theatre Workshop Incorporated. The goal of the NBT is to provide an alternative working and learning environment for African American artists. NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL (NBTF). Established by Larry Leon Hamlin in 1989 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in collaboration with the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the annual six-day festival brings together a plethora of performances by African American theatre companies and solo artists. In 2009, the NBTF celebrated its twentieth year. NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS (NEA). Established by the United States Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts in America, the

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NEA provides leadership in bringing the arts to all citizens and in arts education. The first NEA grant was awarded to the American Ballet Theatre. Many individual theatre artists, groups, and organizations have benefited from NEA support and various initiatives, including the NEA/TCA Theatre Residency Program. During the tenure of NEA chairperson John Frohnmayer, controversy emerged over the content of the work of four performance artists, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes (known as the “NEA Four”) leading to the veto of their grants by Frohnmayer in 1990. The artists involved took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won in 1993. The controversy led to changes in NEA policies and the ceasing of funding to individual artists. Actress Jane Alexander served as NEA chairperson for several years and in 2010 Rocco Landesman was serving as chairperson of the NEA. See also CENSORSHIP. NATIONAL PLAYWRIGHTS CONFERENCE (NPC). First held in 1965, the NPC is a branch of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and was established to make it possible for young playwrights, without the demands of the commercial theatre, to participate with professional actors, directors, and other writers in seeing their work performed and receiving constructive criticism. John Guare, Lanford Wilson, Lee Blessing, and August Wilson are among those playwrights who have participated in the NPC. NATIONAL THEATRE CONFERENCE (NTC). This organization founded in 1925 at a conference hosted by Carnegie Tech aimed to foster the best interests of the American theatre by bringing together distinguished members of the theatre community from academic theatres, Little Theatres,* and commercial theatres. Early initiatives promoted theatre libraries and lobbied to protect not-for-profit theatres, led by such luminaries as George Pierce Baker,* Edith J. R. Isaacs, Gilmor Brown, E. C. Mabie, and Rosamond Gilder. Gradually, the regional structure and open membership policies were found to be unworkable. A reorganizing meeting was held in December 1936, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Under the new plan, members were elected from leaders in the field. Active membership in the NTC is today limited to 120. While the purposes and projects of the organization have varied considerably throughout its occasionally bumpy existence, one ideal emerges consistently: support of new and established American playwrights. The annual meeting has been an important forum for communication among academic, not-for-profit, and commercial theatres. NATIONAL THEATRE OF THE DEAF (NTD). Founded in 1965 with the support of a federal grant from the United States Department of Health, the idea of the NTD was formulated in the 1950s by Dr. Edna Simon Levine,

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a psychologist working with deaf patients. Director Arthur Penn and Anne Bancroft, director and star of The Miracle Worker (1959) on Broadway, were approached to develop the concept of deaf performance and the training of hearing-impaired actors. Penn and Bancroft brought in designer David Hays, who was a potent force in moving the idea to realization. In 1967, a television program was broadcast on the NTD experiment. More funding was supplied via the U.S. Office of Education and NTD’s professional training program began, leading to its first performance at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In tandem with the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, the NTD launched its first tour in the fall of 1967. Within a year, the Little Theatre of the Deaf was established to bring performances to young audiences. In 1983, the NTD moved its base of operations to Chester, Connecticut, and ultimately to the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut. The NTD was awarded a special Tony Award for its work, which includes nearly 80 tours, the National and Worldwide Deaf Theatre Conference (which began in 1994), and other programs. The NTD has adapted classics by Anton Chekhov, Voltaire, Homer, Molière, Henrik Ibsen, and Giacomo Puccini, and has also created original works, including an acclaimed adaptation of Phillip de Broca’s film, King of Hearts. The NTD has also collaborated with hearing artists, including Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, Chita Rivera, Arvin Brown, Bill Irwin, Peter Sellers, Tetsuko Kuroyangi, and Pilobolus Dance Theatre, among others. NATIVE AMERICANS ON STAGE. Theatre in the United States has depicted Native Americans since the colonial period and works with Indian characters were particularly popular during the early nineteenth century, most successfully in John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1828), which starred Edwin Forrest. Most such plays offered either romanticized or demonized images of Native Americans. After 1850, most depictions of Indians were as villains, victims of prejudice, or comic figures, as in such melodramas* as Dion Boucicault’s* The Octoroon (1859) or James J. McCloskey’s Across the Continent (1871). In the early twentieth century, Native Americans were depicted with more sympathy, but usually as exotic or tragic figures. With the dawn of the cinema, western films became increasingly popular and, as such, Native American characters were more likely to be seen on screen, albeit in stereotypical ways, than in theatre. Arthur Kopit’s Indians (1969) was perhaps the first serious play produced on Broadway to feature Native American characters in non-stereotypical ways and, more significantly, to focus on themes related to the slaughter of Indian populations during the westward expansion of the United States

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Christopher Sergel’s Black Elk Speaks (1981), which was adapted from John Neihardt’s book about the circumstances leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, similarly offered an examination of the historical plight of Native Americans. By the late twentieth century, theatre companies devoted to Native American concerns and training for Indian writers and actors appeared, most notably the Native American Ensemble in New York; the Algonkuin Theatre Company, which was founded in 1993 in Connecticut; the American Indian Community House in New York, which houses a theatre; Thunderbird Theatre of the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas; the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Red Earth Performing Arts in Seattle, Washington; Red Eagle Soaring Native American Theatre Group founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1990; a theatre program at the Sinte Gleska University in Rosebud, South Dakota; and the Tulsa Indian Actor’s Workshop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. NATIVE SON. This play, adapted by Richard Wright and Paul Green from Wright’s 1940 novel about Bigger Thomas, a young black man jailed for murder, was produced by Orson Welles and John Houseman and opened at the St. James Theatre on 24 March 1941 for 114 performances. Canada Lee starred as Bigger in this intermissionless drama in which Wright confronts the ways in which systemic race prejudice in America leads to the tragic circumstances of Bigger’s life. Bigger, initially remorseful for his crimes, eventually concludes, as he is sentenced to death, that he has played a small part in undermining the comfortable arrogance of the white world. The cast included several members of the Mercury Theatre, including Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, and Paul Stewart, as well as Frances Bavier and Helen Martin. After a year’s hiatus, the production returned to the Majestic Theatre on 23 October 1942 for an additional 84 performances. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. NATURALISM. See REALISM. NATWICK, MILDRED (1905–1994). Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Natwick pursued a theatre degree at Bennett College and was aided in her early career by Joshua Logan. She developed a distinguished career as a character actress often called upon to play a diverse range of characters on stage and screen. On Broadway, Natwick was nominated for Tony Awards for The Waltz of the Toreadors (1957) and the musical 70, Girls, 70 (1971). Natwick’s more notable roles included the pixilated psychic Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1943) and as Mrs. Banks, the worried, uptight mother in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (1963). Natwick’s many other

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Broadway appearances include The Distaff Side (1934), End of Summer (1936), 1937 and 1942 revivals of Candida, Stars in Your Eyes (1939), a 1946 revival of The Playboy of the Western World, The Grass Harp (1952), Critic’s Choice (1960), a 1969 revival of Our Town, and she stepped in as a replacement during the run of Bedroom Farce (1979). For the movies, Natwick was part of director John Ford’s “stock company,” appearing in his films Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Quiet Man (1952). She was nominated for an Academy Award reprising her stage role from Barefoot in the Park (1967). On television, Natwick was nominated for an Emmy Award for an adaptation of Blithe Spirit in 1956, and she won an Emmy playing opposite Helen Hayes in The Snoop Sisters (1973). NAUGHTON, JAMES (1945– ). A native of Middleton, Connecticut, and the son of school teachers, Naughton was educated at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama and although he has appeared in films and television, his most successful work has been on the Broadway stage. He won Theatre World and Drama Desk Awards for a 1971 Off-Broadway revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night. He also won a Tony Award and another Drama Desk Award for City of Angels (1989) and a Tony for a 1996 revival of Chicago. Among his other Broadway appearances are Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1980), Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), Prymate (2004), and Democracy (2004), and he directed revivals of The Price in 1999 and Our Town in 2002. Naughton’s films include The Glass Menagerie (1987), The First Wives Club (1996), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and he has made numerous television appearances. He is the brother of actor David Naughton. NAUMAN, BRUCE (1941– ). Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman studied at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Davis and creates multimedia works inspired by such varied artists as Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Nauman makes use of visual art elements, video, film, and live performance in performance art pieces drawn from his own life. His pieces, which may or may not be usefully categorized as theatre, include Laair (1970), Clown Torture (1987), Vices and Virtues (1988), Raw Materials (2004), and Leave the Land Alone (2009). NAZIMOVA, ALLA (1879–1945).† Born Alla Leventon at Yalta in the Crimea, Russia, she first studied music, but at 17 began training for the stage under Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and joined the Moscow Art Theatre’s* school in 1898. In 1905, she came to the United States with Paul Or-

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lenoff’s company from St. Petersburg, where she had been performing since 1903, including the role of Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Nazimova remained in America when Orlenoff’s troupe returned to Russia. She reportedly learned English in six months and made her English-speaking debut as Hedda Gabler in 1906. It was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1907 that made her a major star. In 1910, the Shuberts inaugurated the Nazimova Theatre with Nazimova starring in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. After performing on tour and in a number of melodramas,* she joined the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1928, developing a personal as well as professional relationship with its artistic director, Eva Le Gallienne. She also appeared frequently in Hollywood films during the silent era, including Camille (1921) and A Doll’s House (1922), but made her most notable later stage appearances as Christine Mannon in The Theatre Guild’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and directing a 1935 revival of Ghosts, in which she again played Mrs. Alving, as well as a 1936 revival of Hedda Gabler, playing the lead. Nazimova also appeared on Broadway as Olan in The Good Earth (1932), as Ranevskaya in a 1933 revival of The Cherry Orchard, as The Priestess in the fantasy The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935), and as the title character in a short-lived production of Karel Capek’s The Mother (1939). During the sound film era, Nazimova appeared in several movies, including Escape (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944), In Our Time (1944), and Since You Went Away (1944). NEDERLANDER, JAMES M. (1922– ). James Morton Nederlander was born in Detroit, Michigan, and emerged as one of Broadway’s most prolific and respected producers and theatre owners as head of the Nederlander Organization beginning in the 1960s. Among the dozens of productions produced by Nederlander are such Tony Award winners and nominees as Seesaw (1974), Otherwise Engaged (1977), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1979), a 1980 revival of West Side Story, Woman of the Year (1981), The Dresser (1982), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982), Nine (1982), Merlin (1983), Noises Off (1984), La Cage aux Folles (1984), 1985 revivals of Strange Interlude,* Much Ado about Nothing, and Cyrano de Bergerac, Grind (1985), revivals of The Iceman Cometh and Sweet Charity in 1986, Benefactors (1986), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1987), revivals of Me and My Girl in 1987, Café Crown in 1989, and Peter Pan* in 1991, Shadowlands (1991), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), The Goodbye Girl (1993), revivals of She Loves Me in 1994, The King and I in 1996, A View From the Bridge in 1998, and 1776 in 1998, Copenhagen (2000), and a 2002 revival of Private Lives. Nederlander was presented with a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

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NEGRO ACTORS GUILD (NAG). Established in 1937 as an organization to both provide aid to financially strapped theatre workers and to work for the maintenance of high standards in the profession, the NAG finally folded due to internal strife in 1982. The Afro-American Association of Performing Artists rose in its place in 1986, but did not survive for long. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. NEGRO ENSEMBLE COMPANY (NEC). Founded in 1967 by dramatist Douglas Turner Ward, actor Robert Hooks, and manager Gerald Krone, the NEC emphasizes works by and about African Americans and during its over 40 years of existence has nurtured the work of many black actors and playwrights. The NEC received special Tony and Drama Desk Awards in 1968 and 1969 respectively, and among their productions presented on Broadway were Tony winner The River Niger (1974) by Joseph A. Walker and Tony nominee The First Breeze of Summer (1976) by Leslie Lee. SammArt Williams’s Home (1980) was also presented on Broadway. The NEC production of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play (1981) won a Pulitzer Prize, as well as a New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play and an Obie Award for the ensemble cast. In 2010, Charles Weldon was serving as artistic director with Freida Nerangis as executive director. NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE, THE.† In 1915, Alice* and Irene Lewisohn* built The Neighborhood Playhouse on New York’s Grand Street in tandem with the Henry Street Settlement House, which tended to the needs of the neighborhood’s immigrant population. Its goal, like those of the Provincetown Players* and the Washington Square Players,* was to establish a repertory theatre inspired by the burgeoning Little Theatre* movement. The Neighborhood Playhouse began as an amateur operation, but by 1920 it was fully professional and presented a diverse range of multicultural works, including The Little Clay Cart (1924) and The Dybbuk (1926), along with a fourteenth-century French mystery play, a Japanese Noh drama, Celtic dances, a Norse fairy tale, a medieval interlude, and modernist works, including John Galsworthy’s The Mob (1920), Eugene O’Neill’s The First Man (1922), and James Joyce’s Exiles (1924). Popular entertainments were also staged, and the Playhouse found particular success with five annual editions of their musical revue,* The Grand Street Follies. The troupe disbanded in 1927, but the Lewisohns and Rita Wallach Morgenthau established a theatre school there in 1928, and it continues to the present. Among its faculty, Sanford Meisner, who had been a member of The Group Theatre, emerged as the most important, teaching techniques based on the acting innovations

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of Constantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre.* Meisner taught there from 1935 to 1990. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. NELSON, BARRY (1917–2007). Born Robert Haakon Nielson in San Francisco, California, to a Norwegian family, he took up acting in his teens and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Immediately following his graduation, Nelson was signed to a screen contract by MGM and appeared in a few wartime films, including Johnny Eager (1942), The Human Comedy (1943), Bataan (1943), and A Guy Named Joe (1943), before entering the service during World War II. This led to his Broadway debut in Moss Hart’s Winged Victory (1943), which, after the war, brought Nelson the leading role in Hart’s comedy, Light Up the Sky (1948). He received his sole Tony Award nomination for The Act (1978), but he was a reliable leading man in a series of comedies and dramas, usually playing a genial, well-meaning character, including The Rat Race (1949), The Moon Is Blue (1951, Wake Up, Darling (1956), Mary, Mary (1961), Cactus Flower (1965), Everything in the Garden (1967), The Only Game in Town (1968), which he also directed, The Fig Leaves Are Falling (1969), The Engagement Baby (1970), Seascape (1975), The Norman Conquests (1975), and he stepped into the leading roles in Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963) and 42nd Street (1980). Nelson also made numerous appearances in television shows. NELSON, RICHARD (1938–1996). New York native Nelson studied at the High School of the Performing Arts and began working as a lighting designer Off-Broadway in 1955. On Broadway, Nelson assisted Thomas Skelton on the musical Coco (1969), but within a year was designing on his own. He won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his lighting for Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and was nominated for both for Into the Woods (1987). Nelson was also nominated for Drama Desk Awards for a 1980 revival of Morning’s at Seven and the Off-Broadway production of Death of Von Richthofen Witnessed from Earth (1983). His over 60 Broadway designs included numerous revivals and such new works as All Over (1971), In Praise of Love (1974), The Magic Show (1974), The Lady from Dubuque (1980), A Little Family Business (1982), The Tap Dance Kid (1983), Precious Sons (1986), The Boys in Autumn (1986), Sleight of Hand (1987), The Secret Rapture (1989), Shimada (1992), and Swinging on a Star (1995). Along with his many Broadway credits, Nelson also designed lighting for numerous choreographers, including Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, and was the resident designer for Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company from 1968 to 1973. He also taught at the University of Michigan and the Tisch School of the Arts.

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NELSON, RICHARD (1950– ). A prolific dramatist and adaptor, Nelson was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Some Americans Abroad (1990) and Franny’s Way (2002) and a Best Play Tony Award for Two Shakespearean Actors (1992), and he won an Olivier Award for Goodnight Children Everywhere (1999) and a Tony for writing the book for the musical James Joyce’s The Dead (2000). He adapted Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist in 1984 for its Broadway premiere and adapted The Marriage of Figaro in 1985, The Father in 1996, and wrote the book for the musical Chess (1988). He has adapted works by Carlo Goldoni, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Nikolai Erdman, Edith Wharton, and August Strindberg, and collaborated on plays with Colin Chambers and Alexander Gelman. NESBITT, CATHLEEN (1888–1982). Few actors have had a career lasting over 70 years, but Cathleen Mary Nesbitt, who was born in Cheshire, England, educated at the Sorbonne and Queen’s University in Belfast, made her debut in Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister (1910) and appeared in a Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1981. Nesbitt debuted on Broadway in a tour with the Irish Players in The Playboy of the Western World, and her long career took her from London to New York and from theatre to films and television. Nesbitt’s early Broadway credits include Quinney’s (1915), Hush! (1916), Such Is Life (1916), Magic (1917), The Very Minute (1917), The Saving Grace (1918), and Diversion (1928), but 22 years elapsed before she returned in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1950). She also appeared in Gigi (1951), Sabrina Fair (1953), Portrait of a Lady (1954), and replaced Eugenie Leontovich during the run of Anastasia (1954). Nesbitt memorably portrayed Mrs. Higgins in My Fair Lady (1956), and subsequently made her last Broadway appearance in the 1981 revival of the show. Her Broadway credits also included The Sleeping Prince (1956), A Second String (1960), Romulus (1962), and a 1973 all-star revival of Uncle Vanya. She won two Daytime Emmy Awards in 1974 for The ABC Afternoon Playbreak production The Mask of Love, but was best known to TV audiences as Agatha Morley in the situation comedy The Farmer’s Daughter (1963–1965). She continued to act in television and films past the age of 90. NEVER TOO LATE. Sumner Arthur Long’s three-act comedy about a middle-aged couple faced with an unexpected pregnancy opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 27 November 1962 for 1,007 performances. Long, a TV situation comedy writer, offered a conventionally plotted play in which befuddled Harry Lambert learns that his wife, Grace, is expecting at the same time that his grown daughter and son-in-law are also expectant parents. Paul Ford (in

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a Tony Award-nominated role) and Maureen O’Sullivan won kudos for their performances as the Lamberts (and reprised their roles in the 1965 screen version) under the guidance of veteran director George Abbott, who was nominated for a Tony. NEW DRAMATISTS (ND). ND was founded in 1949 with the intention of serving as an advocacy and support organization for playwrights, particularly supplying time, space, and tools for developing dramatists to practice their craft. Funds are available to writers, workshops are regularly scheduled, and residencies are offered to selected artists. Those playwrights supported at various times by ND include Horton Foote, Nilo Cruz, Maria Irene Fornés, August Wilson, Mac Wellman, John Patrick Shanley, Lynn Nottage, David Margulies, David Lindsay-Abaire, Eduardo Machado, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Guare, Robert Anderson, Doug Wright, and others. NEW FEDERAL THEATRE (NFT). Woodie King, Jr., established the NFT in 1970 as an outgrowth of the Mobilization for Youth theatre program. Funded by the Henry Street Settlement and a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, the NFT launched its first neighborhood-based season in St. Augustine’s Church on Henry Street. In 1974, the Louis Abrons Arts Center, on Grand Street, was completed, including three theatres and studios. The NFT specializes in drama by and for minorities in the Lower East Side community and aims to provide emerging artists with a forum. Its stated mission is to integrate minorities and women into the mainstream American theatre. Among those noted writers associated with NFT are Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Ron Milner, Ntozake Shange, David Henry Hwang, Alexis DeVeaux, and others. Such actors as Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Debbie Allen, Phylicia Rashad, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Garrett Morris, Robert Downey, Jr., Ruby Dee, and others performed in NFT productions. NEW GROUP, THE (NG). Defining itself as an artist-driven company committed to developing and staging contemporary theatre, the NG was founded by artistic director Scott Elliott and began in 1995 with a production of Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy. Other plays produced by the NG include This Is Our Youth (1996), The Women of Lockerbie (2002), Avenue Q (2002), and The Starry Messenger (2009), with their productions reaping three Tony Awards and seven Obie Awards. NEW VAUDEVILLIANS. This term has been applied to two generations of postmodern performers such as Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, Paul Zaloom, David

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Shiner, and others, all of whom employ traditional techniques of circus and carnival clowning (without the makeup), burlesque, improvisations, and vaudeville*-style comedy, inspired by everything from commedia dell’arte to silent film comedy. See also MIME.* NEW YORK DRAMA CRITICS CIRCLE. Established in 1935 at the famed Algonquin Hotel roundtable by New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, show business columnist Walter Winchell, and humorist/actor/critic Robert Benchley,* the Circle was ultimately made up of 20 critics from New York-area newspapers, magazines, and wire services. Since 1938, the Circle has given an annual Best Play Award (the first went to Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset in 1935). Other categories were subsequently added, including Best Foreign Play (the first, in 1937, went to Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance), Best Musical (the first, in 1945, was presented to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Carousel), and special awards and citations (the first, in 1951, was given to George Bernard Shaw for Don Juan in Hell). The Lucille Lortel Foundation makes it possible for a cash prize of $2,500 to the author of the Best Play, with $1,000 going to the playwrights of the Best American Play and Best Foreign Play. Some years no award is given in one or more of the categories. See also CRITICS/CRITICISM. NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL (NYIFF). Also known as FringeNYC, this annual festival, founded in 1997 by Aaron Beall, John Clancy, Jonathan Harris, and artistic director Elena K. Holy, is among the biggest in North America. The events of the NYIFF (often as many as 220 shows) are held throughout the city, centered mostly in the Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village. The NYIFF also features varied designated activities, such as FringeU (educational events), FringeART (art events), and FringeJR (children’s theatre). NEW YORK PUBLIC THEATRE. See PUBLIC THEATRE. NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL (NYSF). Founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 to bring Shakespeare’s plays to a more diverse audience, the NYSF has been associated with the Public Theatre as the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, and its main activity is open-air performances held at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. The first of these, in 1962, featured George C. Scott and James Earl Jones in The Merchant of Venice. Since then, numerous Shakespeare productions, as well as works by other playwrights, including Gilbert and Sullivan, Anton Chekhov, Bertolt

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Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, and Eric Bogosian, among others, have been part of the NYSF. Noted actors frequently appear in NYSF productions, including Meryl Streep, Patrick Stewart, Sam Waterston, Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, Helen Hunt, Jimmy Smits, Oliver Platt, and others. NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP (NYTW). An Off-Broadway theatre that has won critical acclaim for new and innovative productions of new works, most by American playwrights, NYTW was founded by Stephen Graham in 1979. The theatre presented its first production, A Day in the Life of the Czar by Frank O’Hara and V. R. Lang, and directed by Peter Sellars, that year. By 1982, the NYTW incorporated and expanded its program of activities, coproducing with other organizations, including Playwrights Horizons. In 1988, James Nicola was named artistic director and clearly separated the NYTW’s twin missions of producing theatre productions and workshops for new plays. The emphasis on developing new plays has led to productions of works by Doug Wright, Claudia Shear, Tony Kushner, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Caryl Churchill, Paul Rudnick, Kia Corthron, Martha Clarke, Amy Freed, and others. Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996) gave its first performances at the NYTW, leading to a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award when it transferred to Broadway. NEWMAN, PAUL (1925–2008). A legendary film star from the 1950s to his death, Paul Leonard Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and began acting in school plays before briefly attending Ohio University prior to joining the United States Navy during World War II. At war’s end, Newman completed his education at Kenyon College, and later studied at Yale University and at The Actors Studio, where he became an exemplar of the “method” approach to acting developed by Lee Strasberg. Newman won a Theatre World Award as Alan in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1953), followed by well-received appearances in The Desperate Hours (1955) and as male hustler Chance Wayne in Tennessee Williams’s The Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). He only made two subsequent Broadway appearances, in Baby Want a Kiss (1964) and as the Stage Manager in a 2002 revival of Our Town, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. On screen, Newman won an Academy Award for The Color of Money (1986) and was presented with an Honorary Oscar in 1986 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994. He was Oscar-nominated nine additional times, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Rachel, Rachel (1968), Absence of Malice (1981), The Verdict (1982), Nobody’s Fool (1994), and Road to Perdition (2002). On television, Newman was nominated for Emmy Awards for The Shadow Box

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(1980), Our Town (2003), and won for Empire Falls (2005), the latter also brought him a Golden Globe Award (one among more than a dozen nominations and wins). He was much-admired for his charitable endeavors, which included founding Newman’s Own, a food company that donated its post-tax profits to various charities. Newman was married to actress Joanne Woodward for 50 years and was also a director and producer in films and television. NEXT FALL. Actor Geoffrey Naufft, artistic director of the Naked Angels, wrote this drama of a gay couple, one an atheist and the other a Christian, debating religious questions, and it opened at Playwrights Horizons on 3 June 2009 for a limited engagement under Sheryl Kaller’s direction. The cast included Patrick Breen and Patrick Heusinger with set design by Wilson Chin. Next Fall moved to Broadway in March 2010. NICHOLS, MIKE (1931– ). Michael Igor Peschkowsky, born in Berlin, Germany, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in the United States with his German-Russian Jewish family. Nichols became an American citizen in 1944 and attended the University of Chicago before joining the improvisatory group the Compass Players in the 1950s, where he met actress/writer Elaine May. As a comedy team, they achieved success on stage, television, and recordings, leading to a Broadway show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960). Nichols and May terminated their partnership in 1961, although they reunited in 1980 to play the leads in a Long Wharf Theatre production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and to reprise the Nichols and May act for charitable causes. After the breakup of the team, Nichols rarely performed, moving into a much-honored career as a director of stage and film. He won a Tony Award for his first Broadway directing job, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in The Park (1963). He subsequently won Tonys for Luv (1965), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), The Real Thing (1984), and Spamalot (2005). Nichols was Tony-nominated for The Apple Tree (1967), Comedians (1977), and The Gin Game (1978). On Broadway, Nichols also directed revivals of The Little Foxes in 1967 and Uncle Vanya in 1973 (which he also translated), Streamers (1976), Lunch Hour (1980), Fools (1981), Social Security (1986), Death and the Maiden (1992), and a 2008 revival of The Country Girl. Nichols was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for his first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and won an Oscar (and a Golden Globe Award and New York Film Critics Circle Award) for The Graduate (1967), with subsequent nominations for Silkwood (1983) and Working Girl (1988). On television, Nichols won Emmy Awards for the

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television films Wit (2001) and Angels in America (2003). Nichols has been married to his fourth wife, television news anchor Diane Sawyer, since 1988. NICHOLSON, KENYON (1894–1986). A native of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Nicholson moved to New York to study playwriting at Columbia University. He scored his first hit with The Barker (1927) starring Walter Huston, which lead to his biggest success with Sailor, Beware! (1933), coauthored by Charles Taylor, which played 500 performances at the Lyceum Theatre. His later plays, most of which were comedies or light dramas, including Swing Your Lady! (1936), Dance Night (1938), and Apple of His Eye (1946), were either mildly successful or failures. Nicholson also wrote about 20 screenplays during the early sound film era, several of which were adaptations of his stage plays. NICOLL, ALLARDYCE (1894–1976). Born in Glasgow, Scotland, this eminent scholar of theatre history made most of his career in England, but he was chair of the Drama Department at Yale University from 1933 to 1945. In 1934, he began a major collection of theatre papers and photographs housed at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library. ’NIGHT, MOTHER. Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play was first staged at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, featuring Kathy Bates and Anne Pitoniak (in a Theatre World Award-winning performance), both of whom appeared as well in the Broadway production, which opened at the John Golden Theatre on 31 March 1983 for 380 performances, receiving four Tony Award nominations, including Best Play, Best Director (Tom Moore), and for the two actresses. This harrowing drama focuses on Jessie, who matter-of-factly informs her mother, Thelma, that she is planning to commit suicide. An intense dialogue in which Jessie explains her reasoning follows, with critics comparing the play to a Greek tragedy. A 1986 film version starred Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft (in a Golden Globe-nominated performance). ’night, Mother was revived on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 14 November 2004 for 65 performances starring Edie Falco and Brenda Blethyn. NIGHT OF JANUARY 16th, THE. Ayn Rand’s courtroom melodrama,* originally titled Penthouse Legend, in which the audience decides the defendant’s fate, opened at the Ambassador Theatre on 16 September 1935 for 235 performances with a cast featuring Walter Pidgeon and Doris Nolan. Inspired by the death of Ivar Kreuger, Rand’s play features themes typical of her novels, particularly the relationship of man to a society in moral decline.

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The most discussed aspect of the play involved the selection of audience members to serve as a jury. Rand clashed with producer Al Woods,* who made this change and others (including the title), and she later professed to embarrassment about the play, although it had a long life in stock, university, and community theatres. NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, THE. This Tennessee Williams play, which garnered a Tony Award nomination as Best Play, was inspired by a 1946 Williams short story and it opened at New York’s Royale Theatre on 28 December 1961 for 316 performances. Under the direction of Frank Corsaro, and with a strong cast led by film star Bette Davis in a rare stage appearance, and costarring Margaret Leighton (Tony winner), Patrick O’Neal, and Alan Webb, Iguana won mostly laudatory reviews and a long run. Featuring Williams’s most memorable characters and a deepening exploration of many of the recurrent themes of his work, particularly the struggle of the spirit over the desires and frailties of the flesh, Williams places emphasis on three principle characters in a lyrical meditation on the nature of God and the struggle of His creatures to find redemption for real or imagined sins. Set in 1940 on the west coast of Mexico, The Night of the Iguana finds two groups of travelers in residence at a rundown hotel cradled in a rain forest overlooking the sea. In this steamy Eden, a group of German tourists enthuse about the blitz of London, which, they are certain, will succeed in subjugating the British people to Nazi rule. The other group is a tour of women teachers from Texas escorted by a distracted guide, Lawrence Shannon (O’Neal), an alcoholic ex-priest subsisting under the casual protection of the hotel’s owner, Maxine Faulk (Davis), a blowsy widow lusting for Shannon. Shannon’s libidinous interest, however, has tragically directed itself toward underage women. He has drifted to Mexico and Maxine, but the lost, tormented Shannon finds momentary redemption when he encounters the deeply spiritual Hannah Jelkes (Leighton), a wandering artist traveling aimlessly with her 97-year-old grandfather, Nonno (Webb), a “minor” poet grasping to create one last poem. Shannon and Hannah find a momentary respite at the hotel where Hannah, unmarried and touchingly devoted to her grandfather, reaches out to Shannon. Their encounter is briefly liberating for both, a release from their individual constraints symbolized by the sudden escape of a tethered iguana captured by some Mexican boys planning to eat it. The iguana’s flight to freedom comes as Nonno completes the poem he has grappled with for 20 years—his most beautiful one, his deeply moved granddaughter exclaims— and he dies, thus achieving the ultimate freedom. Shannon returns to Maxine, while Hannah, now alone and directionless, faces the lonely, barren future stretching before her.

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Critics applauded what several described as a deepening of Williams’s themes in The Night of the Iguana, while many later critics consider it his last great drama. Some reviewers called Iguana a minor Williams work, a play in which he continued to reveal aspects of his own spiritual struggle through those of his characters. Accordingly, some critics lamented their perception that Williams might never write another “great” drama until he resolved his personal demons. The play’s critical and commercial success led to a 1964 screen version directed by John Huston featuring Richard Burton as Shannon, Deborah Kerr as Hannah, and Ava Gardner as Maxine, with Webb repeating his stage role as Nonno. There have been three Broadway revivals of the play, in 1976 starring Dorothy McGuire, Sylvia Miles, and Richard Chamberlain, in 1988 with Maria Tucci, Jane Alexander, and Nicolas Surovy, and in 1996 starring Cherry Jones and William Petersen. See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY. Charles Gordone’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play, the first by an African American and the first produced OffBroadway, opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre on 4 May 1969 before a move to the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Theatre in December and another to the Promenade Theatre for over 900 performances. The play opened on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on 9 September 1971 for 39 performances. It examines issues of race during the civil rights era, focusing on a black bartender in a battle of wits with a white mob. The cast included Mary Alice and Terry Alexander as Johnny Williams, the bartender. NO TIME FOR COMEDY. S. N. Behrman’s three-act play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in a Playwrights’ Company production on 17 April 1939 for 185 performances, starring Katharine Cornell, in her debut in a contemporary comedy. Directed by her husband, Guthrie McClintic, with scene design by Jo Mielziner and costumes by Valentina, Cornell was supported by Laurence Olivier as Gaylord Easterbrook, a playwright convinced by an intrusive friend, Amanda, played by Margalo Gillmore, to abandon his successful career writing comedy to focus on serious subjects about the looming European war. Cornell played Gaylord’s wife, Linda, the star of his plays, who resists this notion. Gaylord plans to leave Linda for Amanda, but ultimately comes to his senses when Linda suggests the triangle would make a fine play. A 1940 film version starred Rosalind Russell, James Stewart, and Genevieve Tobin. NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS. Ira Levin’s two-act comedy, based on a Mac Hyman novel, which had first appeared as a one-hour television play

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on the U.S. Steel Hour in 1955, opened on Broadway on 20 October 1955 for 796 performances. Scene designer Peter Larkin won a Tony Award and a Tony nomination went to acting newcomer Andy Griffith, who, under Morton Da Costa’s direction, played Will Stockdale, a “hillbilly” drafted into the United States Air Force who runs afoul of Sergeant King (Myron McCormick). King, who takes a strong dislike to Will and gives him the job of cleaning latrines and other unpleasant tasks. Will is thought lost during an atomic test, but turns up at a “posthumous” ceremony awarding him a medal. Don Knotts, who later appeared with Griffith on the long-running TV comedy, The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), made his Broadway debut in the play, which also included Roddy McDowall, Earle Hyman, and Rex Everhart. Griffith appeared in the 1958 film version and a television series based on the play ran a season (1964–1965). NOEL, CRAIG (1915–2010). Born in Deming, New Mexico, the son of a railroad conductor, Noel and his family moved to San Diego, California, when he was a toddler and, after high school, he became a member of the San Diego Community Theatre acting company in 1937. While there, he directed for the first time in 1939, after which he served in the United States Army during World War II. At war’s end, he became director of the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, Japan, during the postwar American occupation. Returning to the United States, he directed screen tests for Twentieth Century-Fox and, in 1947, he returned to the San Diego Community Theatre, where he remained as director for the rest of his career, directing more than 200 productions and producing 300 others. In 1949, Noel established the San Diego Shakespeare Festival. In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Noel with the National Medal of Arts. NOGUCHI, ISAMU (1904–1988). An acclaimed sculptor of Japanese American heritage, Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, California, and educated at Columbia University, and although remembered as a sculptor, landscape architect, and furniture designer, Noguchi applied his abstract style to designing masks for actress Michio Ito for a 1926 production of William Butler Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, and in 1935 he created a scene design for Martha Graham’s Frontier. Noguchi supplied visual elements for Graham for Appalachian Spring (1944) and Seraphic Dialogue (1955), drawing elements from Japanese Noh theatre. His work was seen on Broadway in three Graham appearances (1945, 1946, 1960). He also collaborated with George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and provided scenery for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1955 production of King Lear.

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NOONAN, JOHN FORD (1943– ). This New York-born playwright best known for his frequently produced two-character play, A Coupla White Chicks Sitting around Talking (1979), has worked as an actor in films, including Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), and won an Emmy Award for writing an episode of the television series St. Elsewhere in 1984. His plays include The Year Boston Won the Pennant (1969), Lazarus Was a Lady (1970), Rainbows for Sale (1971), Concerning the Effects of Trimethylchloride (1971), Monday Night Varieties (1972), Older People (1972), A Noonan Night (1973), Where Do We Go from Here? (1974), Getting through the Night (1976), The Club Champion’s Widow (1978), Listen to the Lions (1979), Some Men Need Help (1982), Why Can’t You Be Him? (1987), Nothing but Bukowski (1987), Heterosexual Temperature in West Hollywood (1987), Talking Things Over with Chekhov (1987), Spanish Confusion (1987), Mom Sells Twins for Two Beers (1987), Green Mountain (1987), All She Cares about Is the Yankees (1988), Stay Away a Little Closer (1990), Recent Developments in Southern Connecticut (1990), Music from Down the Hill (1993), and A Critic and His Wife (2001). He is the brother of actor Tom Noonan. NOONE, JAMES (1961– ). A New York-born scene designer who began working as a Lake George Opera Festival stagehand at age 12, Noone has numerous credits from regional theatres beginning in the late 1980s, and he began designing for Broadway and Off-Broadway in the mid-1990s, winning a Drama Desk Award for Jekyll & Hyde (1997) and nominations for revivals of The Gin Game in 1997, Night Must Fall in 1999, and The Time of the Cuckoo in 2000. His Broadway credits also include revivals of Inherit the Wind in 1996 and The Sunshine Boys in 1997, Getting and Spending (1998), a 1999 revival of The Rainmaker, A Class Act (2001), Judgment at Nuremberg (2001), Urban Cowboy (2003), Match (2004), Hot Feet (2006), A Bronx Tale (2007), and a 2008 revival of Come Back, Little Sheba. NORMAN, MARSHA (1947– ). Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Norman endured an isolated childhood resulting from her mother’s refusal to allow her to play with other children or watch television. She was permitted to attend Actors Theatre of Louisville productions and she was an avid reader, which prepared her for studying philosophy at Agnes Scott College and for a career as a journalist and, ultimately, a playwright. Getting Out (1977), Norman’s first play, which depicts a young woman paroled from prison, profited from her experiences working with disturbed teenagers at Kentucky’s Central State Hospital. The play was produced at Actors Theatre and led to her next, Circus Valentine (1979). Norman’s third play, ’night, Mother (1983), won a

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Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award nomination for its harrowing depiction of suicide. Her other plays include Traveller in the Dark (1984), The Fortune Teller (1987), and others, but she won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for the libretto and lyrics of the musical The Secret Garden (1991). Norman has written other musicals, including The Red Shoes (1993) and The Color Purple (2005). NORTON, ELLIOT (1903–2003). The leading Boston, Massachusetts, drama critic was, appropriately, born in Boston and educated at Harvard University. He worked as a reporter for the Boston Post and in 1934 became its drama critic, continuing there until 1956 when the paper folded. He moved to the Boston Record American and continued, winning the George Jean Nathan Award in 1964 and a special Tony Award in 1971. The Elliot Norton Awards were established in 1982, the year he retired, to honor theatre work in the Boston area. NOTTAGE, LYNN (1964– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Nottage attended New York’s High School of Music and Art and was inspired by school theatre productions to become a dramatist. She pursued her goal at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, as well as New Dramatists. Her play Ruined (2008) received the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and an Obie Award for its drama of life in a small jungle brothel during a civil war in the Congo which, despite its grim subject, offered a life-affirming study of several characters surviving the vicissitudes of war. Most of her work has focused on the experiences of African American women, including Poof (1993), Crumbs from the Table of Joy (1995), Mud, River, Stone (1998), Las Meninas (2002), Intimate Apparel (2003), and Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (2004). She scripted the film Side Streets (1998) and her play Intimate Apparel was filmed as In Another Time (2007). Nottage’s view of the nature of theatre is evident in a recent statement in an interview: “I think we should somehow be engaging the culture we live in, commenting on it and helping people to understand. And just have a conversation with culture.” NUDITY. Nudity, and the illusion of nudity, have been part of the American theatre since at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century in tableaux vivants and in such entertainments as the melodrama* Mazeppa* (1861), in which Adah Isaacs Menken scandalously appeared scantily clad astride a horse, and The Black Crook (1866), with its ballerinas in pink tights. As early as the 1840s, living models in poses plastiques were typically seen outside of legitimate theatre, but by the 1890s, the technique found its way into musical

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revues,* most notably those produced by Florenz Ziegfeld.* Imitators including George White and Earl Carroll generally failed to equal the high style of the Ziegfeld Follies, but in the first three decades of the twentieth century, such musical performances were permitted some latitude in the area of tastefully depicted nudity. Modern dancers from Isadora Duncan to Ted Shawn at times appeared scantily clad, as did the less high-minded burlesque performers beginning in the 1920s, although some, like striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, adopted an intellectual air to remove the taint of vulgarity. Sally Rand, a nude fan dancer, emulated strippers by using large feathered fans to tease her audience. Nudity did not truly emerge on Broadway or in other legitimate theatres until the vast social changes of the 1960s made it possible in everything from the work of The Living Theatre to the rock musical Hair (1968). In the wake of such groundbreaking performances, many productions incorporated nudity, often gratuitously. Oh! Calcutta, following in the wake of the brief nudity seen in Hair, broke numerous barriers in its exploration of sexual attitudes by having its entire cast first appear in bathrobes which they quickly removed to reveal themselves in the nude. Terrence McNally’s Off-Broadway play, Sweet Eros (1968), featured actress Sally Kirkland in the nude for most of the play, while dramas such as The Changing Room (1973), with locker room scenes, provided male nudity. Since the early 1970s, nudity has found its way into mainstream theatre in urban areas, although various communities find it objectionable and apply local laws to prevent it. Many mainstream plays after the 1980s featured fullfrontal male nudity, including gay-themed plays like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out (2002), while female nudity has been seen more frequently, and even star performers have been willing to bare all, as Nicole Kidman did in David Hare’s The Blue Room (1998), adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen. Performance artists, including Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and others, typically make use of nudity for shock value and to explore sexual mores. Challenges to public morality in the form of nudity are frequent and while theatres in major cities have little difficulty presenting nudity, smaller cities and towns often prove resistant. See also CENSORSHIP; MEN/MASCULINITY; WOMEN/FEMININITY. NUGENT, ELLIOTT (1896–1980).† A native of Dover, Ohio, he was the son of actor J. C. Nugent and began his theatrical career as a child in vaudeville.* He was a classmate of James Thurber at Ohio State University and debuted on Broadway in George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s Dulcy* (1921) with Lynn Fontanne. Nugent scored a personal success the

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following year starring in Kempy (1922), which he cowrote with his father. He wrote 10 more plays with his father, and at the dawn of sound films appeared as a juvenile in The Unholy Three (1930), Romance (1930), and The Last Flight (1931), among others. By the mid-1930s, Nugent devoted himself more fully to directing and writing and scored his greatest success with The Male Animal (1940), which he starred in and cowrote with Thurber, and which he subsequently directed for the screen in 1942 with Henry Fonda playing the role of a mild-mannered professor who comes to believe he must fight for the affections of his wife. Nugent appeared opposite Katharine Hepburn in Philip Barry’s Without Love (1942) and in John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle (1943), he directed Tomorrow the World (1943) and produced The Seven Year Itch (1952). NUGENT, NELLE (1939– ). One of Broadway’s most successful producers since the 1970s, Nugent was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. She worked Off-Broadway as a stage manager from 1960–1963 and began her Broadway career in 1964 as a production assistant, stage manager, and general manager for such shows as Any Wednesday (1964), Ben Franklin in Paris (1964), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1968), My Fat Friend (1974), 1974 revivals of Sherlock Holmes* and London Assurance, and Treemonisha ((1975), among others. In association with Elizabeth McCann, she formed McCann & Nugent Productions, Inc., and they produced numerous productions, including several that won Tony Awards as Best Play or Best Revival, including a revival of Dracula* in 1978, The Elephant Man (1979), a revival of Morning’s at Seven in 1980, Amadeus (1981), and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982). Among other Broadway plays and musicals produced by Nugent as general manager of McCann & Nugent Productions were The Gin Game (1977), Home (1980), Tintypes (1980), Piaf (1981), Crimes of the Heart (1981), The Dresser (1981), Mass Appeal (1981), Good (1982), ’night, Mother (1983), Total Abandon (1983), revivals of All’s Well That Ends Well in 1983, The Glass Menagerie in 1983, Much Ado about Nothing in 1984, and Cyrano de Bergerac in 1984, Leader of the Pack (1985), Tango Argentino (1985), The Smell of the Kill (2002), and revivals of Sly Fox in 2004 and American Buffalo in 2008. On being an effective producer, Nugent said, “you need passion, you need to be able to deal with talent, and you certainly need to convince everybody who works for you to tell you the truth.” NUNN, TREVOR (1940– ). Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, as Trevor Robert Nunn, he studied at Downing College, Cambridge, and as an apprentice at the Belgrade Theatre. Nunn was appointed artistic director of the Royal

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Shakespeare Company in 1968 and, during nearly 18 years in the job he emerged as a major producer and director, with many of his productions seen in New York as well as London, where he also became artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, and Stratford. In the United States, he won the Tony Award as Best Director for The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982), Cats (1983), and Les Misérables (1987), and he was Tony-nominated for All’s Well That Ends Well (1983), Starlight Express (1987), Aspects of Love (1990), Sunset Boulevard (1995), Not about Nightingales (1999), and Oklahoma! (2002). Among Nunn’s other Broadway directing credits are Piaf (1981), Chess (1988), Arcadia (1995), Vincent in Brixton (2003), The Woman in White (2005), Rock ‘n’ Roll (2007), and a 2009 revival of A Little Night Music. Nunn was married to actress Janet Suzman and is currently married to actress Imogen Stubbs. NUYORICAN THEATRE. A term meaning Puerto Rican theatre in New York commonly used by Puerto Rican artists to stress their cultural heritage as separate from the mainstream American culture. The term, which was coined by writer Jaime Carrero, came into common usage in the 1960s during a period of significant artistic activity in New York’s Puerto Rican community due to increased educational opportunity and the ethnic consciousness movement and the civil rights era in general. The term encompasses a range of groups and artists, including types of street theatre performed by various collectives and the achievements of individual playwrights, some confined to prisons. One ex-convict, Miquel Piñero, broke into mainstream culture with his play Short Eyes (1973), which won an Obie Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Other writers with similar background, including Lucky Cinfuegos, Piri Thomas, and Pedro Pietri, among others, led Nuyorican theatre toward themes of Jean Genet, with a focus on crime, drug abuse, sexuality, and gender difference. The association with prison life and aberrant behaviors caused some Puerto Rican writers to reject the term, but subsequent generations have seen the style and content of the Nuyorican playwrights of the 1960s–1970s as thematic inspiration even as their style, language, and dramatic structure has moved more closely to the mainstream. See also CHICANO THEATRE.

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O OBIE AWARDS. Presented annually by the Village Voice newspaper for achievement in Off-Broadway theatre since 1956, the Obie Award categories change in order to provide acknowledgment to and to underscore the varied and experimental activity typical of Off-Broadway theatres. Among the winners of the first Obies were Lionel Abel’s Absalom (1955) as Best New Play, a 1954 revival of Threepenny Opera as Best Musical, José Quintero and Best Director of a 1956 revival of The Iceman Cometh, Jason Robards and George Voskevec tied for Best Actor, Julie Bovasso was Best Actress, and Gerald Hiken and Peggy McCay won Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards. Other performers were given “Distinguished Performance” Awards, including Alan Ansara, Roberts Blossom, Addison Powell, Shirlee Emmons, Frances Sternhagen, and Nancy Wickwire. Klaus Holm and Alvin Cold were acknowledged for High Technical Accomplishment in Sets, Lighting and Costumes, and a revival of Uncle Vanya won the Best All-Around Production category. Lifetime Achievement and Sustained Achievement Awards are presented on occasion. Other awards encompassing Off-Broadway achievement include the Lucille Lortel Award, the Drama Desk Awards, the Drama League Awards, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. O’BRIEN, JACK (1939– ). Born in Saginaw, Michigan, O’Brien was educated at the University of Michigan and began his Broadway career in the mid-1960s assistant-directing revivals of You Can’t Take It with You in 1965) and The Cherry Orchard in 1968 prior to directing Cock-A-Doodle Dandy (1969). Also a writer, O’Brien wrote the book and lyrics for the musical satire The Selling of the President (1972) and directed revivals of The Time of Your Life in 1975 and Porgy and Bess in 1977, which brought him Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations (and he directed it again in 1983 at Radio City Music Hall). He also directed a revival of The Most Happy Fella (1979). In 1981, O’Brien became artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, directing numerous productions there, including a notable 1983 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth broadcast live on PBS-TV’s American Playhouse. He continued at the Old Globe until 2007, directing

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numerous productions (including world premieres) that moved to Broadway. O’Brien won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Hairspray (2003), a 2004 revival of Henry IV, and The Coast of Utopia (2007) and was nominated for both for The Piano Lesson (1990) and The Full Monty (2001). O’Brien also garnered Tony nominations for Two Shakespearean Actors (1992), The Invention of Love (2001), for which he won a Drama Desk Award, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005) and a Drama Desk nomination for The Cocktail Hour (1989). O’Brien also directed a 1994 Broadway revival of Damn Yankees, Getting Away with Murder (1996), a 1997 revival of The Little Foxes, More to Love (1998), Imaginary Friends (2002), and Impressionism (2009). ODD COUPLE, THE. Neil Simon’s most enduringly popular comedy, this three-act play opened in a Saint-Subber production on 10 March 1965 for 966 performances starring Walter Matthau (who won a Tony Award and reprised his performance in the 1968 film version) and Art Carney, playing Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, respectively. Simon was acknowledged with a Best Author Tony and Mike Nichols (who won a Tony) directed, with scene design by Oliver Smith (also a Tony winner). Oscar and Felix become roommates following their divorces, but their differences—Oscar is a funloving slob and Felix is a controlling neat freak—cause chaos as they attempt to find a way to live together. Simon revised the play for a female cast in 1985 starring Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers and the original play was revived on Broadway with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in 2005. Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of the film version and Jack Klugman and Tony Randall played Oscar and Felix in a television situation comedy version from 1970–1975. Simon wrote an ill-advised screen sequel, The Odd Couple II (1998), as a vehicle for Matthau and Jack Lemmon (who had played Felix in the 1970 film version). ODETS, CLIFFORD (1906–1963). Among American playwrights, Odets became a celebrated figure for a period in the mid-1930s as his plays, the most important of which were produced by The Group Theatre, seemed to capture the zeitgeist during the Great Depression. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish American parents, Odets grew up in the Bronx and quit high school to become an actor. His acting career was brief and at the urging of Harold Clurman, he began writing plays for The Group Theatre, which had formed in 1931. He completed Awake and Sing! (1935) first, but The Group chose to produce Odets’s second play, Waiting for Lefty (1935). Its success, which inspired part of the audience to rise shouting “Strike!” along with the actors in this play about labor rights, led to the production of Awake and Sing!, which emerged as the seminal play staged by The Group. 1935

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became a banner year for Odets, who also completed Till the Day I Die and Paradise Lost that year, and The Group’s productions of his plays made it the most talked-about theatre company at the height of the Depression. The socialist foundation of Odets’s plays and The Group’s politics merged to reflect cultural attitudes of the time and put The Group in the forefront of American theatre. Inevitably, Hollywood approached Odets, who wrote the screenplay for The General Died at Dawn (1936) before returning to The Group with Golden Boy (1937), which was a critical and commercial triumph. Odets completed a few other plays produced by The Group, including Rocket to the Moon (1938) and Night Music (1940), but when The Group disbanded in 1940, Odets’s next two plays, Clash by Night (1941), produced by Billy Rose, and The Russian People (1942), staged by The Theatre Guild, failed to find critical or audience favor. Except for occasional revivals of his major plays, Odets had scant success on Broadway. The Big Knife (1949) managed little more than 100 performances, although The Country Girl (1950), one of his most frequently revived plays (with Broadway revivals in 1972 and 2008), had a long run and brought a Tony Award to its star, Uta Hagen. The Flowering Peach (1954) also managed only a modest run and received tepid reviews. Odets had somewhat better luck in films following the heady days of The Group Theatre, directing and scripting None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Story on Page One (1959), and contributing screenplays for some of his own plays, as well as Deadline at Dawn (1946), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and scripts for a few episodic television shows. Odets was married twice, to actresses Luise Rainer and Bette Grayson. ODYSSEY THEATRE (OT). Founded in a Hollywood, California, storefront in 1969 by Ron Sossi as an experimental theatre aiming for popular appeal, the OT moved to a 99-seat theatre on Ohio Avenue in West Long Angeles. Early productions included The Serpent in 1969, Threepenny Opera in 1970, Peer Gynt in 1973, and The Adolf Hitler Show (1975), a controversial piece created by the OT company. In 1979, the OT opened a second performance space with Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1979) and the following year inaugurated a third space with Tracers (1980). Sossi and the OT were awarded the Margaret Hartford Award by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle in 1982. In 1989, the OT moved to a new space in a vacant warehouse in which three theatres were established. The OT’s stated mission is the creation of new work and the revitalization and re-exploration of classical material both American and international. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. OENSLAGER, DONALD (1902–1975). Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Donald Mitchell Oenslager studied with George Pierce Baker* at

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Harvard University and aimed for an acting career, including a small role in the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms* (1924), before switching to scene design in 1924. Oenslager’s work tended more toward traditional three-dimensional realism, but he was part of the first wave of modern scene designers inspired by European developments, including such figures as Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, and Jo Mielziner. Oenslager’s over 140 scene designs (and occasionally costume designs) include some of the most significant Broadway plays and musicals between 1927 and the mid-1970s, including Good News (1927), The New Moon (1928), Girl Crazy (1930), Anything Goes (1934), Stage Door (1936), Johnny Johnson (1936), You Can’t Take It with You (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), Skylark (1939), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), Claudia (1941), Born Yesterday (1946), Years Ago (1946), Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), Sabrina Fair (1953), Janus (1955), The Pleasure of His Company (1958), A Far Country (1961), Spofford (1967), and a 1974 revival of Good News. Oenslager’s designs for a 1957 revival of Major Barbara brought him a Tony Award nomination, and he won a Tony for A Majority of One (1959). Oenslager taught at the Yale School of Drama for many years and wrote Scenery Then and Now (1936). OF MICE AND MEN. John Steinbeck’s drama based on his novella is set among itinerant farm workers in central California. It opened in a Sam H. Harris production at the Music Box Theatre on 23 November 1937 for 207 performances under the direction of George S. Kaufman and with scene designs by Donald Oenslager. A tragic tale of the friendship of farm hands George (Wallace Ford) and the physically powerful but slow-witted Lenny (Broderick Crawford), it captured Depression-era concerns, but proved to be of more lasting significance for the inherent human dilemmas of its characters. When Lennie, who does not know his own strength and cannot control his enthusiasms, accidentally kills the wife of the farm’s foreman, Curly, George flees with Lennie, but is forced to contemplate the inevitable. A 1939 film version starred Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr. and was a Best Picture Academy Award nominee. A 1974 Broadway revival starring Kevin Conway and James Earl Jones had a brief run and another film adaptation, in 1992, featured John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, who also directed. Television adaptations of Of Mice and Men were broadcast in 1968 and 1981. OF THEE I SING. This two-act musical satire of politics and America’s penchant for romanticizing was the first Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. George Gershwin’s melodic score and Ira Gershwin’s witty lyrics are the enduring legacies of Of Thee I Sing, providing song hits in the title number, “Who Cares?” and “Love Is Sweeping the Country,” but the cohesive score

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creates the illusion of an all-sung operetta* in the Gilbert and Sullivan style, although librettists George S. Kaufman (who also directed the show) and Morrie Ryskind* provide pithy and humorous topical dialogue. By the time Of Thee I Sing opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre on 26 December 1931, starring William Gaxton and Victor Moore, the Depression had deepened and the country was turning away from the leadership of President Herbert Hoover. The show racked up an impressive 441 performances in part because the image of the romantic, energetic John P. Wintergreen, the show’s fictional presidential candidate, forecast the coming election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the establishment of his progressive New Deal policies. The featherweight plot focused on a French golddigger who attempts to destroy the relationship of the presidential candidate and his true love. Gaxton and Moore returned for 32 additional performances of the show not long after its closing in 1933 and the show was revived in 1952, this time starring Jack Carson and Paul Hartman, again under Kaufman’s direction, for 72 performances. There has not been another Broadway revival to date, but the musical has been a staple of stock, university, and community theatres, and songs from its memorable score are frequently performed. OFF-BROADWAY. Off-Broadway refers to smaller theatres also surrounding Times Square, usually 100–299 (as opposed to significantly larger Broadway houses), with less stringent requirements from the Actors’ Equity Association and other theatrical unions, thus permitting productions to be mounted for more modest sums than Broadway demands and allows producers to keep ticket prices considerably lower than those for Broadway shows. A theatrical movement described by the term Off-Broadway began as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, when Little Theatres* offered experimental and new works, but in the 1950s Off-Broadway truly emerged with the production of avant-garde plays challenging audiences in both style and content. Many theatre groups and festivals sprung up in New York, all functioning under the unofficial banner of Off-Broadway. OFF-OFF-BROADWAY. As costs mounted for producing theatre on Broadway and Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway emerged with the goals of reining in costs to permit greater experimentation. As a rule, Off-OffBroadway theatres are small spaces (usually less than 100 seats) and, even more so than Off-Broadway, the term is intended to separate its product from the commercial considerations, star actors, and spectacle increasingly expected by Broadway and even Off-Broadway audiences. Off-Off Broadway became by the late 1960s the alternative theatre in New York, the center of experimentation, the rise of new ethnic minority theatres, and new alternative forms, from performance art to multimedia productions.

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OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA’S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELIN’ SO SAD: A PSEUDOCLASSICAL TRAGIFARCE IN A BASTARD FRENCH TRADITION. Arthur Kopit’s first play was written for a Harvard University playwriting competition (which it won) and was intended as a parody of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, Freudian psychology, Tennessee Williams, and other aspects of popular culture. Following a student production at Harvard, the play moved to the Agassiz Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it was so well received that it was staged Off-Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre, where it opened on 26 February 1962 for 454 performances, winning the Vernon Rice Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. The play focuses on the wealthy eccentric Madame Rosepettle (Hermione Gingold), who is a domineering mother of a grown son, Jonathan (Sam Waterston), who she tries to keep pure on a strict diet for his meals and does not allow him outdoors. She ends up in a battle of wills with Rosalie, a young woman determined to win Jonathan’s attention. A 1967 movie version starred Rosalind Russell, Robert Morse, and Barbara Harris. OH, MEN! OH, WOMEN! Edward Chodorov’s three-act comedy, which he also directed, opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre in a Cheryl Crawford production on 17 December 1953 for 382 performances, with a cast including Franchot Tone, Gig Young, Larry Blyden, Anne Jackson, and Betsey von Furstenberg. Tone played a well-known psychoanalyst planning to marry a girl who, he learns from a patient, has had a promiscuous and varied sexual life. He also learns that another patient, a male movie star, plans to seduce his fiancée, all of which leads to near-farcical confusions and an ultimate happy ending. Nunnally Johnson directed a 1957 film version with Dan Dailey, Ginger Rogers, and David Niven and for a time the play was a staple of stock theatres. O’HEARN, ROBERT (1921– ). Born in Elkhart, Indiana, O’Hearn attended Indiana University before becoming a scene designer for the Brattle Theatre at Harvard University. In 1952, he moved to New York and worked as an assistant designer for several productions, including Kismet (1953), The Pajama Game (1954), My Fair Lady (1956), and West Side Story (1957). His Broadway credits include Festival (1955), a 1956 revival of The Apple Cart, Child of Fortune (1956), and Abraham Cochrane (1964), but most of his design work was done for opera and dance companies, including 12 operas for the Metropolitan Opera, as well as designs for the New York City Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival, City Center Theatre, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Boston Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and many others, and for international companies, including Vienna Staatsoper, Vienna Volksoper, Hamburg Staatsoper, Bregenzer Festspiele, Karlsruhe

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Opera House, and the Canadian Opera. O’Hearn spent the last 20 years of his career teaching design at Indiana University, where he designed for the opera theatre, including three original operas by William Bolcom, among others. O’HORGAN, TOM (1924–2009). Director, composer, actor, and musician, O’Horgan was born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at DePaul University before he worked as an actor and musician with the Second City troupe. Best known as a director of the groundbreaking musical Hair (1968), for which he was nominated for a Tony Award, O’Horgan described his work as “kinetic sculpture.” He won a Drama Desk Award for Lenny (1971), a play based on the life and work of controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and on Broadway he also staged Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Inner City (1971), Dude (1972), The Leaf People (1975), 1977 revivals of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, I Won’t Dance (1981), and a 1984 revival of The Three Musketeers. Much of O’Horgan’s work was done Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway, where he won Drama Desk Awards for Tom Paine (1968) and Futz (1969), also receiving an Obie Award for the latter. He directed the 1969 film version of Futz and a screen version of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1974. OLD GLOBE THEATRE. Built in San Diego, California, in 1935 as a venue for presenting abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays for the California Pacific International Exposition, the Old Globe Theatre has become a landmark. When the exposition ended in 1937, the San Diego Community Theatre took over and remodeled the theatre as a not-for-profit company with Craig Noel as founding director. A 1937 production of John Van Druten’s The Distaff Side opened the theatre, which has been in continual operation since, although a 1978 arson fire seriously damaged the Old Globe Theatre itself, though most of its support spaces were salvaged. A new Festival Stage, an outdoor theatre, was built and in 1981, although another arson fire destroyed it four years later. Following a fundraising campaign, a major renovation took place and the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, a 612-seat house, was built. In 1985, the Old Globe moved to a year-round program of plays of all periods and styles. Jack O’Brien was artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre from 1981 to 2007 and several Old Globe productions, both revivals and new works, moved to Broadway. The Old Globe was presented with the Tony Award as outstanding regional theatre in 1984. OLD MAID, THE. Directed by Guthrie McClintic, this three-act Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Zoë Akins* was adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1925 novel The Mother’s Recompense and opened at the Empire Theatre on 7 January 1935 for 305 performances. The cast included Judith Anderson,

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Helen Menken,* and John Cromwell in a tale set during the American Civil War in which Charlotte Lovell loses the man she loves in the war only to find she is pregnant. She hides her daughter’s heritage and when the child is grown and about to marry a wealthy man, the self-sacrificing Charlotte faces the dilemma of hiding her past and protecting her child. A 1939 film version starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. OLEANNA. David Mamet’s highly controversial three-act drama depicting the battle of wills and wits between a male college professor and a female graduate student assaulted the gender-related power struggles inherent in sexual politics, political correctness, the empowerment of women, and the academic world. The play was first performance by Mamet’s own Back Bay Theatre Company in May 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but moved Off-Broadway to the Orpheum Theatre in October 1992, featuring William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon. The play generated considerable angry debate since it appeared at the time of the divisive Senate hearings over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court, during which Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by a former clerk, Anita Hill. Mamet directed a film version of Oleanna with Macy and Pidgeon in 1994 and the play was revived on Broadway in 2009 starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles. See also FEMINIST THEATRE. OLIVER, EDITH (1913–1998). New York native Oliver was educated at Smith College and worked as an actress in stock at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and on radio producing quiz shows and writing. In 1947, she began her work as a critic, contributing to the New Yorker and became a permanent member of the staff in 1961, specializing in writing about Off-Broadway and focusing on promoting new talents, including David Mamet, Woodie King, Jr., Christopher Durang, and Wendy Wasserstein, among others. Oliver once said, “I think of myself as a member of the audience. And I try to maintain that attitude until the curtain comes down. I don’t want to deprive myself of any surprises.” OLIVIER, LAURENCE (1907–1989). Widely considered the greatest English actor of his age, Olivier’s astonishing career extended to include directing and producing on stage and screen. Born in Dorking, Surrey, England, as Laurence Kerr Olivier, he dominated the English stage from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s, was the driving force in establishing the National Theatre of Great Britain, and while doing distinguished work as a director, Olivier was a major star of both theatre and movies. In films, he won a Best Actor Academy Award for Hamlet in 1948, which he also directed, and honorary Oscars in 1947 and

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1979 (he was also Oscar-nominated nine times). He received three Golden Globe Awards and five Emmys, with numerous other nominations and awards. He was knighted in 1947 and, in 1970, became the first English actor created as a life peer, known as Baron Olivier, of Brighton in the County of Sussex. Olivier’s career in America included a Tony Award nomination for acting in The Entertainer (1958) and on Broadway he also appeared in Murder on the Second Floor (1929), Private Lives (1931), with Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, The Green Bay Tree (1933), No Time for Comedy (1939) starring opposite Katharine Cornell, and revivals of Romeo and Juliet in 1940, costarring with his then-wife Vivien Leigh, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 in 1946, Uncle Vanya in 1946, Oedipus Rex in 1946, The Critic in 1946, Caesar and Cleopatra in 1951, and Antony and Cleopatra in 1951, and Becket (1960). Olivier also directed Broadway productions of Venus Observed (1952), The Tumbler (1960), and a revival of Filumena in 1980 starring his third wife, Joan Plowright. Olivier was further honored in 1984, when to acknowledge excellence in the English theatre, the annual Olivier Awards were named for him. OMAHA MAGIC THEATRE (OMT). Founded in 1968 by Jo Ann Schmidman in Omaha, Nebraska, the OMT is an experimental theatre aimed at audiences in the Midwest. Megan Terry is the theatre’s playwright-inresidence—her Viet Rock (1966), among other works, premiered in an OMT production—and Schmidman continues as artistic director. The troupe has toured widely and is located at 325 South 16th Street in Omaha. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. OMINUM GATHERUM. Teresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gerstein Vassilaros’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated “piping hot slice of satire,” as New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it, opened in September 2003 at the Variety Arts Theatre under Will Frears direction, with scenery by David Rockwell, costumes by Junghyun Georgia Lee, and lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. The dinner party concocted by the authors brings together a group of intellectuals and celebrities based on such famous figures as Christopher Hitchens, Martha Stewart, Edward Said, and Tom Clancy, to explore the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 (9/11), the morality of American capitalistic influences in the world, the motives of Muslim terrorists, the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis, and other hot-button topics of the day. ON BORROWED TIME. Paul Osborn’s fantasy of an old man’s battle of wits with Death opened at the Longacre Theatre in a Dwight Deere Wiman production on 3 February 1938 for 321 performances. The whimsical play,

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directed by Joshua Logan with scene design by Jo Mielziner, provided a memorable role for veteran actor Dudley Digges as Gramps who, with his orphaned grandson, Pud, and his wife, Nellie (Dorothy Stickney), take on Mr. Brink, the grim reaper, in a game of life and death. There have been two Broadway revivals; the first, in 1953, starred Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, and Leo G. Carroll and another in 1991 was nominated for a Best Revival Tony Award under the direction of George C. Scott, who also starred along with Teresa Wright and Nathan Lane. A 1939 movie version starred Lionel Barrymore,* Bondi, and Cedric Hardwicke. ON GOLDEN POND. Ernest Thompson’s Drama Desk Award-winning comedy-drama centered on an aging couple facing the infirmities of the years who are rejuvenated by a troubled youth, opened Off-Broadway at the New Apollo Theatre on 28 February 1979 for 126 performances; following a summer hiatus, the production reopened at the Century Theatre on 12 September 1979 for 256 additional performances. Spending the summer in their getaway house on Golden Pond, cantankerous Norman Thayer (Tom Aldredge), who is nearing the end of his life, is tended by his wife, Ethel (Frances Sternhagen, in a Tony Award-nominated performance). The summer idyll is disrupted when their daughter and a new beau arrive and ask the elderly couple to look after Billy, the beau’s adolescent son, for the summer. Norman and Billy have a difficult time adapting to each other, but as the summer goes on they grow close and Norman is rejuvenated by the experience, even as he faces his own imminent demise. On Golden Pond was revived on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on 7 April 2005 for 93 performances starring James Earl Jones (in a Tony-winning performance) and Leslie Uggams. It won a Tony as Best Revival. A film version starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in Academy Awardwinning performances was released in 1981, and a live production aired on CBS-TV in 2001 starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. ON THE VERGE; OR, THE GEOGRAPHY OF YEARNING. Eric Overmyer’s postmodern play about three female explorers (eight other characters are played by one actor) and the journeys they take—through time, as well as physically and emotionally—premiered in 1985 at Baltimore’s Center Stage, prior to productions at several other regional theatres including the Hartford Stage. Despite its esoteric qualities, it has become a staple of regional and university theatres. Critics found the play an intriguing merging of Tom Stoppard-style language and Thornton Wilder’s historical scope and whimsy and, as Mel Gussow wrote about it, “a play that is joyfully profeminist.” See also WOMEN/FEMININITY.

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ONCE IN A LIFETIME. The first collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, this three-act comedy about the lunacies of Hollywood opened in a Sam H. Harris production at the Music Box Theatre on 24 September 1930 for 406 performances, with Kaufman directing and appearing in the cast. Set against the background of the arrival of “talkies” in Hollywood, the play centers on a vaudeville* team, George and May, who, with their friend Jerry, head to Hollywood to start an elocution school for the actors now expected to speak in sound films in the aftermath of The Jazz Singer.* Once in Hollywood, they run afoul of a range of eccentric and self-absorbed movie people, from silent movie actresses and aspiring writers to studio heads and receptionists. A 1978 Circle in the Square revival brought actor Max Wright a Theatre World Award. The play was filmed in 1932 with Jack Oakie and Aline McMahon in the cast and a 1988 PBS-TV Great Performances version featured Zoe Wanamaker in the cast. O’NEAL, FREDERICK (1905–1992). Born Frederic Douglass O’Neal in Brooksville, Mississippi, O’Neal chose a stage career and became the first African American president of the Actors’ Equity Association (1964–1973) and founder of the American Negro Theatre in 1940. O’Neal had been drawn to the theatre in childhood, acting in local plays, and in 1927 he organized the Aldridge Players in St, Louis, Missouri, a black theatre company. In 1936, he moved to New York. On Broadway, he appeared in Anna Lucasta (1944), winning the New York Drama Critics Award for his performance as a comic bully, Take a Giant Step (1953), The Winner (1954), and House of Flowers (1954). On screen, he appeared in the 1959 film versions of Anna Lucasta and Take a Giant Step, as well as Pinky (1949), The Sins of Rachel Cade (1951), and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and on television shows in the 1950s and 1960s. O’NEILL, EUGENE (1888–1953).† Considered by many to be the first internationally significant American dramatist, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill wrote over 60 one-act and full-length plays. He received four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and in 1936 he became the first (and only) American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. O’Neill’s experimental and often epic dramas fall into three distinct eras: one-act plays (1912–1918) written in the realistic style, many depicting the lives of seafaring men and the wharf side denizens of saloons and the street; full-length dramas (1918–1934) in which O’Neill experimented with diverse theatrical devices including expressionism,* masks, and spoken asides employed to depict, among other themes, a modern battle of man versus fate and psychological portraits of individuals caught between their desires and the social and moral

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constraints of their time; and highly emotional, psychologically complex personal dramas (1934–1943) stripped of theatrical artifice for which he is most celebrated. Along with these achievements, O’Neill planned an 11-play cycle, A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, of which he completed only A Touch of the Poet (1935–1942) and a lengthy first draft of More Stately Mansions (1935–1940), intended as a generation-by-generation chronicle of a family tragically entrapped by their possessions and the decisions made by their forebears, and a projected cycle of one-act character studies, By Way of Obit, of which he completed only Hughie (1942). Illnesses undermined O’Neill’s ability to write in his later years—and he suffered, at times, from depression and alcoholism. O’Neill’s work is, to some extent, inspired by classical drama and characters whose psychological turmoil reflects the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and in the intense realistic dramas of family relations inspired by European modernists, particularly Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. O’Neill’s theatrical work began in response to his often troubled relationship with his own father, James O’Neill,* the popular nineteenth-century matinee idol who had a lucrative career with his highly popular performance as the heroic Edmond Dantès in a melodramatic* stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. For O’Neill, his father symbolized the worst attributes of American plays at that time—artificial, vulgar, and devoid of serious thought. Following his expulsion from Princeton University, a stint as a newspaperman, an ill-advised and short-lived marriage (he subsequently married two more times), and a dissolute period as a seaman and prospector in South America and in the bars of New York’s Bowery, O’Neill suffered a bout of tuberculosis which permitted him the leisure to educate himself through the study of the classics and important modernist writers. On this foundation, O’Neill sought to expunge the shallow melodramatic plays of his father’s commercialized popular theatre, but his plays are as much a product of the nineteenth-century stage as they are a rejection of it. Often melodramatic, occasionally sentimental, and owing much to the epic scale and spectacle of nineteenth-century American theatre, O’Neill aimed for—and often achieved—a loftier tragic vision in the classical sense even when making use of such devices. In the finest of his works, he captures moments of deep psychological resonance through the use of the Ibsenite device of the “saving lies” necessary to survive life’s vicissitudes. More importantly, his work is profoundly influenced by his own personal spiritual struggle and the dysfunction of his own family, which stemmed from alcoholism, the nomadic life resulting from his father’s acting career, and the morphine addiction of his mother, Ella Quinlan O’Neill.* Despite the fact that O’Neill soured on producing his plays on Broadway after the early 1930s, he

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continued writing well into the 1940s, during which time he wrote the plays which, after his death, renewed and enhanced his reputation. O’Neill’s plays include his Pulitzer Prize winners, Beyond the Horizon* (1918), Anna Christie* (1921), Strange Interlude* (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–1941). Other major works include his sole comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), as well as The Emperor Jones* (1920), The Hairy Ape* (1922), All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1924), Desire under the Elms* (1925), Lazarus Laughed* (1925), The Great God Brown* (1926), Dynamo* (1929), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Days without End (1933), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), among others. O’Neill had a son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr., by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, and two other children, Shane and Oona (who later married Charlie Chaplin), by his second wife, writer Agnes Boulton. O’Neill’s third wife, actress Carlotta Monterey, served as his literary executor after his death and is responsible for a renaissance of interest in O’Neill’s work in the late 1950s—resulting from her decision to go against O’Neill’s wishes and allow a Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956. That production, which brought the play a Pulitzer Prize, was followed by numerous O’Neill revivals that have continued unabated in international, regional theatres, and university stages. ONE FLEA SPARE. Naomi Wallace’s Obie Award-winning grim drama, inspired by John Donne’s poem “The Flea,” was commissioned by London’s Bush Theatre and opened there in late 1995 prior to its United States premiere in 1996 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, winning the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Joseph Kesselring Prize. Subsequently produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT), it opened on 9 March 1997 under Ron Daniels’s direction and with Dianne Wiest in a leading role. Set in 1665 during the Black Plague, the action focuses on four characters trapped in a house where the horrifying circumstances of their forced quarantine reveals cultural, social class, and sexual conflicts. New York Times critic Ben Brantley, reviewing the NYSF/PT production, described the play as “densely lyrical, self-conscious drama.” ONE-PERSON SHOWS. See SOLO PERFORMANCES. ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON. James P. Hagan’s sentimental, simple comedy in a prologue and two acts opened at the Little Theatre* on 15 February 1933 for 322 performances under the direction of Leo Bulgakov. Set in

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the 1890s, the play featured Lloyd Nolan as dentist Biff Grimes, whose good nature is consistently taken advantage of by his “friend,” Hugo Barnstead. Hugo steals the affections of Virginia, the girl of Biff’s dreams, and Biff ends up in jail thanks to Hugo. Biff marries loyal, gentle Amy and comes to fully appreciate her after he is called upon to extract a tooth from Hugo. Seeing Hugo and the soured Virginia bickering and unhappy helps Biff realize that he has a good life. The New Haven Register wrote of the original production that it is “a warm little love story of disarming sentimentality and charm.” The play was forced to close for a week early in its run when newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a bank holiday to ease the impact of the Great Depression, and the play was purported to be only one vote shy of winning the Pulitzer Prize. A 1933 film version featured Gary Cooper and Fay Wray and a superior 1941 movie, retitled The Strawberry Blonde, memorably starred James Cagney as Biff, with Jack Carson as Hugo, Rita Hayworth as Virginia, and Olivia de Havilland as Amy. A 1949 musical film, restoring the original title, starred Dennis Morgan and Janis Paige. ONE THIRD OF A NATION. This controversial work written by Arthur Arent as part of Living Newspaper series for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) opened on 17 January 1938 for 237 performances under the direction of Lem Ward, with scene design by Howard Bay. The most commercially successful of the FTP’s Living Newspapers, the play, which was presented in a more realistic way than was typical of this unique form, and dramatized the plight of a significant portion of American citizens required to live in substandard housing. The play was adapted to the screen in 1939 with a cast including Sylvia Sidney, Leif Erickson, Sidney Lumet, Myron McCormick, and Hiram Sherman. ONG, HAN (1968– ). A Filipino born in Manila, Ong moved to the United States with his family in 1984. He became interested in theatre while in high school and was accepted by the young playwright’s laboratory of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Dropping out of high school, he pursued a playwriting career, receiving a commission from the National Endowment of the Arts via the Mark Taper Forum. He moved to New York in 1994, where his plays, including Symposium in Manila (1991), Reasons to Live (1992), Cornerstone Geography (1992), Bachelor Rat (1992), Airport Music (1993), and The L.A. Plays (1994), won critical approval and opportunities for his work to be performed in major repertory and Off-Broadway theatres. Ong’s plays, which are typically set in multicultural urban environments, explore issues of identity and the challenges facing Asian Americans. His later works include

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The Chang Fragments (1996), The Stranded in the World (1999), “Fixer Chao” (2002), The Disinherited (2005), and Swooney Planet (2006). OPATOSHU, DAVID (1918–1996). Born David Opatovsky in New York, he was the son of Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu and he became a successful character actor, often in Jewish roles, on stage and screen. On Broadway, he began in small roles in The Group Theatre’s production of Night Music (1940) and, as he worked increasingly in films (and later television), Opatoshu returned to Broadway for Me and Molly (1948), Flight Into Egypt (1952), Reclining Figure (1954), Silk Stockings (1955), Once More, with Feeling (1958), The Wall (1960), Bravo Giovanni (1962), Lorenzo (1963), and Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969). Opatoshu won an Emmy Award for a guest performance in Gabriel’s Fire (1990) and appeared in over 120 television shows and such films as Exodus (1960), Enter Laughing (1967), and A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970). OPEN THEATRE. During the 1960s, this experimental theatre group founded by a group of students of Nola Chilton rose to prominence for the 10 years of its existence from 1963 to 1973. Based in improvisatory techniques, inspired by Viola Spolin, and exercises known as “sound and movement” and “transformations,” the OT was guided by visionary director Joseph Chaikin from The Living Theatre. Its approach paralleled that of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Several of its productions captured the 1960s zeitgeist, most particularly America Hurrah (1966), Viet Rock (1966), and The Serpent (1969). See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. OPPENHEIMER, GEORGE (1900–1977). A New York-born drama critic, playwright, and editor, Oppenheimer also cofounded Viking Press and worked for a time as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Here Today (1932) was produced by Sam H. Harris and starred Ruth Gordon, but managed only a brief run. His translation of Jacques Deval’s Another Love (1934) and A Mighty Man Is He (1960) had similarly short runs. In Hollywood, Oppenheimer was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, The War against Mrs. Hadley (1942). Alone or in collaboration, he also wrote scripts for the films Roman Scandals (1933), Libeled Lady (1936), A Yank at Oxford (1938), Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), Two-Faced Woman (1941), and Easy to Wed (1946), and wrote episodes for the television comedy, Topper (1953–1955). ORBACH, JERRY (1935–2004). Despite a significant career on Broadway and Off-Broadway, Jerome Bernard Orbach, born in the Bronx, New York,

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was best known for his long-running role as Lennie Briscoe in the television series, Law & Order (1990–2004), for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. Son of a vaudevillian* and a singer, Orbach spent a nomadic childhood before pursuing his theatre interests at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, after which he moved to New York and studied acting with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio. His first important appearance Off-Broadway, stepping into the cast of Threepenny Opera (1955), led to his introducing the song “Try to Remember” playing El Gallo in the Off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks (1960), which ran for over 40 years. Subsequent roles were a 1964 revival of The Cradle Will Rock and Scuba Duba (1967), before he appeared in a series of noted Broadway musicals, including Carnival! (1961), revivals of Guys and Dolls in 1965, which brought him a Tony Award nomination, Carousel in 1965, and Annie Get Your Gun in 1966, and Promises, Promises (1968), for which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. He was nominated for Chicago (1975), and he also appeared as the director Julian Marsh in 42nd Street (1980). Orbach also appeared in straight plays including The Natural Look (1967) and the hit comedy 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972). Orbach was nominated for Emmy Awards for an appearance on the TV-situation comedy The Golden Girls in 1990 and for a TV adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, and he acted in numerous films, including Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL (OSF). Established in 1935, the OSF is among the first not-for-profit theatres in the United States. The theatre’s beginnings were in the Chautauqua era in 1893, when Ashland, Oregon, constructed a building to seat 1,500 people. This building was replaced in 1917 by a domed building, but when it was largely abandoned, it fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1933, leaving some structural walls. Angus L. Bowmer, a teacher at Southern Oregon Normal School, felt the remaining walls formed a shape not unlike the Elizabethan playhouses on the sixteenth century and he began producing a Shakespearean festival within the walls, beginning with a production of Twelfth Night in 1935. The festival continued until World War II and took a hiatus until 1947, when construction began on a new stage opened in 1959. An indoor space named for Bowmer opened in 1970, the year before he retired, and a third space opened in 1977. In 1983, the OSF was the recipient of the Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre. The OSF continues to perform Shakespeare’s plays, as well as many classic and modern works. Bill Rauch became artistic director in 2006. ORGANIC THEATRE COMPANY (OTC). This Chicago, Illinois-based theatre was founded by Stuart Gordon in the 1972, and it has premiered new

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works, including David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and has toured productions to several New York theatres, including the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre, the Performing Garage, and others. The OTC’s productions have been staged in several venues around Chicago. The OTC merged with Chicago’s Touchstone Theatre in 1996, with Touchstone’s artistic director Ina Marlowe taking over from Gordon. In 2006, Alexander Gelman assumed leadership of the company. ORPHAN’S HOME CYCLE, THE. Critics made approving comparisons to the plays of Anton Chekhov when Horton Foote’s nine-play cycle, set in an early twentieth-century Texas small town, opened under Michael Wilson’s direction at the Peter Norton Space in a Signature Theatre Company production in November 2009. Some of the nine plays had been seen in previous productions, but this bill was the first to connect all nine interrelated plays which, according to New York Times critic Ben Brantley, offered “the complexity, richness and narrative hold of a juicy nineteenth century novel.” ORPHEUS DESCENDING. Tennessee Williams’s three-act drama, rewritten from his failed 1940 play Battle of Angels, opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on 21 March 1957 for a disappointing 68 performance run under the direction of Harold Clurman, with scene design by Boris Aronson (who was nominated for a Tony Award) and costumes by Lucinda Ballard (Tonynominated). Cliff Robertson won a Theatre World Award as Val Xavier, a character based on the mythological Orpheus, who works in a dry goods store run by Lady Torrance (Maureen Stapleton), a middle-aged woman whose elderly husband, who owns the store, is dying. Tragedy results when Val and Lady are drawn together. Jane Rose and Lois Smith were among the supporting cast. Williams adapted the play for the screen as The Fugitive Kind, which starred Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, and Victor Jory, under Sidney Lumet’s direction. A 1989 revival of Orpheus Descending, directed by Peter Hall and starring Vanessa Redgrave, Kevin Anderson, Tammy Grimes, and Anne Twomey, ran for 97 performances and was filmed for television in 1990. OSBORN, PAUL (1901–1988). Son of an Evansville, Indiana, minister, Osborn was educated at the University of Michigan and Yale University, where he studied with the esteemed drama professor George Pierce Baker.* Osborn taught at both Michigan and Yale before his first play, Hotbed (1928), a drama set on a college campus, was produced to little effect. His next play, A Ledge (1929), was a similarly unsuccessful melodrama,* but he won critical approval with The Vinegar Tree (1930), a comedy about a middle-aged

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woman in pursuit of an old lover. Osborn’s next play, Oliver Oliver (1934), flopped, but he scored a major success with On Borrowed Time (1938), a dramatic fantasy about an old man’s attempt to outsmart the embodiment of Death. This was followed by another failure, Morning’s at Seven (1939), a comedy-drama centered on the lives of four elderly sisters in a midwestern small town, but despite its initial disappointing critical and commercial response, the play triumphed in a long-running 1980 Broadway revival and was also filmed for television. On Borrowed Time and Morning’s at Seven stand out among his plays and reflect the diversity of his style, although one common link among his plays are richly drawn characters and an optimistic, if frequently bittersweet, view of human foibles. Subsequently, Osborn’s dramatic output was strictly limited to dramatic adaptations of novels by other writers, including The Innocent Voyage (1943), A Bell for Adano (1944), Point of No Return (1951), and The World of Suzie Wong (1948), most of which were successful, and he also wrote numerous screenplays. OSBORNE, JOHN (1929–1994). An English-born dramatist whose groundbreaking play Look Back in Anger (1956) began the “angry young man” theatre movement, Osborne saw several of his plays produced on Broadway. Look Back in Anger was the first, garnering a Tony Award nomination in 1958. Other Tony nominations followed for his plays Epitaph for George Dillon (1959) and Inadmissable Evidence (1966), and he won the Best Play Tony for Luther (1964). Osborne’s plays The Entertainer (1958), which starred Laurence Olivier in an acclaimed performance, and A Patriot for Me (1969) were also produced on Broadway. OSTROW, STUART (1932– ). New York-born Ostrow achieved prominence as a Broadway producer, director, and writer, and has taught theatre at the University of Houston. He began his career working as an apprentice for Broadway composer/lyricist Frank Loesser before becoming a producer and sometime director. His productions of the musical 1776 (1969) and the play M. Butterfly (1988) won Tony Awards, and nominations went to his productions of The Apple Tree (1966) and Pippin (1972). Among Ostrow’s other Broadway productions were Here’s Love (1963), which he also directed, Scratch (1971), Stages (1978), The Moony Shapiro Songbook (1981), and La Bête (1991). He founded the Stuart Ostrow Musical Theatre Lab, a not-for-profit workshop to encourage the creation of new musicals and plays. OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY. Jerry Sterner’s comedy premiered at New Jersey’s American Stage Company in 1987, and it ran for over two years OffBroadway. The play concerns a Wall Street operator (“shark”) Garfinkle,

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attempting to buy out a struggling family business whose owner is more interested in the quality of his product and the welfare of his employees than in money. The struggle to save the company from the predatory Garfinkle allows both sides to debate the realities and the sentiments of contemporary American capitalism. A film version starring Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck premiered in 1991. OUR TOWN. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama caused something of a sensation when it opened at the Henry Miller’s Theatre on 4 February 1938 for 336 performances in a Jed Harris production. Harris also directed, and the sensation resulted from the novel approach of eliminating traditional scenery, making use of a rehearsal approach in which a few ladders, chairs, and umbrellas created the environment for the play set in a typical New England small town, Grover’s Corners, between 1901 and 1913. The unique visual approach to Our Town in its conception and original production was its most discussed element by critics who, like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, otherwise described it as a “hauntingly beautiful play” with a “detached tone,” presumably created by the matter-of-fact narration of the Stage Manager, played in its original production by Frank Craven. Atkinson claimed that although Wilder’s reputation was based on his novels, Our Town made it necessary to “reckon with him as a dramatist”; the play, he pronounced, was “one of the finest achievements of the current stage.” Other critics concurred, even those expressing puzzlement over the elimination of scenery, which Atkinson lauded as creating a “profound, strange, unworldly significance.” The elimination of three-dimensional realistic scenery most obviously enhances the overall theatrical qualities of Our Town, although its impact is more profound in stripping away unnecessary details as the central characters reveal their deepest feelings, fears, and longings in one-on-one encounters. This is most evident in the key scenes between the play’s central character, Emily (Martha Scott) and George (John Craven), which for all of their superficial naiveté, are achingly raw in feeling and, as is most obvious in the famous soda fountain scene in which as teenagers they express their enduring love, a high-stakes moment in both of their lives. The play’s juxtaposition of these bare-bones moments with the greater context provided by the omniscient Stage Manager made the play for its original audience a haunting and timeless meditation on life and death. Our Town is often seen as a definitive American play and its continual productions, either on stage, film or television, and in professional and community theatres in the United States and beyond confirms its significance. There have been four major Broadway revivals (1944, 1969, 1988, 2002), in-

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numerable Off-Broadway productions, including an acclaimed 2009 version directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theatre (in 2010, during its run, Helen Hunt took on the role of the Stage Manager; she was not the first woman, though—Geraldine Fitzgerald had played the role in a 1971 Williamstown Theatre Festival production), regional theatre productions, and several filmed versions beginning with the 1940 movie adaptation in which Craven reprised his role as the Stage Manager (along with Scott, the original Emily), and television films in 1977, 1989, and 2003. A 1955 television musical based on the play introduced the song “Love and Marriage” and starred Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager. OUSPENSKAYA, MARIA (1876–1949).† Born in Tula, Russia, Maria Ouspenskaya joined the Moscow Art Theatre* (MAT) and appeared in Russian motion pictures before the Revolution. When the MAT visited New York for a season in 1922–1923, Ouspenskaya decided not to return to Russia and, with Richard Boleslavsky, cofounded the American Laboratory Theatre (ALT), which aimed to bring the acting theories of Constantin Stanislavsky to American actors. While devoted to her ALT classes, Ouspenskaya occasionally acted on Broadway in productions of The Saint (1924), The Witch (1926), The Passing Present (1931), Abide with Me (1935), Daughters of Atreus (1936), and Outrageous Fortune (1943), most of which were short-lived. During the 1930s and 1940s, she appeared in about two dozen Hollywood movies in character roles, most memorably as Maleva, the gypsy fortune-teller, in The Wolf Man (1941) and its sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). OUT CRY. See TWO-CHARACTER PLAY, THE. OUTDOOR DRAMA. This term refers, in its most general sense, to theatre performed in the open air, which includes many summer theatres and Shakespeare festivals, among others, but it more accurately refers to those historically based outdoor productions such as The Lost Colony (1937), the first in a long line of such dramas, in this case recounting the rise and fall of the early colonial experiment at Roanoke, Virginia. This first outdoor drama, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Paul Green, is sometimes referred to as a “symphonic drama,” but “outdoor drama” is the more common appellation. Some of the best known and longest running others include Unto These Hills, Horn in the West, From This Day Forward, Trumpet in the Land, and Tecumseh. Like The Lost Colony, most reflect an historical situation, but some have a religious orientation as well. All feature visual spectacle and large casts in period costumes. The Institute of Outdoor Drama at the

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public service agency with the mission of fostering excellence in the work of 102 constituent theatres. OUTER CRITICS CIRCLE, THE. A group of drama critics from the greater metropolitan area of New York created awards, presented in 1949 for the first time, to celebrate both Broadway and Off-Broadway achievement. The awards jury is made up of critics from the out-of-town New Yorkarea newspapers, national periodicals, and media outlets. The first awards in 1949–1950 went to The Cocktail Party for Best Play and The Consul for Best Musical, along with acting awards. The awards are currently given in 23 categories similar to the Tony Awards and are typically presented about two weeks prior to the annual presentation of the Tonys. OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS. Joe DiPietro’s comedy premiered at the John Houseman Theatre on 5 October 1998 under the direction of Joel Bishoff, with scene and lighting design by Neil Peter Jampolis and Jane Reisman, with a cast including Broadway veterans Dick Latessa and Joan Copeland. The play centers on the machinations of the paternal and maternal grandparents of Nick, a young Italian American from New Jersey, to keep him from taking a job that will cause him to leave the Garden State. A dinner is planned at which the family arranges for an attractive single girl to lure Nick into staying. OVER 21. Ruth Gordon’s three-act comedy opened in a Max Gordon production at the Music Box Theatre on 3 January 1944 for 221 performances under the direction of George S. Kaufman. Gordon also starred as Paula Wharton, the wife of Max, a middle-aged newspaper editor, who signs up for Officer Candidate School during World War II and finds the adjustment to the rigors of army life difficult as he competes with much younger men. Paula supports Max’s goal and counters Max’s boss, who wants him to give up and return to his job at the newspaper. A 1945 movie version starred Irene Dunne and Alexander Knox and, for a time, the play became a staple of stock and community theatres. OVERMYER, ERIC (1951– ). Born Eric McElduff Overmyer in Boulder, Colorado, he graduated from Reed College and is best known for his postmodern, pro-feminist play On the Verge (1985). He has written several other plays, including Native Speech (1983), The Double Bass (1986), In a Pig’s Valise (1986), In Perpetuity throughout the Universe (1988), On the Road to Jerusalem (1989), Don Juan de La Jolla (1990), Kafka’s Radio (1990), Mi Vida Loca (1990), Heliotrope Bouquet (1991), Alki (1992), and Dark Rapture

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(1992), as well as adaptations of works by Henrik Ibsen, Jean Giraudoux, and Heinrich von Kleist. Overmyer has written (and produced) more for episodic television, receiving Emmy Award nominations for Homicide: The Movie (2000) and Law & Order in 2002. He has also written and/or produced for the TV shows The Wire (2006) and New Amsterdam (2008). OWENS, ROCHELLE (1936– ). An avant-garde dramatist who emerged as part of the Off-Broadway scene of the 1960s, she was born Rochelle Bass in Brooklyn, New York. Virtually all of her plays were done in Off-Broadway theatres, including her best known work, Futz (1965), which was produced at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club café, following a workshop production at the Guthrie Theatre. Her plays reflect the era in which they were written, merging antiestablishment political attitudes with an absurdist style. Owens’s other plays, which have brought her five Obie Awards, include The String Game (1965), Homo (1966), Istanboul (1968), Beclch (1968), Farmer’s Almanac (1968), Futz and What Came After (1968), The Queen of Greece (1969), He Wants Shih (1971), The Karl Marx Play (1973), Coconut Folk Singer (1973), Kontraption (1974), Emma Instigated Me (1976), The Widow and the Colonel (1977), Game of Billiards (1978), Sweet Potatoes (1978), Chucky’s Hunch (1981), Who Do You Want Peire Vidal? (1982), and Three Front (1988).

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P PACINO, AL (1940– ). One of the most honored film and stage actors of the late twentieth century, Alfred James Pacino was born in the Bronx, New York. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and Pacino found theatre an outlet. He did not have much luck seeking a stage career until he won acceptance into The Actors Studio, which led to roles and an Obie Award nomination for Why is a Crooked Letter (1966). He won an Obie for his performance in Israel Horowitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968). In 1969, Pacino won Tony, Drama Desk, and Theatre World Awards for the Broadway production of Don Petersen’s Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969), after which he drew critical plaudits for a short-lived revival of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real in 1970. Film stardom followed, and Pacino did not return to Broadway for several years, but starred in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977), for which he won Tony and Drama Desk Awards. His periodic returns to the stage have included a critically derided production of Shakespeare’s King Richard III in 1979, revivals of American Buffalo in 1983, which brought him a Drama Desk Award nomination, Chinese Coffee in 1992, Salome in 1992 and 2003, Eugene O’Neill’s one-act Hughie in 1996, which he also directed, and a revival of The Merchant of Venice for the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) in 2010. Pacino’s fame as an actor results mostly from his screen acting. He won an Academy Award for Scent of a Woman (1992) and has been nominated seven additional times for The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), . . . And Justice for All (1979), Dick Tracy (1990), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also won Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, and Golden Globe awards for the television film version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003) and a Golden Globe for Serpico, along with numerous nominations. Pacino also won acclaim as Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the 2010 television film, You Don’t Know Jack. A sometime film and theatre director, Pacino won a Directors Guild of America Award for directing Looking for Richard (1996), in which he also starred. Pacino won a Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globes in 2001 and an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

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PAGE, GERALDINE (1924–1987). Born in Kirksville, Missouri, Page became a highly respected stage and screen actresses from the early 1950s to her death. She rocketed to the forefront of American stage acting in a 1952 Circle in the Square revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke directed by José Quintero, which brought new respect to a play that had generated only critical apathy in its original Broadway version, and it is the production believed to have given credibility to the fledgling Off-Broadway movement. Page was acclaimed for her performance and won recognition as a leading actor of the highly naturalistic school. Page won a Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in Mid-Summer (1953), and she subsequently received Tony Award nominations for Sweet Bird of Youth (1960), Absurd Person Singular (1975), Agnes of God (1982), and a 1987 revival of Blithe Spirit. Page also gave acclaimed Broadway performances in The Immoralist (1954), The Rainmaker (1954), revivals of Strange Interlude* in 1953 and The Three Sisters in 1964, P. S. I Love You (1964), Black Comedy/ White Lies (1967), and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), among others. Late in her career, Page won an Academy Award for The Trip to Bountiful (1985), following seven other Oscar nominations for Hondo (1953), Summer and Smoke (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), Interiors (1978), and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). Page also won two Golden Globe Awards, for Summer and Smoke and Sweet Bird of Youth, among several nominations, and won two Emmy Awards, for Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory (1966) and The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967). Page married actor Rip Torn in 1961. PAKLEDINAZ, MARTIN (1953– ). A native of Detroit, Michigan, Pakledinaz was educated at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan prior to working as a successful costume designer acknowledged for his versatility in designing for classics, musicals, and original works. In Chicago, he won a Joseph Jefferson Award for a Goodman Theatre revival of Pal Joey and garnered a Jefferson nomination for the Goodman’s Black Snow in 1993. On Broadway, Pakledinaz won Tony Awards for a 2000 revival of Kiss Me, Kate, which also brought him a Drama Desk Award, and Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), the latter bringing him an Olivier Award nomination for its London production. Pakledinaz was also Tony-nominated for his costumes for The Life (1997), Golden Child (1998), revivals of The Pajama Game in 2006, Gypsy in 2008, and Blithe Spirit in 2009. His other Broadway credits include I Won’t Dance (1981), revivals of You Never Can Tell in 1986, Hamlet in 1992, and Anna Christie* in 1993, A Grand Night for Singing (1993), revivals of Hedda Gabler in 1994, Holiday* in 1995, The Father in 1996, Summer and Smoke in 1996, and The Diary of Anne

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Frank in 1997, Taller Than a Dwarf (2000), revivals of A Thousand Clowns in 2001 and The Boys from Syracuse in 2002, A Year with Frog and Toad (2003), The Look of Love (2003), revivals of Wonderful Town in 2003 and Grease in 2007, and Is He Dead? (2007). Pakledinaz has designed for major regional theatres and for several international opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera. PAN ASIAN REPERTORY THEATRE (PART). A company devoted to encouraging production of new plays by and about Asian Americans, the PART was established in 1977 with productions of founder Tisa Chang’s The Legend of Wu Chang (1977), adapted from George C. Hazelton* and J. Harry Benrimo’s* The Yellow Jacket,* and Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (1977). The PART has presented new works by such writers as Wakako Yamauchi, Ernest Abuba, Edward Sakamoto, Momoko Iko, Philip Kan Gotanda, Ruth Wolff, R. A. Shiomi, Kobo Abe, Che Inhoon, Ping Chong, David Henry Hwang, Elizabeth Wong, Kitty Chen, Alexander Woo, Cherylene Lee, Lilah Kan, Susan Kim, Lu Yu, Chin Woon-Ping, Marty Chan, Velina Hasu Houston, and Nguyen thi Minh Ngoc, as well as adaptations of works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Carlo Goldoni, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Noël Coward, John Patrick, and Fay Kanin. The PART began with the mission of providing opportunities for Asian American writers and actors, but became more global in its view at the dawn of the millennium. PAPER BAG PLAYERS, THE (PBP). Founded in 1958 by Judith Martin, Shirley Kaplin, Sudie Bond, and Remy Charlip, the New York-based not-for-profit PBP was established as a company of adult performers who create original, contemporary, musical theatre for kids ages four through nine. Don Ashwander joined the company as a composer and in 2009, Ted Brackett became artistic director, taking over from Judith Martin who was responsible for over 35 original productions. The PBP has toured the United States and numerous countries and performs for in excess of 70,000 children each year, an achievement that has brought the company grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Obie Awards, and other acknowledgments. PAPER DOLLS. Elaine Jackson’s drama satirizing societal roles of African American women was first produced in January 1983 at the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art in New York City. It concerns Margaret-Elizabeth, Miss Emancipation of 1930 and Lizzie, the first runner-up, who are asked to judge a beauty pageant 50 years after their own. Awaiting the competition, the two women replay moments from their lives, with Jackson employing

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various boldly theatrical devices (including a mock minstrel show finale parodying ideals of beauty) to blur past and present. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; WOMEN/FEMININITY. PAPER MILL PLAYHOUSE. Established in 1938 on the site of the eighteenth-century Thistle Paper Mill in Millburn, New Jersey, the PMP was founded by Antoinette Scudder and Frank Carrington. The theatre opened with a production of Gregorio Martinez Sierra’s The Kingdom of God. The following year, Scudder and Carrington produced the first New Jersey Theatre Festival and set up a theatre school for children, also announcing that a permanent year-round repertory company would be established by the PMP. Much of the first decade of productions were operettas,* including the premiere of The Desert Song in 1942. In 1951, a change of policy led to productions of musicals and plays as well as operettas and in 1956, Dorothy and Lillian Gish in The Chalk Garden brought attention to the theatre, as did Basil Rathbone in The Heiress, which he also directed. Scudder died in 1958 to be replaced by Angelo Del Rossi, leading to an era of productions featuring noted stage, film, and television stars, including Arlene Francis, Celeste Holm, Joan Fontaine, Kevin McCarthy, Eve Arden, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Gloria Swanson, Walter Pidgeon, Tallulah Bankhead, Myrna Loy, Carol Channing, Claudette Colbert, Helen Hayes, Shelley Winters, Jack Gilford, Eddie Bracken, Brian Bedford, Tammy Grimes, Bernadette Peters, Mickey Rooney, and numerous others. Carrington died in 1975, but Del Rossi continued until 1980, when a major fire destroyed the theatre. In 1982, a new theatre opened with the American premiere of Robert and Elizabeth and appearances by Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst leading an all-star cast in a revival of You Can’t Take It with You. The 1989 PMP revival of Show Boat was broadcast live on PBS-TV, as was the 1999 PMP production of Crazy for You. Del Rossi departed in 2003 to be replaced by Michael Gennaro, but the PMP suffered a financial crisis in 2006 and Mark S. Hoebee took over as artistic director in 2008. PAPP, JOSEPH (1921–1991). Perhaps the most uniquely influential theatre producer and director in the second half of the twentieth century, Papp was born Joseph Papirofsky in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants. Among Papp’s high school teacher was Harlem Renaissance* dramatist Eulalie Spence, but Papp truly studied at the proverbial school of hard knocks in theatre, starting the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) in 1954 to bring the plays of Shakespeare to a broader, more diverse public than established and comparatively elite theatres could. After a few years of

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struggle, Papp was able to secure the use of Central Park for free outdoor NYSF performances and these have continued into the twenty-first century at the Delacorte Theatre, extending beyond Shakespeare to include other works. The Festival was presented with special Tony Awards in 1958 and 1970. Papp also expanded his interests to establishing the New York Public Theatre at the Astor Library on Lafayette Street in 1967. In this venue, Papp stressed production of works by new and often cutting-edge writers, young actors and directors, and with multicultural diversity evident in content and production style. The first Public Theatre production, Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody (1969), became the first play by an African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. Other Pulitzer Prize-winning plays premiered at the Public include That Championship Season (1972) and A Chorus Line (1975). Both won Tonys, as did the Public’s productions of the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), Sticks and Bones (1972), a 1981 revival of The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), and several were Tony-nominated, including The Au Pair Man (1974), Short Eyes (1975), 1977 revivals of The Cherry Orchard and Threepenny Opera, Streamers (1977), for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977), Runaways (1978), and Plenty (1983). Many of these productions transferred to Broadway. Papp was presented with a special 1978 Theatre World Award. Both the Public and the NYSF pioneered non-traditional casting and Papp’s aesthetic centered on progressive politics. African American and Latino writers and actors were provided nearly unprecedented opportunity, and Papp also produced homosexual-themed plays, particularly in response to the AIDS crisis, staging among other works Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985). Papp directed as well, including In the Boom Boom Room (1973) and Mert & Phil (1974), but his true calling was that of a producer and a visionary in the civic and cultural roles of theatre. Papp undeniably changed the theatrical landscape of New York City at the moment Broadway was in steep decline due to mounting costs and the extraordinary cultural changes of the 1960s. Papp’s efforts shaped the mission of Off-Broadway theatre and kept theatrical experimentation alive in the New York during second half of the twentieth century. PARADISE LOST. Clifford Odets’s three-act drama set during the Great Depression, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 9 December 1935 for 73 performances in a production of The Group Theatre under the direction of Harold Clurman with scene design by Boris Aronson. The cast of Group actors included Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan, Luther Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Robert Lewis. Borrowing his title from

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English poet John Milton, Odets centers his play on a prosperous middleaged couple whose fortunes change during the Depression when the family handbag business is lost and their son marries a flighty young woman oblivious to the new economic circumstances. The play’s production in late 1935 capped an extraordinary year for Odets and the Group, which had produced his plays Awake and Sing!, Till the Day I Die, and Waiting for Lefty to considerable critical acclaim. A 1971 PBS-TV production featured Bernadette Peters, Eli Wallach, Jo Van Fleet, Fred Gwynne, Cliff Gorman, and George Voskovec. PARICHY, DENNIS (1938– ). A noted lighting designer, Parichy studied at Northwestern University before designing over 30 Broadway productions and served as resident lighting designer for the Circle Repertory Theatre, collaborating closely with Marshall W. Mason. Parichy won a Drama Desk Award and was nominated for a Tony Award for designing Talley’s Folly (1980). He also received Tony nominations for Wilson’s Fifth of July (1981) and Redwood Curtains (1993) and Drama Desk nominations for Fifth of July and Coastal Disturbances (1987). Many of Parichy’s Broadway designs were for realistic dramas and comedies, but he also lit a few musicals, including The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978) and its revival in 1982, and two Penn & Teller shows (1987, 1991). Parichy’s other major Broadway credits include Knock Knock (1976), Crimes of the Heart (1981), Angels Fall (1983), As Is (1985), The Nerd (1987), Burn This (1987), and revivals of The Tenth Man in 1989, The Price in 1992, and Bus Stop in 1996. Parichy published Illuminating the Play: The Artistry of Lighting Design (2009). PARKER, DOROTHY (1893–1967).† Dorothy Rothschild was born in West End, New Jersey, and as Dorothy Parker (following a failed marriage to Edwin Porter Parker II) became a celebrated writer. As a critic, Parker wrote during the 1910s for Vogue and Vanity Fair before joining the staff of the New Yorker as book reviewer “Constant Reader” and, later, as drama critic. Parker’s sarcastic, witty condemnations of plays and actors are legendary, as when she described The House Beautiful (1931) as “the play lousy,” or when she wrote that Katharine Hepburn, starring in The Lake (1934), ran the gamut of emotions “from A to B.” Parker wrote sketches for the musical revue* The 49ers (1922), lyrics for No, Sirree! (1922) and Shoot the Works (1931), and collaborated on two successful plays, Close Harmony; or, The Lady Next Door (1924; with Elmer Rice) and Ladies of the Corridor (1953; with Arnaud D’Usseau). With D’Usseau she also wrote the unproduced play The Ice Age (1955), and she collaborated with Ross Evans on the The Coast of Illyria (1949). One of Parker’s books, After Such Pleasures, was adapted

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to the stage by Edward F. Gardner in 1934, but it failed. With her second husband, writer Alan Campbell, Parker wrote motion picture scripts, including A Star Is Born (1937) and the never-produced play The Happiest Man (1939). Parker also contributed lyrics to the musical Candide (1956), wrote 20 other screenplays, several collections of poetry, and is also remembered as founder and resident “wit” of the famed Algonquin Hotel Round Table,* along with George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, and James Thurber, among others. PARKER, MARY-LOUISE (1964– ). Born in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Parker spent part of her childhood in Thailand while her father served in the United States Army. She studied theatre at the North Carolina School of the Arts before landing a job on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in the 1980s. Parker acted Off-Broadway and won a Theatre World Award for her performance as a bride transformed into an old man in Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss (1990), which also brought her Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. She won both as a mathematician’s daughter in David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Proof (2000) and she was nominated for a Tony in Lucas’s Reckless (2004). Parker also appeared in a 1996 revival of Bus Stop as the chanteuse Cheri and in the title role of a 2009 revival of Hedda Gabler. She has also appeared frequently in film and television. On the big screen, she has appeared in Longtime Companion (1990), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and Howl (2010), among others. Parker won and Emmy and Golden Globe Award for the HBO-TV miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003) and she won a Golden Globe for her television series, Weeds (2005–2009). PARKS, HILDY (1926–2004). A native of Washington, D.C., Parks studied at the University of Virginia before working as an actress, writer, and producer. She appeared in small roles on Broadway beginning in the late 1940s, including Summer and Smoke (1948), Magnolia Alley (1949), and To Dorothy, A Son (1951), before marrying producer Alexander H. Cohen and becoming a production associate for Baker Street (1965), a 1966 revival of Ivanov, At the Drop of Another Hat (1966), Black Comedy/White Lies (1967), Little Murders (1967), Dear World (1969), Home (1970), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), and Ulysses in Nighttown (1974). She became a producer for the musical version of I Remember Mama (1979), A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980), 84 Charing Cross Road (1982), Edmund Kean (1983), Le Tragedie de Carmen (1984), which won a Drama Desk Award, Play Memory (1984), Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1984), and others. When

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Cohen produced the annual Antoinette Perry Tony Awards for television beginning in the 1960s, Parks often wrote the shows. PARKS, SUZAN-LORI (1963– ). Born to a military family in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Parks spent some years in Germany during her youth, but returned to the United States to attend the John Carroll School and Mount Holyoke College where she met writer James Baldwin who encouraged her playwriting ambitions. Parks’s plays deal with race and the power of language and history. Off-Broadway, Parks’s In the Blood (2000) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and on Broadway, Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards. Her plays Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989) and Venus (1996) won Obie Awards. Parks’s other works include The Sinner’s Place (1984), Betting on the Dust Commander (1990), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992), The America Play (1994), Fucking A (2000), 365 Days/365 Plays (2006), Ray Charles Live! (2007), and Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 8 & 9) (2009), as well as a few radio plays. Parks has also written the screenplays Girl 6 (1996) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). Of her work as a playwright, Parks says, “When I’m writing, it’s as if I am sitting in a garden, like a jungle where everything grows, and when I’m rewriting, I’m riding on a horse through a field brandishing a beautiful sword, the sword of discrimination—not racial discrimination—but discernment, I suppose you’d call it, a sword of discrimination. I am brandishing the sword, and there’s music, like Wagner playing bumpa-da-bum-bum, and I’m cutting everything that doesn’t belong. So there’s writing, and there’s rewriting. I enjoy both.” PARNELL, PETER (1953– ). A native of Douglastown, Queens, New York, the son of a father in the textile industry and a dental assistant, Parnell began writing plays while an English major at Dartmouth College. Following his graduation, he embarked on a career as a dramatist, authoring such works as Scooter Thomas Makes It to the Top of the World (1977), Sorrows of Stephen (1979), Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket (1982), Romance Language (1985), Hyde in Hollywood (1991), Flaubert’s Latest (1993), An Imaginary Life (1995), The Cider House Rules (2001), adapted from John Irving’s novel, QED (2002), and Trumpery (2007), a play about Charles Darwin. Parnell was playwright-in-residence at the Denver Center Theatre Company from 1983–1984 and he has written for television, most notably The West Wing, which he coproduced in 2000–2001.

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PARSONS, ESTELLE (1927– ). Born Estelle Margaret Parsons in Lynn, Massachusetts, she was educated at Connecticut College and studied law at Boston University before becoming a band singer. During the 1950s, Parsons worked as a writer and commentator for television’s Today Show and appeared in the choruses of a few musicals before making her Off-Broadway stage debut in 1961. She won a Theatre World Award for the double bill, Whisper into My Good Ear/Mrs. Dally Has a Lover (1962) and on Broadway she received Tony Award nominations for The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Miss Margarida’s Way (1978), and a 2002 revival of Morning’s at Seven. Her other Broadway credits include Ready When You Are, C.B.! (1964), Malcolm (1966), a 1967 revival of Galileo, Mert & Phil (1974), The Norman Conquests (1975), Ladies at the Alamo (1977), a 1981 revival of The Pirates of Penzance, and Shimada (1992). Parsons also appeared in numerous Off-Broadway productions and directed 1986 revivals of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and As You Like It, and a 2003 staged reading of Salome. On screen, Parsons won an Academy Award for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and was nominated for an Oscar for Rachel, Rachel (1968), and appeared in Don’t Drink the Water (1969), Watermelon Man (1970), I Never Sang for My Father (1970), For Pete’s Sake (1974), Dick Tracy (1990), and Looking for Richard (1996). She has also appeared frequently on television, including a recurring role as Roseanne Barr’s mother on the long-running situation comedy, Roseanne (1989–1997). Parsons returned to Broadway, at age 83, to take over the role of Violet, the drug-addled matriarch of the family in August: Osage County in 2009, and continued in the national tour. PASADENA PLAYHOUSE. This Pasadena, California-based theatre and its resident semi-professional company, established in 1917 as the Pasadena Community Playhouse, was set up in the spirit of many of the Little Theatres* springing up across the United States in the 1910s. The company offered an array of classics as well as new plays by emerging dramatists, including the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed* in 1928. Such actors as Raymond Burr, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and David Niven, among others, worked at the playhouse at the beginnings of their careers. The playhouse operated with diminishing success after World War II and closed in 1970, reopened, built a subscription base of 8,000, but financial problems forced the playhouse to close in early 2010. PATEL, NEIL (1964– ). A native of Bangor, Wales, Patel received an MFA in Scene Design from the University of California at San Diego in 1991 before beginning a distinguished career as a scene designer. Patel is the recipi-

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ent of 1996 and 2001 Obie Awards for sustained excellence in scene design, among other honors. He has designed for regional theatres and international opera companies. On Broadway, he has designed Side Man (1998), a 2004 revival of ’night, Mother, Ring of Fire (2006), [title of show] (2008), and a 2009 revival of Oleanna. Off-Broadway, Patel has designed for the Second Stage, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, New York Theatre Workshop, Vineyard Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons, among others, receiving Drama Desk Award nominations for Quills (1996), Dinner with Friends (2000), Endpapers (2003), and Fifty Words (2009). Patel has worked in film and television, serving as production designer for several 2009 episodes of In Treatment. He is married to director Maria Mileaf. PATINKIN, MANDY (1952– ). Born Mandel Bruce Patinkin to a middleclass Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, he was raised in a conservative Jewish tradition and began singing in synagogue choirs. He studied at the University of Kansas and the Juilliard School of Drama before embarking on a career as an actor and singer. He won a Tony Award as Ché Guevara in Evita (1979) and was nominated for Tonys as George in Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and Burrs in The Wild Party (2000). Patinkin’s other Broadway credits include a 1975 revivals of Trelawny of the “Wells” and Hamlet, The Shadow Box (1977), The Secret Garden (1991), Falsettos (1993), and several concerts (1989, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2008). OffBroadway, Patinkin was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for a 1982 revival of Henry IV and The Knife (1987), among many others, as well as a range of roles in regional theatre. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his performance in the film Yentl (1983) and his other movie credits include Ragtime (1981), Daniel (1983), The Princess Bride (1987), Alien Nation (1988), Dick Tracy (1990), and Piñero (2001). On television, Patinkin won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe nomination for Chicago Hope (1994–2000) and a 1996 Emmy nomination for his guest appearance on The Larry Sanders Show. PATRICK, JOHN (1905–1995). Born in Louisville, Kentucky as John Patrick Goggan, he was abandoned by his parents and spent most of his childhood in foster care. In the mid-1920s, Patrick found work as an announcer for RKO Radio in San Francisco, California, after which he dropped his last name. His writing career began in 1929 when he scripted an impressive 1,100 episodes of Cecil and Sally, an NBC radio drama. He also wrote for other regular radio series, including adapting classics for an NBC anthology show starring Helen Hayes. His radio career was ended by World War II, during which Patrick served in Egypt, Syria, Burma, and India. After the war, he

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took courses at Harvard and Columbia University, although he never earned a degree at either. Hell Freezes Over, Patrick’s first play, was poorly received on Broadway and closed after a brief run in 1935, but it led to a contract at Twentieth Century-Fox. Teamed with various writers, he worked on 19 film scripts between 1936 and 1939. His Broadway play The Willow and I (1942) received good reviews, but failed before The Hasty Heart (1945) won critical acclaim mixing pathos and humor, a formula Patrick would follow in his most successful plays. It also emphasized themes of human dignity and the search for love and connection, all typical of Patrick’s plays and films, including The Story of Mary Surratt (1947), The Curious Savage (1950), Lo and Behold! (1951), and the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), adapted from Vern Sneider’s novel. Despite this triumph, Patrick never had another major Broadway success, although Everybody Loves Opal (1961), which had a short New York run, attained popularity in regional and amateur theatres, inspiring Patrick to write a series of sentimental sequels. Patrick had considerable success as a screenwriter beginning in the mid1950s with Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), High Society (1956; a musical adaptation of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story with a score by Cole Porter), Les Girls (1957), Some Came Running (1960), The World of Susie Wong (1960), and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), among others. PATRICK, ROBERT (1937– ). Born Robert Patrick O’Connor in Kilgore, Texas, this son of migrant workers dropped out of college and became a fixture of Off-Off-Broadway theatre in the 1960s, emerging as an early openly gay dramatist, first at Caffe Cino, where he staged his first play, The Haunted Host (1964). A pioneer in gay theatre, Patrick received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Kennedy’s Children (1975), to date the only Broadway production of one of his plays. This prolific writer’s numerous other works include Camera Obscura (1968), The Young of Aquarius (1969), Angel, Honey, Baby, Darling Dear (1970), The Golden Animal (1970), The Golden Circle (1972), Play-By-Play (1972), Youth Rebellion (1972), ImpPrisonment (1973), Hippy as a Lark (1973), Mercy Drop; or, Marvin Loves Johnny (1973), Judas (1973), Orpheus and Amerika (1974), Mutual Benefit Life (1978), One Man, One Woman (1978), My Cup Runneth Over (1978), Communication Gap (1979), Diaghilev and Nijinsky (1979), Michelangelo’s Models (1981), 24 Inches (1982), The Spinning Tree (1982), Blue Is for Boys (1983), The Trial of Socrates (1986), Pouf Positive (1986), The Last Stroke (1987), Untold Decades (1988), Fairy Tale (1988), The Trojan Women (1988), Hollywood at Sunset (1994), and Mixed Fruits (1996). In 1997, Pat-

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rick received the Robert Chesley Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Theatre. Of the tragedy of AIDS and its impact on homosexuals in the United States, Patrick has a character in Pouf Positive say, “If you have to do something, write me a funny AIDS play. Sure you can, it’s the biggest joke played on us since sex itself—and with the longest punch line.” PATRIOTS, THE. Sidney Kingsley’s drama in a prologue and three acts opened at the National Theatre on 29 January 1943 for 173 performances under the direction of Shepard Traube, with scene design by Howard Bay. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A production of The Playwrights’ Company, it centered on America’s founding fathers in the first years of the new country, especially Thomas Jefferson (Raymond Edward Johnson), who returns from France to his daughter, Patsy (Madge Evans). Jefferson seeks political advice from George Washington (Cecil Humphreys) about running for president in 1800. Other historical figures depicted include House Jameson as Alexander Hamilton, John Souther as James Madison, and Judson Laire as James Monroe. The play was filmed for television in 1976 in celebration of the bicentennial of the United States. PAWLEY, THOMAS D., III (1917– ). Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Pawley became a noted African American teacher, actor, playwright, and poet. He began as an actor in the 1930s. Concerned that blacks needed a more significant involvement in American theatre, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he wrote three one-act plays, Smokey, Jedgement Day, and Freedom in My Soul, for his master’s thesis. Pawley joined the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, where he became a noted teacher and administrator. He returned to the University of Iowa in 1947 to complete a Ph.D. At Lincoln, where he directed 75 student productions, he established the first college summer theatre for black students in 1952. Pawley retired in 1988, but continued to teach, including as a visiting faculty member at the University of Missouri at Columbia. With William R. Reardon, Pawley edited The Black Teacher and the Dramatic Arts: A Dialogue, Bibliography, and Anthology (1970). PAYNE, BEN IDEN (1881–1976).† The distinguished theatre manager and director emigrated from his birthplace of Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, to the United States in 1913 to manage Little Theatres* in Philadelphia and Chicago, with occasional Broadway productions, including the first American stagings of Langdon Mitchell’s* Major Pendennis and John Galsworthy’s Justice, starring John Barrymore,* both in 1916. Among Payne’s directing credits were Mary Rose (1920), The Great Broxopp (1921), Fools

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Errant (1922), Dagmar (1923), A Weak Woman (1926), Service for Two (1926), and a revival of The Way of the World starring Walter Hampden and Fay Bainter in 1931. His final Broadway ventures, Embezzled Heaven (1944), a rare failure for Ethel Barrymore, and The Winter’s Tale (1946), were not well-received, but Payne spent most of his career (1919–1934) as professor of drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, followed by other academic jobs. PEARL THEATRE COMPANY, THE (PTC). Established in 1984, this New York-based Off-Broadway company produces classic and contemporary plays, usually a five-play season, with a resident acting company. The PTC has received an Obie Award for continuing artistic excellence. J. R. Sullivan serves as artistic director and the PTC describes its mission as producing “a full range repertory strongly rooted in the classics.” PEMBERTON, BROCK (1885–1950).† Born in Leavenworth, Kansas, Brock Pemberton attended the University of Kansas after which he pursued a journalistic career, serving as drama editor for the New York Mail and the New York World. In 1917, he took a position as assistant to producer Arthur Hopkins before branching out on his own to produce Enter Madame and The Tavern,* both in 1920. He continued producing a diverse array of American and European plays with considerable success until shortly before his death, including Miss Lulu Bett* (1920), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922 and 1924), The Mask and the Face (1924), Mr. Pitt (1924), Loose Ankles (1926), The Ladder* (1926), Strictly Dishonorable* (1929), Personal Appearance (1934), Ceiling Zero (1935), Kiss the Boys Good-bye (1938), Lady in Waiting (1940), Janie (1942), and Harvey (1944). PENDLETON, AUSTIN (1940– ). An actor in film, television, and theatre, a stage director, and a playwright, Pendleton, a native of Warren, Ohio, studied at Yale University and began his career as an actor. On Broadway, his first roles were notable, playing Jonathan in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1962) and as Motel the tailor in Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He also appeared in Hail Scrawdyke! (1966), a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, and he won a Drama Desk and an Obie Award for The Last Sweet Days of Isaac (1970). He also appeared on Broadway in Shelter (1973), An American Millionaire (1974), and served as Joel Grey’s understudy in Goodtime Charley (1975). Continuing to act, Pendleton turned his attentions to directing and staged Broadway productions of The Runner Stumbles (1976), a 1980 revival of John Gabriel Borkman, and he was nominated for a Tony Award for directing Elizabeth Taylor and

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Maureen Stapleton in a 1981 revival of The Little Foxes. He later directed Spoils of War (1988) and appeared in Doubles (1985) and a 1997 revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, as well as serving as Michael Jeter’s understudy for Grand Hotel (1989). In addition to these accomplishments, he also served as artistic director of the Circle Repertory Theatre, is a member of the ensemble of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and wrote the plays Booth (1994), Uncle Bob (2001), and Orson’s Shadow (2005), all of which were staged Off-Broadway. He has also directed or acted in many regional theatres and appeared in the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre productions of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (2006) and a 2007 revival of Romeo and Juliet. In films, Pendleton appeared in Catch-22 (1970), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), The Front Page* (1974), Starting Over (1979), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), Guarding Tess (1994), The Associate (1996), The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), Amistad (1997), and A Beautiful Mind (2001), and he has appeared frequently on television. Pendleton also teaches acting at New York’s HB Studio and the New School. In 2007, Pendleton was presented with a special Drama Desk Award celebrating him as “a Renaissance man of the American theatre.” PENN, ARTHUR (1922–2010). Born Arthur Hiller Penn in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this noted film and television director also worked frequently in theatre. Among his earliest work, Penn won praise directing live television during the 1950s, before turning to Broadway and the movies. On Broadway, he had a flop with his first, The Lovers (1956), but was nominated for Tony Awards for Two for the Seesaw (1958) and All the Way Home (1961), and he won a Tony for his direction of The Miracle Worker (1960). His other Broadway credits include Toys in the Attic (1960), An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960), In the Counting House (1962), Lorenzo (1963), Golden Boy (1964), Wait Until Dark (1966), Sly Fox (1976), Golda (1977), Monday After the Miracle (1982), Fortune’s Fool (2002), and a 2004 revival of Sly Fox. Despite his distinguished theatre work, Penn is most known for his film work, where his interests seemed in sync with the counterculture attitudes of the 1960s. He was nominated for Academy Awards for The Miracle Worker (1962), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Alice’s Restaurant (1969), and also directed Mickey One (1965), The Chase (1966), Little Big Man (1970), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and others. Penn was nominated for Emmy Awards for the original Playhouse 90 production of The Miracle Worker and for Law & Order in 2001. PENN & TELLER. See JILLETTE, PENN AND TELLER, RAYMOND.

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PENUMBRA THEATRE COMPANY (PTC). Established in 1976 by artistic director Lou Bellamy, the PTC’s mission was to create a forum for African American theatre in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The first season, the PTC staged two productions, Little Nell and The Hairy Falsetto, but subsequent seasons featured as many as seven productions. In 2000, the PTC was given the Jujamcyn Award for its body of work. PERDZIOLA, ROBERT (1961– ). A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-born costume designer, Perdziola studied at Carnegie Mellon and has mostly worked in opera, but also in regional theatre, including many productions with the Shakespeare Theatre under the direction of Michael Kahn and Keith Baxter. PERELMAN, S. J. (1904–1979). Born Sidney Joseph Perelman in Brooklyn, New York, he became a noted humorist and writer, occasionally writing plays and librettos for musicals. These include Walk a Little Faster (1932), All Good Americans (1933), The Night before Christmas (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), and The Beauty Part (1962), which provided a tour de force for Bert Lahr. As a screenwriter, Perelman won an Academy Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and he also scripted the Marx Brothers screen comedies Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932) and a few other films. PERFECT CRIME. Warren Manzi’s mystery/thriller was first produced in early 1987 at the Courtyard Playhouse by the not-for-profit Actors Collective for a few weeks before the show opened on 18 April 1987 at the 47th Street Theatre (the first of several venues) beginning a remarkable run of over 9,000 performances that continued into 2010. The plot involves a woman psychiatrist who may have committed a “perfect crime,” although a wiley investigator and one of her patients keep her on edge. Catherine Russell has played the lead since the play began its run. PERFECT GANESH, A. Terrence McNally’s drama following two middle-aged women on a trip to India opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) on 4 June 1993 for 123 performance under the direction of John Tillinger, with scene design by Ming Cho Lee, lighting by Stephen Strawbridge, and costumes by Santo Loquasto. Zoe Caldwell and Frances Sternhagen played two unhappy women seeking forgiveness and redemption while learning about Hindu culture. Critics were mixed on McNally’s excursion into spiritual realms, with Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times,

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noting that “When A Perfect Ganesh is absorbing, it is because we root for both these sad women.” PERFORMANCE ART. A merging of elements from fine art, film, live theatre and dance, popular culture, music, and literature, performance art was first identified in the 1960s and can be related to the Happenings of that era, but its roots can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century in Dadaism and Futurism and even as early as the Renaissance. From the 1970s, performance art was related to postmodernism in its deconstruction of familiar forms and the boundaries between art forms. Performance art and artists vary in approach and the ways in which they combine some or all of other art forms, but requires at least one performer and an audience. Often political in nature, performance art has been claimed by various movements, including feminists, gays and lesbians, ethnic and racial minorities, and has often been viewed as controversial in content, leading to censorship of such performance artists as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Karen Finley, Adrienne Piper, Tim Miller, Carolee Schneemann, and others. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. PERFORMANCE GROUP, THE (PG). Richard Schechner established the PG in 1967 in the Performing Garage in the Soho area of New York City. In 1975, Schechner resigned and Elizabeth LeCompte reformulated the troupe at The Wooster Group. PERFORMANCE SPACE 122 (P.S. 122). This not-for-profit arts center in New York is located in former public school 122 and morphed from an abandoned facility on the corner of First Avenue and 9th Street into a performance space in 1979 when choreographer Charles Moulton held rehearsals and workshops there. Other performers, including Charles Dennis, Tim Miller, and Peter Rose made use of PS 122 in this same period. Mark Russell was hired in 1983 to manage programming, and he became artistic director, a position he held until 2004 when Vallejo Gantner took over. Under Russell, the facility had doubled its programming by 1986 as a result of converting the school’s gym into a performance space for extended-run events. PS 122 has emphasized a mission of nurturing emerging artists and groups. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. PERIODICALS. Magazines, journals, and newspapers devoted to theatre in the United States first appeared in the eighteenth century with numerous flourishing during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the rise

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of motion pictures, many such publications ceased or moved toward covering the screen. With the coming of the Great Depression, only a few survived, with one, THEATRE ARTS, established in 1916, emerging as important in presenting the theatre as a significant art form (with little attention to the business side of theatre, which had been amply covered in the trade newspaper Variety since 1905 and continues into the twenty-first century). Founded by Sheldon Cheney, in 1923 under the guidance of Edith Isaacs it became a monthly, moving from a focus on art theatre innovations from European theatres to a focus on the American popular stage which, at that time, essentially meant Broadway and the road.* Theatre Arts, which often featured a new full-length play in each issue, merged in 1939 with Stage, a glossier pictorial magazine which had begun in 1923 as the prestigious Theatre Guild’s own publication, Theatre Guild Bulletin, and finally ceased publication in 1964 after effectively covering the Golden Age of Broadway. Since the 1960s, theatrical periodicals have become more particular to aspects of the art and craft of theatre or more academic in nature. The Theatre Communications Group launched American Theatre magazine in 1984 and, like Theatre Arts, it often includes the text of a new play, but tends to focus on the broader range of theatre and drama in the United States, with much emphasis on activity in regional theatres. Among those periodicals focused on specific areas of theatre practice, Theatre Design & Technology, founded in 1964, and Theatre Crafts, established in 1967, emphasized stage design and technology, while Playbill, which has been utilized by Broadway productions for decades, is now offered to a readership sans the specific production information present for New York theatergoers. The more academic periodicals emphasizing American theatre available circa 2010 include (with date of founding in parentheses): Theatre Journal (1949), Theatre Survey (1960), Modern Drama (1965), TDR: The Drama Review (1968), PAJ: Performing Arts Journal (1976), Theatre Research International (1979), Theatre History Studies (1980), Comparative Drama (1986), Nineteenth Century Theatre (1987), Journal of American Drama and Theatre (1989), Theatre Forum (1992), and Theatre Topics (1996). A few major American dramatists have periodicals or newsletters devoted to them, established by societies promoting the playwright’s work and events and conferences related to that artist. These include The EUGENE O’NEILL Review (1989), The Tennessee Williams Annual Review (1998), and The David Mamet Review (1992), among others. PERKINS, ANTHONY (1932–1992). He was born in New York, the son of actor Osgood Perkins and Janet Esselstyn. His father died when he was five years old and Perkins was sent to private schools prior to attending Columbia

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University and Rollins College. He became an actor, making his screen debut in The Actress (1953), for which he received a Golden Globe Award as New Star of the Year. His second film, Friendly Persuasion (1956), brought him an Academy Award nomination, following on the heels of his Broadway debut stepping into the role of Tom Lee during the run of Tea and Sympathy (1953), for which he received a Theatre World Award. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his next Broadway appearance as Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel (1958). Essentially a prolific film actor, Perkins returned to the Broadway stage occasionally, including Greenwillow (1960), Harold (1962), The Star-Spangled Girl (1966), taking over the role of Dysart in Equus (1974) during its long run, and Romantic Comedy (1979). On screen, Perkins won a Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award for Goodbye Again (1961), and his many film appearances include Fear Strikes Out (1957), Desire under the Elms* (1958), The Matchmaker (1958), On the Beach (1959), Tall Story (1960), Psycho (1960), The Trial (1962), Catch-22 (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Crimes of Passion (1984). PERKINS, OSGOOD (1892–1937).† A native of West Newton, Massachusetts, born James Ripley Osgood Perkins, he graduated from Harvard University in 1914, where he studied with George Pierce Baker,* after which he served in World War I and acted in silent films, forming the Film Guild, a production company. He made his Broadway debut in a supporting role in George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s Beggar on Horseback* (1924), followed by Lynn Starling’s Weak Sister (1925). His greatest stage success as cynical newspaper editor Walter Burns in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page* (1928) provided a demonstration of his versatility in moving easily between comedy and drama. He also appeared in a variety of mostly innocuous plays, but he was applauded as Astrov in a revival of Uncle Vanya in 1930, followed by Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), The Wiser They Are (1931), Foreign Affairs (1932), A Thousand Summers (1932), Chrysalis (1932), Goodbye Again (1932), The School for Husbands (1933), Point Valaine (1935), Ceiling Zero (1935), On Stage (1935), and End of Summer (1936). He also appeared in several films, including Scarface (1931), and was the father of actor Anthony Perkins. PERLOFF, CAREY (1959– ). Born in Washington, D.C. and educated at Stanford University, Perloff continued her studies as a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford University prior to beginning her career as a director. Perloff was artistic director of the Classic Stage Company (CSC), where she staged the world premiere of Ezra Pound’s Elektra in 1987 and the 1988 American debut of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language on a bill with The Birthday Party.

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During her leadership, CSC won a 1988 Obie Award for artistic excellence. Perloff became artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in 1992 and where she has directed classics and contemporary works, including plays by Tom Stoppard, Philip Kan Gotanda, Robert O’Hara, Lucy Caldwell, and others. Perloff has provided strong leadership, including eliminating ACT’s deficit, and she has directed a wide range of plays, including controversial adaptations of classics, during her tenure there. She has also written the plays The Colossus of Rhodes (2001) and Luminescence Dating (2005). PERRY, ANTOINETTE (1888–1946).† Born in Denver, Colorado, Perry made her acting debut at age 17 in 1905, appearing in Lady Jim (1906) and A Grand Army Man* (1907) before marrying wealthy businessman Frank Freauff in 1909. She retired until his death in 1924, after which she returned to the stage under producer Brock Pemberton’s guidance, acting in Mr. Pitt (1924), Minick* (1924), The Ladder (1926), and Electra (1927). She became Pemberton’s assistant and directed plays under his aegis, including Strictly Dishonorable* (1929), Personal Appearance (1934), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvey in 1944. Beginning in the 1930s, Perry actively involved herself in several theatrical service organizations. In collaboration with Jane Cowl and Rachel Crothers, Perry established American Theatre Wing and the Stage Door Canteen during World War II. Her service work led to the annual Antoinette Perry Awards, nicknamed the Tony Awards, being named for her in 1947, the year after her death. PERSONAL APPEARANCE. Lawrence Riley’s popular comedy opened at the Henry Miller’s* Theatre in a Brock Pemberton production on 17 October 1934 for 501 performances starring Gladys George. Pemberton codirected with Antoinette Perry, and George scored a personal success as film star Carole Arden, a flighty diva who falls in love with a gas station attendant (Philip Ober) when her car breaks down in rural Pennsylvania. Arden decides to bring the young man to Hollywood with her in a comedy New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson described as “hilarious enough for a harumscarum evening in Autumn.” Adapted for the screen, Riley’s play became a Mae West* vehicle, Go West, Young Man (1936). PETERSEN, WILLIAM (1953– ). Best known for his Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated role as Dr. Gil Grissom on the CBS-TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2010), William Louis Petersen was born in Evanston, Illinois, attended Idaho State University, studied to be a Shakespearean actor, and eventually became a member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf

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Theatre. Petersen was a fixture in Chicago theatre, appearing in significant roles not only at Steppenwolf, but also at the Goodman Theatre, the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Victory Gardens Theatre, Wisdom Bridge Theatre, and others. His sole Broadway appearance in the Goodman’s transfer of a 1996 revival of The Night of the Iguana won him praise as Shannon opposite Cherry Jones and Marsha Mason. Petersen has also appeared in many films. PETERSON, LISA (1961– ). A native of California, Peterson was educated at Yale University and won acclaim Off-Broadway directing in the 1990s. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 1991 for The Waves, and she staged Tony Kushner’s Slavs! (1994), Donald Margulies’s The Model Apartment (1995), José Rivera’s Sueño (1999), and she has directed numerous productions in major regional theatres. PETIT THÉÂTRE DE VIEUX CARRÉ, LE. Established in 1916, New Orleans’ oldest theatre company was set up in the Little Theatre* style. The theatre found a home almost immediately in an eighteenth-century Spanish colonial building in the French Quarter, later renovated to include a 450-seat space and a modest children’s theatre facility. The theatre’s operation continues to the present day and aside from a regular season of plays, it presents the annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. PETRIFIED FOREST, THE. Despite the fact that he received Pulitzer Prizes for three other works, Robert E. Sherwood’s most enduring work has proven to be The Petrified Forest, which opened on 7 January 1935 at the Broadhurst Theatre for a run of 197 performances. Co-produced by Gilbert Miller, Arthur Hopkins (who directed), and the play’s star, Leslie Howard, The Petrified Forest expressed the desperation of the Great Depression, merging the lost dreams of the World War I generation with the fears of the economically deprived present. Set at a roadside café and gas station deep in the Arizona desert, the surrounding landscape of The Petrified Forest represents the fossilization of Alan Squire’s (Howard) dreams. Squire, a down-and-out intellectual and pacifist whose ideals have faded since World War I and even more so in the current economic crisis, is somewhat invigorated by the purity of artistic dreams expressed by Gaby Maple. The daughter of the café’s owner, Gaby’s idealistic strivings awaken echoes of Squire’s lost dreams, but their encounter is destined for continual interruptions by Gaby’s dull-witted boyfriend, as well as various customers. When notorious gangster Duke Mantee (played by Humphrey Bogart in a star-making performance) arrives with his gang and holds the café’s patrons hostage, the play moves to its crisis as the characters

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discuss various differing views expressed by the two different lost souls, Squire and Mantee. Mantee’s brutishness suggests to Squire that he no longer has a hope of a future and recognizing a small salvation in the possibility that he can help Gaby realize her dreams, he signs over his life insurance policy to her and convinces the desperate Mantee to kill him as the gang flees the authorities. The Petrified Forest was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1936 with Howard and Bogart repeating their performances and Bette Davis added to the cast in the role of Gaby, a part played on stage by Peggy Conklin. Bogart repeated his performance again in a 1955 television production, with Henry Fonda taking on Howard’s role and Lauren Bacall as Gaby. PHILADELPHIA STORY, THE. Philip Barry’s three-act high comedy revived the career of film star Katharine Hepburn, and provided her most iconic role. Barry wrote the play for her (she had starred in a film version of his 1928 play Holiday* the year before). The Philadelphia Story opened in a Theatre Guild production at the Shubert Theatre on 28 March 1939 for 417 performances under the direction of Robert B. Sinclair with scene and lighting design by Robert Edmond Jones. Hepburn, whose meteoric rise in the 1930s had, by the end of the decade, led to her being labeled “box office poison,” returned to the Broadway stage and first-rank stardom through the success of The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn played a high society goddess Tracy Lord who, on the eve of her second marriage, learns to accept the imperfections in others and herself with the help of her first husband, C. Dexter Haven (Joseph Cotten), and two tabloid newspaper reporters (Van Heflin and Shirley Booth) who have been sent by an unscrupulous editor who is attempting to blackmail Tracy’s philandering father. Indulging in too much alcohol at a party on the eve of her wedding opens Tracy’s eyes to her own humanity. The changes in Tracy lead her back to Dexter and the wedding proceeds, but with Dexter as the groom. Hepburn starred in a lavish 1940 MGM film version and was Academy Award-nominated for her performance, with support from Cary Grant and James Stewart (who won an Oscar). The play was adapted to television in 1950, 1954, and two in 1959. The Philadelphia Story was revived on Broadway in 1980 starring Blythe Danner, Frank Converse, and Edward Herrmann. Cole Porter wrote a score for a 1956 musical film version retitled High Society, with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra playing the leads. High Society was ultimately adapted to the Broadway stage in 1998 using a range of Porter’s songs from the film and elsewhere. PHILADELPHIA THEATRE COMPANY (PTC). Founded in 1974 as the Philadelphia Company by Robert Hedley and Jean Harrison, the company

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devoted itself to the work on emerging artists and the development of new work. The PTC has premiered works by Terrence McNally, Bill Irwin, Christopher Durang, Jeffrey Hatcher, Daniel Stern, David Ives, Naomi Wallace, and others, but has also produced a range of classics. PHOENIX THEATRE. See ASSOCIATION OF PRODUCING ARTISTS. PHOTOGRAPHERS. Since the advent of photography in the 1830s, theatrical persons and productions have been captured, first in posed studio images and, later, on theatre stages. Few photographers dedicated themselves exclusively to theatre, but in the mid-nineteenth century, Napoleon Sarony captured many stage celebrities in carte-de-viste and cabinet photographs that became popular with the general public. In the late nineteenth century the Vandamm Studio dominated photography of Broadway for several decades. By the mid-twentieth century, a few photographers regularly captured on-stage images of stage productions, notably Eileen Darby, Fred Fehl, and, most significantly Martha Swope and Joan Marcus. PIANO LESSON, THE. August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize, Drama Desk, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning drama, first staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 16 April 1990 for 328 performances. Lloyd Richards directed a cast including Charles S. Dutton, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Lisa Gay Hamilton. The fourth play in Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” The Piano Lesson is set in 1936 and centers on a disagreement between Boy Willie and his sister Berniece over a piano. Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land that his family worked as slaves, while Berniece wants to keep the piano, a family heirloom on which carved images of their great-grandmother and her son are preserved. Dutton reprised his role in a 1995 Peabody Award-winning CBS-TV “Hallmark Hall of Fame” film version, receiving Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations. PICKLE FAMILY CIRCUS (PFC). Established in San Francisco, California, in 1975, this small but highly influential circus is credited with helping to renew the fortunes of circus in the United States. Abandoning the three rings of earlier twentieth-century circuses and eschewing animal acts, the PFC emphasized clowning, acrobatics, and juggling. Among its earliest performers were Larry Pisoni, Bill Irwin, and Geoff Hoyle, a threesome whose antics generated considerable attention. When Irwin left the PFC in 1979, Hoyle and Pisoni continued. The PFC influenced such later troupes as Cirque du Soleil and “new vaudevillian”* performers. The PFC changed its name to the New Pickle Circus in 1993 and merged with the Circus Center in San Francisco.

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PICNIC. William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama opened at the Music Box Theatre on 19 February 1953 for 477 performances. Directed by Joshua Logan (who won a Tony Award for his efforts), the cast featured Ralph Meeker and Janice Rule, with support from Kim Stanley, Eileen Heckart, Arthur O’Connell, and a young Paul Newman. Picnic is set on Labor Day in a small Kansas town where the sudden appearance of Hal Carter, a virile young drifter, arouses sexual and emotional undercurrents in three generations of the town’s women. Hal is strongly attracted to Madge Owens, local beauty queen, who has been dating Alan Seymour, a bland young man whose family wealth offers the prospect of a secure life. Alan wins the favor of Flo, Madge’s mother, who instinctively resists Hal, whose presence painfully reminds her of her wayward spouse. Flo turns to her feisty widowed neighbor, Helen Potts, but the sharp-tongued old lady seems invigorated by the passion evident between Madge and Hal. Unable to conform to small-town proprieties, Hal’s wanderlust is heightened by the whistle of the passing train. Madge, who longs to escape small town life, grapples with the safe choice of Alan versus her forbidden attraction to Hal and opts for Hal. Picnic also focuses on Rosemary Sidney, a lonely middleaged schoolteacher, who feels increasing urgency to find herself a mate. Her only prospect is Howard Bevans, a local merchant, who is not at all certain that he wants marriage. Their seriocomic battle of wills is set against the Hal-Madge-Alan triangle, but it all takes a dramatic turn when the distraught Rosemary literally begs Howard to marry her. As the play ends, Madge runs off with Hal, dashing Flo’s hopes for her daughter’s comfortable future. The lyrical realism of Picnic was inspired to a significant extent by the influence of Tennessee Williams. In 1950, Inge had written a one-act play, Front Porch, which he expanded and renamed Women of Summer before it evolved into Picnic. Logan also directed the popular 1955 film version starring William Holden, Kim Novak, and Rosalind Russell. A 1994 Roundabout Theatre revival starred Ashley Judd, Kyle Chandler, and Deborah Monk. In 2003, Picnic was filmed for television starring Josh Brolin, Gretchen Mol, and Mary Steenburgen. Despite critical and commercial success, Inge revised Picnic, shifting the play’s focus to the relationship of Rosemary and Howard, and retitled it Summer Brave for production at the Equity Library Theatre in 1973 with Alexis Smith as Rosemary. Critics were not favorable and the original Picnic remains a classic piece of lyrical realism from the post-World War II Broadway stage. PICON, MOLLY (1898–1992).† Born in New York, Molly Picon grew up in Philadelphia where she and her mother sewed costumes for Yiddish theatre actors. She made her debut in an English-language vaudeville* act

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in 1904, although she spent much of her career on the Yiddish stage in New York. Picon became one of the most beloved comic and musical stars on Second Avenue, mixing an infectious gamin charm with a tomboyish feistiness. Often working with her husband, Jacob Kalich, Picon, who also wrote and produced many of her vehicles, made occasional appearances on Broadway, in vaudeville (playing the fabled New York Palace Theatre in the 1920s), film, radio, and television. In the 1940s, as Yiddish theatre declined, Picon appeared more frequently on Broadway in comedies and musicals, including The Kosher Widow (1959), How to Be a Jewish Mother (1967), Paris Is Out! (1970), Something Old, Something New (1977), Those Were the Days (1979), and her most notable appearance as a widow in Israel in the Jerry Herman musical Milk and Honey (1961). Her film roles include the harried mother in Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn (1963). PILBROW, RICHARD (1933– ). An English-born lighting designer with an international reputation, Pilbrow studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and served in the Royal Air Force prior to founding Theatre Projects in 1957. This lighting rental company launched his theatrical career when it evolved into a producing organization in 1963 so that Pilbrow could co-produce the London production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Among his Broadway productions, Pilbrow won a Drama Desk and an Outer Critics Circle Award for the 1997 revival of Show Boat and received Tony Award nominations for Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992) and The Life (1997). His other Broadway designs include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Zorba (1968), The Rothschilds (1970), Shelter (1973), Tango Pasion (1993), a 2002 revival of Our Town, and A Tale of Two Cities (2008). Pilbrow’s book, Stage Lighting Design: The Art, The Craft, The Life (1970, 2008), is widely considered an essential text in the field. PIÑERO, MIQUEL (1947–1988). A native of Gurabo, Puerto Rico, Piñero moved with his family to New York City as a child. When his father abandoned the family they were forced onto welfare and by age 11 Piñero had already been convicted of theft. He joined a gang and became addicted to drugs, leading to a long criminal record. He was sent to Sing Sing Prison in 1972, where he wrote the play Short Eyes (1974), which was produced by a prison playwriting workshop and, ultimately, at the Riverside Church in New York. It won an Obie Award and producer Joe Papp moved the play to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was nominated for six Tony Awards (the play was filmed in 1977). After leaving prison, Piñero played small roles in films and was a co-founder

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of the Nuyorican Poets Café. Prior to his premature death from cirrhosis of the liver, Piñero wrote other plays, including All Junkies (1973), Sideshow (1975), The Sun Always Shines for Cool (1975), The Guntower (1976), Straight from the Ghetto (1976), Eulogy for a Small Time Thief (1977), Cold Beer (1979), Paper Toilet (1979), Payland Blues (1980), Nuyorican Nights at the Stanton Street Social Club (1980), and Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon (1981). See also CHICANO THEATRE. PINKINS, TONYA (1962– ). Born in Chicago, Illinois, to a police officer and a postal employee, Pinkins studied acting at the Goodman Theatre Young People’s Program while in high school and attended Columbia College and Carnegie Mellon. Pinkins appeared in Merrily We Roll Along (1981), but appeared more frequently on television, including a continuing role on the soap opera All My Children beginning in 1991. On Broadway she won acclaim, and Tony and Drama Desk Awards, for Jelly’s Last Jam (1992). She was subsequently nominated for Tonys for Play On! (1997) and Caroline, or Change (2004), the latter bringing her an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award, and also appeared on Broadway in Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1995), The Wild Party (2000), and Radio Golf (2007). Pinkins has also appeared in Off-Broadway productions of Shakespeare, in a few films, and as a cabaret and recording artist. PIONEER PLAYHOUSE (PP). Founded in Danville, Kentucky, in 1950 by Eben C. Henson, the PP is the oldest outdoor theatre in Kentucky, a forerunner of outdoor dramas. A major summer stock theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, the PP has provided a training ground for young performers, in part because Henson and his wife, Charlotte, established a School of Drama at the PP. PIPER, ADRIAN (1948– ). Born in New York and educated at the School of Visual Arts, City College of New York, Harvard University, and the University of Heidelberg, Piper, who moved to Berlin in 2005, is a noted conceptual and performance artist whose work emphasizes the parallels in racial and sexual discrimination. Her performance art pieces include Meat into Meat (1968), Catalysis Series (1970–1971), Being Mythic on the Street (1973), and My Calling (Card) (1986). Piper has won numerous awards and fellowships. PIRATE, THE. S. N. Behrman’s three-act comedy adapted from Ludwig Fulda’s Die Seerauber was produced by The Playwright’s Company at the Martin Beck Theatre, where it opened on 25 November 1942 for 177 performances. Alfred Lunt directed (with John C. Wilson) and starred,

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along with his wife and stage partner, Lynn Fontanne. Estelle Winwood and Clarence Derwent also appeared in this fanciful, farcical play set in the West Indies in the early nineteenth century in which a traveling actor is mistaken for the dreaded pirate and wins the heart of a romantic girl. A 1948 film costarring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly musicalized the story with songs by Cole Porter. PISCATOR, ERWIN (1893–1966). Born Erwin Friedrich Maximillian Piscator in Greifenstein-Ulm, Germany, he was educated at Munich University following service in the German army during World War I. Piscator emerged as a director, producer, and major advocate of the techniques of epic theatre, which focused on the intellectual engagement of the audience and eschewed emotionalism and visual beauty and unity. He worked with playwright Bertolt Brecht, who shared his ideas on epic theatre, which in Piscator’s view made utilitarian use of stage devices, including mechanized settings, staged lectures, film, and other elements to focus on the sociopolitical content of a play. Piscator founded the short-lived Piscator-Bühne in 1927, and in 1931 traveled to Russia, where he stayed for a time when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. Resistant to the Soviet dictatorship, Piscator moved to New York in 1939, where his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, titled Case of Clyde Griffiths, was produced by The Group Theatre with Lee Strasberg as director in 1936. Piscator founded a Dramatic Workshop at the New School, where he staged over 100 experimental works, including War and Peace (1942), and among his students were Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Elaine Stritch, Judith Malina, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte, and others. During the McCarthy era, Piscator was targeted as a result of his politics and his time in the Soviet Union, so he returned to Germany in 1951, where he staged Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy (1963), a work of documentary theatre owing much to his influential work formulating epic theatre. PITT, LEONARD (1941– ). Born in Detroit, Michigan, Pitt attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles, California, and began to work in advertising. He gave it up and traveled to Europe, staying for several years in Paris where he studied mime with Etienne Decroux. In 1970, he returned to the United States and established a school of physical theatre and giving one-person performances. Pitt founded Life on the Water, a contemporary theatre company dedicated to producing new work, in 1986, and also established EcoRap, an environmental education program merging ecological concerns with rap music to educate inner-city youth on social concerns.

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PITTSBURGH PLAYHOUSE (PP). Established in 1933 as a community theatre, the PP had a rocky start, but under the general management of Frederick Burleigh beginning in 1937 (and continuing to 1963), the PP found its footing. After producing in various locations, the PP settled at the Craft Street Theatre in 1952, with the ultimate goal of becoming a professional company, but a serious attempt to convert the theatre to a resident not-for-profit theatre was unsuccessful. This led to Point Park College to take over the PP in 1968. Reestablished as the Pittsburgh Public Theatre in 1975, the theatre has become a Pittsburgh fixture. PLATT, LIVINGSTON (1885–1968).† A native of Plattsburg, New York, Livingston Platt was a force in the triumph of European-inspired New Stagecraft* through his work at Boston’s Toy Theatre following a period of art studies in Europe. For Margaret Anglin,* Platt created scene designs and costumes for The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and As You Like It, all in 1914. In these and most of his subsequent productions (for which he usually designed lighting as well), Platt created stylized settings resisting the realism typical prior to World War I. He demonstrated versatility in a wide range of plays, including East Is West* (1918), Shakuntala (1919), Rain* (1922), Daisy Mayme* (1926), The Racket* (1927), Behold the Bridegroom* (1927), The First Mrs. Fraser (1929), Grand Hotel (1930), Dinner at Eight (1933), and The Pursuit of Happiness (1933), after which an arrest on a morals charge ended his career. PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen’s comedy, with a title misquoting a line from the film Casablanca (1942), opened in a David Merrick production at the Broadhurst Theatre on 12 February 1969 for 453 performances. Allen himself played Allan Felix, a schlemiel in the throes of a messy divorce. Allan is frustrated by what he believes is his inability to understand women. For guidance in handling the women in his life, Allan invokes the spirit of cinema legend Humphrey Bogart, played by Jerry Lacy, in his iconic Casablanca role as romantic man-of-the-world Rick Blaine. Supporting players Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton were nominated for Tony Awards, as was the production’s director, Joseph Hardy. Allen scripted and starred in a 1972 film version, with Roberts, Keaton, and Lacy repeating their performances. PLAYBILL.† Printer Frank Vance Strauss established a company to produce programs for New York theatrical productions in 1884. These programs were of the four-page variety typical of the period, but in 1911 Strauss create a longer format filled with articles and advertising, varying only in a unique cover for each play and the pertinent production information and credits. First

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called the Strauss Magazine Theatre Program, the name was simplified to Playbill in 1934. With modest changes, this format continues to be employed by Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres, and serves as a model for many repertory theatres, academic groups, and community theatres. See also PERIODICALS. PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY (PRC). Established in 1975 on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Playmakers was an outgrowth of the Carolina Playmakers,* which had been established by Professor Frederick Koch, who had introduced theatre and drama courses at UNC around that time. Carolina Playmakers began given regular performances in 1923 in a Greek Revival building ultimately known as the Historic Playmakers Theatre, but in the 1970s moved to the Center for Dramatic Art on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Artists trained by Carolina Playmakers include Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, Andy Griffith, Louise Fletcher, Billy Crudup, and Michael Cumpsty, among many others. The PRC is currently a League of Resident Theatres (LORT) theatre known for productions of both classic and contemporary plays. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. PLAYS/PLAYWRIGHTS. The style and content of American plays has changed radically since 1930, in part as a result of major cultural changes during the 80 subsequent years. In 1930, the first wave of major post-World War I American dramatists, led by Eugene O’Neill and including Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood, and Thornton Wilder, among others, brought realism, expressionism,* and other European influences to Broadway, in frequently ambitious works exploring a range of serious issues usually without the remaining trappings of nineteenth century melodrama* and romanticism. Most of these playwrights contributed new works until into the 1950s. This began a “golden age” of American drama—and playwrights in the United States won the sort of cultural respect that novelists and poets had attained since the early nineteenth century. In this same period, women playwrights as diverse as Zoë Akins,* Clare Boothe, Rachel Crothers, Edna Ferber, Rose Franken, Zona Gale,* Susan Glaspell, Ruth Gordon, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Sophie Treadwell,* among others, also contributed to a broadening of themes and characters in American plays between 1910 and 1950, providing evolving images of women outside of traditional roles and sentimentalized depictions. World War II brought the next wave of major American playwrights, led by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, both of whom dominated serious drama in the United States into the 1960s, when the vast cultural changes

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of that revolutionary era shifted the focus of the American theatre from Broadway to Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatres, with lighter fare, such as the comedies of Neil Simon continuing to succeed on Broadway. Among other accomplishments, Williams explored the subject of sexuality in franker and more diverse ways than had been seen before, also bringing a lyricism to the realistic form and experimenting outside the frame of realism in more experimental plays such as Camino Real (1953). Miller emphasized the moral and political dilemmas of mid-twentieth-century American men in otherwise realistic dramas. Both Williams and Miller were among the first generation of first-rank American dramatists to frequently write for films, adapting their own works and writing original screenplays. Noted contemporaries of Williams and Miller include Robert Anderson, William Inge, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, all of whom worked effectively within the Broadway arena almost exclusively and all of whom were indebted to Williams and Miller. Playwrights of color gained a footing in the 1960s and 1970s, including such African American playwrights as Ed Bullins, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, and Douglas Turner Ward standing out among African Americans. Other voices reflecting the discontents of the era emerging between 1960 and the mid-1980s include such diverse dramatists as Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, Horton Foote, Maria Irene Fornés, Jack Gelber, John Guare, Israel Horowitz, Arthur Kopit, Romulus Linney, David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Rochelle Owens, David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, and Lanford Wilson, most of whom were more frequently produced in OffBroadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatres than on Broadway, reflecting a major shift to a more geographically diversified American theatre after the 1960s. With the appearance of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, openly gay dramatists responded in dramatic terms, following in the footsteps of preAIDS openly gay writers like Mart Crowley, whose The Boys in the Band (1968), brought gay lives to Broadway in ways they had not been seen before, and Harvey Fierstein, Robert Patrick, and Mac Wellman, whose works were more frequently seen Off-Broadway. Gay playwrights post-AIDS often writing on the lives of homosexuals or with an overtly gay sensibility include Harry Kondoleon, Larry Kramer, Charles Ludlam, Terrence McNally, Paul Rudnick, among many others. The increased diversity of American life—and, consequently, the American stage—is evident in the leading dramatists to emerge post-1985. These two generations form a new “golden age” of American drama, although the decentralization of American drama away from Broadway make it more

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difficult for these playwrights to become well-known to large audiences in the ways that O’Neill, Williams, Miller, and Albee became known. Among these playwrights, Eric Bogosian, Constance Congdon, Nilo Cruz, Melissa James Gibson, Richard Greenberg, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, Neil LaBute, Warren Leight, David Lindsay-Abaire, Craig Lucas, Charles L. Mee, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Eric Overmyer, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, John Patrick Shanley, Wallace Shawn, Nicky Silver, Paula Vogel, Naomi Wallace, Wendy Wasserstein, and August Wilson, stand out, and developed a significant body of work and enduring careers. As with their immediate predecessors, much of their work was first produced in Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatres, and relatively few of them have had more than a few Broadway productions. Critics often indulge in creating lists of the “best” American plays—and the titles selected vary to some extent, but most lists invariably include some or all of the following plays: All My Sons (1947), American Buffalo (1975), Angels in America (1992), August: Osage County (2007), Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985), Awake and Sing! (1935), Buried Child (1978), Bus Stop (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Children’s Hour (1934), Crimes of the Heart (1981), The Crucible (1953), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Death of a Salesman (1949), A Delicate Balance (1967), Doubt (2004), Dutchman (1964), Fences (1985), Fifth of July (1978), The Glass Menagerie (1944), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), The Heidi Chronicles (1988), The House of Blue Leaves (1971), How I Learned to Drive (1997), The Iceman Cometh (1939), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), The Little Foxes (1939), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1939), Lost in Yonkers (1991), M. Butterfly (1988), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), ’night, Mother (1983), The Night of the Iguana (1961), The Odd Couple (1965), Our Town (1938), The Petrified Forest (1935), The Philadelphia Story (1939), The Piano Lesson (1987), Picnic (1953), Prelude to a Kiss (1988), A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Six Degrees of Separation (1990), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Streamers (1976), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Talley’s Folly (1979), That Championship Season (1972), Three Tall Women (1994), The Time of Your Life (1939), Topdog/Underdog (2002), A View from the Bridge (1955), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Winterset (1935), The Women (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1936), and The Young Man from Atlanta (1995). These plays demonstrate the depth of U.S. theatre, including dramas and comedies, plays in the style of lyric realism, and works inspired by Asian and European influences, racial and ethnic concerns, economics, gender issues, and other topics, but many focus on family, politics,

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and the changing American cultural landscape, eternal topics in the growing canon of American drama. PLAYWRIGHTS’ COMPANY, THE. Unhappy with the dominance and policies of The Theatre Guild, this producing organization was founded in 1938 by noted American dramatists Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood (Kurt Weill and Robert Anderson joined later, as did lawyer John Wharton and producer Roger L. Stevens) with the intention of making a “center for ourselves within the theatre, and possibly rally the theatre as a whole to new levels by setting a high standard of writing and production.” Among the company’s most important productions, many of which were written by its founders, were Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), No Time for Comedy (1939), Key Largo (1939), There Shall Be No Night (1940), Candle in the Wind (1941), The Eve of St. Mark (1942), The Pirate (1942), The Patriots (1943), Dream Girl (1945), The Rugged Path (1945), Truckline Café (1946), Street Scene (1947), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), The Grand Tour (1951), Tea and Sympathy (1953), In the Summer House (1953), Sabrina Fair (1953), Ondine (1954), The Bad Seed (1954), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Ponder Heart (1956), Nude With Violin (1957), The Pleasure of His Company (1958), Summer of the 17th Doll (1958), The Gazebo (1958), Juno (1959), Five Finger Exercise (1959), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959), and The Best Man (1960), among others. The organization dissolved in 1960 after most of the founders were deceased. PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS (PH). Founded in 1971 at the Clark Center Y by Robert Moss before a subsequent move to Theatre Row on 42nd Street, PH has emerged as one of most important theatres in New York in the areas of supporting and developing the new work of playwrights, composers, and lyricists. By 2010, PH had produced the work of more than 350 writers, including Kenneth Lonergan, Kirsten Childs, Richard Nelson, William Finn, Christopher Durang, Jon Robin Baitz, A. R. Gurney, Scott McPherson, Tina Landau, Adam Guettel, Jeanine Tesori, Doug Wright, Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, Alfred Uhry, and Wendy Wasserstein, among others. Playwrights Horizons established a Theatre School affiliated with New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. PLAZA SUITE. Neil Simon connected three one-act comedies, all set in the same Plaza Hotel suite, in this long-running hit that opened at the Plymouth Theatre in a Saint Subber production on 14 February 1969 for 1,097 performances under the direction of Mike Nichols, who won a Tony

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Award. George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton (in a Tony-nominated performance) played wildly different couples in each of the three acts. In the first and most dramatic, “A Visitor from Mamaroneck,” Stapleton played a middle-aged wife of a successful businessman who is cheating on her. She confronts him on their anniversary about her suspicions and he leaves her. In the second play, “A Visitor from Hollywood,” Scott played a randy film producer attempting to seduce his high school girlfriend. The third and most farcical of the plays, “A Visitor from Forest Hills,” depicted Scott and Stapleton as the battling parents of a bride with cold feet on her wedding day who has locked herself in the suite’s bathroom. The frantic parents try to get her out in time for the very expensive ceremony. Stapleton recreated her “A Visitor from Mamaroneck” character in a 1971 film version also starring Walter Matthau, Lee Grant, and Barbara Harris. PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY, THE. Samuel Taylor’s two-act comedy, written in collaboration with Cornelia Otis Skinner, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 22 October 1958 for 474 performances under Cyril Ritchard’s direction, with scene and lighting design by Donald Oenslager and costumes by Edith Head. Ritchard also played the lead, Biddeford “Pogo” Poole, a charming and wealthy rake, who turns up at the San Francisco home of his ex-wife, Katharine (Skinner), on the eve of the wedding of their grown daughter, Jessica (Dolores Hart). Poole wants to disrupt the marriage and take Jessica away with him on one of his many international adventures, much to the chagrin of Katharine and her stolid second husband, Jim. Pogo’s machinations are observed by Katharine’s father, Mackenzie Savage (veteran character actor Charlie Ruggles), who offers advice. Ultimately, Pogo is foiled and Jessica marries her beau. Ruggles won a Tony Award and Hart received a Theatre World Award. Fred Astaire, in a rare non-musical role, played Pogo in a 1961 film version, reaping a Golden Globe Award nomination. PLUMMER, AMANDA (1957– ). The daughter of actors Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes, Plummer was born in New York and was educated at Middlebury College and The Neighborhood Playhouse. She debuted on Broadway (following involvement in the aborted 1981 comedy The Stitch in Time) in a 1981 revival of A Taste of Honey, for which she won a Theatre World Award and received Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. The following year she won both awards for her performance in the title role of a pregnant nun in Agnes of God. Plummer played opposite Jessica Tandy in a 1983 revival of The Glass Menagerie, and also appeared on Broadway in revivals of You Never Can Tell in 1986 and Pygmalion in 1987, receiving a Tony nomination for the latter. Plummer also acted

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Off-Broadway in a 1979 revival of A Month in the Country, A Lie of the Mind (1985), Abundance (1990), Killer Joe (1998), and in regional theatre. Plummer won an Emmy Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the television film Miss Rose White (1992), and she also won Emmys for her guest appearances on The Outer Limits in 1996 and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2005. PLUMMER, CHRISTOPHER (1929– ). Canadian-born Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was the son of a McGill University professor and the daughter of a Canadian prime minister. He worked toward a career as a concert pianist before becoming a stage, film, and television actor of distinction in Canada, England, and mostly in the United States. Following Broadway appearances in two short-lived 1954 productions, The Starcross Story and Home Is the Hero, Plummer won a Theatre World Award in Christopher Fry’s The Dark Is Light Enough (1955) in support of Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power. He received a Tony Award nomination for J.B. (1959) and won Tony and a Drama Desk Awards for the musical Cyrano (1973) and Barrymore* (1997). He won a Drama Desk Award playing Iago in a 1982 revival of Othello, which also brought him a Tony nomination. He was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards for No Man’s Land (1994) and revivals of King Lear in 2004 and Inherit the Wind in 2007. Plummer also appeared on Broadway in The Lark (1955), Night of the Auk (1956), Arturo Ui (1963), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), The Good Doctor (1973), and a 1988 revival of Macbeth. In 2010, Plummer appeared as Prospero in a production of The Tempest at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. Plummer was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for a television film, American Tragedy (2000), and won Emmy Awards for Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers (1976) and Madeline (1993), as well as several Emmy nominations. Plummer appeared in numerous television dramas beginning in the early 1950s and his movie credits include The Sound of Music (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), Oedipus the King (1968), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Murder by Decree (1979), Malcolm X (1992), The Insider (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Syriana (2005), The New World (2005), and The Last Station (2009). He is the father of actress Amanda Plummer from his marriage to Tammy Grimes. POLAKOV, LESTER (1916–2006). As a scene, costume, and lighting designer, Polakov contributed numerous Broadway designs in one or all of the three areas beginning in 1939, including The Mother (1939), Reunion in New York (1940), Crazy with the Heat (1941), Call Me Mister (1946), Crime and

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Punishment (1947), The Member of the Wedding (1950), The Golden State (1950), The Little Blue Light (1951), Mrs. McThing (1952), The Emperor’s Clothes (1953), The Winner (1954), a 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, I Knock at the Door (1957), Great Day in the Morning (1962), and Charlotte (1980). He founded the highly regarded Polakov Studio and Forum for Stage Design in 1958. He received the United States Institute of Theatre Technology (USITT) Distinguished Achievement Award in 1999 and the Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. PORTER, STEPHEN (1925– ). Born in Ogdensburg, New York, as Stephen Winthrop Porter, he was educated at Yale University and taught theatre at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for three years before moving to New York, where he became a noted director, producer, occasional scene designer, and writer. On Broadway, Porter was nominated for Tony Awards for revivals of The School for Wives in 1971 and Chemin de Fer in 1974 and Drama Desk Awards for revivals of They Knew What They Wanted* in 1976 and Man and Superman in 1979. In 1960, Porter was named director of the Association of Producing Artists and in 1971 as artistic director of the New Phoenix Repertory Company. Porter rarely directed new plays on Broadway, but his work was marked by acclaimed revivals, including Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in 1966, The Wild Duck in 1967, The Show Off* in 1967, The Misanthrope in 1968, Private Lives in 1969, Harvey in 1970, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1972, Don Juan in 1973, The Visit in 1973, Holiday* in 1973, Tartuffe in 1977, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1977, Major Barbara in 1980, The Man Who Came to Dinner (1980), The Devil’s Disciple in 1988, The Miser in 1990, and Getting Married in 1991, among many others. Porter also directed revivals Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and occasional television productions. PORTLAND STAGE COMPANY (PSC). The sole League of Resident Theatre (LORT) company in Maine, the PSC was founded in 1974 as the Profile Theatre, a touring company of young performers. Over time, the company evolved into a resident theatre devoted to classics and contemporary plays, with occasional new works, including Leaving Queens (2001), a musical which transferred to New York. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. POTTS, NANCY (1940– ). A prolific costumer who began her career OffBroadway with revivals of Right You Are (If You Think You Are) and The Tavern,* both in 1964, Potts also worked on Broadway where she received three Tony Award nominations for costume designs for 1967 revivals of The Wild Duck and The School for Scandal and for a 1977 revival of Porgy

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and Bess, which also brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination. Her numerous and varied Broadway credits include many revivals, but also new works including Hair (1968), Exit the King (1968), La Strada (1969), The Grass Harp (1971), The Selling of the President (1972), Veronica’s Room (1973), Who’s Who in Hell (1974), Children of a Lesser God (1980), I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980), Lolita (1981), Einstein and the Polar Bear (1981), The Curse of an Aching Heart (1982), Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1982), and Sing, Mahalia, Sing (1985). POWER, TYRONE (1914–1958). The scion of a theatrical family extending across four generations, Power was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and, as Tyrone Power, Jr., debuted on Broadway as a replacement in Flowers of the Forest (1935) and in two revivals, Romeo and Juliet in 1935 and Saint Joan in 1936, both starring Katharine Cornell. His astonishing good looks led him to Hollywood, where he became a major movie star during Hollywood’s Golden Age, appearing in such screen classics as In Old Chicago (1937) Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), Jesse James (1939), The Rains Came (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), The Razor’s Edge (1946), Nightmare Alley (1947), Captain from Castile (1947), The Long Gray Line (1955), The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), The Sun Also Rises (1957), and Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Late in his career, Power returned to Broadway in John Brown’s Body (1953), The Dark Is Light Enough (1955), costarring with Cornell, and a revival of Back to Methuselah in 1958, the year he died of a heart attack will working on a film in Spain. POWERS, TOM (1890–1955). Owensboro, Kentucky-born Tom Powers attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which he appeared in a Pennsylvania production of In Mizzoura* (1911). He gained notice in two New York productions, Mr. Lazarus and Mile-a-Minute Kendall, both in 1916, then made an auspicious debut in musicals, introducing Jerome Kern’s “Till the Clouds Roll By” in Oh, Boy! (1917). Most of his subsequent work was in non-musicals, with notable performances in Why Not? (1922) and in Theatre Guild productions The Wild Duck (1925) and three George Bernard Shaw plays: Androcles and the Lion (1925), The Man of Destiny (1926), and Arms and the Man (1926). Powers scored later successes in Philip Barry’s comedy White Wings* (1926) and in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Strange Interlude (1928). He replaced Orson Welles in The Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar (1938). Powers’s other Broadway credits include End of Summer (1936), When We Are Married (1939), Fledgling (1940), Broken Journey (1942), a

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revival of The Three Sisters in 1942, and Allah Be Praised! (1944). He also had a lengthy motion picture career, appearing most memorably as the victim in Double Indemnity (1944). PRELUDE TO A KISS. Craig Lucas’s Tony Award-nominated romantic comedy/fantasy took its title from a Duke Ellington song. The play opened under Norman René’s direction at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 1 May 1990 for 440 performances following previous runs at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in 1988 and the Circle Repertory Company (CRC) in 1990. Mary-Louise Parker, who won a Theatre World Award for her performance, played Rita, a young woman pessimistic about life who falls in love and marries Peter (Timothy Hutton). At the wedding, Rita is kissed by a mysterious old man (Barnard Hughes), causing them to exchange bodies. This switch tests the love of Peter and Rita and some critics noted that the play was a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, with Peter’s love for Rita challenged by the fact that she was trapped in a dying body. Prelude to a Kiss was revived on Broadway in 2007 in a Roundabout Theatre production starring Annie Parisse, Alan Tudyk, and John Mahoney. A 1992 film version, starring Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin (who had played Peter in the CRC production), featured Hughes reprising his stage role. PRESTON, ROBERT (1916–1987). Born Robert Preston Meservey in Newton, Massachusetts, he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse before service in the United States Army during World War II. Prior to and during the war, beginning in 1938, Preston appeared in films, but except for a few for director Cecil B. DeMille, the roles were secondary and the films undistinguished. Turning his attentions to Broadway in the early 1950s made him a major stage star and improved the roles he occasionally played on screen. He was well-received in a 1952 revival of The Male Animal and despite a few subsequent flops, including Men of Distinction (1953), His and Hers (1954), and The Magic and the Loss (1954), his genial virility and charisma led to great successes in The Tender Trap (1954), Janus (1955), and The Music Man (1957), which brought him a Tony Award for his first musical role. He repeated his now-legendary performance in the 1962 film version, playing a romantic con man in turn-of-the-century Iowa. Another musical, I Do! I Do! (1966), in which he costarred with Mary Martin in a rare twocharacter musical (based on the 1951 play The Fourposter), brought him another Tony. He was nominated for a Tony for Mack & Mabel (1974) and also won praise for a 1963 revival of Too True to Be Good, Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), Ben Franklin in Paris (1964), The Lion in Winter (1966), and he replaced George C. Scott in Sly Fox (1976).

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Preston was nominated for Supporting Actor Academy Award for Victor Victoria (1982) and also appeared in such films as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), All the Way Home (1963), Junior Bonner (1972), Child’s Play (1972), Mame (1974), Semi-Tough (1977), and S.O.B. (1981), and on several television dramas. PRICE, THE. Arthur Miller’s Tony Award-nominated drama opened at the Morosco Theatre on 7 February 1968 for 429 performances, his mostsuccessful later play. Produced by Robert Whitehead, directed by Ulu Grosbard, and designed by Boris Aronson, The Price focused on two estranged middle-aged brothers, Victor and Walter, played by Pat Hingle and Arthur Kennedy, respectively, who meet in the attic of their deceased father’s brownstone to sell his remaining possessions to Gregory Solomon, an elderly Jewish antique dealer (Harold Gary). The brothers, one a successful doctor and the other a cop, battle out sibling rivalries and old wounds as Miller continued to explore themes of guilt and responsibility inherent in his drama. Kate Reid played Esther, Victor’s wife, and the play has had three major New York revivals, in 1979, 1992, and 1999. PRIDE’S CROSSING. Tina Howe’s play opened in January 1997 at the Old Globe Theatre under the direction of Jack O’Brien and featuring Cherry Jones before moving to the Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1997. A fictional biography of a woman who swam the English Channel, the play won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The swimmer, Mabel Tidings Bigelow, has her perseverance tested in the face of social and familial constraints as her life, suggested by that of Howe’s aunt, is seen in glimpses across 80 years. PRIMARY STAGES (PS). First located in a 99-seat theatre on West 45th Street, beginning in 1987, PS moved in 2004 to a 198-seat theatre at 59 East 59th Street where it continues its mission of developing new plays. More than 100 new plays, many premieres, have been produced at PS, including works by Horton Foote, A. R. Gurney, Romulus Linney, Donald Margulies, Mac Wellman, Terrence McNally, John Patrick Shanley, Lee Blessing, and others. PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, THE. Jay Presson Allen adapted Muriel Sparks’s novel of the same name, which opened on 16 January 1968 for 379 performances under Michael Langham’s direction, with scenery and lighting by Jo Mielziner and costumes by Jane Greenwood. Zoe Caldwell won a Tony Award as a 1930 Scottish teacher at a girl’s school in Edinburgh

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who exerts undue influence on her special students, the “Brodie Girls.” Miss Brodie’s romantic travails with another teacher (Joseph Maher) and with the headmistress of the school, combined with her arrogance and liberated attitudes, leads to her downfall. Maggie Smith won an Academy Award playing the title role in a 1969 movie version. PRINCE, HAROLD (1928– ). Born Harold Smith Prince in New York, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he served in the United States Army, stationed in Germany. He began his career as an assistant stage manager working under legendary Broadway director, producer, and playwright George Abbott, becoming Abbott’s coproducer on the Tony Award-winning musical, The Pajama Game (1954). Continuing to produce, Prince also began directing, amassing most of his credits in musical theatre. He won Best Producer Tonys for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) and Fiddler on the Roof (1965) and won Tonys for his direction of Cabaret (1966), Company (1969), Follies (1971), a 1974 revival of Candide, Sweeney Todd (1979), Evita (1980), The Phantom of the Opera (1988), and a 1995 revival of Show Boat. Prince’s occasional non-musical directing assignments included revivals of The Great God Brown* in 1972, The Visit in 1973, Love for Love in 1974, The Member of the Wedding in 1975, Some of My Best Friends (1977), Play Memory (1984), End of the World (1984), and Hollywood Arms (2002). Prince was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2006. Prince is the father of actress Daisy Prince. PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE, THE. Neil Simon’s Tony Awardnominated comedy-drama opened in a Saint Subber production at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on 11 November 1971 for 798 performances under the direction of Mike Nichols, who won a Tony. Peter Falk and Lee Grant starred as Mel and Edna Edison, a middle-aged and middle-class New York couple, facing the struggles of city life in the early 1970s. Mel loses his job, their apartment is robbed, and their upstairs neighbor frequently dumps buckets of water on a frustrated Mel. Vincent Gardenia won a Tony as Mel’s concerned brother, Harry, and Dena Dietrich, Tresa Hughes, and Florence Stanley played Mel’s older sisters. Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft took over the leads in a 1975 film from the play. PRODUCING/PRODUCERS.† This term typically refers to an individual or an organization providing financial and organizational support for a play. In the period between 1880 and 1930, producers were often theatre owners and many were creative forces, as well as savvy business people. Prior to the twentieth century, plays were often produced by star actors who were

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also managers of a repertory-style company and, in many cases, owned an operated their own theatres. Producers often spring from the ranks of theatre workers; some work in performance areas or, more likely, in box office, as agents, or publicists. The battle over the Theatrical Syndicate,* a small group of producers who attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to dominate theatre ownership across the country at the end of the nineteenth century, encouraging dramatists to protect their interests by establishing organizations like The Playwrights’ Company, to produce plays themselves. The Little Theatre movement,* which often attempted to produce new works ignored by commercial producers and to provide opportunities for experimentation and young talents, pointed to the limitations of commercial producers, a fact also underscored by the Actors Equity Association strike of 1919, which shut down Broadway theatres as actors demanded better wages and working conditions from producers. While these circumstances suggest that writers, designers, directors, and actors must battle producers to elevate the quality of the American stage, it is also the case that many producers and producing organizations have made quality their hallmark, as with such pre-1930 producers as David Belasco,* Harrison Grey Fiske* and Minnie Maddern Fiske,* Florenz Ziegfeld,* Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre,* and the Theatre Guild. Some talents developed long-term relationships with producers to positive effect; one pre-1930 example is the highly successful 20-year partnership between actor, playwright, and composer George M. Cohan and producer Sam H. Harris. The conflict between commercial and artistic considerations often recurred after 1930, but strong partnerships between artistic personnel and producers also evolved and, in many respects, are significant in regard to the strength and diversity of Broadway theatre between World War I and 1960. Such producing organizations as the Theatre Guild, The Playwrights Company, the Provincetown Players,* and The Group Theatre, among others prior to World War II, set a high bar of quality, as did individual producers, including such noted figures as John Golden, Max Gordon, T. Edward Hambleton, Harris, Arthur Hopkins, Lawrence Langner, Kenneth Macgowan, Gilbert Miller, and Brock Pemberton, while others, like the Shubert Brothers, had no qualms about producing a quality play, but were more concerned with the bottom line and providing an audience with entertainments that were more likely to sell tickets. Many of these producers had long careers continuing into the 1950s in some cases. From the 1940s to the 1960s, individual producers took the lead for a number of years, with some producing an impressive number of works. Among these, George Abbott (who produced—or participated in producing—many of the plays and musicals he directed), Cheryl Crawford, Jean

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Dalrymple. Alfred De Liagre, Jr. (who also directed), Leland Hayward (who had a long career as an agent before switching to producing), and Dwight Deere Wiman (whose career extended from the mid-1920s to the 1950s), were generally known for high quality productions. Some producers developed close ties to particular artists, as in the case of Herman Shumlin, who produced most of Lillian Hellman’s plays (and directed some as well). Directors increasingly produced; for example, Guthrie McClintic, who guided the career of his wife, Katharine Cornell, produced many of her Broadway productions and tours along with directing them. Actors were so inclined as well: Eddie Dowling produced two of the most significant plays of the war years, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939) and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), in part to present himself in exceptional roles. By the 1950s, some producers devoted themselves to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatre, including Lucille Lortel, whose support of the blooming Off-Broadway theatres of the 1950s–1970s made her an essential figure and a theatrical legend; Theodore Mann, who similarly aided OffBroadway with the establishment of the Circle in the Square Theatre, which he operated for decades; or Ellen Stewart, whose La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club gave a start to many singular playwrights, actors, and directors during the 1960s and beyond. From the 1960s, producers including Kermit Bloomgarden, Frederick Brisson, Arthur Cantor, Alexander H. Cohen, Robert Fryer, Morton Gottlieb, Ernest H. Martin, James M. Nederlander, Stuart Ostrow, Hildy Parks, Roger L. Stevens, Robert Whitehead, and Charles Woodward were dominant figures, but increasingly produced in association with others as Broadway “angels” (investors), who had always been part of a producer’s means operation, became increasingly necessary. Certain producers associated themselves with individual creators, as had been true in the past; for example, Clinton Wilder produced many of Edward Albee’s plays from the 1960s, while Arnold Saint Subber did the same for Neil Simon’s early plays, although Emanuel Azenberg devoted himself almost exclusively to producing Simon’s prolific output of comedies and musicals from the 1970s. In the same era, among musical theatre producers, Harold Prince produced many of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals (and directed several), but also produced and directed a range of varied plays and musicals during a 50-plus-year career. By the 1970s, creative partnerships between two or more producers became typical, as in the case of Elizabeth McCann and Nelle Nugent, who together produced an array of the most important Broadway plays and musicals of the 1970s and 1980s. Separately, both have continued producing into the twenty-first century.

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Two producing names dominated in the second half of the twentieth century: Joseph Papp and David Merrick. Papp, a crusading producer devoted to bringing the best innovative theatre to the largest and most diverse audience, established both the New York Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theatre, both of which became essential theatrical institutions in New York from the mid-1950s. Papp gave a start to many of the most important new dramatists of the era and scores of actors, directors, and designers, while emphasizing the increasing cultural and gender diversity of New York and, in fact, the country. Few producers of any era fit the archetype of the solo producer more vividly than David Merrick, a producer admired for his courage in producing a wide range of works, from the most popular Broadway musicals between the 1950s and 1970s, to great dramas, the work of new writers, and European imports. He was also widely despised for his high-handed ways and arrogance, a reputation he seemed to encourage. Few producers were as well-known (he was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1966) as Merrick, and the identity of Broadway in its weakest period in the 1960s and 1970s was bolstered by Merrick’s productions. Merrick was truly the most visible representation of the last of a breed of producers that had dominated Broadway from the 1920s to the 1960s. After 1970, the cost of mounting theatre productions, particularly on Broadway and Off-Broadway, made it virtually impossible for a single producer to manage the expenses of a single production alone. This became viscerally evident in the last decades of the twentieth century when during the presentation of a Best Play or Best Musical Tony Award, the stage became filled with producers of a given production. Producing organizations became more important after the 1970s, with companies and regional theatres producing seasons with the assistance of grants, boards of directors, and season subscribers. Some producers were truly managing and/or artistic directors of theatre companies, like Lynne Meadow, who became well-known due to associations with important producing organizations (in Meadow’s case, the Manhattan Theatre Club), or Michael Ritchie, who has spent much of his career with the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Other producers aspired to return to the Merrick tradition or to work in partnership with other producers and investors. Among the major figures of the era between 1980 and 2010 are Roger S. Berlind, Zev Bufman, Rocco Landesman (who eventually became head of the National Endowment of the Arts [NEA]), Cameron Mackintosh, Daryl Roth, and Barry and Fran Weissler, among others. PRODUCING MANAGERS’ ASSOCIATION (PMA). Producer Sam H. Harris led this producers’ organization established in 1918 at the behest of

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John Golden in the face of mounting tensions between the Actors’ Equity Association and the United Managers’ Protective Association. The PMA resisted negotiations with Equity, leading to the actors’ strike of 1919. Compelled by Equity’s resolve, the PMA signed the first American labormanagement contract. In 1924, several producers broke with PMA to establish the Managers’ Protective Association, which evolved into the League of New York Theatres and Producers in 1930. PROLET-BUEHNE. This New York-based workers’ theatre group styled on similar socialist theatre troupes in Berlin and Moscow was established by immigrant German activists in 1925. Employing agit-prop techniques under the leadership of John E. Bonn, their productions inspired the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre and the creation of the Living Newspaper techniques of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The Prolet-Buehne ceased functioning in 1934, and Bonn became director of the German wing of the FTP. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. PROOF. David Auburn’s drama opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 24 October 2000 for 917 performances under the direction of Daniel Sullivan (who won a Tony Award) and with scene design by John Lee Beatty, winning a Pulitzer Prize and Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Best Play. Mary-Louise Parker, in a Tony and Drama Desk Award-winning performance, played Catherine, an unhappy college dropout, who returns to her Chicago home. Her father, Robert, a celebrated mentally disturbed mathematician, has recently died. Catherine befriends Hal (Ben Shenkman, in a Tony-nominated performance), a former pupil of her father’s, and Hal discovers an important, hitherto unknown proof of a mathematical formula in one of Robert’s notebooks. Catherine, however, claims that she wrote the proof, and Hal is left to attempt to probe the mysteries of the relationship of madness and genius and the difficulty of forging human relationships in the murky realm of love and trust. Larry Bryggman as Robert and Johanna Day as Claire were also Tony-nominated. Gwyneth Paltrow was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Catherine in a 2005 screen version costarring Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Hope Davis. PROSKY, ROBERT (1930–2008). Born Robert Józef Poruczek to Polish American parents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Prosky studied economics at Temple University. While working as a bookkeeper for the Federal Reserve Bank, Prosky took acting classes at the American Theatre Wing and began a long and successful career as a character actor on stage and screen. Among his many stage credits, Prosky originated the role of Shelly “The Machine”

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Levine in David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), which brought him a Tony Award nomination. He was also Tony-nominated for A Walk in the Woods (1988). Prosky appeared in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions of Moonchildren (1971), a revival of A View from the Bridge in 1983, Camping with Henry and Tom (1996), and Democracy (2004). He acted in many productions at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he lived, including revivals of The Dybbuk in 1975, An American Daughter in 2002, and Awake and Sing! in 2006. In films, Prosky appeared in The Natural (1984), Broadcast News (1987), Far and Away (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Dead Man Walking (1995), among many others, as well as numerous television programs. PTERODACTYLS. Nicky Silver’s first important play opened at the Vineyard Theatre in October 1993 under the direction of David Warren. A bright cast, including Kelly Bishop and Hope Davis, appeared in this dark sex farce in the age of AIDS that critics compared with the plays of Joe Orton. New York Times critic Ben Brantley found the traditional nuclear family (alcoholic mother, adulterer father, brother with AIDS, and pill-popping sister) as “poignantly grotesque symbols of a species on the verge of extinction.” See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. PUBLIC THEATRE, THE (PT). Founded in 1954 by Joseph Papp as the Shakespeare Workshop, the PT, which is associated with the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), also founded by Papp, is a central force in the cultural life of New York City and Off-Broadway. Productions mounted by the PT have won 42 Tony Awards, 149 Obie Awards, 40 Drama Desk Awards, and 4 Pulitzer Prizes, among other honors. Papp’s guiding principle in creating the PT was to make theatre available to all of the people, regardless of economic status, and to be inclusive in providing a forum for emerging artists and underrepresented ethnic, racial, and gender groups. Since Papp’s death, other artistic directors, including Joanne Akalaitis, George C. Wolfe, and Oskar Eustis, have guided the PT, continuing Papp’s vision and establishing various outreach and education programs to further the theatre’s mission. PUERTO RICAN TRAVELING THEATRE (PRTT). Established in New York in the wake of a successful 1967 production of René Marqués’s The Oxcart, dealing with Puerto Rican immigration, the PRTT decided to present the play, free of charge, as street theatre with funding from the city. The event spawned the Spanish bilingual theatre in New York (and, ultimately, throughout the United States). Annually, the PRTT presents a range of mainstage

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plays from Puerto Rico, Latin America, Spain, and the United States, alternating Spanish and English performances of each work. The PRT also offers a summer tour and training units in acting (named for actor Raúl Juliá), and emerging playwrights. The company has won several honors, including Obie Awards, and is located on West 47th Street. See also CHICANO THEATRE. PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA.† Established according to provisions in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) in 1917, this honor is bestowed annually on a new American play performed in New York deemed to have “best represented the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standards of good morals and good manners.” Over the years, many of the choices made met with disagreement, encouraging critics to set up the New York Drama Critics Circle. Jesse Lynch Williams’* Why Marry?* was the first play awarded in 1918. The most awarded dramatist, Eugene O’Neill, had won three Pulitzers (Beyond the Horizon* in 1920, Anna Christie* in 1922, and Strange Interlude* in 1928) by 1930. The first musical to win, Of Thee I Sing (1932), acknowledged the work of librettists George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, but omitted the music by George Gerhswin. Post-1930, Of Thee I Sing was preceded by The Green Pastures (1930) and Alison’s House (1931), with subsequent post-1930 winners (dates indicating the year the award was presented) including Both Your Houses (1933), Men in White (1934), The Old Maid (1935), Idiot’s Delight (1936), You Can’t Take It with You (1937), Our Town (1938), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939), The Time of Your Life (1940), There Shall Be No Night (1941), The Skin of Our Teeth (1943), Harvey (1945), State of the Union (1946), A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), Death of a Salesman (1949), South Pacific (1950), The Shrike (1952), Picnic (1953), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1954), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Diary of Anne Frank (1956), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1957), Look Homeward, Angel (1958), J. B. (1959), Fiorello! (1960), All the Way Home (1961), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1962), The Subject Was Roses (1965), A Delicate Balance (1967), The Great White Hope (1969), No Place to Be Somebody (1970), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1971), That Championship Season (1973), Seascape (1975), A Chorus Line (1976), The Shadow Box (1977), The Gin Game (1978), Buried Child (1979), Talley’s Folly (1980), Crimes of the Heart (1981), A Soldier’s Play (1982), ’night, Mother (1983), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Sunday in the Park with George (1985), Fences (1987), Driving Miss Daisy (1988), The Heidi Chronicles (1989), The Piano Lesson (1990), Lost in Yonkers (1991), The Kentucky Cycle (1992), Angels in America: Millennium

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Approaches (1993), Three Tall Women (1994), The Young Man from Atlanta (1995), Rent (1996), How I Learned to Drive (1998), Wit (1999), Dinner with Friends (2000), Proof (2001), Topdog/Underdog (2002), Anna in the Tropics (2003), I Am My Own Wife (2004), Doubt (2005), Rabbit Hole (2007), August: Osage County (2008), Ruined (2009), and Next to Normal (2010). No awards were presented in 1942, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1974, 1986, 1997, and 2006. See also AWARDS. PUPPETRY. Puppets, inanimate figures manipulated by a puppeteer, have been seen by audiences since the beginning of American theatre (and, in theatrical history, since ancient times). Whether hand (or sock) puppets or marionettes (puppets manipulated by strings or rodds), these iconic human symbols appear to date back to the beginnings of human history. Spanish puppeteers first performed in North America as early as the sixteenth century and Native Americans were known to use puppets in ritual performances. English puppet shows were frequently seen during the eighteenth century, with the earliest documented performance in Barbados in 1708. Chinese shadow puppets were seen in America in this era, as were puppet performances from Central and South America, France, Italy, and elsewhere. Puppets were popular with American children from the early eighteenth century and many shops sold puppet stages and puppets to youngsters. Tony Sarg (1880–1942) was perhaps the first important modern puppeteer, beginning with performances in his studio in 1915. He toured the United States and performed The Rose and the Ring, Don Quixote, and Rip Van Winkle* with frequency. Prior to 1930, other major American puppeteers included Helen Haiman Joseph, Edith Flack Ackley, Remo Bufano, Marjorie Batchelder, and especially Paul McPharlin (1903–1948), whose seminal book, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History (1949), provides a detailed record of the often overlooked history of the puppet and its manipulators in the United States. Puppets were seen with some frequency during the era of vaudeville,* with Edgar Bergen (1903–1978) and his marionette “Charlie McCarthy” emerging as breakout stars on radio, film, and television. With the arrival of television in the United States in the late 1940s, puppetry experienced something of a resurgence, particularly in children’s programming, including Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and Howdy Doody in the 1950s and Sesame Street beginning in 1969. Some puppeteers directed their efforts to either combining the child-adult audiences or moving toward adult entertainments. Bil (1904–1987) and Cora (1912–1967) Baird won fame designing and performing with puppets, as did Jim Henson (1936–1990), whose “Muppets,” won great popularity after the 1970s in television and a series of films. Political and experimental theatre groups often made use of puppets during the 1960s and beyond, includ-

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ing such collectives as The Bread & Puppet Theatre, founded by Peter Schumann (1934– ), the Horse and Bamboo Theatre, the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, or, on the other end of the spectrum, entertainer Wayland Flowers (1939–1988) and his satirical puppet, Madame, a randy old woman. Designer and director Julie Taymor brought puppetry back to Broadway with The Lion King (1997) and several notable productions of classics in regional theatres, and Avenue Q (2003), won a Tony Award as Best Musical featuring puppets (ala the Muppets) in adult-themed situations. Noted experimental artists, including Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, have made use of the “object”—including puppets—in highly theatrical, multimedia postmodern productions. PURLIE VICTORIOUS. Ossie Davis’s comedy, directed by Howard Da Silva and produced by Philip Rose, opened on 28 September 1961 for 261 performances at the Cort Theatre with a cast, including Davis in the title role, with his wife, actress Ruby Dee, Beah Richards, Alan Alda, and Godfrey Cambridge (in a Tony Award-nominated performance). Set in “Jim Crow” Georgia in “the recent past,” the play focuses on a traveling preacher, Purlie Victorious Judson, who returns to his small Georgia hometown to attempt to save its church and help its members, who are cotton pickers working on the plantation of Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee. Purlie saves the church with the help of Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins and Cotchipee’s liberal son. Filmed as Gone Are the Days! (1963), Davis starred with Dee, Cambridge, Richards, and Alda repeating their roles, and a Tony Award-nominated musical version, Purlie (1970), scored a major hit and was broadcast in 1981 with much of its original cast. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, THE. Written by Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall under the pen names Alan Child and Isabelle Louden, this three-act comedy, which opened at the Avon Theatre on 9 October 1933 for 252 performances under the direction of Miriam Doyle, with scene design by Livingston Platt, was set during the American Revolution and focused on Max, a Hessian soldier, who goes AWOL on a Connecticut farm where he falls in love with Prudence Kirkland, daughter of a captain in the American army (Peggy Conklin), who is engaged to the local sheriff. He and Prudence marry, leading him to realize that he is in sympathy with the American cause because he has experienced “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Langner and Marshall, married producers, only collaborated on this single play, which later served as the source material for the musical Arms and the Girl (1950). Paramount Pictures released a movie version in 1934 starring Joan Bennett and Francis Lederer.

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Q QUEER THEATRE. See GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. QUINN, ANTHONY (1915–2001). Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, as Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn, he attended high school in Los Angeles when his family moved there to escape poverty in Mexico. He became a movie star after initially studying architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright. Signed up by his future father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille, his screen career began at Paramount Pictures in the mid-1930s and led to two Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards for Viva Zapata! (1952) and Lust for Life (1957). He acted in over 150 films, but also appeared on stage, replacing Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and playing opposite Uta Hagen in the play’s national tour. He also appeared on Broadway in The Gentleman from Athens (1947), in a 1950 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, Borned in Texas (1950), and Tchin-Tchin (1962). On Broadway, he starred opposite Laurence Olivier in Becket (1960), receiving a Tony Award nomination, and appeared in a revival of the musical Zorba (1983), playing the title role as he had done in the film Zorba the Greek, which had inspired the musical. QUINTERO, JOSÉ (1924–1999). José Benjamin Quintero was born in Panama City, Panama, and attended the University of Southern California and worked in stock before beginning a distinguished directing career at New York’s Circle in the Square. Winning the confidence of Eugene O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta Monterey, Quintero was tapped to direct the Broadway production of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956, which won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for O’Neill and a Tony Award for Quintero. That same year, Quintero directed an acclaimed Off-Broadway revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, reviving the fortunes of this play, which had won scant approval in its original 1947 staging. Quintero’s name became synonymous with O’Neill’s—and the twin successes of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh ignited a renaissance of interest in O’Neill’s work, with Quintero staging acclaimed revivals of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude in 1963, Marco Millions* in 1964, Hughie in 1964, More

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Stately Mansions in 1967, Anna Christie* in 1977, A Touch of the Poet in 1977, The Iceman Cometh in 1985, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1988. In 1973, Quintero also won particular acclaim, and another Tony, for reviving the fortunes of another O’Neill work with his sensitive staging of O’Neill’s last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. Among Quintero’s non-O’Neill directing credits, he staged Tennessee Williams’s The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968) and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). He also directed a 1961 film adaptation of Williams’s novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, starring Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty. It was the only film Quintero directed, although he helmed a few television dramas. QUINTON, EVERETT (1951– ). Actor and playwright Quinton was life partner of Charles Ludlam and a member of Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company (RTC) for 10 years prior to Ludlam’s death in 1987, after which he took over the artistic directorship of the company and became its leading “grande dame” player. Quinton wrote a version of A Tale of Two Cities (1989) in which he depicts a transvestite performing Charles Dickens’s novel. His other plays include a camp, cross-dressing version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994) and the solo Bitch Slapped By God (2007), which he performed in both New York and London. Quinton has performed in numerous RTC productions, winning an Obie Award for The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984). Following the closing of RTC in 1997, Quinton has freelanced as a performer and director, touring during the early 2000s in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella as the Wicked Stepmother. He has appeared in several films, including Legal Eagles (1986), Hello Again (1987), Big Business (1988), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Pollock (2000), and on television, including the soap opera The Guiding Light in 1999. See also FEMALE/ MALE IMPERSONATION.

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R RABB, ELLIS (1930–1998). A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Rabb studied drama at Carnegie Tech, and in 1953 he began his career acting and directing for the Antioch Area Theatre in Yellow Springs, Ohio, after which he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in an American Shakespeare Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing. He began working in New York theatre in 1955 and won a Clarence Derwent Award in a 1958 revival of Molière’s The Misanthrope Off-Broadway. Regarded as a boldly imaginative, flamboyant actor and director of classical and modern American plays, Rabb won a special 1962 Drama Desk Award and a 1968 Tony Award for his founding of the Association of Producing Artists (which later merged with the Phoenix Theatre to become the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company). He was nominated for a Tony for his direction of a 1966 Broadway revival of You Can’t Take It with You (he directed a 1983 revival as well) and won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for a 1975 revival of The Royal Family,* in which he also acted the character based on John Barrymore,* a performance preserved in a 1977 PBS-TV production. Among the plays Rabb directed for APA-Phoenix and elsewhere were works by Shakespeare, Molière, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, George M. Cohan, Eugene O’Neill, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and others. Rabb was married to Rosemary Harris from 1959–1967, who appeared in several APA-Phoenix productions. RABE, DAVID (1940– ). Born in Dubuque, Iowa, to a teacher and a store clerk, David William Rabe attended Loras College and Villanova University, but in 1965 he dropped out and was drafted into the United States Army. He spent nearly a year at war in Vietnam, which provided the impetus for his most important dramatic work, a loosely connected trilogy of Vietnamthemed plays merging elements of realism and theatricalism to an often surreal effect. These plays include Sticks and Bones (1969), The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), which won a Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk Award, and In the Boom Boom Room (1973), which was Tony-nominated. Streamers (1976), which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award,

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is similarly set among the military of the Vietnam era. Rabe’s other plays include the Tony-nominated Hurlyburly (1984), Goose and Tomtom (1987), Those the River Keeps (1994), A Question of Mercy (1997), and The Dog Problem (2001). Rabe has also written for the screen, including adaptations of his plays Streamers (1983) and Hurlyburly (1998), as well as I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1983), Casualties of War (1989), and The Firm (1993), and is the author of two novels. Rabe married actress Jill Clayburgh in 1979. RACE, RACISM. See AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE; ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE; CHICANO THEATRE; ETHNIC THEATRE. RACE. David Mamet directed his own drama on the provocative subject of race in contemporary America. The play, Mamet’s first directorial effort on Broadway, opened on 6 December 2009 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, slightly more than a year after the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States. Mamet cynically questions the ability of blacks and whites to find common ground as Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), a rich white man, is accused of raping a black woman. For his defense, he turns to two lawyers (David Alan Grier and James Spader), one black and one white. The characters, in typical Mamet fashion, view all human behavior as motivated by self-interest, and discuss various facets of race accordingly. As Spader’s character, Jack Lawson, states, “You tell me that equally, you might not exploit being black? Or that any human being whatever might not, when pressed, exploit whatever momentary advantage he or she possessed. Tell me that, and I’ll go give my life to Christ.” The play ran well into 2010 with a new cast, featuring Eddie Izzard, Dennis Haysbert, Afton C. Williamson, and Thomas. RAHMAN, AISHAH (1936– ). A New York-born avant-garde playwright and teacher, Rahman was educated at Howard University and Goddard College. She started her career as a teacher at Brown University where she began writing plays in the 1970s. Her themes focus on African American historical figures, and her style features many surreal elements, which has inspired critics to compare her to Adrienne Kennedy. These aspects are evident in her first play, Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy (1972), centered on the life of singer Billie Holiday. The New York Shakespeare Festival produced her most noted work, Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977), a play set on the day of Charlie Parker’s death at a home for unwed mothers. Rahman’s other plays include The Tale of Madame Zora (1986), The Mojo and the Sayso (1987), and Only in America (1993).

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RAINMAKER, THE. N. Richard Nash’s play opened at the Cort Theatre on 28 October 1954 for 125 performances under Joseph Anthony’s direction, with scene and lighting design by Ralph Alswang. Geraldine Page won critical approval as Lizzie Curry, a “spinster,” who, with her father and brothers, is trying to survive a drought in a western state. Lizzie is also suffering from an emotional drought. Halfheartedly courted by File, the local sheriff’s deputy, Lizzie’s soul is unexpectedly stirred by Starbuck, a traveling con man (“a rainmaker”) played by Darren McGavin, who promises to end the literal drought and, instead, opens the floodgates of Lizzie’s desires. Starbuck’s interest in Lizzie also arouses File, who finally realizes the depth of his feelings for Lizzie. A 1956 movie version starred Katharine Hepburn, in an Academy Award-nominated performance, and Burt Lancaster, and the play was revived on Broadway in 1999 under Scott Ellis’s direction and featuring Jayne Atkinson in a Tony Award-nominated performance as Lizzie. A musical adaptation, 110 in the Shade (1963), was also directed by Anthony and racked up 330 performances; the musical was revived in 2007. RAISIN IN THE SUN, A. Lorraine Hansberry’s acclaimed drama was directed by Lloyd Richards and produced on Broadway with a large percent of financing from the black community. It opened on 11 March 1959 at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (the first ever awarded to an African American) and running for an impressive 530 performances. Its title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem, “A Dream Deferred,” reflecting on the shriveling of hopes among the American black population, and Raisin’s plot focuses on that subject. The Younger family, Lena (Claudia McNeil), the matriarch; her grown daughter, Beneatha (Diana Sands); and her grown son Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), his wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), and their son, Travis (Glynn Turman), all share a cramped apartment in a poor, predominantly black South Side Chicago neighborhood. The recent death of Lena’s husband provides a ray of hope in the form of a $10,000 life insurance policy, arousing dreams in all of the family members—Lena wants to move to a nice suburban home where she can have a garden (a dream shared by Ruth), Beneatha wants to go to college to become a doctor and perhaps return to the family’s roots in Africa, and Walter Lee wants to invest the money in a dubious partnership in a liquor store. Lena finds a house in an all-white neighborhood, but when the residents learn that a black family is moving in, they send an emissary, Lindner (John Fiedler), to offer the Youngers money to keep them out. The Youngers proudly reject Lindner’s offer, but to the horror of all, Walter Lee gives a portion of the insurance money to shady partners who disappear with

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his investment. When he realizes this, Walter Lee bitterly contacts Lindner, planning to take the offer. Appalled, Lena finally succeeds in appealing to Walter Lee’s pride, suggesting that he take the money in front of Travis. Chastened and, as Lena later describes it, “coming into his manhood,” he firmly rejects Lindner’s offer again, and the family proudly prepares to move into their new home financed by the remains of the father’s legacy. A Raisin in the Sun significantly aided the careers of Poitier, Dee, and Sands, and gave boosts to newcomers Lou Gossett, Ivan Dixon, and Lonne Elder III in secondary roles. Critics were uniformly enthusiastic, and McNeil, Poitier, Dee, and Sands reprised their roles in the well-received 1961 screen version, which, like the play, demonstrated Hansberry’s skill at characterization and language, while also examining themes of contemporary significance. The play’s greatest achievement may be that it educated a largely white Broadway audience in the realities of the lives of African Americans and the obstacles caused by prejudice and segregation. In 1973, Robert Nemiroff (who had been married to Hansberry) and Charlotte Zaltzberg adapted A Raisin in the Sun into the musical Raisin, which won a Tony Award as Best Musical and was revived successfully in 1981.There have been several significant revivals of A Raisin in the Sun, too, including twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversary productions, numerous regional theatre productions, and one acclaimed television film version starring Esther Rolle and Danny Glover in 1989. A 2004 Broadway revival starred Sean Combs, Audra McDonald, and Phylicia Rashad under Kenny Leon’s direction. RAMICOVA, DUNYA (1950– ). Born in Czechoslovakia, Ramicova moved to the United States in 1968 and studied at the Goodman School of Drama and Yale School of Drama before beginning her career in 1977 as a costume designer for theatre, opera, and dance. Her work has appeared in major international opera houses and dance theatre, as well as regional theatres across the United States. On Broadway, her work was seen in Grown Ups (1981) and a 1998 revival of Ah, Wilderness! Ramicova taught at Yale for 10 years and served as resident costume designer for the Yale Repertory Theatre, but in more recent years has devoted herself to opera. RAMSAY, REMAK (1937– ). Born Gustavus Remak Ramsay in Baltimore, Maryland, he began acting Off-Broadway in Hang Down Your Head and Die (1964) and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for a 1981 revival of The Winslow Boy and The Quartermaine’s Terms (1983), both OffBroadway. On Broadway, he has demonstrated versatility in both dramatic and musical roles, debuting as a replacement in Half a Sixpence (1965), as

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well as Sheep on the Runway (1970), Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen (1970), a 1971 revival of On the Town, Jumpers (1974), a 1975 revival of Private Lives, Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land (1977), a 1988 revival of The Devil’s Disciple, Nick & Nora (1991), and revivals of Saint Joan in 1993, The Molière Comedies in 1995, and as a replacement in The Heiress in 1995. His film roles include The Stepford Wives (1975), The Front (1976), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), and Julie & Julia (2009), and he has appeared frequently on television. RAND, SALLY (1904–1979). A native of Hickory County, Missouri, Helen Harriet Beck, who initially performed under the name of Billie Beck, became famous as a dancer in burlesque, mostly notably in the nude with an ostrich feather fan. She appeared in small roles in silent films, including The King of Kings (1927) and The Sign of the Cross (1932), for Cecil B. DeMille, who suggested the name change to Sally Rand, but she scored a major success as a fan dancer at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Along with the fan dance, Rand also did a bubble dance, continuing her career until late in life. RANDALL, TONY (1920–2004). Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as Arthur Leonard Rosenberg, Randall studied at Northwestern University before embarking on an acting career in New York, bolstered with further training at The Neighborhood Playhouse and with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham, among others. He served in the United States Army during World War II, after which his career on stage, and in films and television, began in earnest. He proved to be a facile performer in all genres. On Broadway, Randall was nominated for a Tony Award in the musical Oh, Captain! (1958) after beginning his postwar career in a small role in Katharine Cornell’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1947. He also originated the role of Hornbeck, the character based on H. L. Mencken,* in Inherit the Wind (1955), as well as UTBU (1966) and he took over the role of Rene in M. Butterfly (1988) during the show’s run. Between the mid-1950s and the 1980s, Randall’s stage appearances were relatively few, as he appeared in many movies and television programs. In films, Randall was nominated for Golden Globe Awards for Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), Pillow Talk (1959), and Lover Come Back (1961), and he also appeared in Let’s Make Love (1960), Boys Night Out (1962), and Send Me No Flowers (1964). On television, Randall was nominated for an Emmy Award for Mister Peepers (1952–1955) in 1954 and won an Emmy (and four nominations) in 1975 for the television series, The Odd Couple (1970–1975), based on Neil Simon’s stage play. He also appeared in the title role of the short-lived TV situation comedy Love, Sidney (1981–1983), play-

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ing the first openly gay character in television history. Late in his life, in the early 1990s, Randall founded and was artistic director (and principal donor) of the National Actors Theatre, which produced a series of classics and vintage American plays in limited runs on Broadway. RANDO, JOHN (1961– ). A native of Houston, Texas, Rando was educated at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he studied directing. He worked as assistant director at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego before embarking on a directing career. Rando won a Tony Award for the musical Urinetown (2001) and on Broadway he also directed Broken Glass (1994), The Dinner Party (2000), a 2001 revival of A Thousand Clowns, Dance of the Vampires (2002), and The Wedding Singer (2006), but much of his work has been done in regional theatres and Off-Broadway, where he directed revivals of Strike Up the Band in 1998, Do Re Mi in 1999, The Pajama Game in 2002, Off Thee I Sing in 2006, Face the Music in 2007, Damn Yankees in 2008, and The Toxic Avenger (2009). On his work in the theatre, Rando has said, “I know what makes me laugh, and I know what is ebullient and alive. For me, what’s important is a celebration of the human spirit through laughter.” RAPHAELSON, SAMSON (1896–1983). A native of New York City, Raphaelson was educated at the University of Illinois and his most enduring play was also his first, The Jazz Singer* (1925), which was adapted for the screen as the first feature-length sound film. As a playwright, Raphaelson moved easily between popular comedy and light drama. He followed The Jazz Singer with Young Love (1928) and The Wooden Slipper (1934), but both failed. Accent on Youth (1934), a long-running comedy starring Constance Cummings, was well-received (and revived on Broadway in 2009) and among his subsequent plays, Skylark (1939), which he also directed, was his most successful, perhaps because it starred Gertrude Lawrence. Other plays, including White Man (1936), Jason (1942), A Perfect Marriage (1944), and Hilda Crane (1950), failed to find favor with critics or audiences. Raphaelson was more successful writing for films, including Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), The Shop around the Corner (1940), and Heaven Can Wait (1943), as well as adaptations of his plays. RAPP, ADAM (1968– ). Chicago, Illinois-born Rapp studied at Clarke College and played varsity basketball prior to embarking on a two-year fellowship in playwriting at the Julliard School. His play, Nocturne (2001), was produced by the American Repertory Theatre and won the Elliot Norton Award prior to its production Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre

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Workshop. Rapp’s other plays include Animals and Plants (2001), Train Story (2002), Finer Noble Gases (2002), Faster (2002), Trueblinka (2002), Stone Cold Dead Serious (2003), Blackbird (2004), Gompers (2005), Members Only (2005), Red Light Winter (2005), Essential Self Defense (2007), American Sligo (2007), Bingo with the Indians (2007), The Metal Children (2008), and Kindness (2008). Rapp has also written a series of young adult novels before writing one for adults, The Year of Endless Sorrows (2006). Rapp also works in film and has directed Winter Passing (2005) and Blackbird (2007) and he has written episodes for the television series The L Word (2006–2007). He is the brother of actor Anthony Rapp. RASCHE, DAVID (1944– ). Son of a minister born in St. Louis, Missouri, Rasche studied at Elmhurst College before becoming a member of Chicago’s Second City troupe and, ultimately, acting in theatre, film, and television. In Chicago, he helped establish the Victory Gardens Theatre. On Broadway, Rasche began as a replacement in The Shadow Box (1977) and replaced again in Speed-the-Plow (1988). He also appeared in Lunch Hour (1980), Getting and Spending (1998), and To Be or Not To Be (2008). Rasche also acted Off-Broadway, winning critical plaudits in David Mamet’s Edmond (1982) and in an American Shakespeare Theatre production of The Taming of the Shrew directed by Zoe Caldwell in the 1980s. Rasche appeared in small film and television roles beginning in the late 1970s before becoming a regular on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope (1978–1981) and on the comedy series Sledge Hammer (1986–1988). In 2008, Rasche played recurring roles in the long-running soap opera, All My Children (1970–2009) and in Ugly Betty (2006–2009). RASHAD, PHYLICIA (1948– ). Born Phylicia Ayers-Allen in Houston, Texas, daughter of a dentist and a writer/artist, she was educated at Howard University before beginning a stage career that led to stardom (and two Emmy Award nominations) as Clair Huxtable, the matriarch on the longrunning television situation comedy, The Cosby Show (1984–1992). Despite her TV success, Rashad has returned to the Broadway stage with some frequency. In 2004, Rashad won a Tony Award (the first ever given to an African American actress in a leading role) and a Drama Desk Award in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun (she also received an Emmy nomination for a television film version of the revival). Rashad was again Tony-nominated for Gem of the Ocean (2005) and her other Broadway credits include The Wiz (1975), Dreamgirls (1981), replacing Bernadette Peters in Into the Woods (1987) and Tonya Pinkins in Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), a 2007 revival of Cymbeline, and an all-black revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008. In 2009,

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Rashad replaced Deanna Dunagan as Violet in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County (2007). She is the sister of director/choreographer/actress Debbie Allen. RATHBONE, BASIL (1892–1967).† Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Rathbone worked for 10 years in London theatre before his New York stage debut in The Czarina (1922). He played opposite Eva Le Gallienne in The Swan (1923), but his own play, Judas (1929), in which he also starred, flopped. Rathbone played Romeo to Katharine Cornell’s Juliet in 1934, after which he focused on Hollywood films, returning to the stage as the tyrannical Dr. Sloper in Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square called The Heiress (1947). More remembered for his screen work, Rathbone played both heroes, most notably Sherlock Holmes in a long series of popular movies, and villains, including Sir Guy of Gisbourne in the classic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), both of which were well-served by his tall, stately presence and imperious, intellectual manner. He continued to alternate between films and the stage, appearing in many stock productions throughout the remainder of his career, and made his final Broadway appearance replacing Raymond Massey in J.B. (1958). RATTIGAN, TERENCE (1911–1977). London-born as Terence Mervyn Rattigan, he became one of England’s most popular dramatists and screenwriters. His work was seen with some frequency on Broadway, but generally proved less popular in the United States than in England. Most of his plays are centered on the British upper classes and might best be defined as serious high comedies, where matters of manners and breeding, as well as politics and economics, significantly influence the characters. Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1956), his biggest success in the United States, was nominated for a Tony Award and In Praise of Love (1974) was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and ran a season thanks to the presence of Rex Harrison and Julie Harris in the cast. His other plays produced on Broadway during the 1930s and 1940s, most of which had short runs, include First Episode (1934), French without Tears (1937), Grey Farm (1940), Flare Path (1942), While the Sun Shines (1944), and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne starred in his O Mistress Mine (1946). Perhaps Rattigan’s greatest successes of the post-World War II era were The Winslow Boy (1947) and The Browning Version/Harlequinade (1949), as well as Separate Tables, which generated most attention for its 1958 all-star screen version and brought Rattigan an Academy Award nomination. He was also nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for The Sound Barrier (1952).

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Other Rattigan plays include The Deep Blue Sea (1952), The Sleeping Prince (1956), Ross (1961), and Man and Boy (1963). REALISM.† Since the terms realism and naturalism are often assumed to be synonymous, it is useful to distinguish between them, and in this enterprise their practitioners are unhelpful. In his art criticism of the 1860s, for example, Emile Zola wrote ardently and indiscriminately of impressionism, realism, and naturalism. With arguments often advanced for realism, August Strindberg defended naturalism in his preface to Miss Julie. What realism and naturalism share is an allegiance to an art of representation or imitation of unheroic everyday contemporary life, a departure from the romantic and melodramatic* plays that dominated European and American stages in the nineteenth century. Zola, the main spokesman for realism, was attracted to the “real” in realism, but it has become clear that realism is a style, no closer to reality than the several movements (including naturalism) that are similar to it or those that rose in reaction against it, each claiming to approach reality more closely. The nineteenth-century novel is a bastion of realism, but its techniques entered theatre gradually in Europe—and even more slowly in the United States. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century came real objects on a stage that resembled a room with the fourth wall separating the action from the audience removed—the so-called picture-frame stage. Tom Robertson introduced real bread and real tea to the London stage of the 1860s, but Zola’s dramatization of his own novel Thérèse Raquin is usually cited as the first realist play. André Antoine founded the Théâtre Libre in Paris in 1887, where he provided authentic settings for “slice-of-life” dramas, which are extremely naturalistic plays that aim to create the illusion of real people behaving and speaking “naturally” in a convincing setting at a recognizable moment in time and eschewed the tight suspenseful structure of the well-made play. Realism is the dominant style of modern drama, recognizable in the verisimilitude of setting, coherence of character, modernity of problems, and the prosaic quality of dialogue. In Europe, such diverse writers as Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and countless others made use of its basic properties in varied ways and, in Russia, the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre,* where Constantin Stanislavsky established his system for acting, methods by which his actors were able to achieve an emotional depth and reality previously unseen, the tide toward realism finally flowed toward the American stage. Playwright James A. Herne* went so far as to attempt to break from nineteenth-century melodramatic traditions to craft a more realistic play based on Ibsen’s approach, but his Margaret Fleming* (1890) contended with censorship and unresponsive audience re-

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action, discouraging him from continuing his Ibsenite experimentation. The new realism inherent in contemporary European plays was seen with greater frequency on American stage between 1900 and 1920, but with the possible exceptions of Clyde Fitch’s* last two plays, The Truth* (1907) and The City* (1909), and a few works by William Vaughan Moody,* Edward Sheldon,* and Percy MacKaye,* few U.S. playwrights ventured into the realm of realism (except in visual elements) prior to Eugene O’Neill and some of his contemporaries after World War I. From then until the 1960s, realism dominated serious drama in various ways, whether in the deeper emotional truths and the adult themes of O’Neill’s plays, politically-inspired dramas from such diverse writers as Robert E. Sherwood and Clifford Odets, or the poetic realism of Tennessee Williams. A more theatrical brand of realism emerged in the 1930s in Thornton Wilder’s plays in which, as in the case of Our Town (1938), he included a “stage manager” speaking directly to the audience and eliminated traditional realistic scenery and fragmented scenes, while maintaining a reality to his characters, dialogue, and their situations. After World War II, realism’s strictures became less strict, with predominantly realistic plays featuring such unrealistic elements as ghostly (as in the case, of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love [1983], among many others) or historical (as in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America [1993]) characters appearing in essentially realistic plays and the unities of time, place, and action being employed with greater freedom. American drama remains firmly rooted in the realistic tradition despite the fact that it has morphed, over 100 years, into a far more expansive and flexible form than its original practitioners envisioned due to the influence of virtually every major theatrical movement (many in strong opposition to realism) that followed during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from symbolism and expressionism to the Theatre of the Absurd and a range of experimental forms emerging in the 1960s. REASONS TO BE PRETTY. Neil LaBute’s play opened for a limited run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club production on 14 May 2008 before moving to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre on 6 March 2009, where it garnered three Tony Award nominations for Best Play, Best Actor (Thomas Sadoski), and Best Featured Actress (Marin Ireland), although it managed to run only for a 85 performances. As with LaBute’s The Shape of Things and Fat Pig, reasons to be pretty explores the present-day obsession with physical appearance, focusing on four young friends and lovers who express various dissatisfactions with their own personas and with their relationships with each other. New York Times critic Ben Brantley applauded the play’s “compelling naturalness of overheard conversation” and its celebration

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of “the everyday heroism in the struggle to find out” the truth in human means of communication. REBECK, THERESA (1958– ). Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated at Brandeis University, Rebeck began her career as a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter whose plays, as she herself explained them, are about “betrayal and treason and poor behavior. A lot of poor behavior.” Her play Omnium Gatherum (2003), cowritten with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and another work, Mauritius (2007), had a brief run on Broadway. Her other works have been produced Off-Broadway and in regional theatres, including Sex with the Censor (1990), Speakeasy (1990), What We’re Up Against (1993), Loose Knit (1994), Spike Heels (1994), The Family of Mann (1995), Sunday on the Rocks (1996), Abstract Expression (1998), View of the Dome (1998), Late Arrival (1999), The Butterfly Collection (2000), The First Day (2000), DollHouse (2001), Josephina (2001), Art Appreciation (2002), The Actress (2003), Aftermath (2005), The Bells (2005), CouchWorks (2005), The Water’s Edge (2006), The Scene (2006), Myth America (2007), The Understudy (2007), Open House (2007), and Our House (2009). She was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for writing episodes of the television drama NYPD Blue (1993–1997), winning a 1997 Writers Guild Award for her work on this series. Rebeck has taught at Brandeis University and Columbia University. RED. John Logan’s two-hander on the life and work of artist Mark Rothko opened on 1 April 2010 at the John Golden Theatre, where it received a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and an Outer Critics Circle Award as Best Play. First produced at London’s Donmar Warehouse, Red was directed for Broadway by Michael Grandage (Drama Desk Award, Tony-nominated), with Tony-nominated scene design by Christopher Oram, lighting by Neil Austin, and sound design by Adam Cork. Alfred Molina as Rothko received Tony and Drama Desk nominations and his fellow actor Eddie Redmayne, won a Tony and a Theatre World Award. Set in 1958, the play centers on Rothko’s dilemma as an angry, revolutionary abstract-expressionist painter whose goal was to unsettle his viewers. Offered a commission to paint murals for a new Park Avenue building, Rothko and his young admiring assistant, Ken, grapple with his hypocritical decision and his resistance to new movements in art. RED HORSE ANIMATION, THE. Lee Breuer’s play, the first developed by Mabou Mines, was created in collaboration with JoAnne Akalaitis,

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Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow and first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970. Revised and expanded, it opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on 22 April 1972 featuring music by Glass and performances by Akalaitis, Maleczech, and Warrilow. Set in an open space, the performance began with a taped prologue and the three actors enacted aspects of the consciousness of a horse. The play’s structure is divided into three individual components: “Outline,” “Lifeline,” and “Story Line,” but ultimately these areas merged as the horse became fully conscious of its surroundings. REDDIN, KEITH (1956– ). New Jersey-born Reddin was educated at Northwestern University and the Yale School of Drama before working as an actor and playwright. Reddin’s early plays, including Life and Limb (1984), Rum and Coke (1985), and But Not for Me (1998), were premiered at the South Coast Repertory, and other works include Big Time (1987), Nebraska (1989), Life during Wartime (1990), Brutality of Fact (1993), Almost Blue (1994), All the Rage (1997), Synergy (2000), Frame 312 (2003), Human Error (2004), The Missionary Position (2006), The Will to Art (2008), and Cleveland Heights (2008). He has adapted works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder, and Alexander Buravsky. As an actor, Reddin has appeared in episodic television and in small roles in such films as Lolita (1997) and Revolutionary Road (2008) and wrote the screenplays All the Rage (1999) and Mr. Softie (2009). On Broadway, he acted in two revivals, A Taste of Honey in 1981 and The Play’s the Thing in 1995. REED, FLORENCE (1883–1967).† Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of actor-manager Roland Reed, Reed spent a long apprenticeship in stock at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre beginning in 1901, after which she toured as E. H. Sothern’s* leading lady. She found her true niche in exotic roles, scoring her first success as a Russian prostitute in The Yellow Ticket (1914), in the long-running musical Chu Chin Chow (1918), and as the vengeful Asian madam Mother Goddam in The Shanghai Gesture* (1926). She headed the national companies of Mourning Becomes Electra and Elizabeth the Queen and created the role of the Fortune Teller in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), repeating the role in the 1955 American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) revival, and she play*ed the Nurse to Judith Anderson’s Medea in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s play in 1947. She appeared in a number of silent films and played Miss Havisham in the 1934 screen version of Great Expectations.

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REES, ROGER (1944– ). This Welsh-born actor has spent much of his career on the London stage and in films, and won a Tony Award in 1981 in the title role of the epic Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (and was nominated for an Emmy for the 1982 television production) and was later nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for Indiscretions (1995). On Broadway, he has also appeared in revivals of London Assurance in 1974, The Rehearsal in 1996, and Uncle Vanya in 2000, and won critical plaudits Off-Broadway in The End of the Day (1992) and A Man of No Importance (2002). In films, his credits include Star 80 (1983), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), The Substance of Fire (1996), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), Frida (2002), and The Prestige (2006). On television, Rees had a recurring role in the situation comedy Cheers (1982–1993). He served as artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival from 2004–2007. REEVE, CHRISTOPHER (1952–2004). New York-born actor, director, and sometime producer and screenwriter, Christopher D’Olier Reeve became a major film star when he appeared in a series of Superman films (1978, 1980, 1983, 1987), but despite his screen fame, Reeve returned to the stage. The son of a teacher/poet and journalist, Reeve began acting as a child in amateur production and in 1968, at the age of 15, he signed on as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He attended Cornell University, where he acted in numerous campus productions. During college, he acted with the San Diego Shakespeare Festival and he also took a leave of absence from school to see theatre in England and Scotland. After Cornell, Reeve attended the Juilliard School. He found work in television soap operas, and he appeared with Katharine Hepburn on Broadway in A Matter of Gravity and developed a close relationship with Hepburn. He subsequently appeared in the Broadway productions of Fifth of July (1980) and The Marriage of Figaro (1985). Aside from the Superman films, Reeve appeared on screen in Somewhere in Time (1980), Deathtrap (1982), The Bostonians (1984), Noises Off (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993), and in many television programs. In 1995, Reeve became a quadriplegic after a fall from a horse. He lived for nine more years, even acting and directing in television, receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance in the television remake of Rear Window in 1998. REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. This designation includes a range of professional, semi-professional, and not-for-profit theatres across the United States. The term resident theatre is often applied, meaning professional companies outside New York City, as is repertory theatre, which was

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the style in which a number of early regional theatres functioned at the beginning of the regional theatre movement in the late 1950s with the founding of the Guthrie Theatre. Most ultimately abandoned a true repertory style, moving instead to hiring actors show-by-show as opposed to a “permanent” resident company. Most regional theatres present a season of plays for a subscription audience, while also maintaining various kinds of secondary spaces for various specific purposes (edgier works, cabaret, children’s theatre, etc.). The top tier of these companies are the 74 member theatres of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), which works with these companies in negotiations with the various theatrical unions, including Actors’ Equity Association, United Scenic Artists, and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Other theatres, as many as 460, belong to the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and have not-for-profit status, but are not faced with as stringent union concerns as LORT companies. Whether labeled resident, regional, or repertory theatres, this movement can be traced to the Little Theatre* movement of the early twentieth century, but more directly to the establishment of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which has served as a prototype of many LORT and TCG theatres, although all have evolved in various directions with unique mission statements and goals. LORT and TCG resident not-for-profit theatres are essentially supported by individual donors, grants, and box office returns, and most are controlled by boards made up not of artists, but of local business and civic leaders, and this has tended to lead many theatres toward the same issues confronting commercial theatres. Most significantly, this causes even the most adventurous not-for-profit theatres to place a great emphasis on popular successes which, to some extent, undermines the original goals of most of these theatres of bringing high quality productions of classic, modern, and new works to a local audience. Resident not-for-profit theatres have successfully decentralized the American theatre, pulling the center of gravity away from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway, and their often increasingly cautious season selections, inspired by the need for box office returns, has created other local theatres, often semi-professional or amateur, presenting cutting-edge works not likely to be produced by LORT and TCG theatres. As of 2010, these concerns, along with a generally diminished audience for live theatre and debate over the appropriate mission of such theatres, were the central concerns facing the American professional stage in the twentyfirst century. See also REPERTORY THEATRE; RESIDENT NOT-FORPROFIT PROFESSIONAL THEATRE. REID, KATE (1930–1993). Born to Canadian parents in London as Daphne Kate Reid, she attended a performance art school in Canada. As an actress,

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she worked in both England and the United States in theatre, film, and television. On Broadway, she was nominated for a Tony Award twice, for Dylan (1964) and Slapstick Tragedy (1966), and received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Bosoms and Neglect (1979). She played the role of Martha in the original matinee productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Her other Broadway credits include The Price (1968), The Freedom of the City (1974), revivals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1974, Morning’s at Seven in 1980, and Death of a Salesman in 1984. Death of a Salesman brought her a Golden Globe Award nomination when it was broadcast in 1985. Reid also received a Golden Globe nomination for the film A Delicate Balance (1973) and an Emmy Award nomination for The Invincible Mr. Disraeli on The Hallmark Hall of Fame TV-series. Reid also appeared in the films This Property Is Condemned (1966), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Equus (1977), and Atlantic City (1980). REILLY, CHARLES NELSON (1931–2007). A Bronx, New York-born actor, direct, and teacher, Reilly began an acting career in the 1950s after studying voice, but abandoned plans for a music career. He worked in character roles in theatre and film and became a popular celebrity on television talk and game shows. Reilly won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor playing Bud Frump in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961) and was nominated for a Tony as Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly! (1964). He also appeared on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie (1960), Skyscraper (1965), God’s Favorite (1974), and Charlotte (1980). By the late 1970s, Reilly moved into directing and garnered another Tony nomination, this time as Best Director, for a 1997 revival of The Gin Game starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. He also directed Broadway productions of The Belle of Amherst (1976), Paul Robeson (1978), Break a Leg (1979), and The Nerd (1987). In a rare return to stage acting, Reilly was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his solo show, Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly (2002). On television, Reilly received three Emmy Award nominations for his continuing role in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968–1970) in 1970 and his guest appearances on Millennium (1996–1999) in 1998 and The Drew Carey Show (1995–2004) in 1999. He also acted in numerous other TV shows, but is most remembered as himself as a panelist on the long-running game show, The Match Game (1973–1982). REINHARDT, MAX (1873–1943).† Born Max Goldmann in Baden, Austria-Hungary, Reinhardt became one of the most admired and prolific directors and producers in Europe. Prior to 1930, his work was seen in America

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in Sumurun (1912) and in The Miracle* (1924), a sensation resulting from its ambitious scope and the fact that designer Norman Bel Geddes transformed Broadway’s Century Theatre into a medieval cathedral. In 1927–1928, Reinhardt’s celebrated productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Danton’s Death, and others were seen in New York when his company spent a season there. With the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s, Reinhardt abandoned his theatres in Germany and Austria and settled first in Hollywood, where he directed a lavish production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. This led to a 1935 all-star Warner Bros. film version, after which he ran a Hollywood acting workshop and directed for Broadway, including productions of Franz Werfel’s epic of Jewish history, The Eternal Road (1937), Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), and Irwin Shaw’s Sons and Soldiers (1943). RELIGIOUS DRAMA. The resistance of most organized religions to theatre from the time of the colonization of North America seemed to discourage dramatists from writing about religion in overt ways. Defining the term religious drama is problematic, since many plays in the American canon, to a lesser or greater degree, focus on spiritual matters, and depict clergy, believers, and a nation shaped by religious principles. Biblical stories and plays about religious figures appeared beginning in the early nineteenth century and the faiths of noted actors (usually in the Protestant faith) led to a few British plays finding popularity in the United States. Between 1800 and the early twentieth century, these plays included Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu (1839), Henry Arthur Jones’s Saints and Sinners (1895), and Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1909). Despite the fact that most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century plays dealing overtly with religion neither challenged faith nor the veracity of Bible stories, audiences and critics seemed resistant to any such depictions. A few tested the waters, but met with controversy. The Passion Play (1879) by Jewish dramatist Salmi Morse caused a furor (and arrests for the producer and cast) for depicting biblical matters and Christ (played by James O’Neill*) as a character, and it closed abruptly during its New York run in 1883, serving as a discouragement to playwrights interested in religious matters. In 1899, audiences were more receptive to an epic dramatization of General Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben-Hur,* although it is likely that its popularity stemmed more from the production’s spectacle, which included an onstage chariot race. Critics applauded Charles Rann Kennedy’s* The Servant in the House* (1908), which depicted a mysterious Christ-like butler (played by Walter Hampden) who serves as a healing force in an unhappy family, but its moderate success at the box office served as a further discouragement.

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Conversely, the burgeoning Yiddish theatre in New York frequently offered plays on religious topics, as did other theatres serving a diverse and predominantly ethnic audience. After World War I, as American drama came into its own and reflected both European stage techniques and serious themes resulting from the psychological realism and socially conscious attitudes emerging in the modernist plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg, among others, more sophisticated and challenging attitudes about religion emerged on occasion in U.S. plays. German-Austrian director Max Reinhardt’s spectacular pageant The Miracle* (1924) caused a sensation in New York and on tour, and Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) founded a receptive audience, but American dramatists, were still cautious. One of the biggest hits of the 1920s, J. Frank Davis’s The Ladder* (1926), met with critical derision for its depiction of reincarnation across the centuries and Irish Catholic playwright Eugene O’Neill, despite the critical acclaim heaped on his 1920s dramas, failed to achieve a Broadway production with Lazarus Laughed* (1927), inspired by the Bible story. Religious conflicts were better received in a sugarcoating, as was evident in the astonishing success of Anne Nichols’s* long-running comedy, Abie’s Irish Rose* (1922), which depicted the romance of a Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic girl who meet with resistance before acceptance from their families. Sampson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer* (1925) also won popularity depicting the son of a rabbi clashing with his father as he moves away from traditional Jewish life. O’Neill tried again to approach religious and spiritual questions in the 1930s with Days without End (1934), but its critical and commercial failure drove him away from Broadway productions of new works. Philip Barry similarly encountered apathetic responses to his plays Bright Star (1935) and Here Come the Clowns (1938), but Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures (1930), featuring an all-black cast rendering Bible stories in a stereotypical “Negro” idiom, won a Pulitzer Prize and was a long-running Broadway hit. Despite its success, few other writers prior to World War II addressed religious topics in either serious or popular plays, although Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) are deeply concerned with spiritual matters in the face of the coming disasters of World War II. Following the war, and perhaps as a result of an even deeper cynicism than that which followed the World War I, many dramatists approached the subject more critically. Particularly in response to the horrors of the Holocaust, some playwrights reached to find life-affirming hope in the darkest of times, as in Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), or condemnation of the inaction of religious leaders during the Nazi era, as in Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (1964)

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and German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial The Deputy (1964), a documentary (docudrama) work assailing the Catholic Church for turning a blind eye toward the extermination of the Jews. Other dramatists visited biblical stories and characters, including Archibald MacLeish, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning J. B. (1958) revived the tale of Job, and such diverse plays as Robinson Jeffers’s Dear Judas (1947), which argued that Judas’s betrayal may have ensured Christ’s lasting significance, Clifford Odets’s The Flowering Peach (1954), which revisited Noah and the flood, and Paddy Chayefsky’s Gideon (1961) which, like other late twentieth-century religious plays, emphasized the relationship of God and man. Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man (1959) also approached this mystical question within the context of a Jewish synagogue. From the 1960s, religious subjects were seen in a wide range of American plays, including both serious and satiric works such as God’s Favorite (1974), The Runner Stumbles (1976), Mass Appeal (1981), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1981), Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Reflect Up? (1981), Agnes of God (1982), Handy Dandy (1990), Angels in America (1993), Sacrilege (1995), Late Nite Catechism (1996), Doubt (2005), and others, and some plays challenged aspects of organized religion and human conceptions of a higher power. In musicals, such popular successes as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Salvation (1969), Godspell (1971), Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976), and Nunsense (1985), addressed religious matters in a range of serious, nostalgic, or broadly comic ways. European imports including Becket (1960), A Man for All Seasons (1961), Luther (1963), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Amadeus (1980), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1982), Racing Demon (1995), and others, won critical approval and popular success on Broadway, but few major dramatists, however concerned with spiritual matters, have devoted themselves exclusively to religious subjects. REPERTORIO ESPAÑOL. Gilberto Zaldívar and René Buch founded this company in 1968 with the goal of promoting the production and creation of Latin American, Spanish, and Hispanic American drama. In 1972, the company took up residence at the Gramercy Arts Theatre and scored a critical success with a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a Latino cast. The first actress to win an Obie Award performing exclusively in Spanish, Ofelia González, was showcased at the Repertorio, and the company also received Drama Desk and Obie Awards for its achievements, which include premiering the first Spanish-language production of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics (2003). See also CHICANO THEATRE; ETHNIC THEATRE.

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REPERTORY THEATRE. This term typically refers to a rotation of plays, usually seasonally, with a core company of actors taking roles in some or all of the plays performed. However, this term is now commonly interchanged with regional theatre. Few regional theatres make use of a true repertory style, although the names of many retain the word “repertory.” During the Golden Age of American theatre, roughly between 1920 and 1960, many summer theatres adopted a modified repertory style and from the early nineteenth century well into the twentieth century, many actor/managers toured with companies performing in a repertory style. Eva Le Gallienne attempted to establish a true repertory theatre in New York—the Civic Repertory Theatre—in the late 1920s and it survived for several seasons before finances became too difficult during the Great Depression. Other attempts were made to establish repertory theatre in New York over the decades, none with lasting success. See also RESIDENT NOT-FOR-PROFIT PROFESSIONAL THEATRE. REPERTORY THEATRE OF LINCOLN CENTER. See LINCOLN CENTER. REPERTORY THEATRE OF ST. LOUIS. An outgrowth of Webster College’s Theatre Impact (1961–1966), this company was formed in 1966 in the wake of the establishment of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the prototype for repertory theatre companies in the United States. With the goal of producing an eclectic range of live theatre experiences to the St. Louis audience, the theatre, under the direction of Michael Flanagan, established a resident company and its 1966–1967 season opened with The Private Ear/ The Public Eye, followed by Twelfth Night, Waiting for Godot, The School for Wives, and The Cage. Steven Woolf has served as artistic director since the 1980s. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. RESIDENT NOT-FOR-PROFIT PROFESSIONAL THEATRE. See REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT; REPERTORY THEATRE. REUNION IN VIENNA. Robert E. Sherwood’s three-act drama opened in a Theatre Guild production at the Martin Beck Theatre on 16 November 1931 for 264 performances. Directed by C. Worthington Miner with scene designs by Aline Bernstein, the play starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Lunt played an Austrian archduke returning from exile to Vienna, attempting to renew his romance with a former mistress (Fontanne), who has married a Freudian psychologist. A popular hit for the Lunts, the play was little more than a vehicle for their estimable talents. The large supporting cast

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included Helen Westley, Henry Travers, Lloyd Nolan, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Minor Watson. A 1933 film adaptation starred John Barrymore* and Diana Wynyard. REYNOLDS, JAMES (1891–1957). A native of Warrenton, Virginia, this scene and costume designer began designing on Broadway in 1920 and was most sought after for musicals, operettas,* and revues,* including the 1921, 1922, and 1923 editions of the Ziegfeld* Follies, Dearest Enemy (1925), The Vagabond King (1925), Sunny (1925), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), and Jumbo (1935), and others. He made occasional forays into non-musical works, including These Charming People (1925), The Royal Family* (1927), Coming of Age (1934), Within the Gates (1934), and Daughters of Atreus (1936). By the mid-1930s, he gave up designing to write and paint. RIBMAN, RONALD (1932– ). This New York-born dramatist emerged in the mid-1960s following study at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees after service in the United States Army. He taught English literature at Otterbein College in the early 1960s before quitting to focus on his playwriting. His plays, which often emphasize the intrusion of the past in the present, are influenced by his love of literature. The American Place Theatre produced his Harry, Noon and Night (1965) and The Journey of the Fifth Horse (1966), freely adapted from an Ivan Turgenev short story, which won an Obie Award. Two of his plays were presented on Broadway, but the first of these, The Poison Tree (1976) failed. The other, Cold Storage (1977), which won a Dramatists Guild Award, was more successful, but the bulk of Ribman’s work has been produced OffBroadway and in regional theatres. His other plays include The Ceremony of Innocence (1967), Passing through from Exotic Places (1969), Fingernails Blue as Flowers (1971), A Break in the Skin (1972), Buck (1983), Sweet Table at the Richelieu (1987), The Cannibal Masque (1987), A Serpent’s Egg (1987), The Rug Merchants of Chaos (1991), and Dream of the Red Spider (1993). Ribman was nominated for an Emmy Award for his teleplay, The Final War of Olly Winter (1966), and several of his plays were adapted for television films. RICE, ELMER (1892–1967).† Elmer Leopold Reizenstein was born in New York and studied law before giving it up for playwriting, renaming himself Elmer Rice (sometimes billed as Elmer L. Rice). One of the most versatile and prolific dramatists of the first half of the twentieth century, Rice wrote plays ranging from gritty realistic character studies to expressionist* fantasy. His first successful Broadway drama, On Trial* (1914), made use

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of his legal background to depict a sensational murder case and employed cinematic-style flashbacks in the revelation of its plot. Rice’s next few plays also had legal settings, including For the Defense (1919) and It Is the Law (1922). He collaborated with Hatcher Hughes* on a vehicle for Minnie Maddern Fiske* called Wake Up, Jonathan! (1921), but his most important work of the early 1920s was The Adding Machine* (1923), which, along with Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* (1920) and The Hairy Ape* (1922), was among the most overt examples of expressionism* seen on Broadway. Rice collaborated with Dorothy Parker on Close Harmony (1924), but it flopped, after which he worked with Philip Barry on Cock Robin (1928), a modest success. Following two 1929 plays, The Subway and See Naples and Die, Rice offered the Pulitzer Prize-winning Street Scene* (1929), a hard-hitting naturalistic melodrama* set on the steps of a tenement and focusing on the frictions in New York City’s immigrant melting pot. In 1931, Rice wrote two successful plays, The Left Bank and Counsellor-at-Law, but his firebrand leftist politics led him to spend much of his energy in the 1930s on propagandistic plays, including We, The People (1933), Judgment Day (1934), Between Two Worlds (1934), American Landscape (1938), Two on an Island (1940), Flight to the West (1940), and A New Life (1943). Rice’s biggest hit was Dream Girl (1945), written as a vehicle for his wife, actress Betty Field. Rice directed many of his own plays, including Street Scene and Counsellor-at-Law, as well as those by others, notably Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). His later plays include The Grand Tour (1951), The Winner (1954), and Cue for Passion (1958). Rice served as regional director for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), but resigned when censorship was threatened. Rice wrote two memoirs, The Living Theatre (1959) and Minority Report (1963), and was a founder of the Playwrights’ Company in 1938. He was also an outspoken opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Communist “witch hunt” and the blacklisting of theatre and film writers. RICH, FRANK (1949– ). Born in Washington, D.C. and educated at Harvard University, Rich was film critic for Time magazine before becoming drama critic for the New York Times in 1980, a post he held until 1993. Rich’s reviews were admired for the quality of his writing, but he also earned the nickname “The Butcher of Broadway” for his frequent harsh critiques and the power of all Times reviewers over the success or failure of a show. Rich moved to the editorial pages of the New York Times, where he writes on American politics and culture. His books include Hot Seat: Theatre Criticism for the New York Times, 1980–1993 (1998) and Ghost Light (2000), the latter a memoir of his childhood escape into theatregoing.

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RICHARDS, BEAH (1920–2000). Beulah Richardson was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to a minister and seamstress. She was educated at Dillard University and moved to New York in 1950, changing her name and winning critical approval for her performance as an elderly woman in Take a Giant Step (1955) Off-Broadway. She was nominated for a Tony Award and won a Theatre World Award in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (1965). Her other Broadway appearances include understudying the role of Lena in the original production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Miracle Worker (1959), Purlie Victorious (1961), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1963), and a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes. On screen, Richards was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award as Sidney Poitier’s mother in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and her other film roles include repeating her Off-Broadway role in Take a Giant Step (1959), Hurry Sundown (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Great White Hope (1970), Mahogany (1975), and Beloved (1998). Richards’s television appearances brought her two Emmy Awards, for Frank’s Place (1987–1988) and The Practice (1997–2000), and had a recurring role on ER from 1994–1995. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. RICHARDS, DAVID (1942– ). A Washington, D.C.-based drama critic for the Washington Star (1971–1981) and the Washington Post (1981–1990), who was also the Sunday drama critic for the New York Times from 1990– 1993. In 1995, Richards rejoined the Washington Post as its cultural affairs writer. RICHARDS, LLOYD (1919–2006). Lloyd George Richards was born in Toronto, Canada, but grew up in Detroit, Michigan. A troubled childhood resulting from his father’s death and mother’s blindness did not prevent him from attended Wayne State University to study law, but he became interested in theatre prior to serving in the United States Air Force during World War II. Richards directed the original production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and worked closely with playwright August Wilson at the Yale Repertory Theatre (which won the regional theatre Tony Award in 1991 during Richards’s tenure) where Richards was the dean of the Yale School of Drama. On Broadway, Richards won a Tony for his direction of Wilson’s Fences (1987) and was Tony-nominated for his direction of A Raisin in the Sun, A Lesson from Aloes (1981), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), and Seven Guitars (1996). Richards’s other Broadway directing credits include The Long Dream (1960), The Moon Besieged (1962), I Had a Ball (1964), The Yearling (1965), Paul Robeson (1978), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), and Two Trains Running (1992). Richards was nominated

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for an Emmy Award for his direction of the television film of Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1995). RICHARDSON, LEE (1926–1999). A Chicago, Illinois-born classical actor also excelled in contemporary plays and the works of George Bernard Shaw, Richardson began his career as Lee Richard and appeared OffBroadway in the Circle in the Square revival of Summer and Smoke in 1952. His Broadway debut came in a 1956 revival of Saint Joan, followed by The Legend of Lizzie (1959), and he was nominated for a Tony Award for Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1972). He was a founding member of the Guthrie Theatre and appeared there during the 1960s and on Broadway in their production of The House of Atreus (1968). Richardson’s other credits include Lord Pengo (1962), revivals of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1968 and Othello (playing Iago opposite Moses Gunn) in 1970, The Jockey Club Stakes (1973), Find Your Way Home (1973), A Texas Trilogy: The Oldest Living Graduate (1976), Trick (1979), Goodbye Fidel (1980), Tricks of the Trade (1980), and revivals of The Devil’s Disciple in 1988 and Getting Married in 1991. Richardson also appeared with the New York Shakespeare Festival, the American Shakespeare Theatre, and in regional theatres, and on television from the 1950s and in films, including Middle of the Night (1959), Network (1976), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). RIDICULOUS THEATRICAL COMPANY, THE (RTC). Formed in 1967 and first known as The Play-House of the Ridiculous, this company produced plays by Ronald Tavel under the direction of John Vaccaro. This descriptive title, which stems from Tavel’s works and taken from a phrase in Antonin Artaud’s concepts, refers more particularly to the queer/camp mission of the RTC under the control of Charles Ludlam a few years later. Ludlam became the RTC’s guiding spirit, star, and playwright. The RTC featured cross-gender casting—Ludlam himself more often than not appeared in drag—and the outrageous, farcical humor and popular culture references of his plays were also inherent in RTC productions. The queer sensibility of RTC productions in the Ludlam era was first seen in Big Hotel (1967), but in many subsequent plays, most famously in Ludlam’s two-actor Obie Award-winning The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), the mixture of queer humor, Victorian melodrama,* farce, and Alfred Hitchcock’s films, among other influences, definitively demonstrated the RTC’s style. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE; FEMALE/ MALE IMPERSONATION; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. RIFKIN, RON (1939– ). Saul M. Rifkin was born in New York to orthodox Jewish parents. An actor able to move comfortably among various genres,

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Rifkin won a Tony Award as Herr Schultz in a 1998 revival of the musical Cabaret, but is more often seen in dramatic and comedy roles. His Broadway credits include The Goodbye People (1979), a 1989 revival of The Tenth Man, Broken Glass (1994), a 1995 revival of A Month in the Country, and Wrong Mountain (2000). Off-Broadway, Rifkin won Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Drama-Logue Awards for his performance in Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire (1991), and he also appeared in Baitz’s Three Hotels (1992), which brought him a Drama Desk nomination, and Ten Unknowns (1996), the latter at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. He also appeared Off-Broadway in The Art of Dining (1979). Rifkin has appeared in numerous television programs and, in 2009, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his voice-over work on PBS-TV’s American Masters: Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. For the movies, he recreated his role in The Substance of Fire, I’m Not Rappaport (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), and The Majestic (2001), among others. RIGDON, KEVIN (1956– ). Born in Pontiac Michigan, Rigdon studied at Drake University prior to serving an internship at the Guthrie Theatre before becoming resident scene and lighting designer for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 1974. Rigdon has also designed for the Goodman Theatre, the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, and for dance companies. Off-Broadway, Rigdon was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for a 1985 revival of Balm in Gilead and Prairie Du Chien/The Shawl (1986), and on Broadway, he garnered a Drama Desk nomination for a 1989 revival of Our Town and both Drama Desk and Tony Award nominations for the Steppenwolf’s acclaimed production of The Grapes of Wrath (1990). His other Broadway credits include Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), a 1986 revival of The Caretaker, Speed-the-Plow (1988), Ghetto (1989), a 1992 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Song of Jacob Zulu (1993), The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1994), Buried Child (1996), The Old Neighborhood (1997), and a 2001 revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Rigdon is also head of design at the University of Houston. RIGGS, LYNN (1899–1954). A native of Claremore, Oklahoma, Rollie Lynn Riggs attended the University of Oklahoma and embarked on a career writing about his home state. His first plays, Big Lake (1927) and Roadside (1930), failed, but his reputation is largely based on Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), a Theatre Guild production featuring Helen Westley, June Walker, Lee Strasberg, and Franchot Tone in the cast. It provided the source material for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s landmark musical, Oklahoma! (1943). Riggs’s subsequent plays, some of which

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focused on Native American characters, include The Cherokee Night (1932), Russet Mantle (1936), The Cream in the Well (1941), and Borned in Texas (1950), had short runs. RINGLING BROS. AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS. See CIRCUS. RITCHARD, CYRIL (1897–1977). Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard was born in Sydney, Australia, and raised a Catholic by his devout mother. He began his acting and directing career in musicals, including Broadway’s Puzzles of 1925, and returned to them frequently, while diversifying into a range of comedies and occasional dramas. He was also a popular television personality and appeared in films. On Broadway, Ritchard won a Tony Award for his broadly comic performance as the sinister Captain Hook in the Mary Martin Peter Pan* (1954), a performance subsequently filmed for television and which brought him an Emmy Award nomination. His sonorous voice and droll personality caused him to be cast frequently as larger-than-life characters, usually from the upper classes. Ritchard subsequently received Tony nominations for A Visit to a Small Planet (1957), The Pleasure of His Company (1959), also receiving a Tony nomination for his direction, and The Roar of the Greasepaint (1965). Among Ritchard’s other Broadway credits as an actor are a 1947 revival of Love for Love, Make Way for Lucia (1948), revivals of The Relapse, which he also directed in 1950, and The Millionairess costarring with Katharine Hepburn in 1952, The Happiest Girl in the World (1961), which he also directed, Romulus (1962), a 1963 revival of Too True to Be Good, The Irregular Verb to Love (1963), which he also directed, Sugar (1972), and A Musical Jubilee (1975). As a director, Ritchard staged the Broadway productions of Buy Me Blue Ribbons (1951), Jane (1952), a 1953 revival of Misalliance, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953), The Heavenly Twins (1955), The Reluctant Debutante (1956), Look After Lulu (1959), Everybody Loves Opal (1961), Roar Like a Dove (1964), and The Jockey Club Stakes (1973). In England, he appeared in early sound films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s first “talkie,” Blackmail (1929), and such later movies as The Winslow Boy (1948) and Half a Sixpence (1967). RITCHIE, MICHAEL (1957– ). Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ritchie began his education at Assumption College, but was expelled and began his work in theatre as a stage manager in 1980. Until the mid-1990s, he staged over 50 shows on Broadway and off before joining the staff of the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) as producer in 1996. Under his supervision, the WTF produced a number of new plays by Arthur Miller, Simon Gray,

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David Rabe, A. R. Gurney, Paul Rudnick, John Guare, Warren Light, Kenneth Lonergan, Richard Nelson, and others, as well as revivals of classic and forgotten American plays, including most notably Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck in 2002. Ritchie became artistic director of the Center Theatre Group in 2005 and has been married to actress Kate Burton since 1985. RITMAN, WILLIAM (1928–1984). Born in Chicago, Illinois, where he studied at the Goodman Theatre School, Ritman began his career in television and as producer of the Rebekah Harkness Dance Festival. Ritman designed many productions for the Cherry Lane Theatre in the early 1960s, including the early plays of Edward Albee. Ritman also designed Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and its 1976 revival, Tiny Alice (1964), Malcolm (1966), A Delicate Balance (1966), Everything in the Garden (1967), Box/Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), The Death of Bessie Smith/The American Dream (1968), The Zoo Story (1968) on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and Albee’s adaptation of Lolita (1981) on Broadway, where he was Tony Award-nominated for Sleuth (1971) and God’s Favorite (1974) and received Drama Desk Award nominations for God’s Favorite, Deathtrap (1978), and a 1980 revival of Morning’s at Seven. Ritman’s other Broadway designs include Absence of a Cello (1964), Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1965), The Birthday Party (1967), Loot (1968), Lovers (1968), We Bombed in New Haven (1968), Play It Again, Sam (1969), Moonchildren (1972), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972), Finding Your Way Home (1973), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), My Fat Friend (1974), Same Time, Next Year (1975), California Suite (1976), Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976), Chapter Two (1977), Deathtrap (1978), Tribute (1978), and a 1983 revival of The Corn Is Green. Ritman also taught design at Yale University. RITZ, THE. Terrence McNally’s two-act farce opened in an Adela Holzer production at the Longacre Theatre on 20 January 1975 for 400 performances under the direction of Robert Drivas. Jack Weston played Gaetano Proclo, whose mob-connected brother-in-law, Carmine Vespucci (Jerry Stiller) is out to kill him. Proclo hides out at a New York City gay bathhouse where he and Vespucci run afoul of each other and various patrons of the house played by F. Murray Abraham, Stephen Collins, John Everson, and others. Rita Moreno won a Tony Award for her uproarious performance as Googie Gomez, a remarkably untalented entertainer at the baths who claims that Barbra Streisand stole her act. Most of the original cast appeared in a 1976 movie version directed by Richard Lester, garnering Golden Globe

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nominations for Weston and Moreno, and the play was revived on Broadway in 1983 and 2007. RIVER NIGER, THE. Joseph A. Walker’s Tony and Obie Award-winning play was produced Off-Broadway at St. Mark’s Playhouse by the Negro Ensemble Company prior to transferring to Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where it opened on 27 March 1973 for 162 performances under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward. Walker, who won a Drama Desk Award, crafted this partially autobiographical play on the difficulties facing black men in a traditionally racist American society. A young African American man, Jeff Williams, returns to his family in Harlem from the United States Air Force. After he arrives, Ann Vanderguild, a South African nurse who had cared for Jeff in Canada, arrives hoping to convince him to marry her. Jeff also is under pressure from his childhood friend, Mo, who wants him to join a politically radical group. Jeff’s father is disappointed to learn that he has flunked out of the Air Force, which he had not wanted to join in the first place, and Jeff is reluctantly pulled into Mo’s group. When police arrive to arrest them, Jeff’s father sacrifices himself to keep Jeff out of trouble. The cast included Ward, as Jeff’s father, and Roxie Roker, as his mother, both of whom were Tony-nominated, with Frances Foster and Charles Weldon. The film adaptation was directed by Krishna Shah and starred Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones. RIVERA, JOSÉ (1955– ). Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rivera moved with his family to New York in the late 1950s. His writing was influenced by his exposure to American culture and by his readings of classic plays (Shakespeare, Molière, Henrik Ibsen) and the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, whose concept of magical realism is evident in Rivera’s plays. Rivera has won two Obie Awards, for Marisol (1992) and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot (2000). His other plays include The House of Ramon Iglesia (1983), The Promise (1988), Each Day Dies With Sleep (1990), Flowers (1994), Giants Have Us in Their Books (1997), The Street of the Sun (1996), Sueno (1998), Lovers of Long Red Hair (2000), Sonnets for an Old Century (2000), School of the Americas (2006), Massacre (Sing to Your Children) (2007), Brainpeople (2008), Boleros for the Disenchanted (2008), and Human Emotional Process (2008). Rivera’s screenplay for Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries) (2004) was nominated for an Academy Award, a first for a Puerto Rican artist, and he has written and produced for television. See also CHICANO THEATRE. ROAD COMPANY, THE. Robert H. Leonard found this touring improvisational company in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1972. The company, which

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survived until 1998, created over 20 original plays focused on the history and culture of Central Appalachia and the Upper Tennessee Valley in particular, including Mountain Whispers, The Flying Lemon Cirque, Horsepower, Blind Desire, and Echoes & Postcards. ROBARDS, JASON, JR. (1922–2000). One of the most respected stage actors of his generation, Robards, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, also appeared with distinction in films and television. His father, Jason Robards, Sr.* (1892–1963), was a noted actor in silent films whose career declined with the advent of sound films. Robards completed high school, but joined the United States Navy during World War II and aboard the USS Nashville, he first read one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, Strange Interlude.* Following the war, Robards studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and began an acting career which, despite a slow start, led to stardom when he appeared in José Quintero’s Off-Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh in 1956, which brought him an Obie Award, but more importantly a career-long connection to O’Neill’s plays, including the Broadway premiere of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), which brought him the first of his Tony Award nominations and a Theatre World Award as Jamie Tyrone, Jr. Robards won a Tony for The Disenchanted (1958), the only time he acted with his father. He also received Tony nominations for Toys in the Attic (1960), After the Fall (1964), Hughie (1965), and revivals of The Country Girl in 1972, A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1973 (for which he won a Drama Desk Award), and A Touch of the Poet in 1978. His other Broadway appearances included Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), A Thousand Clowns (1962), But for Whom Charlie (1964), The Devils (1965), We Bombed in New Haven (1968), revivals of You Can’t Take It with You in 1983 and The Iceman Cometh in 1985, A Month of Sundays (1987), revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1988, this time playing James Tyrone, Sr., and Ah, Wilderness! in 1988, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1991), and a 1994 revival of No Man’s Land. Off-Broadway, he appeared in Moonlight (1995) and Molly Sweeney (1996), which brought him an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination. On screen, Robards won Supporting Actor Academy Awards for All the President’s Men (1976) and Julia (1977) and was nominated for an Oscar for Melvin and Howard (1980). His other noted movie appearances include Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), Tender Is the Night (1962), Act One (1963), Any Wednesday (1966), The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Sakharov (1984), Parenthood (1989), Philadelphia (1993), and Magnolia (1999). Robards’ television work, which began in the early days of live TV, brought him an Emmy Award for his performance in a TV film version of Inherit the Wind (1988) and Emmy nominations for Abe

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Lincoln in Illinois (1964), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1975), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), and F.D.R.: The Last Year (1980). Robards was married to actress Lauren Bacall from 1961 to 1969 and two of his sons, Sam and Jake, became actors. ROBBINS, CARRIE (1943– ). Born Carrie Mae Fishbein in Baltimore, Maryland, she added Robbins to her name when she married Richard D. Robbins, a doctor. She studied at Penn State University and the Yale School of Drama. Robbins began her diverse and prolific career as a costume designer in 1968 with a flop, Leda Had a Little Swan, which closed prior to opening on Broadway. She had better luck with a 1972 revival of The Beggar’s Opera, for which she won a Drama Desk Award, as she did for Grease (1972), which also brought her a Tony Award nomination, as did Over Here! (1974). She also won Drama Desk Awards for Over Here! and a 1974 revival of The Iceman Cometh and Drama Desk nominations for The Octette Bridge Club (1985) and Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (2009). On Broadway, she also designed costumes for numerous revivals as well as new works, including Look to the Lilies (1970), The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1972), Let Me Hear You Smile (1973), Molly (1973), Yentl (1975), Frankenstein (1981), It Had to Be You (1981), Agnes of God (1982), The Boys of Winter (1985), Raggedy Ann (1986), Anna Karenina (1992), and A Class Act (2001). She has designed for regional theatres, opera and ballet companies, for films and television, and she teaches at the Tisch School of the Arts. ROBERTS, TONY (1939– ). David Anthony Roberts was born in New York, the son of a radio announcer and animator, and educated at Northwestern University. He began his acting career on Broadway in a small role in Something about a Soldier (1962) and has been nominated for Tony Awards for the musical How Now, Dow Jones (1968) and the Woody Allen comedy, Play It Again, Sam (1968), beginning a long collaboration with Allen in films. Roberts has appeared in mostly musicals and comedies, but has also taken on dramatic roles on stage and screen. His Broadway credits include replacing leading actors in several shows, including Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park (1963), Jerry Orbach in Promises, Promises (1968), Robert Klein in both They’re Playing Our Song (1979), Jason Alexander in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), Klein again in The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), and Ron Rifkin in a 1998 revival of Cabaret. Roberts’s other Broadway appearances include Sugar (1974), Absurd Person Singular (1974), Murder at the Howard Johnson’s (1979), Doubles (1985), revivals of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986 and The Seagull in 1992, Victor/Victoria (1995), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000), a 2006 revival of Barefoot in the Park, Xanadu

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(2007), and a 2009 revival of The Royal Family.* Roberts’s film roles include Star Spangled Girl (1971), repeating his stage role in Play It Again, Sam (1972), Serpico (1973), Annie Hall (1977), Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), and he has appeared on many television programs. ROBESON, PAUL (1898–1976).† Princeton, New Jersey-born Paul Bustill Robeson graduated from Rutgers University with four varsity letters, then earned a law degree at Columbia University while performing on the side. After singing in the chorus of the all-black musical Shuffle Along (1921), he appeared in Ridgely Torrence’s* Simon the Cyrenian. He acted in England and on Broadway in Taboo (1922) and sang at the Cotton Club, but encountered a paucity of serious roles available for African Americans until Eugene O’Neill’s controversial drama, All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1924), after which he acted in an acclaimed Provincetown Players’s* revival of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones* in 1925 (a role he recreated in an early Hollywood “talkie” in 1931). He also appeared in the short-lived Jim Tully and Frank Dazey drama Black Boy (1926) before scoring a major hit as Joe in the London production of the Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.* production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat in 1928. He played Joe again in the 1932 Broadway revival and in a classic 1936 screen version, making Joe’s song, “Ol’ Man River,” with some lyrical adjustments to stress activism, his trademark. Robeson earned success as a concert artist. He played Othello in three productions: in London opposite Peggy Ashcroft, in the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway (1943), and at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959. Robeson’s only other Broadway appearance came in John Henry (1940), a short-lived musical by Roark Bradford and Jacques Wolfe. Robeson’s leftist politics hampered his career after World War II, but he inspired generations of African American actors and activists, leading Philip Hayes Dean to create a one-man drama Paul Robeson (1978), in which James Earl Jones recreated highlights of Robeson’s extraordinary life and career. ROBINS, LAILA (1959– ). Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a Latvian-American family, she was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the Yale School of Drama before becoming an actress of uncommon intelligence and intensity. After work in theatres around the country, including the Williamstown Theatre Festival, she began her career on Broadway as a replacement for Glenn Close in The Real Thing (1984). She has continued to appear in regional theatre, including many seasons with the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. On Broadway, she has appeared in The Herbal Bed (1998), Frozen (2004), and in a 2006 revival of Heartbreak House.

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Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Mrs. Klein (1995) with Uta Hagen and in a 2000 revival of Tiny Alice. In 1997, she won a Joseph Jefferson Award in Chicago for her performance as Blanche DuBois in the Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Her numerous television and film appearances include portraying the young Livia Soprano in The Sopranos. ROBINSON, CHARLES (1909–1980). New York-born playwright Robinson had his longest-running hit with the comedy Sailor, Beware! (1933), which he coauthored with Kenyon Nicholson. His other plays include Mahogany Hall (1934), Swing Your Lady (1936), The Flying Gerardos (1940), and Apple of His Eye (1946), which starred Walter Huston. Several of his plays were filmed and he wrote for television as well. ROBINSON, EDWARD G. (1893–1973).† Born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, Hungary, he emigrated with his family to the United States as a child and was educated at the City College of New York, Columbia University, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He debuted with a stock company in Binghamton, New York in 1913, but he did not make a mark until joining The Theatre Guild for The Adding Machine* (1923), Ned McCobb’s Daughter* (1926), and numerous others. When Robinson played a ruthless gangster in The Racket* (1927), it led to a long career in Hollywood films beginning with Little Caesar (1930), where he again played a vicious gangster. Ultimately, he won a range of varied roles and developed into a character actor of distinction until his death. Robinson returned to the stage in 1951 to tour in Sidney Kingsley’s Darkness at Noon (1951) and to star on Broadway in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night (1956). ROCKET TO THE MOON. Clifford Odets’s Depression-era drama opened at the Belasco Theatre on 24 November 1938 for 131 performances in a production of The Group Theatre, under the direction of Harold Clurman and with scene design by Mordecai Gorelik. Economic issues dominate in a play centered on the relationship of Ben Stark, a dentist (Morris Carnovsky), with not only his male coworkers (Art Smith and Luther Adler) and wife (Ruth Nelson), but also with his attractive young secretary, Cleo Singer (Eleanor Lynn). Stark wants to escape his personal and economic pressures and to become a specialist in a better part of town. His wife resists and Stark indulges in an affair with Cleo, who represents his liberation. Considered by some critics as a transition play for Odets, who was seen to be shifting from overtly political topics to plays more fully centered on human relationships, Rocket to the Moon has had few revivals, although a 1986

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PBS-TV film version starred John Malkovich, Judy Davis, Connie Booth, Ian McShane, and Eli Wallach. ROCKWELL, DAVID (1956– ). Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in New Jersey, Rockwell studied architecture and design at Syracuse University before founding the Rockwell Group, an architectural firm, in 1984. He has designed the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California, the Cirque du Soleil Theatre in Orlando, Florida, and the renovation of Radio City Music Hall. Rockwell has also designed scenery for Broadway, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Hairspray (2002) and Drama Desk Award nominations for a 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Show, All Shook Up (2005), and Legally Blonde (2007). Rockwell also designed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005). ROGOFF, GORDON (1931– ). Following his graduation from Yale University, Rogoff taught drama at Brooklyn College and the State University of New York at Buffalo and was associate dean at the Yale School of Drama from 1966–1969. In that same period, he began writing drama criticism for the Village Voice and worked as dramaturg for the Open Theatre. Rogoff won the George Jean Nathan Award for his criticism in 1985 and returned to Yale to teach dramaturgy and criticism in 1987. Also a director, Rogoff won an Obie Award for staging Morton Lichter’s Old Timers’ Sexual Symphony (1976). He has published collections of his reviews, including Theatre Is Not Safe: Theatre Criticism 1961–1986 (1987) and Vanishing Acts: Theatre Since the Sixties (2000). ROOM SERVICE. Produced by George Abbott, this three-act knockabout farce by John Murray and Allen Boretz opened at the Cort Theatre on 19 May 1937 for 500 performances under Abbott’s direction. Set in a New York hotel room where fly-by-night producer Gordon Miller (Sam Levene) is holed up fearing eviction at the hands of the hotel manager, who is also his brother-in-law, while trying to raise the funds to reach opening night with a new play, written by novice dramatist Leo Davis (Eddie Albert). A host of Broadway characters help and interfere, but Miller is ultimately assisted by a United States Senator with an affection for show business. The bright cast included Betty Field, Teddy Hart, Philip Loeb, Donald MacBride, and Alexander Asro. The Marx Brothers* starred in a 1938 movie adaptation that significantly altered the play to fit their unique talents. Room Service was revived in 1953, but closed after only a mere 16 performances. ROOSTERS. Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s play opened in March 1987 at the International Arts Relations, Inc., (INTAR) Theatre under the direction of

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Jackson Phippin, with scene design by Loy Arcenas. A Latino family faces the return home of the father, a breeder of fighting roosters, who has served a prison term for manslaughter. Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, described the play as “both comic and poignant,” in its tale of domestic emotional violence and a primal struggle between father and son. Edward James Olmos and Sonia Braga appeared in a 1995 film version of Roosters. See also CHICANO THEATRE. ROSE, GEORGE (1920–1988). An English-born actor of theatre, film, and television, Rose was educated at the Central School of Speech and Drama before serving in the British military during World War II. After the war, he attended Oxford University and began his work as an actor with the Old Vic, appearing in Shakespeare. With the Old Vic, he made his Broadway debut in 1946 in a revival of Henry IV, Part I. He continued to act in England, but became a fixture on Broadway in both straight plays and musicals, winning Tony Awards for a 1976 revival of My Fair Lady and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1986) and was Tony-nominated for Coco (1969), My Fat Friend (1974), and a 1981 revival of The Pirates of Penzance. Rose also won Drama Desk Awards for My Fat Friend, My Fair Lady, The Kingfisher (1979), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Rose’s other Broadway appearances included the Richard Burton revival of Hamlet in 1964, Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), Walking Happy (1966), Loot (1968), Canterbury Tales (1969), Sleuth (1970), A New Leaf (1972), Wise Child (1972), revivals of Peter Pan* in 1979 and You Can’t Take It With You in 1983, Dance a Little Closer (1983), and Aren’t We All? (1985). Rose, an openly gay man, was beaten to death by a young man he had planned to adopt and who endeavored to make Rose’s death appear to be an accident. ROSE TATTOO, THE. Tennessee Williams’s Tony Award-winning drama opened in a Cheryl Crawford production at the Martin Beck Theatre on 3 February 1951 for 306 performances under the direction of Daniel Mann and with scene designs by Boris Aronson, who won a Tony for his work. Tonys and Theatre World Awards were also presented to Maureen Stapleton as Serafina Delle Rose and Eli Wallach as Alvaro Mangiacavallo. This tale is set in a Sicilian community on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans where Serafina, a widow, had withdrawn from the world since her husband’s death and similarly holds back her daughter. Mangiacavallo is attracted to Serafina, who resists him for a time before he is able to bring her back to life. The supporting cast included Phyllis Love and Martin Balsam. A movie version starred Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster in 1955, and Broadway revivals

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appeared in 1966, with Stapleton reprising her performance opposite Harry Guardino, and in 1995 starring Mercedes Ruehl and Anthony LaPaglia. ROSENTHAL, JEAN (1912–1969). A New York native born to RomanianJewish parents, she met Martha Graham in 1929 at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, where she studied. She worked as Graham’s technical assistant and ultimately developed a long-term working relationship with Graham. At Yale University, Rosenthal studied lighting with Stanley McCandless in the early 1930s. In 1935, she joined the Federal Theatre Project and served as a production manager (although she also provided lighting designs) for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Beginning her long and distinguished Broadway career as an assistant stage manager for Leslie Howard’s 1936 revival of Hamlet, Rosenthal moved into design as a pioneer in the art and craft of stage lighting. She ultimately designed lights for over 80 Broadway productions in every genre: dramas, comedies, musicals, revivals of classics, opera, and dance and concert performances for Graham, Judy Garland, Maurice Chevalier, and Jerome Robbins. Her major Broadway credits include The Consul (1950), House of Flowers (1954), The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), The Great Sebastians (1956), A Hole in the Head (1957), West Side Story (1957), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), The Disenchanted (1958), Take Me Along (1959), The Sound of Music (1959), Dear Liar (1960), A Taste of Honey (1960), Becket (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1961), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Luv (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), Cabaret (1966), I Do! I Do! (1966), Plaza Suite (1968), and Dear World (1969), among many others. Rosenthal’s book, Magic of Light (1972), published posthumously, is an essential text for lighting designers. ROSENTHAL, RACHEL (1926– ). Born in Paris, France, this performance artist and teacher escaped France with her family during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, ultimately settling in New York. She studied at the High School of Music and Art and became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In the late 1940s, she studied with such signal figures as Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Hans Hoffmann before founding Instant Theatre in California in 1955, where she developed her individual style merging elements of theatre, dance, and art in services of themes of social justice, environmental and animal rights concerns, feminism, spirituality, and other issues. She became a central figure in the Los Angeles Women’s Art Movement during the 1970s, cofounding Womanspace

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before ultimately forming the Rachel Rosenthal Company, established in Los Angeles in 1989. She won an Obie Award in 1989 for Rachel’s Brain. Her other performance art pieces include Zone (1994), DBDBDB-d: An Evening (1994), TOHUBOHU! (1995), Meditation on the Life and Death of Ken Saro-Wiwa (1996), Timepiece (1996), The Swans (1997), The Unexpurgated Virgin (1997), and UR-BOOR (2000). See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. ROSSE, HERMAN(N) (1887–1965). Best known for his work in film, Rosse, who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, studied design and architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and, following travel in Asia, earned a B.A. from Stanford University. Between 1911 and 1913, he worked in interior design before becoming head of the Design Department at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He contributed a few Broadway scene designs, including Little Miss Bluebeard (1923), Chauve-Souris (1925), for which he also designed costumes, Hello, Daddy (1928), and Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler’s The Great Magoo (1932). He also designed for vaudeville* theatres, but won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for the film King of Jazz (1930) and also designed the films East Is West* (1930), Resurrection (1931), Strictly Dishonorable* (1931), and The Emperor Jones* (1933). He was not credited for his work on the films Dracula* (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) despite the fact that he designed sets for all three. In 1948, Rosse became resident stage designer at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, where he worked for 12 years. He also won a competition to design the Antoinette Perry Tony Award. ROTH, ANN (1931– ). Born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, Roth studied design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before embarking on a long and highly successful Broadway career as a costume designer in 1958. She designed in virtually every genre and style, including musicals, classics, and contemporary drama and comedy. After assisting Irene Sharaff, she designed such shows as The Disenchanted (1958), Take Me Along (1959), A Far Country (1961), Purlie Victorious (1961), Natural Affection (1963), and The Private Ear/The Public Eye (1963). She also coproduced and designed Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964), which brought her a Tony Award nomination. As costume designer, she was also Tony-nominated for a 1975 revival of The Royal Family,* The Crucifer of Blood (1978), and The House of Blue Leaves (1986). Her other costume design credits include The Odd Couple (1965), The Star-Spangled Girl (1966), Play It Again, Sam (1969), Purlie (1970), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), revivals of The Women in 1973, The Heiress in 1976, and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1977, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), Hurlyburly (1984), Biloxi Blues

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(1985), Social Security (1986), Death and the Maiden (1992), A Small Family Business (1992), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000), The Vertical Hour (2006), The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), and Deuce (2007), among numerous others. ROTH, DARYL (1944– ). A Wayne, New Jersey-born producer, Roth began her career as an interior designer, but moved into theatre production following her marriage to real estate magnate Steven Roth. Her first productions were presented Off-Broadway, including Closer Than Ever (1989) and The Baby Dance (1991). Her first Broadway production, Nick & Nora (1991) was a short-lived flop, but she has served as producer or associate producer for a range of critical and commercial successes on Broadway and Off-Broadway, including some of the most important new plays and musicals of the era, as well as distinguished revivals. Among these are Das Barbecu (1994), Twilight: Los Angeles (1992), Three Tall Women (1994), Camping with Henry and Tom (1995), Old Wicked Songs (1995), How I Learned to Drive (1997), Defying Gravity (1997), Wit (1998), Snakebit (1999), The Play about the Baby (2000), Proof (2001), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2001), The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002), a 2002 revival of Medea, Talking Heads (2003), Tea at Five (2003), Anna in the Tropics (2003), Caroline, or Change (2004), a 2005 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Curtains (2007), The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) a 2007 revival of Inherit the Wind, Deuce (2007), August: Osage County (2007), Is He Dead? (2007), A Catered Affair (2008), a 2008 revival of The Country Girl, Thurgood (2008), Irena’s Vow (2009), 2009 revivals of Mary Stuart, Desire under the Elms,* Accent of Youth, and A Little Night Music, and Fela! (2009). Her son, Jordan Roth, is also a producer and president of Jujamcyn Theatres and a theatre at Union Square is named the Daryl Roth Theatre. Of her work, Roth has said, “I’m committed to quality theatre that touches a chord both intellectually and emotionally. For me, the theatre has always been a place for audiences to take risks and encounter and explore issues of life and identity. It’s a haven in which to engage challenging subjects with a safety net.” ROTH, WOLFGANG (1910–1988). A Berlin, Germany-born designer and artist, Roth worked in Berlin cabarets in the 1920s and early 1930s and also with Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht before fleeing the Nazis for the United States. For Broadway, he provided scene designs (and sometimes lighting and costume designs) for The First Million (1943), Too Hot for Maneuvers (1945), A Pound on Demand/Androcles and the Lion (1946), The Wanhope Building (1947), a 1947 revival of Yellow Jack, Oh, Mr.

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Meadowbrook! (1948), Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (1950), The Tower beyond Tragedy (1950), revivals of Twentieth Century in 1950 and Porgy and Bess in 1953, The Good Woman of Setzuan (1956), Portofino (1958), The Deadly Game (1960), and Strider (1979). Roth also designed for the Metropolitan Opera and the children’s dance-pantomime, The Littlest Circus. * ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY (RTC). Founded in 1965 by Gene Feist and Elizabeth Owens as a not-for-profit company with an emphasis on producing the classics, the RTC opened with a production of August Strindberg’s The Father in a supermarket basement in Chelsea. By the mid1970s, the theatre’s reputation led them to a new facility on 23rd Street called Roundabout State One. Serious financial problems accumulated so that by 1983 the company was in serious trouble. Todd Haimes took over as managing director and the theatre moved to Tammany Hall, which was subsequently converted into 499-seat theatre space and scored a major success with a revival of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which won a Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award. Feist retired as artistic director in 1989 and Haimes took over that role and let the Roundabout to its present home in the Criterion Center on West 45th Street. In the early 1990s, the RTC altered its mission to focusing on “the classic American art form” of musicals, as well as great American and European plays. The RTC has emerged as one of the most important venues in New York theatre, premiering new works and reviving major plays and musicals typically featuring star performers. RUDD, PAUL RYAN (1940–2010). A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Rudd studied psychology at Fairfield University and considered becoming a Roman Catholic priest prior to working for an advertising agency. He switched to acting and appeared in regional theatres and a few small roles on Broadway before scoring successes in Peter Nichols’s The National Health (1974) and in a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1975. He was widely praised in several roles for the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), playing opposite Meryl Streep in Henry V in 1976. He also appeared with Maureen Stapleton in a 1975 revival of The Glass Menagerie, in the NYSF’s premiere of David Rabe’s Streamers (1976), in an NYSF revival of Romeo and Juliet in 1977, and in John Guare’s Bosoms and Neglect in 1979. He also appeared in films and television until the mid-1980s, when he gave up acting for teaching in order to more centrally involve himself in the raising of a family. He was no relation to the younger film and television actor named Paul Rudd. RUDNICK, PAUL (1957– ). Born in Piscataway, New Jersey, to a physicist and a publicist, Rudnick studied at Yale University prior to beginning a play-

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writing career. An openly gay man whose mostly comic plays frequently deal with queer characters and situations, Rudnick won an Outer Critics Circle Award for one of his first plays, Poor Little Lambs (1982). After a few oneact plays, including Cosmetic Surgery (1983), Arts and Leisure (1983), and Raving (1984), Rudnick’s first Broadway play, I Hate Hamlet (1991), about a young man haunted by the ghost of John Barrymore,* was produced on Broadway. This success was followed by Jeffrey (1993), which brought him an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a John Gassner Playwriting Award, and a Drama Desk Award nomination. Rudnick’s subsequent plays include The Naked Eye (1995), Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach (1998), The Most Fabulous Story Ever Heard (1998), Valhalla (2004), Regrets Only (2006), and The New Century (2008). Rudnick also frequently writes for the New Yorker and other publications, including Premiere magazine under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner, and he authored two novels, Social Disease (1986) and I’ll Take It (1990). For films, Rudnick has written the screenplays for Addams Family Values (1993), Jeffrey (1995), In & Out (1997), Isn’t She Great (2000), and The Stepford Wives (2004). RUEHL, MERCEDES (1948– ). Daughter of an FBI agent and a schoolteacher with Cuban American ancestry, Ruehl was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, and was educated at the College of New Rochelle. She studied acting with Uta Hagen and Tad Danielewski and made her first professional appearances at the Denver Theatre Center and other regional theatres. Off-Broadway, she won an Obie Award for The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985) and also appeared in I’m Not Rappaport (1985). She won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award as Bella Kurnitz in Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers (1991) and was Tony and Drama Desk Award-nominated for a 1995 revival of The Shadow Box and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002). She won another Obie for Woman Before a Glass (2005), and her other Broadway credits include a 1995 revival of The Rose Tattoo, which brought her another Drama Desk Award nomination, and The American Plan (2008). Ruehl won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for The Fisher King (1991), and her other films include Married to the Mob (1989) and the screen version of Lost in Yonkers (1993). RUHL, SARAH (1974– ). A native of Wilmette, Illinois, Ruhl studied at Brown University and Pembroke College, Oxford, before embarking on a playwriting career with the guidance of Paula Vogel, who had been her teacher at Brown. She won her first significant critical attention for The Clean House (2004), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Eurydice (2003), was produced by Second

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Stage in New York in 2007, Passion Play (2003, 2004) was performed in several regional theatres and opened at the Epic Theatre Ensemble in New York in 2010 to positive reviews, and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007) starred Mary-Louise Parker in a 2008 Playwrights Horizons production following its premiere at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in 2007. Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (2009) opened on Broadway in late 2009 after a premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ruhl’s other plays include Melancholy Play (2001), Virtual Meditations #1 (2002), Orlando (2003), Late: A Cowboy Song (2003), and Demeter in the City (2006). RUINED. Lynn Nottage’s drama set in a Congolese brothel during a decadelong civil war won the Pulitzer Prize and an Obie Award. Focused on the women living in Mama Nadi’s shabby bar and brothel, the play examines the tense and bloody struggle for survival, both physical and emotional, of those caught in the crossfire of rival military forces. Of her research in writing the play, Nottage said, “I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn’t find anything about them in the newspapers or in the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa and find the story myself. I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It’s very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case.” Also inspired, in part, by Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Ruined was first produced by Chicago’s Goodman Theatre on 8 November 2008, after which it opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club running until September 2009. RUSSELL, ROSALIND (1907–1976). Born in Waterbury, Connecticut (her birth year is alternately given as 1911 and 1914 in various sources) to an Irish-Catholic family, this versatile stage and screen actress was educated in Catholic schools and Marymount College before enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began working as a model and in small roles in the Broadway shows Garrick Gaieties (1930) and Company’s Coming (1931), but went to Hollywood at the dawn of the sound film era and became a star. She was nominated for an Academy Award for My Sister Eileen (1942), Sister Kenny (1946), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1947). She won five Golden Globe Awards, for Sister Kenny, Mourning Becomes Electra, Auntie Mame, A Majority of One (1961), and Gypsy (1962). Her other films, which demonstrate an impressive versatility typical of her later stage roles, include Craig’s Wife* (1936), Night Must Fall (1937), The Citadel (1938), The Women (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), No Time for Comedy (1940), Picnic (1955), Five Finger Exercise (1962), and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1967).

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Russell had two major Broadway successes in the 1950s, dazzling critics in her first musical Wonderful Town (1953) and winning a Tony Award, and in Auntie Mame (1956), the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee comedy, based on the memoirs of Patrick Dennis, which brought her a Tony Award nomination. She repeated the role in the 1958 screen version and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1973, Russell was presented the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award Oscar in tribute to her many charitable works, and she received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.

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S SABINSON, HARVEY B. (1929– ). A New York native and educated at Queens College, Sabinson worked as a press agent for such producers as David Merrick, Saint Subber, Cheryl Crawford, Roger L. Stevens, Alexander Cohen, and Robert Whitehead, publicizing as many as 250 Broadway productions, beginning with Finian’s Rainbow in 1947. He became the executive director of the League of American Theatre and Producers from 1982–1995. Sabinson was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and received a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1995, among other honors. SABRINA FAIR. Samuel Taylor’s two-act comedy about a chauffeur’s daughter involved with the sons of a wealthy Long Island family opened at the National Theatre on 11 November 1953 for 318 performances under H. C. Potter’s direction. Margaret Sullavan starred as the title character, daughter of the Larrabee chauffeur, who has grown into a beauty while studying in Paris. Sabrina is pursued by David Larrabee (Scott McKay) and other wealthy young men, but prefers David’s no-nonsense businessman brother, Linus (Joseph Cotten). Meanwhile, Sabrina’s father, Fairchild (Russell Collins) the chauffeur, has made a fortune in the stock market. The strong cast included John Cromwell and Cathleen Nesbitt as the senior Larrabees and Luella Gear. Billy Wilder directed a 1954 screen version, retitled Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and featuring Walter Hampden in a rare screen appearance. A 1995 remake, also titled Sabrina, starred Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, and Greg Kinnear, and was directed by Sydney Pollack. Taylor’s play was a popular vehicle for leading actresses in stock for many years. SACKLER, HOWARD (1929–1982). Born in New York as Howard Oliver Sackler, he was educated at Brooklyn College. Sackler won his greatest acclaim as a playwright for The Great White Hope (1967), which brought him a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and other honors before becoming a successful film in 1970. None of his subsequent plays, including Uriel Acosta (1954), Mr. Welk and Jersey Jim

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(1960), The Yellow Loves (1960), A Few Inquiries (1965), The Pastime of Monsieur Robert (1966), The Nine O’Clock Mail (1967), Semmelweis (1977), Goodbye Fidel (1980), and Klondike (1982), equaled the acclaim achieved with The Great White Hope. Sackler’s screenplays include Gray Lady Down (1978), Jaws 2 (1978), and Saint Jack (1979). SAILOR, BEWARE! Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson’s two-act comedy opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 28 September 1933 for 500 performances, directed by Nicholson and Arthur Sircom with scene design by P. Dodd Ackerman. On the USS Dakota docked in the Panama Canal Zone, the sailors make pro-and-con bets whether the crew’s ladies’ man, Chester “Dynamite” Jones (Bruce MacFarlane) can make a conquest of Billie “Stonewall” Jackson (Audrey Christie), a nightclub singer. Stonewall holds out until the crew calls off its bets. This inexplicably long-running comedy inspired the Harlem Players to stage it for 16 performances at the Lafayette Theatre, where it opened on 3 May 1935 under the direction of Shepard Traube and Mack Hilliard and featuring Juano Hernandez and Christola Williams as Dynamite and Stonewall. The cast also included Canada Lee and Juanita Hall. A 1952 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film borrowed elements from the play. SAINT-DENIS, MICHEL (1897–1971). French-born actor, director, and teacher, Saint-Denis was the nephew of French theatre visionary Jacques Copeau, founder of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, and joined his uncle’s troupe in 1919. Not long after he established the Compagnie des Quinze in Paris in 1929, Saint-Denis went to London and, in collaboration with George Devine and Marius Goring, established the London Theatre Studio in 1935. He directed in London and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1946, Saint-Denis directed William Butler Yeats’s version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, starring Laurence Olivier, which played 15 performances on Broadway. Beginning in 1957, Saint-Denis taught acting at the Juilliard School, and continued despite severe health problems leading to his death from a stroke. SAKS, GENE (1921– ). A New York native, Saks, from a Jewish American family, studied at Cornell University and with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School before becoming a noted Broadway director and occasional actor, beginning with his first Broadway appearance in the musical South Pacific (1949). His other acting roles included supporting roles in The Tenth Man (1959), A Shot in the Dark (1961), and A Thousand Clowns (1962), but Saks increasingly devoted himself to directing on Broadway and in films and television by the mid-1960s. He moved comfortably

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between directing straight plays and musicals, winning Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Musical for I Love My Wife (1977) and Best Direction of a Play for Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) and Biloxi Blues (1985). His other Tony nominations include Half a Sixpence (1965), Mame (1966), Same Time, Next Year (1975), and Lost in Yonkers (1991). Saks’s other Broadway credits include directing Enter Laughing (1963), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), Generation (1965), Sheep on the Runway (1970), How the Other Half Loves (1971), California Suite (1976), The Supporting Cast (1982), Special Occasions (1982), a 1985 revival of The Odd Couple, Rags (1986), A Month of Sundays (1987), Rumors (1988), Jake’s Women (1992), and Barrymore* (1997). Saks directed films with a Broadway source, including Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Odd Couple (1968), Cactus Flower (1969), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), Mame (1974), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), and a TV remake of Bye Bye Birdie in 1995. Saks also acted on screen, including repeating his stage role in A Thousand Clowns (1965), as well as The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The One and Only (1978), The Goodbye People (1984), Nobody’s Fool (1994), and Deconstructing Harry (1997), among others. Saks was married to actress Beatrice Arthur from 1950–1978. SALT LAKE ACTING COMPANY, THE. Founded in 1969 with the mission of producing “thoughtful, provocative, regional and world premieres” and to support a community of performing artists in Salt Lake City, Utah, its early play selections often reflected the times, although later choices demonstrated a greater balance between new avant-garde works and conventional Broadway and classic fare. The first season, in 1969–1970, featured three plays by experimental Off-Broadway feminist writer Megan Terry: Viet Rock, Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place, and Comings and Goings. Other playwrights represented include Tom Eyen, Edward Albee, Edward J. Gryska, Stephen Sondheim, Charles Ludlam, Neil Simon, Terrence McNally, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill, Emily Mann, Christopher Durang, Sam Shepard, Romulus Linney, John Olive, Athol Fugard, David Henry Hwang, Jane Martin, Tony Kushner, A. R. Gurney, Paula Vogel, Nilo Cruz, Amy Freed, Theresa Rebeck, David Ives, and David LindsayAbaire as well as Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Harold Pinter, Lillian Hellman, Jean Cocteau, and others. Jason Bruffy serves as artistic director in recent years. SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR. Bernard Slade’s Tony Award-nominated and Drama Desk Award-winning two-act two-character comedy about an annual tryst opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 14 March 1975 for 1,453

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performances under the direction of Tony-nominated Gene Saks. Tony and Drama Desk Award winner Ellen Burstyn played Doris, a young wife and mother, who meets George (Charles Grodin), a married man at a country inn in California in 1951. After spending a night together, they agree to return to their mates, but to meet for a weekend together annually. Slade divides his play into six scenes set at five-year intervals (1951, 1956, 1961, 1970, and 1975) as the relationship between George and Doris goes through changes that often parallel those in American society during those years. Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award repeating her performance in a 1978 screen version, with Alan Alda, in a Golden Globe-nominated performance, replacing Grodin. SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE, THE. Currently billing itself as “America’s theatre of political comedy,” this company was founded in 1959 by R. G. Davis as an experimental mime troupe, but by 1961, the company moved toward spoken plays with a commedia dell’arte-inspired piece, The Dowry, which they performed in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park. The commedia foundation led them to the plays of Molière, which they anachronized to permit them to comment on contemporary politics and cultural matters. Over time, the troupe applied the same anachronizing approach to the techniques of other theatrical cultures, from Asian and epic theatre to musicals and minstrel shows.* Davis, Saul Landau, and a group of mixed-race actors created A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel (1965), in which the cast, in blackface* makeup, skewered racial attitudes of both the racist and liberal kinds in one of their most controversial productions. They similarly offered an antiwar message in L’Amant Militaire (1967), updating one of Carlo Goldoni’s plays to comment on America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Davis withdrew from the troupe in 1970 as the company committed to a more collective ideology in the creation of its productions. Some of the troupe’s most noted productions were The Independent Female (1970), Clown Show (1971), The Dragon Lady’s Revenge (1971), Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother (1973), Factwino Meets the Moral Majority (1981), Steeltown (1984), Seeing Double (1989), I Ain’t Yo Uncle (1991), Offshore (1994), Soul Suckers from Outer Space (1996), 1600 Transylvania Avenue (2001), Godfellas (2006), Red State (2008), and Too Big to Fail (2009). SÁNCHEZ, EDWIN (1955?– ). Born in Puerto Rico, he moved to New York in the 1980s with the goal of acting. He joined the Circle Repertory Company and was encouraged to write by Milan Stitt. Despite lacking an undergraduate diploma, Sánchez was accepted to the Yale School of Drama playwriting program on Stitt’s recommendation. His first major Off-Broadway

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credit, Trafficking in Broken Hearts (1994), was staged by the Atlantic Theatre Company. Most of his other works, which focus on issues of sexuality, AIDS, race, and economic strife, have been produced by various regional theatres, including Clean (1995), Icarus (1997), The Road (1999), Back Story (1999), Barefoot Boy with Shoes On (1999), and Diosa (2003), which was inspired by the life of Rita Hayworth and, as Sánchez has said of Hayworth’s dancing, “She owns who she is, and she triumphs” in her identity as an Hispanic woman. Sánchez’s most recent plays include La bella familia (2006). See also CHICANO THEATRE. SANDBOX, THE. Edward Albee’s 1959 one-act play in the Theatre of the Absurd tradition opened on 15 April 1960 at New York’s Jazz Gallery. Mommy, a domineering middle-aged woman, and her wealthy, meek husband, Daddy, encounter a virile bodybuilder, the Young Man, while placing Grandma, a wizened old lady, in a sandbox. A musician accompanies the action in which Grandma and The Young Man become friendly. He ultimately announces he is the Angel of Death and Grandma compliments his line delivery and closes her eyes. Most critics were dismissive of the play, but along with several other one-acts written between 1959 and 1961, The Sandbox is often produced, particularly by academic theatres. SANDS, DIANA (1934–1973). New York-born Sands, the daughter of a carpenter and a milliner, studied at the Manhattan High School of the Performing Arts and rose to prominence as an actress on Broadway when she appeared as Beneatha in the original production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), for which she won an Outer Critics Circle Award. She also won a Theatre World Award for Peter S. Feibleman’s Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962) and was twice nominated for Tony Awards, for James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) and Bill Manhoff’s The Owl and the Pussycat (1964), playing opposite Alan Alda in a romantic comedy, which caused some controversy for its depiction of a mixed-race relationship. Of the dilemma of a black actress in the 1960s, Sands said, “I refuse to be stereotyped. Look at me. Never mind my color. Please look at me!” Sands also appeared on Broadway in the title role of a 1968 revival of Saint Joan, in a 1968 revival of Tiger at the Gates, We Bombed in New Haven (1968), and The Gingham Dog (1969). Off-Broadway, Sands won an Obie Award for The Living Premise (1964). Sands was nominated for an Emmy Award for an episode of the TV drama East Side/West Side in 1964 and recreated her Broadway performance in the 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun and a few other films prior to her premature death from cancer. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE.

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SANTIAGO-HUDSON, RUBEN (1956– ). Born in Lackawanna, New York, to a Puerto Rican father and African American mother, he was educated at Binghamton University, Wayne State University, and Buffalo State College. His autobiographical play, Lackawanna Blues (2001), which brought him a special Obie Award when it was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), also reaped an Emmy Award nomination for its 2005 HBO film version. Also an actor, Santiago-Hudson has appeared in films and television, and acted in numerous stage productions, including Broadway productions of Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), Seven Guitars (1996), Gem of the Ocean (2004), and numerous Off-Broadway and regional theatre productions. He became a regular on the television series Castle in 2009. See also CHICANO THEATRE. SARDI’S RESTAURANT. A New York-based theatre district restaurant and bar, this popular theatrical hangout, operated by Vincent and Eugenia Sardi, opened in 1921 in a brownstone on West 44th Street. The building was torn down in 1926 so that the St. James Theatre could be built in its place and a new Sardi’s was constructed a few doors to the east. In the golden age of Broadway between 1920 and the 1960s, theatre workers typically repaired to Sardi’s following opening nights to await newspaper reviews. Theatregoers enjoyed the opportunity of spotting Broadway personalities or caricatures of them lining the restaurant’s walls. Artist Alex Gard created these until 1947, when Don Bevan and Richard Baratz took over the tradition of adding new drawings of emerging celebrities. SAROYAN, WILLIAM (1908–1981). An Armenian American born in Fresno, California, Saroyan was sent to an orphanage in childhood following his father’s death when he was three years old. Saroyan was subsequently inspired to become a writer when his mother shared his father’s writing with him. Saroyan began a prolific writing career in the late 1920s before working for producer B. P. Schulberg and Columbia Pictures in the mid-1930s. He wrote short stories, novels, and won a Pulitzer Prize (which he refused) for his play The Time of Your Life (1939), which also received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. His plays include (among 200 credited to him) My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), Love’s Old Sweet Song (1940), Hello Out There (1941), The Beautiful People (1941), Coming through the Rye (1942), Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning/Talking to You (1942), Get Away Old Man (1943), The Slaughter of the Innocents (1952), and The Cave Dwellers (1958). Saroyan won a Best Screenplay Academy Award for adapting his story The Human Comedy to the screen in 1943. As a dramatist, his most significant innovation was his disregard of conflict as the driving

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force of drama, focusing instead on characters and deeply personal themes, including the struggles of immigrants in America and a humanistic view merged with an existentialist philosophy burnished by an inherent optimism. Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life is alone among his plays to be revived, but it is frequently staged and considered a unique classic in the canon of American drama. SCENE DESIGN. See DESIGN/DESIGNERS. SCHARY, DORE (1905–1980). Isadore Schary was born in Newark, New Jersey, and completed high school before embarking on a writing career that led him in numerous directions, including running a major Hollywood studio and directing Broadway plays. His first play produced on Broadway, Too Many Heroes (1937), failed, but it led him to Hollywood, where he won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the film Boys Town (1938). He was Oscar-nominated again for Edison, the Man (1940) and for two documentary films. He produced and/or wrote numerous films during the 1940s and for a time beginning in 1949 Schary was production head at MGM, but often found himself in conflict with Louis B. Mayer over the content of films. Mayer preferred musicals and family-friendly entertainments while Schary favored serious films with a message. He left the studio in 1956 and returned to Broadway. An admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Schary wrote Sunrise at Campobello (1958), a dramatization of Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome polio, winning a Best Play Tony Award. Schary was nominated for Tonys for his direction of A Majority of One (1959) and his own play, The Devil’s Advocate (1961), which was also nominated as Best Play. Schary also directed and often produced Broadway productions of Triple Play (1959), The Highest Tree (1959), which he wrote, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960), Something about a Soldier (1962), Love and Kisses (1963), One by One (1964), which he also wrote, and The Zulu and the Zayda (1965). Two other Schary plays were produced on Broadway, Brightower (1970) and Herzl (1976), but both failed. SCHECHNER, RICHARD (1934– ). Educated at Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and Tulane University, Schechner founded The Performance Group, an avant-garde experimental company, in 1967, but he left it in 1980 as it morphed into The Wooster Group. He was a founder of the Performance Studies Department of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and, in 1992, established a new experimental company, East Coast Artists, which he led until 2009. Schechner also edited TDR: The Drama

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SCHISGAL, MURRAY

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Review (formerly known as the Tulane Drama Review) from 1962–1969 and again from 1986 to the present, developing the publication into the leading publication reporting on experimental performance techniques. Schechner is the author of more than a dozen books, including Public Domain (1968), Environmental Theatre (1973), Between Theatre and Anthropology (1985), The Future of Ritual (1993), and he also edited The Growtowski Sourcebook (1997) with Lisa Wolford. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE; CRITICS/ CRITICISM; PERIODICALS. SCHILDKRAUT, JOSEPH (1895–1964).† Born in Vienna, Austria, as the son of German actor Rudolph Schildkraut,* he came with his father to New York, where Rudolph became a celebrated figure in Yiddish theatre. Joseph studied with Max Reinhardt and made his earliest appearances performing in Yiddish. His first leading roles were for The Theatre Guild in Liliom (1921) and The Firebrand (1924). He joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre and appeared frequently in films beginning in the silent era. He returned to Broadway periodically, most notably in Clifford Odets’s drama Clash by Night (1941), Thomas Job’s Uncle Harry (1942), a Le Gallienne-directed revival of The Cherry Orchard in 1944, a revival of Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree in 1951, and his most acclaimed performance as Otto Frank in Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), a role he repeated in the 1959 screen version. SCHISGAL, MURRAY (1926– ). New Yorker Schisgal, born in Brooklyn as the son of a tailor, won a Drama Desk Award for his first important work as a playwright, a bill of two one-acts inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd, The Typists and The Tiger in 1963. His name became synonymous with Off-Broadway theatre of the 1960s, but his greatest success was the Broadway comedy Luv (1965), which brought him a Tony Award nomination. His other plays, both full-length and short, include Ducks and Lovers (1961), Knit One, Purl Two (1963), Reverberations (1965), Windows (1965), Fragments (1966), The Old Jew (1966), The Basement (1967), Jimmy Shine (1968), which provided an early showcase for Dustin Hoffman, Memorial Day (1968), A Way of Life (1969), The Chinese and Dr. Fish (1970), An American Millionaire (1974), All Over Town (1974), which brought him a Drama Desk nomination, Popkins (1978), The Pushcart Peddlers (1979), The Flatulist (1980), Walter (1980), Little Johnny (1980), Simple Kind of Love Story (1980), Twice around the Park (1982), Closet Madness (1984), The New Yorkers (1984), Jealousy (1984), Summer Romance (1984), Old Wine in a New Bottle (1985), The Rabbi and the Toyota Dealer (1985), There Are No Sacher Tortes in Our Society! (1985), Schneider (1986), Road Show

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(1987), Man Dangling (1988), The Songs of War (1989), Play Time (1991), 74 Georgia Avenue (1992), The Japanese Foreign Trade Minister (1992), The Cowboy, The Indian, and The Fervent Feminist (1993), Angel Wings (1994), Extensions (1994), Circus Life (1995), Slouching towards the Millennium (1997), and Occasion for Celebration (1997). The National Yiddish Theatre produced a bill of Schisgal’s short plays in 2009. For film, Schisgal cowrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Tootsie (1982) with Larry Gelbart and Don McGuire. His other films include Ducks and Lovers (1962) and The Tiger Makes Out (1967). SCHMIDT, DOUGLAS W. (1942– ). Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he studied for a design degree at Boston University before he began designing at the Monmouth Repertory Theatre in Maine, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and for the Juilliard Opera Theatre. He assisted David Hays on A Cry of Players (1968), before embarking on his own scene design career with a 1969 revival of The Time of Your Life. Schmidt, a prolific designer for both Broadway (where he has designed more than 50 shows) and Off-Broadway, won Drama Desk Awards for Over Here! (1974), Veronica’s Room (1974), and a 2002 revival of Into the Woods, which also brought him a Tony Award nomination, and he received Drama Desk nominations for The Robber Bridegroom (1977), The Crazy Locomotive (1977), Sidewalkin’ (1980), Frankenstein (1981), The Death of Von Richtofen Witnessed from Earth (1983), a 2001 revival of 42nd Street, which also brought him a Tony nomination. Schmidt has designed all manner of plays, from classics to musicals, including The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (1972), Grease (1972), revivals of Twelfth Night in 1972, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1973, Measure for Measure in 1973, Angel Street in 1974, Threepenny Opera in 1976, and Agamemnon in 1977, Runaways (1978), They’re Playing Our Song (1979), Romantic Comedy (1979), and revivals of Porgy and Bess in 1983 and Damn Yankees in 1994, and Sight Unseen (2004). SCHMIDT, PAUL (1933–1999). Brooklyn, New York-born and educated at Colgate University and Harvard University, Schmidt went to Paris following his graduation and studied mime with Marcel Marceau. He was drafted into the United States Army, after which he became playwright, librettist, poet, and translator. He wrote about the stylized productions of Vsevolod Meyerhold and taught Slavic languages at the University of Texas at Austin before working with major regional theatres, including the Yale Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, and the Guthrie Theatre, translating classics and modern European plays. Schmidt also wrote three plays, including Black Sea Follies (1987), winning Helen Hayes and Joseph Kesslring

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Awards. He also worked closely with The Wooster Group and such artists as Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Sellars, and David Schweitzer. From 1993 until his death from AIDS, Schmidt taught dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama. SCHNEEMANN, CAROLEE (1939– ). Born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, and educated at Bard College and the University of Illinois, this performance artist emphasizes the body and issues of gender and sexuality in her work, as well as feminist concerns and issues of censorship. She began her career as a painter in the 1950s, but was attracted to theatre when she participated in Happenings, creating Meat Joy (1964), and working closely with Allan Kaprow. She founded the Judson Dance Theatre and developed techniques influenced by visual art, Antonin Artaud, and neo-realists to create such pieces as an autobiographical trilogy, Plumb Line (1971), Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–1976), Interior Scroll (1975), Infinity Kisses (1981–1988), Mortal Coils (1994), Vulva’s Morphia (1995), More Wrong Things (2001), Terminal Velocity (2001), and Devour (2007). See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. SCHNEIDER, ALAN (1917–1984). Born Abram Leopoldovich in Kharkov, Russia, he began his career in America as an actor on Broadway in Storm Operation (1944) before beginning a directing career on Broadway and in major theatres including the Arena Stage, The Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Juilliard Theatre Center. He is most known for his association with the works of Samuel Beckett, directing the American premiere of Waiting for Godot (1956) at the Coconut Grove Theatre in Florida, and notable Off-Broadway productions of Beckett’s Endgame (1958), Happy Days (1961), and Play (1964). Schneider also directed Beckett’s Film (1965), which starred Buster Keaton. On Broadway, Schneider also directed Krapp’s Last Tape (1968), on a double bill with Edward Albee’s 1959 play The Zoo Story, and Happy Days (1968). Schneider won an Obie Award for his direction of The Pinter Plays (1963) and a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). He also received Tony nominations for directing Albee’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), Tiny Alice (1964), and A Delicate Balance (1966), and for Robert Anderson’s You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1968). He also won a Drama Desk Award for directing Preston Jones’s A Texas Trilogy (1977) and was Drama Desk-nominated for Loose Ends (1980). In 1984, Schneider was presented with a special Drama Desk Award for his directorial achievements. On Broadway, Schneider, who believed the director’s task was to serve the playwright’s goals by acting as an intermediary between the writer and

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the audience, also directed The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1953), Anastasia (1954), a 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, Miss Lonelyhearts (1957), The Birthday Party (1967), I Never Sang for My Father (1968), The Gingham Dog (1969), La Strada (1969), a 1972 revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Moonchildren (1972), Zalmen or The Madness of God (1976), and The Lady from Dubuque (1980). Schneider was killed when struck by a car while crossing a London street. His autobiography, Entrances: An American Director’s Journal, was published posthumously in 1986. SCHREIBER, LIEV (1967– ). A native of San Francisco, California, Isaac Liev Schreiber was the son of an actor and an artist and was raised in New York, before studying briefly at Hampshire College and then attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Yale School of Drama with the intention of becoming a playwright. Upon his graduation, he began an acting career with a series of Shakespearean roles with the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), winning an Obie Award in a 1998 production of Cymbeline. He played Hamlet for the Festival in 1999 and won critical plaudits as Iago in a 2001 production of Othello. On Broadway, Schreiber debuted in a 1993 revival of In the Summer House and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for a 2000 revival of Betrayal. He won a Tony Award playing Ricky Roma in a 2004 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross and shared a Drama Desk Outstanding Ensemble Award with his costars. He was again nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award in Talk Radio (2007). Schreiber also appeared as Eddie Carbone in a critically acclaimed 2010 revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, winning a Drama Desk Award for his performance. Schreiber’s film work includes A Walk on the Moon (1998), Jakob the Liar (1999), playing Laertes in Hamlet (2000), Kate & Leopold (2001), The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Omen (2006), The Painted Veil (2006), Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), Defiance (2008), Taking Woodstock (2009), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), and Repo Man (2010), and he was nominated for a Golden Globe and Emmy Award for playing Orson Welles in the television film RKO 281 (1999). SCOTT, GEORGE C. (1927–1999). One of the finest stage and film actors of his generation, Scott also occasionally directed. Born in Wise, Virginia, George Campbell Scott was raised by his automobile company executive father following the death of his mother when he was eight years old. He served in the United States Marines from 1945 to 1949, after which he attended the University of Missouri majoring in journalism until he participated

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in some theatrical productions. He quit college to become an actor, finding his first successes Off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square and with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He won an Obie Award for Children of Darkness (1958), in which he acted with his future wife, actress Colleen Dewhurst. He also won critical accolades in As You Like It and Richard III (which brought him a Theatre World Award) for Papp. Scott began to act in films and television in the late 1950s, becoming first a respected character actor and then a major star, winning an Academy Award (which he refused to accept, condemning awards for establishing competitions among actors), a New York Film Critics Award, and a Golden Globe Award in the title role of Patton (1970), as well as Oscar nominations for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Hustler (1961), and The Hospital (1971). His many other films include The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Petulia (1968), They Might Be Giants (1971), and The Formula (1980). Scott was nominated for eight Emmy Awards, winning for a television adaptation of The Price (1971) and a TV film version of 12 Angry Men (1997), the last bringing him a Golden Globe Award. Despite his film and TV work, Scott returned frequently to the stage, receiving five Tony Award nominations for his work in Comes a Day (1959), The Andersonville Trial (1960), a revival of Uncle Vanya in 1974, Death of a Salesman in 1976 (which he also directed), and Inherit the Wind in 1996. Scott was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as the director of a 1983 revival of Present Laughter, in which he also played the lead, and he was presented with an honorary Drama Desk Award for his body of work in 1996. Scott’s other Broadway credits include The Wall (1960), General Seeger (1962), which he also directed, a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, Plaza Suite (1968), Sly Fox (1976), Tricks of the Trade (1980), The Boys in Autumn (1986), and a 1991 revival of On Borrowed Time, which he also directed. Scott also directed Dr. Cook’s Garden (1967), revivals of All God’s Chillun Got Wings* in 1975 and Design for Living in 1984. Scott was the father of two sons, one of whom, Campbell Scott, is an actor. SCOTT, HAROLD (1935–2006). Born Harold Russell Scott, Jr., in Morristown, New Jersey, he attended Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard University before beginning his career as an actor, winning an Obie Award for his performance in Jean Genet’s Deathwatch (1959). Scott also appeared Off-Broadway in The Death of Bessie Smith (1961) and on Broadway in The Cool World (1960), After the Fall (1964), a 1964 revival of Marco Millions,* The Changeling (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Cuban Thing (1968), and Les Blancs (1970), after which he devoted himself to directing, staging

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Broadway productions of The Mighty Gents (1978), and 1988 and 1995 revivals of Paul Robeson, and Garden District (1995). Scott also directed the twenty-fifth anniversary revival of A Raisin in the Sun at the Roundabout Theatre in 1986. He was the only black actor in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, but when dismissed by the theatre’s new directors, Scott wrote a letter to Variety criticizing the paucity of opportunities for African American artists. Scott became the first black artistic director of the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey (and thus the first black man to lead a major regional theatre), and he headed the directing program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. SCOTT, MARTHA (1912–2003). A versatile actress of stage and screen, Martha Ellen Scott was born in Jamesport, Missouri, and began her career acting in high school productions before working at Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933–1934 appearing in tab (cut down to tour) versions of Shakespeare’s plays. She debuted on Broadway as Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), and repeated the role in the 1940 film version for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Despite developing a thriving film career, Scott returned frequently to the Broadway stage, taking roles in Foreigners (1939), The Willow and I (1942), a brief 1944 City Center revival of Our Town, Soldier’s Wife (1944), It Takes Two (1947), Design for a Stained Glass Window (1950), The Number (1951), a 1952 revival of The Male Animal, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1953), Cloud 7 (1958), A Distant Bell (1960), The Tumbler (1960), The 49th Cousin (1960), a 1975 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, and as Rebecca Nurse in a 1991 revival of The Crucible. Scott also took over the role of Nettie in The Subject Was Roses (1964) during its run. As one of the founders of the Plumstead Theatre Society, along with her old friend Henry Fonda, Scott produced First Monday in October (1978), in which Fonda starred. Scott’s notable movie appearances include The Howards of Virginia (1940), Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), The Ten Commandments (1956), Sayonara (1957), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Turning Point (1977), and she appeared in numerous television programs. SCUBA DUBA. Bruce Jay Friedman’s satiric race-centered comedy opened at the New Theatre on 10 October 1967 for 692 performances. A liberal Jewish intellectual, Harold Wonder (Jerry Orbach) has his values tested when his wife, Jean, runs away with a black man, Foxtrot (Cleavon Little). Seeking comfort from his overbearing mother, a bikini-clad neighbor, and a psychiatrist, Harold leaves when Jean brings Foxtrot to live in their house.

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SEASCAPE. Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony and Drama Desk Award-nominated two-act play opened at the Shubert Theatre on 26 January 1975 for 65 performances under Albee’s direction. The play had originally been staged in Europe as a three-act work, but the second act was removed when the play premiered on Broadway. Frank Langella won Tony and Drama Desk Awards in his Broadway debut as Leslie, a human-sized lizard who, with his mate, played by Maureen Anderman, have evolved and have left the sea for land. They encounter an aging couple, played by Deborah Kerr and Barry Nelson, in a troubled relationship as they face retirement. Harold Clurman, writing in The Nation, described Albee’s play as one of “great density, with many interesting emotional and intellectual reverberations. It is his most relaxed play, a ‘philosophical’ whimsy.” Seascape was revived (and Tony-nominated as Best Revival) by the Lincoln Center Theatre at Broadway’s Booth Theatre in 2005 for 55 performances under the direction of Mark Lamos, and featuring George Grizzard, Frances Sternhagen, Frederick Weller, and Elizabeth Marvel. SEASON IN THE SUN. New Yorker drama critic Wolcott Gibbs’s comedy opened at the Cort Theatre on 28 September 1950 for 367 performances under the direction of Burgess Meredith with scene and lighting designs by Boris Aronson (who won a Tony Award) and costumes by Natalie Barth Walker. Richard Whorf appeared as George Crane, a New Yorker writer sick of his job writing light comic pieces, who escapes with his wife, Emily (Nancy Kelly), to Fire Island with the goal of becoming a serious novelist. George’s hopes are dashed when an array of oddball characters, played by Joan Diener, Paula Laurence, Eddie Mayehoff, and Jack Weston, among others, descend on the Cranes’ summer cottage. Gibbs may be the only professional drama critic in American theatre history to have written a hit play. SEATTLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE (SCT). Founded in 1975, the second largest resident theatre for young audiences in the United States, the SCT staged plays in Poncho Theatre at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo as a program of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation. In 1993, the SCT moved to the Charlotte Martin Theatre, and in 1995 also performed in the Eve Alvord Theatre while completing construction of the Allen Family Technical Pavilion, which housed rehearsal and classroom spaces, and scene, costume, and prop shops, in 2000. SCT’s first season in 1975 included a world premiere production of Little Red Riding Hood and has since produced numerous premieres; the SCT’s thirty-fifth season, in 2009–2010, included seven productions. See also CHILDREN’S THEATRE.

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SEATTLE REPERTORY THEATRE (SRT). The Seattle Playhouse, a performance space built for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, provided the locale for the SRT, which was founded by Stuart Vaughan in 1963, along with founding members Marjorie Nelson and John Gilbert, both of whom developed longstanding commitments to the SRT. The theatre began with a production of King Lear and, in 1964, added a “Theatre-in-the Park” festival with The Taming of the Shrew. In 1966, Allen Fletcher succeeded Vaughan as artistic director and inaugurated an “Off-Center” series of avant-garde works with productions of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith and The American Dream. In 1970, W. Duncan Ross followed Fletcher. In 1973, Hume Cronyn directed and starred with his wife, Jessica Tandy, in Promenade All for the SRT, and Daniel Sullivan became artistic director in 1981. The SRT presented the 1984 premiere of Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport with Harold Gould, Cleavon Little, and David Strathairn prior to its move to Broadway. Other premieres included Bill Irwin’s Largely New York in 1988 and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles in 1989. In 1990, the SRT was awarded the Outstanding Regional Theatre Tony Award. More premieres followed with Gardner’s Conversations with My Father in 1991, Neil Simon’s London Suite in 1994, Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig in 1994, and Peter Parnell’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules in 1995. In 1997, Sharon Ott became artistic director of the SRT, and the company premiered Philip Kan Gotanda’s Sisters Matsumoto in 1999 and the pre-Broadway premiere of Proof in 2001. David Esbjornson became artistic director of the SRT in 2005 and premiered new works by Ariel Dorfman, Amy Freed, and Kevin Kling, as well as announcing the intention of presenting all ten plays in August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle following Wilson’s death in 2006. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT; REPERTORY THEATRE. SECOND CITY, THE (SC). Established in 1959 as an improvisational comedy theatre, The Second City, which ultimately expanded to establish venues in other major cities, including Los Angeles and Toronto, evolved from the 1950s Compass Players, which had been created by a group of University of Chicago students. Its style has evolved slightly over the years, but features a mixture of scripted and semi-improvised scenes, plus fully improvised bits taken from audience suggestions during performances. A television version, SCTV, developed from the Toronto venue and ran on television in Canada between 1976 and 1984, and was also broadcast in the United States. Since the 1980s, SC has created a training center and a progressive school for children. SC has provided a beginning to careers of a wide range of actors and directors, including Paul Sills, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Robert

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Klein, Peter Boyle, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, George Wendt, Shelley Long, Richard Kind, Dan Castellaneta, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Steve Carell, Nia Vardalos, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Horatio Sanz, and numerous others. SECOND STAGE THEATRE (SST). Carole Rothman and Robyn Goodman founded this Off-Broadway theatre company in 1979 with the intention of providing a venue for contemporary American plays that experienced problems in their first performances. In 1984, SST found a permanent venue at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, but moved in 1999 to a space at West 43rd and Eighth Avenue. In 2008, Second Stage purchased the Helen Hayes Theatre, while continuing to present works at the two prior venues. Among the theatre’s many productions, troubled works by Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Douglas Carter Beane, Eric Bogosian, Jules Feiffer, Charles Fuller, Tina Howe, Kenneth Lonergan, Sarah Ruhl, Theresa Rebeck, Stephen Sondheim, Wendy Wasserstein, Michael Weller, August Wilson, Mary Zimmerman, among others, have a second chance at SST. SELDES, GILBERT (1893–1970).† Born in Alliance, New Jersey, Gilbert Vivian Seldes studied at Harvard University prior to becoming a writer, serving as the New York contributor to T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion. He rose to the editorship of The Dial, for which he also served as drama critic, and won acclaim for several books, most notably The Seven Lively Arts (1924). His writing extended beyond theatre, including the other arts, most notably with a study of cinema, An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies (1929) and in The Public Arts (1964). He was also a cultural historian. Seldes also completed a modern version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Seldes was the father of actress Marian Seldes. SELDES, MARIAN (1928– ). Daughter of drama critic Gilbert Seldes, Marian Hall Seldes was born in New York and studied at The Neighborhood Playhouse in preparation for an acting career that began auspiciously with her Broadway debut in Robinson Jeffers’s free adaptation of Medea starring Judith Anderson. She won a Tony Award for A Delicate Balance (1966), a Drama Desk Award for Father’s Day (1971), and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Painting Churches (1983). Seldes also received Tony nominations for Father’s Day, Deathtrap (1978), and revivals of Ring Round the Moon in 1999 and Dinner at Eight in 2003, and Drama Desk nominations for a 1998 revival of Ivanov, Ring Round the Moon, The Butterfly Collection (2001), The Play about the Baby (2001), and Dedication, or The Stuff of

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Dreams (2006). Seldes’s other Broadway credits include The Tower beyond Tragedy (1950), Ondine (1954), The Chalk Garden (1955), The Wall (1960), A Gift of Time (1962), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1964), Before You Go (1968), Equus (1974), The Merchant (1977), 45 Secondsfrom Broadway (2001), and Deuce (2007). She also directed a 1974 revival of Next Time I’ll Sing to You. Seldes taught at the Juilliard School of Drama from 1967 to 1991 and also taught at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Seldes has also appeared in films, including The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Tom and Huck (1995), Affliction (1997), August Rush (2007), and The Visitor (2008), and on television. Seldes was married to playwright/director Garson Kanin from 1990–1999. She was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, presented with an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in 1996, and given a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2010. SELLARS, PETER (1957– ). Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sellars was educated at Harvard University, beginning his avant-garde directing career while an undergraduate. His stunning and occasionally controversial work (including staging Cosi Fan Tutte in a diner) has ranged from minimalist productions of classics to elaborate operatic stagings. He has directed operas with a wide range of international companies and served as director of the Boston Shakespeare Company (1983–-1984), and he directed a revival of the melodrama* The Count of Monte Cristo at the American National Theatre in Washington, D.C., where he was director from 1984–1986. Sellars has worked closely with composer John Adams, staging the premieres of Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). He has staged classic plays in regional theatres, including the Guthrie Theatre, Goodman Theatre, and the La Jolla Playhouse, among others. His only effort for Broadway, directing what became My One and Only (1983), ended up with his being fired the same week he received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. SEPARATE ROOMS. Joseph Carole and Alan Dinehart, in collaboration with Alex Gottlieb and Edmund Joseph, wrote this three-act sex comedy that opened at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on 23 March 1940 for 613 performances under William B. Friedlander’s direction. Dinehart played Jim Stackhouse, a newspaper gossip columnist, whose sister-in-law Pamela Barry (Glenda Farrell), has refused to consummate her marriage with Jim’s brother, Don (Lyle Talbot). Despite critical disinterest, the comedy won an audience through offering cut-rate tickets. SERBAN, ANDREI (1943– ). Born in Bucharest, Romania, son of a photographer and a teacher, Serban staged puppet shows as a child and directed

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Shakespeare while attending the Theatrical and Cinematographic Art Institute in Bucharest. He moved to the United States in 1969, studied in Paris with Peter Brook in 1970, and staged a production of Medea at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1971, for which he won a Drama Desk Award. At La MaMa he also directed other classics, include Fragments of a Greek Trilogy (including Medea, The Trojan Women, and Electra), which brought him an Obie Award in 1974. In 1977, Serban directed what became his most emblematic production, a striking minimalist all-white staging of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center. Serban has directed in a wide range of regional and international theatres and has been closely associated with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has directed classics, and staged operas with major American and European companies. On Broadway, Serban has directed revivals of Agamemnon in 1977 and The Marriage of Figaro in 1985. Serban has taught at Yale University, Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and other schools, including Columbia University, where he was appointed director of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies and heads the M.F.A. acting program. SEVEN GUITARS. August Wilson’s New York Drama Critics Award Best Play, which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 28 March 1996 for 188 performances under the direction of Lloyd Richards (who was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award), with scene design by Scott Bradley (Drama Desk winner), lighting by Christopher Akerlind, and costumes by Constanza Romero. The 1940s’ play in Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Seven Guitars continues Wilson’s thematic emphasis on the struggles of black males in America to achieve self-realization in the warped environment of a racist country. Pittsburgh blues singer Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton (Keith David) is asked to go to Chicago to record songs a year after his first recording, which has scored a hit on radio. Barton has had a difficult year since recording his hit, including the loss of his mother, the squandering of the money he earned, and a stint in jail. Cast member Ruben Santiago-Hudson won a Tony and Roger Robinson, Viola Davis (who won a Theatre World Award), and Michele Shay were all Tony-nominated. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. SEVEN YEAR ITCH, THE. George Axelrod’s three-act sex comedy opened in an Elliott Nugent and Courtney Burr production at the Fulton Theatre on 20 November 1952 for 1,141 performances under John Gerstad’s direction, with scene and lighting design by Frederick Fox. Tom Ewell won a Tony Award as Richard Sherman, a married man whose wife and kids are spending

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a sweltering summer in the country while he remains in the city. When The Girl (Vanessa Brown) moves into a neighboring apartment, Richard fantasizes about a possible affair with her. Ewell repeated his performance in a 1955 film version, directed by Billy Wilder, with Marilyn Monroe as The Girl, one of her most iconic screen characters. Ewell won a Golden Globe Award for his performance. SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO. David Mamet’s play about the sexual lives of men and women in 1970s’ Chicago premiered at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1974 before moving to Chicago in a production by the Organic Theatre Company in June 1974 under the direction of Stuart Gordon. An Off-Off-Broadway production followed on a double bill with Mamet’s The Duck Variations and opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre on 16 June 1976 for 273 performances under the direction of Albert Takazauckas with a cast, including F. Murray Abraham and Peter Riegert. Filled with the Chicago street slang and obscenities typical of Mamet’s plays, Sexual Perversity in Chicago is constructed of 30 very short scenes in which the relationship of Danny Shapiro and Debbie Soloman is destroyed by the misogyny and abusive sexual language and attitudes of their friends. The play was adapted as the film About Last Night . . . (1986), which Mamet disowned, and a 2003 London production featured Matthew Perry, Minnie Driver, Hank Azaria, and Kelly Reilly. See also MEN/MASCULINITY; WOMEN/FEMININITY. SEXUALITY. The depiction of sexuality on the American stage has always been fraught with controversy, challenging playwrights, producers, and censors, not to mention audiences. By the middle of the nineteenth century, attention was focused on the revelation of the female form as most vividly exemplified by Adah Isaacs Menken’s illusion of nudity in Mazeppa* (1861), which simultaneously scandalized and titillated audiences. From 1880 to 1930, the focus shifted from nudity (it was generally not permitted, although musicals and burlesque featured scantily clad chorus girls throughout this period) to frank discussions of life’s realities, including sexuality, in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and a few of their contemporaries. The earliest productions of these plays in American theatres inspired considerable controversy, mostly over depictions of marital infidelity, unwed mothers, social disease, prostitution, etc. United States dramatists were slow to step into such areas except in the most moralizing ways. James A. Herne’s* Margaret Fleming* (1890), which dealt with a faithless husband forced to bring his out-of-wedlock child to his wife’s care, appeared in this period, although it was not widely seen. Produc-

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tions of the plays of Ibsen and Shaw raised outcries, with producer Arnold Daly* and actress Mary Shaw* arrested for producing Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1905, a play equating prostitution and marriage. Prior to World War I, a few dramatists, including Edward Sheldon,* touched on sexuality. During and after the war, sexual themes were often present, if only vaguely, in depictions of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, faithless spouses, and a somewhat more open awareness of sexuality. Interracial sexuality was occasionally depicted, although not without considerable controversy, as in the case of Edwin Milton Royle’s* The Squaw Man* (1905), featuring a marriage between a white man and a Native American woman, but more significantly in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1924), exploring a relationship between an African American man and a white woman. O’Neill received death threats and a significant censorship battle ensued. Mae West* scandalized Broadway with her play Sex* (1926), in which she assaulted the hypocrisies of early twentieth-century sexual mores. West’s next play, The Drag* (1927), which delved into homosexuality, so outraged the populace that it never opened in New York despite West’s box office clout. Explorations of heterosexuality were more frequently seen, but homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender issues would not find dramatic voice until after the 1960s. Sexuality was inherently present in a flood of romantic plays on the American stage at least since the rise of melodramatic* plays in the mid-nineteenth century, but although a woman’s virtue might be threatened, serious exploration of sexual issues largely remained a taboo until Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which made the male body, in the case of Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, an object of desire and danger while depicting Stanley’s wife, Stella, as a woman driven by sexual passions. Stella’s troubled sister, Blanche DuBois, is a desperately promiscuous woman who has deviated from any recognizable norm by seeking to return to the past—and her young closeted gay husband—through sexual encounters with inappropriate younger men, including one of her high school pupils. From A Streetcar Named Desire to his final play, Williams’s themes were typically explored through the complex nexus of love and sexual desire. In Summer and Smoke (1948), Williams pitted Alma Winemiller’s high-minded, spiritual idea of love against Dr. John Buchanan’s physical, almost biologically clinical sexuality. The previously unexplored physical passions and sexual confusions of women remained central to Williams’s characters through his major works, with some, like Blanche and Alma, seeking transcendence or a romanticized attitude about love and sex, while others, such as Maxine Faulk of The Night of the Iguana (1959), filled the emptiness of her life with a robust carnality.

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Deviance from the sexual norm in Williams’s time meant homosexuality, and he began to cautiously explore the topic in his drama, from Blanche DuBois’s long-dead husband to Brick Pollitt’s fears about his own sexual nature in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) to the predatory Sebastian Venable, the unseen pivotal figure in the grotesquerie of Williams’s Southern Gothic drama Suddenly Last Summer (1958). Williams’s late plays, beginning with Small Craft Warnings (1972) and concluding with one of his last plays, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), approached homosexuality with more openness and balance than had been possible in his earlier plays, but he himself seemed to remain ambivalent on the subject, placing emphasis on the need for a romanticized attitude toward life to survive its realities. Without question, Williams opened the door for other dramatists to approach the subject of sexuality in various ways and, as the social upheavals of the 1960s commenced, the “sexual revolution” that was part of that turbulent era found its way into the drama. Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway plays explored many previous taboos, with nudity providing yet another barrier to be breached. Despite the fact that musical comedies and revues* like the annual Ziegfeld* Follies had often featured scantily clad chorines, sometimes fully nude in tableaux vivants, from the early twentieth century, nudity had otherwise been off-limits, especially after 1930. In the 1960s, the musical theatre broke the taboo when the cast of the counterculture musical, Hair (1968), stripped off their clothes in one sequence. The production’s success Off-Broadway led to a Broadway run and despite shocked protestations, audiences accepted the nude scene and for years to follow, nude scenes were frequently found in dramas and comedies as more liberal views of sexuality permitted playwrights a wider range of options in exploring sex-related topics. Changes were especially evident in the area of homosexuality as pioneering plays such as Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) both traded in stereotypical images and offered a richer and deeper depiction of the lives of gay men. Gay and lesbian writers generally presented a broader view of the lives of homosexuals in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, which accelerated dramatic depictions of the homosexual experience, not to mention sexuality in general. By the end of the twentieth century, few taboos regarding the exploration of sexuality remained in the theatres of major American urban centers, while some suburbs and rural areas of the United States continued to resist certain aspects of the dramatic depiction of sexuality on political or religious grounds. See also FEMINIST THEATRE; MEN/MASCULINITY; WOMEN/FEMININITY. SHADOW BOX, THE. Actor Michael Cristofer’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning drama of three terminally ill patients in a hospice

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being interviewed about dying opened at the Morosco Theatre on 3 March 1977 for 315 performances under the direction of Gordon Davidson, who won a Tony, with scene design by Ming Cho Lee. Laurence Luckenbill, Patricia Elliott, and Rose Gregorio were all Tony-nominated and the cast also included Geraldine Fitzgerald, Joyce Ebert, Mandy Patinkin, Josef Sommer, and Simon Oakland. Sommer played a nameless interviewer who encounters the three patients: Joe, a middle-aged blue-collar worker whose wife is in denial about his imminent death; Brian, a bisexual university professor cared for by his lover Mark while being visited by his ex-wife; and Felicity, an elderly woman cared for by a Agnes, her daughter, but staying alive in hopes that an estranged daughter will return. Paul Newman directed a 1980 television film version of the play, which won a Golden Globe Award. The Shadow Box was revived on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre on 20 November 1994 for 49 performances under the direction of Jack Hofsiss, with a cast, including Marlo Thomas, Estelle Parsons, Mary Alice, Jamey Sheridan, Frankie R. Faison, and Mercedes Ruehl, who was nominated for a Tony. SHAFFER, ANTHONY (1926–2001). Twin brother of playwright Peter Shaffer, Anthony Shaffer was born in Liverpool, England, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University. His greatest success, the Tony Award-winning mystery-thriller Sleuth (1970) ran for three years and spawned two film versions and numerous regional theatre, stock, and university productions. His other Broadway entry, Whodunnit (1982), also in the mystery vein, ran for 157 performances under the direction of Michael Kahn with a cast including Hermione Baddeley, Barbara Baxley, John Glover, Fred Gwynne, and George Hearn. He also wrote novels and screenplays for such films as Frenzy (1972), which brought him a Golden Globe Award nomination, Death on the Nile (1978), Absolution (1978), and Evil under the Sun (1982), as well as the 1972 film of Sleuth. Shaffer was married to actress Diane Cilento in 1985. SHAFFER, PETER (1926– ). Born in Liverpool, England, as Peter Levin Shaffer, the son of a real estate agent of Jewish heritage, he attended St. Paul’s School and Trinity College, Cambridge University along with his twin brother, Anthony Shaffer, the Tony Award-winning author of Sleuth (1970). Shaffer’s The Salt Land (1954), his first play, was produced by the BBC and with his next work, Five Finger Exercise (1958), directed by John Gielgud, Shaffer’s work made its first appearance on Broadway when the production moved there in 1959 and brought him a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. For the next 50 years, Shaffer’s plays would usually be performed in

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both London and New York. Shaffer’s Equus (1974) and Amadeus (1980), won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award when produced for long runs on Broadway. Shaffer’s Black Comedy/White Lies (1967) and Lettice and Lovage (1990) were Tony-nominated and his The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1963) and The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965) also had successful Broadway runs. Other Shaffer plays, including The Battle of Shrivings (1970), Black Mischief (1983), Yonadab (1985), This Savage Parade (1987), Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? (1990), and The Gift of the Gorgon (1992), were produced in England but did not receive major American productions. Shaffer won an Academy Award for adapting his play Amadeus to the screen in 1984, and he had previously been Oscar-nominated doing the same for his play Equus in 1977. Shaffer was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY. This Lenox, Massachusetts-based theatre company was founded in 1978 by Tina Packer with the goal of presenting Shakespeare’s plays as the Elizabethans did. Until 2000, the company performed at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate, but moved to a new facility on 30 acres at 70 Kemble Street in Lenox Center. The company performs a range of drama beyond Shakespeare’s works, including hosting William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony (2003) prior to its Broadway run. The theatre runs numerous education programs with a goal of introducing young audiences to theatre and Shakespeare. SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS. Curt L. Tofteland established this company in 1995, the first in the United States within prison walls, at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex. By 2001, the group had expanded from its original seven participants to a number that required two spaces to accommodate the 300 performances given each year. The emphasis is on Shakespeare’s plays, but works by others are featured as well. SHAKESPEARE FESTIVALS. Annually, across the United States, festivals celebrating the plays of William Shakespeare have appeared, growing in number since the middle of the twentieth century. The first of these, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, was founded by Angus L. Bowmer in 1935. That same year, the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival was also established, but it did not begin a summer festival of Shakespearean plays until 1949. The format of summer festivals was typical in the first decades, but in the latter part of the twentieth century, many Shakespeare festivals altered their missions to feature plays by other Elizabethan-era authors or all manner of plays (including new works) and/or to produce not only in the summer

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months, but on year-round or partial-year schedules. Among the leading and most enduring festivals and the year of their founding are the American Shakespeare Festival (1951), New York Shakespeare Festival (1954), Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (1961), and Alabama Shakespeare Festival (1984). Among others are the California Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Shakespeare at Santa Cruz, Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Houston Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Shakespeare & Company, Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and North Carolina Shakespeare Festival. Some, like the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival, have closed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century approximately 80 Shakespeare festivals were in operation across the United States. SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK. See NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. SHAKESPEARE ON U.S. STAGES. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) were frequently produced in North America from the earliest settlements of Europeans. Prior to American independence, and well into the nineteenth century, English troupes, or British-trained actors, included Shakespeare’s plays centrally in their repertories. The first performance of Shakespeare in New York is believed to be Richard III, staged in 1750 by Thomas Kean, but he used Colley Cibber’s bowdlerization of Shakespeare for his text. Resistance to English players in the United States came to a violent head in the Astor Place riot in 1849, pitting supporters of rivals William Charles Macready, an English actor, and America’s greatest star, Edwin Forrest, against each other. African Americans made their first theatrical inroads with the African Grove Theatre producing Shakespearean plays and establishing important black Shakespeareans James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge. By the mid-nineteenth century, Edwin Booth* emerged as the premiere American Shakespearean, scoring a major triumph with his Hamlet, which ran for 100 consecutive performances in 1864–1865. Other actors followed in Booth’s model, but British actors continued to appear in Shakespeare with frequency into the twenty-first century. Booth’s only significant rival, Lawrence Barrett,* toured widely, as did such subsequent Shakespeareans as E. L. Davenport,* Emma Waller, John McCullough,* and Helena Modjeska.* In the first decade of the twentieth century, elaborately staged productions of Shakespeare were typical and the most admired purveyors were E. H. Sothern* and Julia Marlowe* who, following a 1904 triumph in Romeo and Juliet, barnstormed with a Shakespearean repertory until the 1920s, as did lesser lights including Charles Coburn and his wife, Ivah Wills Coburn,*

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who performed virtually the entire Shakespearean canon on tour with their company. As European immigrants poured into New York beginning in the 1890s, foreign-language productions of Shakespeare were frequently seen, including notable Yiddish theatre performances by Jacob Adler* in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. Modern European staging techniques began to have an impact on Shakespearean production in the United States with English director Harley Granville Barker’s innovative A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1916 and others, but the New Stagecraft* triumphed in the Arthur Hopkins-Robert Edmond Jones collaborations on Richard III (1920) and Hamlet (1922) starring John Barrymore,* who many critics considered the greatest Hamlet since Booth. After 1930, Shakespearean production became more prevalent through the establishment of various festivals and regional theatres as new generations of actors, directors, and audiences were drawn to Shakespeare’s plays. Comparatively few innovative Shakespearean productions appeared in the 1930s–1940s, although the Federal Theatre Project encouraged Shakespeare revivals and Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre staged Julius Caesar in 1936 to great acclaim, setting the play in fascist Italy. Katharine Cornell, Maurice Evans, and Judith Anderson appeared with distinction on Broadway and on the road in Shakespearean productions, and English actors including John Gielgud, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, and Vivien Leigh appeared on Broadway in Shakespearean revivals prior to the start of World War II. Director Margaret Webster staged Shakespeare’s plays, most effectively for a production of Othello in 1943 starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, generating a long run and considerable discussion of Robeson’s Othello—at the time, few black actors had attempted the role, but others like Earle Hyman and James Earl Jones would follow during the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of regional Shakespeare festivals after World War II became the home of many Shakespearean productions, although outstanding efforts frequently moved to Broadway, particularly from the New York Shakespeare Festival, founded by Joseph Papp in 1955. After the 1970s, the influence of international productions, as well as racial and gender-blind productions, invigorated Shakespeare’s plays, although purist critics objected to such practices, including the setting of the plays in contemporary and non-Elizabethan periods. Since the mid-1990s, several major actors have brought Shakespeare to Broadway, including Ralph Fiennes, who won a Tony Award as Hamlet in 1995, as well as Helen Hunt, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Kline, Denzel Washington, Brian Bedford, Al Pacino, Kelsey Grammer, and others.

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SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY, THE (STC). Founded in 1985, the STC, located in Washington, D.C., has a stated mission of preserving and presenting Shakespeare’s plays, as well as classic theatre. The company performs at the Harman Arts Center under the guidance of artistic director Michael Kahn. SHAKESPEARE THEATRE OF NEW JERSEY, THE (STNJ). Located in Madison, New Jersey, this company formerly known as the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was founded in 1962 to stage the works of Shakespeare and other classical writers. Bonnie J. Monte has served as artistic director of the STNJ since 1990. SHANGE, NTOZAKE (1948– ). Born Paulette L. Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, to a well-to-do African American family, Shange encountered racist attitudes for the first time when her family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. However, her parents, a doctor and a teacher/social worker, had close relationships with numerous black artists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and others, who inspired her interest in the arts. Shange graduated from Barnard College and the University of Southern California, majoring in American Studies at both schools. She married while in college, but when the relationship ended, she attempted suicide and changed her name, moved to New York, and wrote her first play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975), a poetic drama that won an Obie Award before moving to Broadway for a long run, receiving a Tony Award nomination. Shange performed in the play. A recording of the production was nominated for a Grammy Award and a 1977 television production of the play was Emmy Award-nominated. Shange’s themes focus on the complex progression of black women from adolescence to adulthood. She freely adapted Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in 1980, winning another Obie. A prolific writer, Shange has published several novels, children’s books, poetry, and other plays, including A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979), Spell #7 (1979), Bocas (1982), Three for a Full Moon (1982), and Daddy Says (1989). Shange’s for colored girls was adapted to the screen and directed by Tyler Perry in 2010 with an all-star cast. SHANK, ADELE EDLING (1940– ). This playwright/educator studied at the University of California, San Diego, graduating in 1963 before beginning a playwriting career. Her plays include Sunset/Sunrise (1979), Sandcastles (1982), Winterplay (1983), Rocks In Her Pocket (1993), Back Story (1999), and a 2007 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse,

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staged at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Shank is head of the playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego, and edits the journal TheatreForum. She is married to theatre scholar and director Theodore Shank. SHANLEY, JOHN PATRICK (1950– ). Born in the Bronx, New York, and educated at New York University, Shanley served in the United States Marines prior to developing a career as a playwright and screenwriter. He began writing plays with Welcome to the Moon (1982), but achieved his first significant success winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for the film Moonstruck (1987). His numerous plays, many of which were produced Off-Broadway, include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (1983), Savage in Limbo (1984), The Dreamer Examines His Pillow (1985), Italian American Reconciliation (1986), Women of Manhattan (1986), All for Charity (1987), Five Corners (1987), The Big Funk (1990), Beggars in the House of Plenty (1991), What Is This Everything? (1992), Kissing Christine (1995), Missing Marisa (1995), Four Dogs and a Bone (1993), The Wild Goose (1995), Psycopathia Sexualis (1998), Where’s My Money? (2001), Cellini (2001), Dirty Story (2003), Defiance (2005), and Sailor’s Song (2005), for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination. He won a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, Obie Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Drama Desk Award for Doubt (2005) and he directed the 2008 film version of the play, which starred Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, and was Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for it. Shanley has previously directed his own screenplay of Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and his other screenplays include the TV film Live from Baghdad (2002), which brought him an Emmy Award nomination. Shanley also collaborated with Henry Krieger on the play Romantic Poetry (2007). SHAPE OF THINGS, THE. Neil LaBute’s play opened in London’s Almeida Theatre in May 2001 (before moving to New York’s Promenade Theatre later that year), with a cast, including Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol, and Fred Weller under LaBute’s direction. Reflecting on contemporary attitudes about the nature of art, human relationships in their most intimate form, and psychopathic behaviors, the play is set among four students at a Midwestern university who are entangled sexually and emotionally and, most of all, examines the nature of love. The Shape of Things was adapted to the screen by LaBute, who also directed, with the same cast, and released in 2003. SHAPIRO, MEL (1939?– ). He studied at Carnegie Mellon University, receiving an M.F.A. in 1961. He was resident director of Arena Stage from

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1963–1965, producing director of the Guthrie Theatre from 1968–1970, and resident director of the New York Shakespeare Festival from 1971–1977. He won 1972 Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his collaboration with John Guare on the book for Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), and was also Tony-nominated as Best Director for that production. He also won a Drama Desk Award for his direction of Older People (1972). On Broadway, Shapiro directed the 1978 Sammy Davis, Jr. revival of Stop the World— I Want to Get Off and Guare’s Bosoms and Neglect (1979). Off-Broadway, Shapiro directed The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1969), Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves (1971), The Karl Marx Play (1973), a 1974 New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) production of Richard III, Guare’s Rich and Famous (1976), Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1977), Road Show (1987), and a 1999 NYSF production of The Taming of the Shrew. Shapiro was a founding member of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and headed the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and the Acting and Music Theatre Department of University of California, Los Angeles. SHARAFF, IRENE (1910–1993). Born in Boston, Massachusetts, this legendary costume designer of stage and screen was educated at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, the Art Students League of New York, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Her first major design assignment, following assisting Aline Bernstein* on several productions with the Civic Repertory Theatre (CRT), was for Eva Le Gallienne’s CRT production of Alice in Wonderland (1931), leading to a 50-year career and over 60 Broadway designs. She won a Tony Award for The King and I (1952) and was nominated in again in 1957 for her work on four 1956 productions, Shangri-La, Candide, Happy Hunting, and Small War on Murray Hill, as well as subsequent nominations for West Side Story (1957), Flower Drum Song (1958), The Girl Who Came to Supper (1964), and Hallelujah, Baby! (1967). Sharaff’s many Broadway designs, mostly for musicals, included As Thousands Cheer (1933), On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), The American Way (1939), Lady in the Dark (1941), The Land Is Bright (1941), By Jupiter (1942), Maurice Evans’s 1945 Hamlet, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), Do Re Mi (1960), Funny Girl (1964), Sweet Charity (1966), Irene (1973), and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989). She designed costumes for Judy Garland’s New York stage appearances in 1951 and 1959. In addition to her stage work, Sharaff designed costumes for numerous Hollywood films, winning five Academy Awards for her designs for An American in Paris (1951), The King and I (1956), West Side Story (1961), Cleopatra (1964), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Sharaff was

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also Oscar-nominated for Call Me Madam (1953), Brigadoon (1954), A Star Is Born (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), Porgy and Bess (1959), Can-Can (1960), Flower Drum Song (1961), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Hello, Dolly! (1969), and The Other Side of Midnight (1977). Sharaff also designed costumes for the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and for several fashion magazines. The TDF/Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award was established to honor her work in 1993 and she was the first recipient. Sharaff’s last screen credit brought her full circle, it was a 1983 PBS-TV production of Le Gallienne’s Alice in Wonderland in 1983. SHAW† ON THE U.S. STAGE. The slow, steady acceptance of the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) on the United States stage began in the mid-1890s with his least controversial works: Arms and the Man, produced at the Herald Square Theatre in 1894, and The Devil’s Disciple, staged at the 5th Avenue Theatre in 1897. Richard Mansfield* was the driving force behind these early Shaw productions in the United States, but in the last days of the nineteenth century, actor-manager Arnold Daly* offered a series of Shaw’s plays beginning with Candida, which he first presented in Chicago in 1899 (the play had been seen in two amateur productions prior to this one) and later in Philadelphia in 1903, followed by a New York run later that year. Daly also produced other Shavian works, including The Man of Destiny (1904), You Never Can Tell (1905), and John Bull’s Other Island (1905). Mainstream audiences were clearly attracted to the vaguely scandalous reputation of Shaw, a socialist and women’s rights advocate, but when Daly presented Shaw’s controversial Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which seemed to equate prostitution with marriage, at the Garrick Theatre in October 1905, he and Mary Shaw,* the play’s star, were arrested for indecency through the efforts of Anthony Comstock’s* Society for the Suppression of Vice and a flurry of editorials in newspapers. Despite Comstock’s efforts, the play was performed and drew substantial audiences. Shaw’s plays were not always appreciated in England either, as was the case with his Androcles and the Lion, which was hissed at its London premiere, but American audiences were receptive when Harley Granville Barker staged it in New York in 1915. Grace George* produced and starred in the American premiere of Major Barbara that same year and it became one of the most frequently revived Shaw plays in the United States. Other productions of Shaw plays followed, as well as Oscar Strauss’s operetta* based on Arms and the Man, called The Chocolate Soldier (1921). Most of Shaw’s plays premiered in England with American productions following, but a few of his works had their initial performances in New York through the auspices

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of The Theatre Guild, including Heartbreak House at the Garrick Theatre in 1920 and Saint Joan, also at the Garrick, in 1923. All told, the Guild produced American premieres of seven Shavian works, also including Back to Methuselah (1922) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935). By 1930, Shaw’s plays were produced frequently on Broadway and, later, became staples of the burgeoning regional and repertory theatres emerging after 1960. Shaw’s influence on American drama can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in the works of a range of playwrights, including Clyde Fitch,* Langdon Mitchell,* Edward Sheldon,* Eugene O’Neill, Rachel Crothers, Robert E. Sherwood, Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, among others, and many American actors made their reputations appearing in Shaw’s works. Since World War II, notable Shaw productions included Katharine Cornell in Candida in 1946 (she had previously appeared on Broadway in the title role in 1937 and 1942), Cedric Hardwicke and Lili Palmer in Caesar and Cleopatra in 1949 followed, after Shaw’s death at age 94 in 1950, by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in a 1951 production in repertory with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The immediate aftermath of Shaw’s death inspired many productions of his plays, including Hardwicke, along with Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorehead, and Charles Laughton, who won critical raves in Don Juan in Hell, the third act of Shaw’s Man and Superman, in 1951 (it was revived in 1973, with Moorehead, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Henreid, and Edward Mulhare), Uta Hagen played Saint Joan in 1951, screen star Olivia de Havilland made a rare Broadway appearance in Candida in 1952, Katharine Hepburn starred in The Millionairess in 1952, Maurice Evans appeared as King Magnus in The Apple Cart in 1956, and Laughton, Glynis Johns, Burgess Meredith, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Eli Wallach had a long run in Major Barbara in 1956. Shaw’s plays also found renewed life in musical form (as they had earlier in operettas), most notably with My Fair Lady (1956), adapted from Pygmalion, as well as Her First Roman (1968), a short-lived musical adapted from Caesar and Cleopatra. Shaw’s work also inspired non-musical adaptations: Katharine Cornell appeared with Brian Aherne in a staging of Shaw’s correspondence with Mrs. Patrick Campbell entitled Dear Liar (1960), and Max Adrian appeared in By George (1967), a solo rendering of Shaw’s non-dramatic writings. From the late 1950s, noted Shaw productions on Broadway were fewer, but Heartbreak House returned in acclaimed productions starring Maurice Evans in 1959, Rex Harrison (along with Rosemary Harris, Amy Irving, Philip Bosco, Dana Ivey, and others) in 1983, and Philip Bosco in 2006; a 1963 revival of Too True to Be Good starred Cedric

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Hardwicke, Lillian Gish, Glynis Johns, Robert Preston, David Wayne, Cyril Ritchard, Eileen Heckart, and Ray Middleton; Diana Sands was the first African American to play Saint Joan in 1968; Ingrid Bergman appeared in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1972; Ruth Gordon, Lynn Redgrave, Edward Herrmann, Philip Bosco, and Milo O’Shea appeared in Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 1976; Rex Harrison and Elizabeth Ashley were Caesar and Cleopatra in 1977; Raul Juliá, Kevin Kline, and Glenne Headly starred in Arms and the Man in 1985; Peter O’Toole, Amanda Plummer, and John Mills revived Pygmalion in 1987, and Claire Danes, Jefferson Mays, and Boyd Gaines appeared in Pygmalion in 2007; and there were productions of You Never Can Tell in 1986, Getting Married in 1991, Candida in 1993, Saint Joan in 1993, and Major Barbara in 1993 (with Maryann Plunkett) and 2001 (with Cherry Jones), among many others. Shaw’s plays found receptive audiences in regional theatres and academic theatres after the middle of the twentieth century. SHAW, IRWIN (1913–1984). Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff was born in the Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish parents who raised him in Brooklyn, where they moved shortly after his birth. Shaw attended Brooklyn College, after which he wrote radio scripts. His most important theatrical contribution was his expressionistic* antiwar play, Bury the Dead (1936), His other plays, all of which were produced on Broadway, include Siege (1937), The Gentle People (1939), Retreat to Pleasure (1940), Sons and Soldiers (1943), The Assassin (1945), The Survivors (1948), and Children from Their Games (1963). In the late 1940s, Shaw began to write novels, most notably The Young Lions (1949), Rich Man, Poor Man (1969), and Beggarman, Thief (1977), among others. For movies, Shaw was nominated for an Academy Award for cowriting (with Sidney Buchman) the screenplay for The Talk of the Town (1942), and he worked on numerous films, including screen adaptations of his novels. SHAWN, WALLACE (1943– ). Born Wallace Michael Shawn in New York, he was the son of the New Yorker editor William Shawn and journalist Cecille Lyon Shawn. He studied at the Putney School, Harvard University, and Oxford University with intentions of a career in diplomacy, but as of the late 1970s, he worked as an actor and playwright. Among his plays, the best known and most controversial is Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and depicted a woman with neo-Nazi convictions. His other works include The Hotel Play (1970), Our Late Night (1975), A Thought in Three Parts (1976), Marie and Bruce (1978), The Fever (1990), The Designated Mourner (1998), a 2006 Broadway translation of

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Threepenny Opera, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2008). David Hare directed Shawn’s play The Designated Mourner for the screen in 1998. As an actor, Shawn has appeared in numerous films, including Atlantic City (1980), My Dinner with Andre (1981), The Princess Bride (1987), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Shadows and Fog (1991), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), and many television programs. SHE LOVES ME NOT. Howard Lindsay’s two-act comedy opened in a Dwight Deere Wiman production at the 46th Street Theatre on 20 November 1933 for 360 performances under Lindsay’s direction, with scene design by Raymond Sovey. Polly Walters played Curly Flagg, a dancer, who seeks refuge in a Princeton University dormitory room after witnessing a murder at a nightclub. Curley is protected by Paul Lawton (John Beal) and his dorm mate Buzz Jones (Burgess Meredith), who disguise Curley as a man. Curley pretends to be Paul’s younger brother and causes havoc when she becomes involved in making a film. Elliott Nugent directed a 1934 film version starring Bing Crosby, Miriam Hopkins, and Kitty Carlisle, with Crosby introducing the Academy Award-nominated song “Love in Bloom.” SHEAR MADNESS. David Eastwood and Bruce Jordan adapted German playwright Paul Pörtner’s Scherenschnitt (1963) into the audience participatory comic murder mystery Shear Madness, which opened at the Charles Playhouse Stage II in Boston, Massachusetts, in January 1980 and as of 2010 was still running in Boston and elsewhere, advertised as one of the longest running non-musical plays in history. Set in a unisex hair salon, the landlady, who lives above the shop, is murdered and the cast, including a gay hairdresser, a flirtatious assistant, a proper old lady, and an old man, involve the audience in solving the crime. The play has been performed in over 20 American cities and as many foreign productions. SHELLEY, CAROLE (1939– ). London, England-born actress who began her acting career performing in cabaret in Amsterdam before making her Broadway debut as one of the Pigeon sisters in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965), a role she repeated in the movie version. A character actress of impressive range and a formidable visage, Shelley acted with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, but spent most of her career in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen. She has appeared on Broadway and in films and television, moving with ease from broad comedy to classical drama, from musicals to high comedy. She was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Absurd Person Singular (1975) and won a Tony and was Drama Desk-nominated as Mrs. Kendal in The Elephant Man (1979). She

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was also Tony-nominated for Stepping Out (1987) and Billy Elliot: The Musical (2008). Shelley’s other Broadway credits include The Astrakhan Coat (1967), Loot (1968), Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato (1968), a 1970 revival of Hay Fever, The Norman Conquests (1975), and revivals of The Misanthrope in 1983 and The Miser in 1990. Shelley also stepped in as a replacement in several notable hits, including Noises Off (1983), a 1994 revival of Show Boat, The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), a 1998 revival of Cabaret, and Wicked (2003). On screen, Shelley appeared in a couple of the Carry On comedies in England, The Boston Strangler (1968), Quiz Show (1994), The Road to Wellville (1994), Bewitched (2005), and The Queen of Greenwich Village (2009). SHEPARD, SAM (1943– ). Few playwrights as fully embody the changes in American theatre since the 1960s as Sam Shepard, who was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, to teacher parents (and a father who served in the United States Air Force during World War II). Following high school, Shepard joined a traveling theatre group and claimed to be a heroin addict to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Still in his teens, Shepard moved to Greenwich Village and became deeply involved in OffOff-Broadway theatre as a sometime actor and full-time playwright. As the center of American drama shifted away from Broadway in the 1960s, Shepard wrote most of his plays for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres—and continued to do so after achieving significant success as a dramatist. A prolific writer, Shepard’s recurrent themes address the conflict between myth and reality in American life, with a particular emphasis on family and the American West in which he finds an emptiness in the concept of the American dream and an often futile or disappointing search for connection and grounding roots. Shepard’s early plays include Cowboys (1964), The Rock Garden (1964), Chicago (1965), Icarus’s Mother (1965), 4-H Club (1965), Red Cross (1966), La Turista (1967), Cowboys #2 (1967), Forensic & the Navigators (1967), The Unseen Hand (1969), sketches contributed to Oh! Calcutta! (1969), The Holy Ghostly (1970), Operation Sidewinder (1970), Mad Dog Blues (1971), Back Bog Beast Bait (1971), Cowboy Mouth (1971; coauthored with Patti Smith), The Tooth of Crime (1972), Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), Action (1975), Suicide in B Flat (1976), Angel City (1976), Inacoma (1977), and Tongues (1978; cowritten with Joseph Chaikin). In 1976, Shepard moved to San Francisco and became playwright-in-residence of the Magic Theatre where his subsequent plays premiered, including those for which he is best-known: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child

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(1978), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Shepard’s later plays include A Short Life of Trouble (1987), States of Shock (1991), Simpatico (1993), Eyes for Consuela (1998), The Late Henry Moss (2000), The Notebook (2004), The God of Hell (2004), Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), and Ages of the Moon (2010). Shepard’s more than 40 plays have brought him a multitude of honors, including the aforementioned Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1979, and two Tony Award-nominations for the Broadway productions of Buried Child in 1996 and True West in 2000. He won a Drama Desk Award for A Lie of the Mind and 11 Obie Awards. Shepard also wrote for the screen from the beginning of his career, gaining credits for Me and My Brother (1968) and Zabriskie Point (1970), among others, and he continued to write screenplays, including adaptations of his own plays, including Fool for Love (1986), in which he also acted, and, increasingly, to devote himself to acting on film from the late 1970s. Shepard was nominated for an Academy Award playing test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983), and also appeared in Days of Heaven (1978), Resurrection (1980), Frances (1982), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Steel Magnolias (1989), Purgatory (1999), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Accidental Husband (2008), and Felon (2008). Shepard was nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe Awards playing Dashiell Hammett in Dash and Lilly (1999) on television. As a screenwriter, Shepard worked with Wim Wenders on two films, Paris, Texas (1984) and Don’t Come Knocking (2005), and he directed Far North (1988) and Silent Tongue (1994), both of which he scripted. Shepard was married to actress O-Lan Johnson Jones from 1969–1984 and has since had a long-term relationship with Academy Award-winning actress Jessica Lange. Writing in the New Yorker of Shepard’s characters, John Lahr described them as “doomed by their unconscious, which they can’t or won’t examine. In fact, they’ll do anything for an unexamined life.” SHER, BARTLETT (1959– ). A native of San Francisco, California, this much-honored theatre director was educated at St. Ignatius College Preparatory and the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, prior to teaching English. A versatile director of a wide range of classic and contemporary works, Sher began his career as associate artistic director of Hartford Stage and company director of the Guthrie Theatre prior to becoming artistic director of Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington, in 2000, where he has directed Nickel and Dimed, Homebody/Kabul, and several plays by Craig Lucas, as well as a 2002 production of Cymbeline, which bought him a Drama Desk Award nomination when it moved to Off-Broadway. Sher

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is also resident director of the Lincoln Center Theatre and won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for his direction of the 2008 revival of South Pacific there. He has also garnered Tony nominations for The Light in the Piazza (2005), which also brought him a Drama Desk nomination, a 2006 revival of Awake and Sing!, and a 2009 revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone which caused controversy because Sher was the first white director to stage a major production of one of August Wilson’s plays. Off-Broadway, Sher staged the American premiere of Harley Granville Barker’s 1907 play Waste, which won a Best Play Obie Award, and productions of Don Juan in 2003 and Pericles, Prince of Tyre in 2004. Sher has directed at the Metropolitan Opera and in international theatres and opera companies. SHERIN, EDWIN (1930– ). Following a brief career as an actor, Sherin, who was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, became a successful director. He had appeared on Broadway in A Desert Incident (1959), Face of a Hero (1960), and Romulus (1962), as well as productions of Shakespearean plays and a 1960 revival of Peer Gynt, but switched to directing as resident director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he premiered Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1968), casting James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander, his future wife, in star-making roles. When the production moved to Broadway, Sherin won a Drama Desk Award. Sherin directed Alexander in several plays and his Broadway credits include his Tony Awardnominated direction of Find Your Way Home (1973), and An Evening with Richard Nixon and . . . (1972), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), revivals of Of Mice and Men in 1974 and Sweet Bird of Youth in 1975, Rex (1976), The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976), Do You Turn Somersaults? (1978), First Monday in October (1978), Goodbye Fidel (1980), a 1992 revival of The Visit, and Prymate (2004). Sherin has directed and produced for television since the 1980s, including serving as executive producer of Law & Order from 1993–2000, for which he shared in a 1997 Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. SHERMAN, MARTIN (1938– ). A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sherman was the son of a lawyer and studied at the Boston University College of Fine Arts. He moved to London in 1980, where his play Bent (1979), which dealt with World War II-era persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis, scored a critical success, followed by a Tony Award-nominated Broadway production. Sherman wrote the libretto for the musical The Boy from Oz (1998), based on the life of entertainer Peter Allen, the play Rose (2000), and several film scripts, including the 1997 screenplay for Bent, Indian Summer (1996), Callas Forever (2002), a television adaptation of Tennessee

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Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003), and Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005). See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE; SEXUALITY. SHERWOOD, ROBERT E. (1896–1955). Born in New Rochelle, New York, and educated at Harvard University, Robert Emmett Sherwood wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, studied with George Pierce Baker,* and worked on campus theatricals with the Hasty Pudding Club. His service with the Canadian Black Watch during World War I led to his stance of pacifism and mistrust of government. After various writing assignments with Vanity Fair, Life, and Scribner’s, his first important play, The Road to Rome* (1927), was an antiwar comedy set in ancient times starring Jane Cowl, but it was followed by more commercial offerings. The tragic wartime romance of Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge (1930) was not well-received, although it ultimately proved enduringly popular in two screen versions in 1931 and 1940. Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (1931) proved a sturdy vehicle for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and his other works of the early 1930s were either failures, such as Acropolis (1933), or mild successes like Tovarich (1936). With storm clouds gathering for World War II, Sherwood’s pacifist views began to take on a nationalistic fervor. His subsequent Broadway plays examine frustrated idealism, as in The Petrified Forest (1935), or are overtly patriotic as in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). His antiwar sentiments were conflicted, however, as suggested by his other two Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas, the harshly antiwar Idiot’s Delight (1936) and the propagandistic assault on American isolationism, There Shall Be No Night (1940), both of which starred the Lunts. During World War II, Sherwood became a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was appointed director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information. As the war ended, Sherwood’s plays were less successful, including The Rugged Path (1945), about a journalist in war-torn Asia that marked screen star Spencer Tracy’s return to Broadway, and the Irving Berlin musical Miss Liberty (1949). He completed the late Philip Barry’s final play, Second Threshold (1951), and was one of the cofounders of The Playwrights’ Company. He also wrote a history of FDR’s relationship with his close aide, Harry Hopkins, and a novel, The Virtuous Knight (1931). SHINN, CHRISTOPHER (1975– ). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Shinn became a playwright finding his first successes in England, where his play Four (1998) was staged by the Royal Court Theatre, followed by a production Off-Broadway at the Soho Theatre. Among his other plays, which have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and other Off-Broadway venues, are Other People (2000), What Didn’t Happen

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(2002), Where Do We Live (2004), for which he won an Obie Award, On the Mountain (2005), and Dying City (2007). The British attraction of Shinn’s work reflects the literary, well-structured nature of his plays. Shinn teaches playwriting at the New School. SHORT EYES. Miguel Piñero’s New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Obie Award-winning prison drama opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre on 28 February 1974 for 54 performances before moving to Broadway, where it was nominated for a Tony Award and opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on 23 May 1974 for 80 performances. The prisoners in a New York jail turn against a new prisoner, Clark Davis, accused of child molestation. Juan, one of the prisoners, responds differently, but when Clark is about to be released, Juan is left with the dilemma of how to cope, since he is convinced that Clark will molest again. Before Juan can make a decision, the other inmates murder Clark. Piñero won a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding New Playwright and scene designer David Mitchell won a Drama Desk Award as well. Short Eyes was adapted to the screen in 1977 under the direction of Robert M. Young, with Bruce Davison and Luis Guzmán in the cast. SHRIKE, THE. Joseph Kramm’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-act drama opened at the Cort Theatre on 15 January 1952 for 161 performances under the direction of José Ferrer, who won Tony Awards for directing and starring as Jim Downs. Downs, a failed theatre director, attempts suicide and is committed to a psychiatric hospital, leaving his future in the hands of his estranged wife, Ann (Judith Evelyn). Ann takes control and manipulates him into giving up his new love and returning to her. The cast also included Stephen Elliott and Edward Platt. Ferrer starred in and directed a 1955 film version in which he costarred with June Allyson. SHUBERT ALLEY. This famed alley runs beside two busy Broadway theatres, the Shubert Theatre on West 44th Street and the Booth Theatre on 45th Street. Nearby restaurants have come and gone, as well as Broadway ticket and souvenir shops, but Sardi’s Restaurant, a famous theatrical hangout, is nearby on 44th Street, and the alley is surrounded by numerous other Broadway theatres on 44th and 45th Streets. SHUBERT BROTHERS (SAM S. [1877?–1905], LEE [1875?–1953], JACOB J. [1879?–1963]).† Levi, Samuel, and Jacob Szemanski were all born in Shervient, Lithuania, and all emigrated to the United States in 1882 when their family settled in Syracuse, New York. Americanizing their names

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to Lee, Sam S., and J. J. Shubert, they created a theatrical empire that bears their names over a hundred years after they bought the area touring rights to Charles Hoyt’s* A Texas Steer* (1894). Leading the way, Sam and Lee rented the Herald Square Theatre (and later, the Casino) and made a truce with A. L. Erlanger* of the Theatrical Syndicate,* allowing them to present Augustus Thomas’s* Arizona* (1900). Among the stars of Shubert productions in their early years were Richard Mansfield,* Sarah Bernhardt,* and Lillian Russell.* Within only a few years, the Shuberts managed to break the Syndicate’s monopoly, amassing a theatrical chain larger than any other. In 1905, Sam, the dominant partner, died in a train wreck after which Lee took over the management of their interests. J. J., who was more interested in staging productions, particularly operettas* and musicals, left managerial tasks to Lee. Among the Shubert stars between 1910 and 1930, Al Jolson* (1885–1950) was their greatest discovery. He starred in a long series of musicals in the Winter Garden Theatre, the Shubert crown jewel theatre, beginning in 1911, among them La Belle Paree (1911), Vera Violetta (1911), The Honeymoon Express (1913), Dancing Around (1914), Robinson Crusoe, Jr. (1916), Sinbad (1918), Bombo (1921), and Big Boy (1925). Between their failed production of The Brixton Burglary (1901) and 1954, the Shuberts produced a remarkable 250 Broadway productions, including Heidelberg (1902), Widowers’ Houses (1907), The City* (1909), The Passing Show (1912), Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), Maytime (1917), He and She* (1920), Blossom Time (1921), Artists and Models (first edition in 1923), The Student Prince (1924), and Countess Maritza (1926). Their principle New York theatres, the Winter Garden and the Princess, were seldom dark. The Shuberts met with criticism for ruthless business practices, but they were also known to offer reduced rents to worthy productions or troupes struggling to make a go of it. See also SHUBERT ORGANIZATION. SHUBERT ORGANIZATION. The largest theatre-owning company on Broadway, the Shubert organization began in 1900 as a partnership of the three Shubert brothers, Sam S., Lee, and Jacob (Jake), all producers who worked together and separately on Broadway until their deaths (Sam died in a railroad accident in 1905, Lee died in 1953 and Jake in 1963). The brothers vigorously acquired theatres, beginning with the Herald Square Theatre in 1900, and Lee and Jake opened their flagship theatre, the Sam S. Shubert Theatre, in 1913. During the 1910s and 1920s, the Shuberts produced all manner of plays and musicals, employing such noted stars as Al Jolson,* Eddie Cantor, Marilyn Miller, Jeanne Eagles,* Fred and Adele Astaire, Tallulah Bankhead, Marie Dressler, and others. Despite some setbacks during

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the Great Depression, the Shuberts continued to produce musicals, revues,* and occasional straight plays, including Ten Little Indians (1944) and Dark of the Moon (1945), during the 1930s and 1940s. As Lee and Jake Shubert neared the end of their lives, the Shubert Organization returned to full-time producing after 1972, when Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs took over as chairman and president, Under their guidance, the Shubert Organization produced many important productions, including The Gin Game (1977), The Act (1977), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), Children of a Lesser God (1980), Amadeus (1981), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1981), “Master Harold”. . . and the Boys (1982), Angels Fall (1983), ’night, Mother (1983), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), As Is (1985), The Heidi Chronicles (1989), The Grapes of Wrath (1990), Lettice and Lovage (1990), Skylight (1996), Closer (1999), and Amy’s View (1999), as well as many revivals. In 1945, the Shuberts established the not-for-profit Shubert Foundation to aid in supporting regional theatres and dance companies. In the 1980s, the company established a ticket service and owns and/or operates 17 Broadway theatres, an Off-Broadway company, and theatres in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. SHUE, LARRY (1946–1985). Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Shue was raised in Kansas and Chicago, Illinois, before attending Illinois Wesleyan University. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War before working as an actor in repertory theatres and on soap operas. Established as playwright-in-residence at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Shue wrote two popular farces, The Nerd (1981) and The Foreigner (1983), both widely produced and demonstrating great promise. Unfortunately, Shue died in an airplane crash in 1985. He left behind other plays, including Wenceslas Square (1988), which was produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre under the direction of Jerry Zaks, and Grandma Duck is Dead (1980), which had been produced at the Dallas Theatre Center. SHUMLIN, HERMAN (1898–1979). A native of Atwood, Colorado, Shumlin worked as a writer for some theatrical publications and as an associate of producer/director Jed Harris and others before beginning an independent career as a producer and/or director of such plays as The Last Mile (1930), which brought Spencer Tracy to stardom, Grand Hotel (1930), The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), The Male Animal (1940), The Corn Is Green (1940), Daphne Laureola (1950), a 1952 revival of Candida, Inherit the Wind (1955), and The Deputy (1964). Shumlin’s most fruitful associa-

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tion was with playwright Lillian Hellman. He produced and directed most of Hellman’s major plays, including The Children’s Hour (1934), Days to Come (1936), The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1941), and The Searching Wind (1944). Shumlin also directed Kiss Them for Me (1945), Lace on Her Petticoat (1951), Wedding Breakfast (1954), Tall Story (1959), Little Moon of Alban (1960), Dear Me, The Sky Is Falling (1963), and Spofford (1967), which he also wrote. SHYRE, PAUL (1926–1989). Born in New York, Shyre studied for the theatre at the University of Florida at Gainesville and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. As an actor, dramatist, and director, as well as an educator, Shyre was a particularly successful adaptor of non-dramatic works by Sean O’Casey, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken,* and others. He also directed and acted in O’Casey’s plays, as well as works by Eugene O’Neill and August Strindberg. Shyre won a Drama Desk Award and a special Tony Award for his adaptation of O’Casey’s Pictures in the Hallway (1957), in which he acted, and O’Casey’s Purple Dust (1957) Off-Broadway. His other Broadway efforts include producing, adapting, and directing O’Casey’s I Knock at the Door (1957), which brought him an Obie Award, and for directing Fair Game for Lovers (1964), Will Rogers’ USA (1974), and Hizzoner! (1989), and wrote the last two. Shyre stepped into the cast of Absurd Person Singular (1974) as a replacement and appeared in a 1977 revival of Saint Joan. Shyre died of complications from AIDS. [sic]. Melissa James Gibson’s Obie Award-winning play was given its first production by the Soho Repertory Theatre in November 2001. The play had been commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre as part of its New Plays Lab in 1997–1998 and was followed by a Chicago Roadworks production in June 2000. The play focuses on a threesome of young adult neighbors in a New York apartment house and the ways their lives, and those of some unseen neighbors, intersect. The characters, all 20-somethings with artistic desires, are seen to be in flux about their futures, but share one common bond: the landlord is the enemy. Directed by Daniel Aukin, the Soho cast featured James Urbaniak, Dominic Fumusa, Christina Kirk, Jennifer Morris, and Trevor Williams. SIDE MAN. Warren Leight’s Tony Award-winning memory drama premiered Off-Off-Broadway at the East 13th Street Theatre, where it opened on 11 March 1998 with a cast including Frank Wood, Robert Sella, and Edie Falco (who won a Theatre World Award). The play moved to Broadway, where it opened at the Criterion Center Stage Right on 25 June 1998 for 517

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performances under the direction of Michael Mayer, with scene design by Neil Patel, lighting by Kenneth Posner, and costumes by Tom Broecker. Side Man, which is set in 1953, deals with the lives of jazz musicians narrated by Clifford Glimmer, the son of a jazz trumpeter and an alcoholic mother, who is looking back at his early life from the present. As the relationship of his parents deteriorates against the backdrop of the jazz scene, Clifford takes on the responsibility of looking after his mother when his father can no longer support the family with his music. SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW, THE. Lorraine Hansberry returned to Broadway following her acclaimed 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, with this drama of the disillusionments and intellectual struggles of Greenwich Village artists. The play opened at the Longacre Theatre on 15 October 1964 for 99 performances under the direction of Peter Kass. The cast included Alice Ghostley, who won a Tony Award, Gabriel Dell, Rita Moreno, and Dolph Sweet. Critics were mixed about the play’s merits and Hansberry, who was battling cancer, died a few days after the production folded. SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY (STC). James Houghton founded the STC in 1991 to produce plays by in-residence playwrights, producing reexaminations of their past works and nurturing premieres. Among the playwrights who have worked closely with STC are Horton Foote, Edward Albee, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornés, Romulus Linney, Arthur Miller, Lee Blessing, August Wilson, Bill Irwin, Charles Mee, Paula Vogel, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, and Lanford Wilson. The works premiered at STC include a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta (1995), and numerous Drama Desk and Obie Award winners. In 2010, the Signature Theatre announced it would focus its season on Tony Kushner, presenting the first major New York revival of both parts of Angels in America (1993) and two other Kushner works, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) and his adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion. SILLS, PAUL (1927–2008). The son of teacher/writer Viola Spolin, Sills, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at the University of Chicago, devoted his career to realizing in performance the theories his mother had espoused in her Improvisation for the Theatre (1963) book. Sills founded such significant organizations as the Playwrights’ Theatre Club in 1948, which included Edward Asner, Zohra Lampert, and other actors. In 1955,

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Sills, along with David Shepherd, founded The Compass Players, a seminal improvisational theatre, which was significant in launching the careers of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and others. In 1959, Sills, partnered with Howard Alk and Bernie Sahlins, and established The Second City, a nightclub in which such actors as Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris (who he married), and Paul Sand were early members, but which ultimately was a proving ground for a remarkably large number of actors and comedians during its 50-plus years of operation in Chicago (and, ultimately, with branches in Toronto and Los Angeles). In 1961, Sills directed From the Second City on Broadway for an 87 performance run with a cast, including Arkin, Harris, Sand, and others. In 1965, Sills left The Second City to establish the Game Theatre, again making use of his mother’s theories in audience-participatory improvisational performances. Moving beyond his mother’s work, Sills pioneered a form called “story theatre,” putting together Paul Sills’ Story Theatre (1970), which was performed on Broadway, playing for 243 performances with a cast, including Paul Sand (who won Tony and Drama Desk Awards), Valerie Harper, Melinda Dillon, and others. Sills won a Drama Desk Award for his direction. “Story Theatre,” as conceived by Sills, involves the use of improvisations to develop short plays from stories, myths, folk tales, and legends. He applied his techniques and won another Drama Desk Award for Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1971), which also had a successful run on Broadway. In 1988, Sills, Mike Nichols, and George Morrison founded the New Actors Workshop, an acting school, and he also established the Wisconsin Theatre Game Center. Sills is quoted as saying, “There’s no laugh like the explosion of laughter after improvisation.” SILVER, NICKY (1960– ). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Silver was educated at the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in upstate New York and at New York University. Following graduation, he began writing plays, and his Pterodactyls (1994), a dark sex farce set in the AIDS era, and Raised in Captivity (1995) received Drama Desk Award nominations as Best Play during their Off-Broadway runs. Silver provided a revised libretto for a 2002 revival of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse. His other plays, which are marked by scathing satire and irreverent humor on family dysfunction, sex and love, spiritual need, and loneliness include Fat Men in Skirts (1988), Free Will & Wanton Lust (1994), The Food Chain (1994), Fit to Be Tied (1995), The Altruists (2000), The Maiden’s Prayer (2000), Beautiful Child (2004), The Agony and the Agony (2006), Past Perfect (2007), and Three Changes (2008).

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SILVER, RON (1946–2009). Ronald Arthur Zimelman was born in New York, son of a clothing executive and a teacher. He was educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo, St. John’s University, at the College of Chinese Culture in Taiwan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of International Affairs prior to studying acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio and The Actors Studio. Silvers developed a varied career as an actor, director, producer, radio commentator, and political activist. He acted in films and television beginning in the 1970s, including a stint on the Rhoda TV show, from 1976–1978. He appeared in three Broadway plays, including Hurlyburly (1984), Social Security (1986), and won Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Charlie Fox in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988), a role that tapped into Silver’s intensity and New York aggressiveness. Silver, who had been a liberal Democrat, became an Independent following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001 (9/11), and supported President George W. Bush, increasing his involvement in political activities previously focused on environmental concerns and issues of artistic freedom. Silver hosted The Ron Silver Show on Sirius Satellite Radio beginning in 2008 and continuing until his death the following year. In movies, Silver appeared in Silkwood (1983), Romancing the Stone (1984), The Goodbye People (1984), Garbo Talks (1984), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Mr. Saturday Night (1992), Ali (2001), and My Father’s Will (2009). He was twice nominated for Emmy Awards, for the TV film Billionaire Boys Club (1987) and for his recurring role as Bruno Gianelli on series The West Wing (1999–2006). SIMON, JOHN (1925– ). Born in Yugoslavia of Hungarian descent, John Ivan Simon was raised in Belgrade prior to moving to the United States in 1941, where he attended Harvard University and began a long career as drama, film, music, and book critic for a wide range of publications, including New York magazine, for whom he wrote from 1968 to 2005, mostly drama reviews. He has written more than a dozen books, several collecting his theatre and film reviews. He often generated controversy for the vitriolic attacks on plays and especially individual actors, earning the nickname “The Vampire of Broadway,” but his erudite writing and love of classics and language also marked his legacy as a critic. Since 2005, Simon has reviewed plays for BloombergNews.com. and contributes a monthly essay to The Weekly Standard and occasional contributions to other publications. He has won the George Jean Nathan Award and the George Polk Award. SIMON, NEIL (1927– ). Marvin Neil Simon, born in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish American parents, qualifies as the most commercially successful

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Broadway playwright of the post-World War II era. A graduate of DeWitt Clinton High School, Simon studied between 1944 and 1946 at both New York University and the University of Denver before quitting to work in the Warner Bros. mailroom in New York in hopes of writing radio and television scripts with his brother, Danny Simon. He participated in a CBS writing workshop taught by Goodman Ace and created revue* entertainments at Club Tamiment in the Pocono Mountains, where his efforts came to the attention of Sid Caesar, who hired the Simon brothers to write for Caesar’s Your Show of Shows TV variety show, where he collaborated with such comedy writing talents as Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and others. Simon’s writing for Caesar brought him two Emmy Award nominations and the opportunity to write for Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko TV series in 1959. By this time, Simon had his eye on a Broadway writing career, which was realized when his first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), was a hit on Broadway, followed almost immediately by his libretto for the musical Little Me (1961), which starred Caesar and brought Simon a Tony Award nomination. From then until his most recent play, Rose’s Dilemma (2003), Simon has written over 30 plays and musicals, as well as screenplays. He had won Tonys for The Odd Couple (1965), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Lost in Yonkers (1991), the latter bringing him a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Desk Award. Between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, there were periods when as many as four Simon plays or musicals were running simultaneously on Broadway. Among his works in that period were Barefoot in the Park (1963), Sweet Charity (1966), The Star-Spangled Girl (1966), Plaza Suite (1968), Promises, Promises (1968), The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), The Gingerbread Lady (1970), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), The Sunshine Boys (1973), The Good Doctor (1974), God’s Favorite (1974), California Suite (1976), Chapter Two (1977), They’re Playing Our Song (1979), I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980), and Fools (1981). In the 1980s, Simon, who, despite the commercial success of his works, was often dismissed by critics for the conventional mainstream values in his plays and what some regarded as the jokiness of even his most serious works, turned his attention to three autobiographical plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound (1986), which chronicled his life from his adolescence during the Great Depression through his basic training in the military during World War II to his family’s stresses as he had his first writing successes in radio. He had previously written about his courtship and marriage to actress Marsha Mason in the aftermath of the premature death of his first wife, Joan, in Chapter Two, and other Simon plays had featured autobiographical elements, but the 1980s’ trilogy was viewed by

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some critics as a maturing of his work and themes, featuring a greater depth of character and emotional intensity than had been typical of his earlier work. The peak of Simon’s evolution was seen in Lost in Yonkers, his most honored play, but much of his other work seemed more in the spirit of his earlier plays, including a female version of The Odd Couple (1986), Rumors (1988), Jake’s Women (1992), the libretto for a musical version of his film The Goodbye Girl (1993), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), which recreated his experiences writing TV comedy in the 1950s, London Suite (1995), Proposals (1997), The Dinner Party (2000), and 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001). Most of these were considerably less successful, both commercially and critically, than his earlier works. In films, Simon won a Golden Globe for The Goodbye Girl (1978) and was nominated for an Academy Award for The Odd Couple (1968), The Sunshine Boys (1975), The Goodbye Girl, and California Suite (1978). His other screenplays include adaptations of his plays, as well as direct-to-the-screen scripts for The Out of Towners (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Murder by Death (1976), The Cheap Detective (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), Only When I Laugh (1981), Max Dugan Returns (1983), The Slugger’s Wife (1985), and The Marrying Man (1991). Television adaptations of Simon’s Broadway Bound in 1992 and Laughter on the 23rd Floor in 2001 brought him Emmy Award nominations. SIMONSON, LEE (1888–1967). Born in New York, Simonson, along with Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Jo Mielziner, became one of the most important scene designers of the first half of the twentieth century. He attended Harvard University, where he studied with George Pierce Baker,* and his first designs were done for the Washington Square Players.* Simonson returned from service in World War I to become a founding member of The Theatre Guild, designing settings for many of the Guild’s most prestigious productions, including Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), R.U.R. (1922), The Adding Machine* (1923), The Road to Rome* (1927), Marco Millions* (1928), and Dynamo* (1929). From 1930, he created some of his most important designs for Philip Barry’s Hotel Universe (1930), George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1930), Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen (1930) starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1931), Molière’s The School for Husbands (1934), John Wexley’s They Shall Not Die (1934), S. N. Behrman’s End of Summer (1936), Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Idiot’s Delight (1936) also starring the Lunts, Jean Giraudoux’s Amphytrion 38 (1937) adapted by Behrman and starring the Lunts, and Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine (1946), as well as Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Niebelungen

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for the Metropolitan Opera in 1947. His design style owes much to the European modernist innovations known as the New Stagecraft,* and he wrote two important books on his design ideas, The Stage Is Set (1932) and The Art of Scenic Design (1950), as well as an autobiography, Part of a Lifetime (1943). SINISE, GARY (1955– ). Gary Alan Sinise was born in Blue Island, Illinois, to a film editor father of Italian heritage. He studied at Illinois State University. With two friends, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, Sinise founded Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 1974, where he developed his career as an actor and director. In 1983, he won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for his direction of Sam Shepard’s True West, costarring with John Malkovich, a production filmed for PBS-TV in 1984. He began working in film and television that year, but returned frequently to the stage, most successfully playing Tom Joad in the Steppenwolf’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1990), which brought him Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. He won a Drama Desk Award as part of the ensemble of an Off-Broadway revival of Balm in Gilead in 1985 and accepted a Tony for outstanding regional theatre on behalf of the Steppenwolf in 1985. He was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as director of Orphans (1986) and acted on Broadway in a 1986 revival of The Caretaker and Off-Broadway in a 1997 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1996, he directed the first Broadway production of Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play Buried Child, which brought him a Tony nomination. He was again Tonynominated, this time as an actor, playing Randle P. McMurphy in a 2001 revival of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On screen, Sinise received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Forrest Gump (1994). His other film credits include Of Mice and Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), and The Green Mile (1999). Sinise was nominated for an Emmy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Truman (1995) and won an Emmy and received a Golden Globe nomination for George Wallace (1997), both TV films. In 2004, he took the role of Detective Mac Taylor in the TV series CSI: NY, and continues in the role in 2010. SISTER MARY IGNATIUS EXPLAINS IT ALL FOR YOU. Christopher Durang’s controversial one-act character study of a nun inculcating her pupils at a Catholic grammar school with her own distorted view of church dogma opened on 14 December 1979 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) featuring a memorable performance by Elizabeth Franz. Sister Mary teaches catechism to her class, including Thomas, a young student she treats like a trained animal by feeding him a cookie when he delivers the answer she seeks. Subsequently, she is confronted by former students, all of whom

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are troubled and believe Sister Mary’s teachings have destroyed their lives. The EST revived the play in 1981 on a double bill with another Durang oneact, The Actor’s Nightmare. Franz repeated her performance and was followed during the long run by other actresses, including Nancy Marchand, Kathleen Chalfant, Mary Louise Wilson, and Lynn Redgrave. A 2001 Showtime-TV movie version starred Diane Keaton. See also CENSORSHIP; RELIGIOUS DRAMA. SISTERS ROSENSWEIG, THE. Wendy Wasserstein’s Tony Awardnominated and Outer Critics Award-winning play debuted at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in April 1992 before opening at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre Off-Broadway on 22 October 1992 for 149 performances. Positive critical response led to a move to Broadway, where the play reopened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 18 March 1993 for 556 performances under the direction of Daniel Sullivan (who was nominated for a Tony), with scene design by John Lee Beatty, lighting by Pat Collins, and costumes by Jane Greenwood, who was nominated for a Tony. Madeline Kahn won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her performance of Gorgeous Teitelbaum, one of three Jewish American sisters in London, exploring the lives of middleaged women as the millennium approached. Jane Alexander, who was Tonynominated and won a Drama Desk Award, played Sara Goode, with Christine Estabrook, Julie Dretzin, and Robert Klein, who was Drama Desk-nominated, among the cast. During the run, Linda Lavin took over for Kahn and Michael Learned replaced Alexander. Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, described the play as a “captivating look at three uncommon women and their quest for love, self-definition and fulfillment. But underlying the comedy is an empathetic concern for the characters and for the prospects of women today.” See also FEMINIST THEATRE. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION. John Guare’s Tony Award-nominated drama opened in a Lincoln Center Theatre production at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on 8 November 1990 for 485 performances under the direction of Jerry Zaks, who won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, with scene design by Tony Walton, lighting by Paul Gallo, and costumes by William Ivey Long. New York socialite Ouisa Kittredge (Stockard Channing) and her culturally prominent husband, Flan (John Cunningham), are confronted by a young black man, Paul (Courtney B. Vance) who turns up at the swanky apartment. He claims to be Sidney Poitier’s son and friends with their old friends from college. After accepting him, they are shocked to learn that Paul is a con man who has taken them for money, as he has other economically and socially prominent individuals. Paul, it turns out, is an urban

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legend come true. Channing and Vance were both Tony-nominated and the cast also included Kelly Bishop, Evan Handler, John Cameron Mitchell, and Anthony Rapp. A 1993 film version directed by Fred Schepisi starred Channing, recreating her Broadway performance, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, and Ian McKellen. SKELTON, THOMAS R. (1927–1994). Born in North Bridgeton, Maine, Skelton was educated at Middlebury College before moving to New York City to study dance with Martha Graham and José Limon. He became an apprentice to Broadway lighting designer Jean Rosenthal at the American Dance Festival and also stage-managed and designed lights for Robert Joffrey’s dance company. Despite the fact that Skelton’s design work was heavily focused in dance for such companies as the American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and the Ohio Ballet, Skelton designed lighting for over 60 Broadway productions, including three Tony Award-nominated designs for Indians (1970) and revivals of All God’s Chillun Got Wings* in 1975 and The Iceman Cometh in 1985. Skelton also received Drama Desk Award nominations for Legend (1976) and Lena Horne: “The Lady and Her Music” (1981). On Broadway, Skelton also designed Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1962), Jimmy Shine (1968), A Patriot for Me (1969), Coco (1969), Purlie (1970), The Selling of the President (1972), Gigi (1973), Absurd Person Singular (1974), Shenandoah (1975), a 1975 revival of Death of a Salesman, A Matter of Gravity (1976), The Kingfisher (1978), The West Side Waltz (1981), A Few Good Men (1989), Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1991), and Shakespeare for My Father (1993), as well as numerous revivals of classics and musicals. Skelton wrote frequently for Dance Magazine beginning in the 1950s and taught at Yale University and the New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design. SKIN OF OUR TEETH, THE. As World War II loomed, Thornton Wilder began work on a play titled The End of the World, which eventually evolved into The Skin of Our Teeth, a serious play in cartoonish guise resulting from many influences, including most essentially James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but also George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh, with which, as critic Thomas P. Adler writes, The Skin of Our Teeth “shares structural, philosophical, and tonal affinities.” The play’s cartoonish quality expands on Wilder’s notion of the value of the stage’s fundamental pretenses well beyond those he exploited for his earlier play, Our Town. In this case, Wilder depicted the cyclical nature of human existence, constructing an absurd merging of 1930s New Jersey with the Ice Age, the biblical flood, and an apocalyptic war,

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stressing that progress—both human and technological—may be illusory. While on the one hand the play despairs of the human penchant for destruction and violence, Wilder also points up, in comedic and serious ways, the resilience of human beings in surviving natural and human-made catastrophe. A cautionary tale, a satire of humanity’s frailties and failures, a lampoon of traditional theatrical conventions, and, most importantly, a guarded call to optimism on the brink of apocalypse, The Skin of Our Teeth is bolder in its convergence of past and present than Our Town, and is “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” In The Skin of Our Teeth, as in Our Town, Wilder captures a merging of past and present within seriocomic intersections of historical periods: past, present, and future coexist, and each time matters and is at the heart of both plays, as are Wilder’s insistence on the universal truths he has identified and which he sees as intersecting with social and individual realities. The universality of human experience—a struggle for hope, meaning, and survival—is set in juxtaposition with humanity’s darker impulses and the inevitability of loss. The Skin of Our Teeth opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 18 November 1942 for 359 performances and won a Pulitzer Prize under Elia Kazan’s direction, with scene design by Albert R. Johnson and costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. Tallulah Bankhead appeared as Sabina, the maid of the Antrobus family (played by Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Montgomery Clift, and Frances Heflin) of Excelsior, New Jersey, and a highly dissatisfied actress playing the lead in a play she does not like. She and the stage manager (E. G. Marshall) battle as the play, like the human race, moves inexorably forward in spite of continual natural and man-made disasters. The cast included Florence Reed as an Atlantic City fortune-teller. Reed appeared again in a 1955 American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Playhouse revival, which starred Mary Martin as Sabina, with George Abbott, Helen Hayes, Don Murray, and Heller Halliday (Martin’s daughter), a production that toured Europe. The Skin of Our Teeth was also briefly revived in 1975 with a cast featuring Elizabeth Ashley as Sabina, with Alfred Drake, Martha Scott, Steve Railsback, and Janet Grey as the Antrobus clan. In 1983, Jack O’Brien directed a revival at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre which was broadcast on PBS-TV featuring Blair Brown as Sabina, with the Antrobuses Harold Gould, Sada Thompson, Jeffrey Combs, and Monique Fowler, and Rue McClanahan as the fortune teller. The New York Shakespeare Festival revived the play in 1998 at the Delacorte Theatre with a cast, including Kristen Johnson as Sabina and John Goodman and Frances Conroy as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus under the direction of Irene Lewis.

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SKINNER, CORNELIA OTIS (1901–1979).† Born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of actor Otis Skinner,* she was educated at Bryn Mawr before joining her father in his production of Blood and Sand (1921). She appeared in many plays, including Candida (1939), Theatre (1941), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1946), and The Pleasure of His Company (1958), which she coauthored with Samuel Taylor, but Skinner gained enduring success with a long series of monodramas (one-person performances) beginning in the early 1930s, including The Wives of Henry VIII (1931), The Empress Eugenie (1932), The Loves of Charles II (1933), and Paris ’90 (1952). SKULNIK, MENASHA (1890–1970). A Polish-born actor of Jewish heritage, Skulnik emigrated from his native Warsaw to the United States and ran away from home to join a circus. In 1913, he began working in Yiddish theatre in Philadelphia and later became successful on New York’s Yiddish stage playing the “the schlemiel” in such plays as In a Tenement House (1932), God, Man, and Devil (1935), The Perfect Fishel (1935), Laugh Night (1936), Schlemihl (1936), Yossel and His Wives (1937), The Little Tailor (1938), The Wise Fool (1938), Mazel Tov, Rabbi (1938), and Three Men and a Girl (1939). On radio, he played Uncle David opposite Gertrude Berg on the long-running radio comedy The Goldbergs for 19 years (and later on television) and also on the comparatively short-lived series Abie’s Irish Rose* (1942–1944), based on the phenomenally long-running 1922 play. After World War II, Skulnik appeared on television and occasionally on Broadway in leading roles in The Fifth Season (1953), The Flowering Peach (1954), Uncle Willie (1956), The 49th Cousin (1960), and The Zulu and the Zayda (1965). In the 1930s, he appeared in a few Yiddish films, Oy Doktor! (1930) and Live and Laugh (1933), and he appeared in a few television dramas in the 1950s. SLADE, BERNARD (1930– ). A Canadian by birth, he began his career as an actor in his native Ontario, but moved to Hollywood, California, in the mid-1960s to write for television. He wrote for the situation comedy Bewitched (1964–1968) and created a few successful TV series, including Love on a Rooftop (1966–1967), The Flying Nun (1967–1970), The Partridge Family (1970–1974), and Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–1973). He switched to theatre writing in the 1970s, scoring a major success with the two-character Same Time, Next Year (1975) starring Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin. Slade won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Play and the comedy ran 1,453 performances. His next play, Tribute (1978), starred Jack Lemmon, but had a far shorter run, and his Romantic Comedy (1979), featuring Anthony Perkins and Mia Farrow, ran a season. All three

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became films, with Slade garnering an Academy Award nomination for his Same Time, Next Year screenplay. An additional Slade play, Special Occasions (1982), closed on opening night. SLAVE SHIP: A HISTORICAL PAGEANT. This one-act 1967 drama by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was first performed at Brooklyn’s Chelsea Theatre (which won an Obie Award for this “distinguished production”) on 13 January 1970 under the direction of Gilbert Moses, who won an Obie, with scene design by Eugene Lee. It is a grotesque pageant which immerses its audience in the horrors, sounds, and smells of a slave ship bringing Africans to the United States in the first of its three sections. The second is set on a Southern plantation where “Old Tom,” an enslaved “shuffling Negro” reports a planned slave revolt to his “massa.” The third section depicts a black minister, “New Tom,” preaching integration as a dead baby is laid at his feet and the sounds of a white man pleading for his life is killed in a revolt. Original music by Archie Shepp was featured in the Chelsea production. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. SLAVS! THINKING ABOUT THE LONGSTANDING PROBLEMS OF VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS. Tony Kushner’s first play following the critical acclaim for his seven-hour, two-play epic Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Angels in America (1993), had its first performance at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays on 8 March 1994, followed by productions by the Lesbian Avengers Civil Rights Organizing Project in New York, Steppenwolf Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), and in England. A coda to the Angels plays (it contains one scene and a character introduced in Perestroika, the second of the Angels plays), it is Kushner’s response to the catastrophic Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl (also referred to in Perestroika) and features characters and situations Kushner had originally intended for Perestroika, but which were eliminated when that play grew too long. Slavs! questions change in the face of the demise of old values in a time of moral, political, racial, and sexual division. Among its characters are a female doctor attempting to care for those harmed by the Chernobyl catastrophe and her lesbian lover, a guard at a facility storing the pickled brains of the dead leaders of the Soviet era. A mute child dying of the effects of Chernobyl questions the future with some dead Soviets when she arrives in heaven. Marisa Tomei, Mary Shultz, Barbara Eda-Young, Joseph Wiseman, Gerald Hiken, and Mischa Barton appeared in the NYTW production under Lisa Peterson’s direction.

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SLEUTH. Anthony Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning two-act mystery opened at the Music Box Theatre on 12 November 1970 for 1,222 performances under the direction of Clifford Williams (who was nominated for a Tony Award), with scene design by Carl Toms and Tony-nominated lighting by William Ritman. Anthony Quayle starred as Andrew Wyke, a wealthy mystery writer, who has summoned his wife’s lover, Milo Tindle (Keith Baxter), to his country estate, which is filled with puzzles and games. A cat-and-mouse exchange between the two men leads to a shooting at the end of the first act, but the second act, which involves some red herrings to fool the audience, reveals that things are not what they seem. Quayle and Baxter shared a Drama Desk Award for their performances. Patrick MacNee, Paul Rogers, and George Rose succeeded Quayle during the long run, with Jordan Christopher, Curt Dawson, and Donal Donnelly stepping in for Baxter. Film legend Joan Crawford considered starring in a distaff version of the play on Broadway, which was filmed under the direction of Joseph Mankiewicz in 1972, starring Laurence Olivier as Wyke and Michael Caine as Tindle. Both were nominated for Academy Awards, as was Mankiewicz. A second film version in 2007, adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Kenneth Branagh, starred Caine as Wyke, with Jude Law as Tindle, but was not a success. SLEZAK, WALTER (1902–1983). Born in Vienna, Austria, the son of opera tenor Leo Slezak, Slezak studied medicine and worked as a bank teller. He had appeared in over 20 silent films in Austria prior to coming to the United States to appear on Broadway in both musical and non-musical works, including Meet My Sister (1930), Music in the Air (1932), Ode to Liberty (1934), May Wine (1935), I Married an Angel (1938), a 1941 revival of The Trojan Women, Little Dark Horse (1941), My Three Angels (1953), The First Gentleman (1957), and The Gazebo (1958). He won a Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for Fanny (1954). In films, Slezak played character roles in Lifeboat (1944), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Born to Kill (1947), The Pirate (1948), The Inspector General (1949), Call Me Madam (1953), Come September (1961), Black Beauty (1971), and Treasure Island (1972), as well as numerous television programs. He was the father of actress Erika Slezak. SLOW DANCE ON THE KILLING GROUND. William Hanley’s drama opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 30 November 1964 for 88 performances under the direction of Joseph Anthony, with scene design by Oliver Smith, lighting by Jack Brown, and costumes by Ann Roth. Set in 1962 in a Brooklyn candy store and adjoining apartment, the store owner Glas (George Rose) is confronted with Randall, a black man (Clarence Williams III), who

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appears to be escaping from something unseen. These men are joined by Rosie (Carolan Daniels), an unhappy young woman considering terminating her pregnancy. The three characters indulge in a “slow dance” as the truth of their circumstances is slowly revealed. Williams (who won a Theatre World Award) and Daniels were both nominated for Tony Awards. SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS. Tennessee Williams’s drama set in a seedy coastal bar in Southern California, opened Off-Broadway at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre on 2 April 1972 under the direction of Richard Altman. The cast featured Helena Carroll as Leona, a brassy beautician, who gets into a dispute with Violet (Candy Darling, a blonde transsexual protégé of Andy Warhol), a “tramp” who flirts with Leona’s lover, Bill. Along with the bar’s cook, Steve (William Hickey), and bartender, Monk, the triangle of Leona, Violet, and Bill plays out as observed by Doc, a middle-aged alcoholic who has lost his medical license but practices anyway to eke out a living, Quentin, a played-out screenwriter and homosexual, and Bobby, a young drifter. The characters, in monologue form, express themselves about their disillusionments, hopes, and fears. Clive Barnes, writing in the New York Times, described the play as a “dramatic essay.” Audiences were scant and to boost the box office, Williams himself took on the role of Doc during the run. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. SMITH, ANNA DEAVERE (1950– ). Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a coffee merchant and a school principal, Smith was educated at Beaver College and the American Conservatory Theatre, where she received an M.F.A. in acting. She appears frequently in films and television, but she won acclaim in theatre for some documentary theatre plays in which she performed herself, including Fires in the Mirror (1993), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 1993, and Twilight: Los Angeles (1994), which brought her two Tony Award nominations and Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards. Smith received a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 1996. Smith appeared in her most recent work, Let Me Down Easy (2008), which debuted at the Long Wharf Theatre and Off-Broadway at Second Stage in 2010. Smith taught at Stanford University from 1990–2000 and currently teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2010, she was at work on a new stage piece, The Americans. In films, Smith has appeared in Philadelphia (1993), Dave (1993), The American President (1995), Rent (2005), and Rachel Getting Married (2008), and she has been a regular on the TV dramas, including The West Wing (2000–2004) and Nurse Jackie (2009–2010).

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SMITH, OLIVER

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SMITH, LOIS (1930– ). Lois Arlene Humbert was born in Topeka, Kansas, and married a teacher, Wesley Dale Smith, taking his name. She studied at the University of Washington and with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio. She made her Broadway debut in Time Out for Ginger (1952). She has been twice nominated for Tony Awards, for The Grapes of Wrath (1990) and Buried Child (1996), and won a Drama Desk Award for the 2006 Off-Broadway revival of The Trip to Bountiful. A member of the Steppenwolf Theatre, she has done much of her work with them, as well as at such regional theatres as the Baltimore Stage Center, Guthrie Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Hartford Stage, and others. Smith appeared on Broadway in The Wisteria Trees (1955), The Young and Beautiful (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Edwin Booth* (1958), Bicycle Ride to Nevada (1963), a 1973 revival of The Iceman Cometh, and Stages (1978). On screen, Smith won a National Society of Film Critics Award for Five Easy Pieces (1969) and appeared in East of Eden (1955), Up the Sandbox (1972), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), Resurrection (1980), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Dead Man Walking (1995), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), The Laramie Project (2002), Minority Report (2002), Hollywoodland (2006), and Diminished Capacity (2008). Smith has been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. SMITH, OLIVER (1918–1994). One of Broadway’s greatest scene designers was born in Waupun, Wisconsin, and studied at Penn State University prior to moving to New York and beginning his design career working with choreographers Léonide Massine and Agnes de Mille. Smith began designing for Broadway with the operetta* Rosalinda (1942) and won most acclaim for his designs for musicals, but he worked on all manner of plays and on a few Hollywood films. On Broadway, Smith won Tony Awards for his scene designs for My Fair Lady (1956), West Side Story (1957), The Sound of Music (1959), Camelot (1960), Becket (1961), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Luv (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), and Baker Street (1965), and he was Tony-nominated for Candide (1956), Auntie Mame (1956), A Visit to a Small Planet (1957), Eugenia (1957), A Clearing in the Woods (1957), a 1957 revival of Carousel, Nude with Violin (1957), Time Remembered (1957), Jamaica (1957), a 1957 revival of Brigadoon, The Gay Life (1961), I Do! I Do! (1966), Dear World (1969), and Gigi (1973). Among his many notable designs are On the Town (1944), No Exit (1946), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1949), In the Summer House (1953), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), Flower Drum Song (1958), Five Finger Exercise (1959), A Taste of Honey (1960), Mary, Mary (1961),

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The Night of the Iguana (1961), Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962), Natural Affection (1963), Barefoot in the Park (1963), Dylan (1964), Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), Cactus Flower (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), A Patriot for Me (1969), Indians (1969), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), a 1973 revival of The Women, First Monday in October (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), 84 Charing Cross Road (1982), The Golden Age (1984), and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989). Smith designed a few movies, reaping an Academy Award nomination for Guys and Dolls (1955). His other film designs include Oklahoma! (1955) and Porgy and Bess (1959). Smith taught at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Along with his competitive awards, Smith won a special Tony in 1965. SMITH-CAMERON, J. (1955– ). Born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Kentucky, she was the daughter of an architect and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, prior to studying at Florida State University. She made her Broadway debut replacing Mia Dillon in Crimes of the Heart (1981). She won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for As Bees in Honey Drown (1998) and was nominated for a Tony Award for Our Country’s Good (1991), Drama Desk-nominated for The Naked Truth (1995) and Sarah, Sarah (2004), and won an Outer Critics Circle Award for Lend Me a Tenor (1989). On Broadway, Smith-Cameron also appeared in Wild Honey (1986), The Real Inspector Hound/The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1992), revivals of The Play’s the Thing in 1995, Night Must Fall in 1999, and Tartuffe in 2003, and After the Night and the Music (2005). Smith-Cameron has also appeared in the films 84 Charing Cross Road (1984), Jeffrey (1995), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Sabrina (1995), The First Wives Club (1996), In & Out (1997), You Can Count on Me (2000), and numerous television programs. Smith-Cameron is married to playwright Kenneth Lonergan. SOCIETY OF STAGE DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS. See STAGE DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS SOCIETY, THE. SOLDIER’S PLAY, A. Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning mysterydrama set at the United States Army’s Fort Neal in Louisiana in 1944 opened in a Negro Ensemble Company production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on 20 November 1981 for 468 performances. The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and its ensemble cast, which included Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Larry B. Riley, and Peter Friedman, shared an Obie Award for Distinguished Ensemble Performance. During the period in which the U.S.

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military was racially segregated, Captain Davenport, a black officer, is sent to Fort Neal to investigate a killing of African American Sgt. Waters (played in flashbacks by Caesar). The local Ku Klux Klan is first suspected in the killing, but Davenport discovers that Waters, who shared the bigotry of whites against what he considered inferior black soldiers, alienated his own troops over his persecution of one soldier who seemed to represent his dismissive views of certain black men. When this soldier commits suicide, Waters’s troops turn against him, but Davenport is unable to definitively discover the culprit. A film version retitled A Soldier’s Story was directed by Norman Jewison and Caesar, Washington, and Riley recreated their stage performances. SOLID GOLD CADILLAC, THE. Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s two-act comedy about a little old lady who takes a company to task opened at the Belasco Theatre on 5 November 1953 for 526 performances under Kaufman’s direction. Veteran actress Josephine Hull had her final Broadway role and charmed critics as Mrs. Laura Partridge, a stockholder who turns up at a major corporation’s stockholder’s meeting and asks pointed questions that disturb some corrupt executives. They attempt to silence her with a job writing to other small stockholders, but her letters only succeed in giving her a voting bloc that allows her to take over the company, fire the executives, and set the company on a sounder footing. Along with Hull, the cast included Loring Smith, Henry Jones, Mary Welch, and Vera Fuller Mellish. A 1956 film version was adapted as a vehicle for Judy Holliday, who was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. SOLO PERFORMANCES. Performances featuring only one performer (sometimes called one-person shows) have been particularly prevalent since the mid-twentieth century. Comedians have typically performed solo in nightclubs and concert halls—and, at times, in theatres, including Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Mason, among many others. In more recent years, performance artists—from Holly Hughes, Karen Finley and Tim Miller to John Leguizamo, Spalding Gray, and Anna Deavere Smith—and actors and “monologists,” some of whom were nurtured in vaudeville,* have also developed solo shows. Ruth Draper won widespread critical acclaim with performances in which she played a range of characters in 1940s and 1950s. Most often, the theatrical application of this term suggests one-character plays often depicting an historical person. Hal Holbrook scored a major success in Mark Twain Tonight (1954), in which he played the elderly writer on the turn-of-the-century lecture circuit. Julie Harris won a Tony Award as poet Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst (1976), James Whitmore

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SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR

scored in two solo shows, Give ’Em Hell, Harry! (1975) and Bully! (1978), playing United States presidents Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt, and Tovah Feldshuh drew critical kudos for Golda’s Balcony (2003), portraying Golda Meir. SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR. One of Tennessee Williams’s last dramas, this most autobiographical of his works is a “memory play,” the logical counterpart to his first great dramatic success, The Glass Menagerie (1944), but it can be appreciated on its own terms. In Something Cloudy, Something Clear, The Glass Menagerie’s Tom Wingfield is transformed into August, a young aspiring playwright seeking his first break; like The Glass Menagerie, this play is deceptively simple in its structure, but richly lyrical in its language and complex in theme, character development, and dramatic devices. Something Cloudy, Something Clear opened in a Jean Cocteau Repertory production at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre on 24 August 1981 with Williams’s blessing. The production, directed by Eve Adamson, met with critical apathy and remains one of Williams’s leastproduced full-length plays despite its clarifying connections to his most autobiographical work. In Something Cloudy, August becomes enamored of Kip, a handsome young man spending the summer on the beach with a fragile beauty, Clare. August becomes aware that Kip, recovering from unsuccessful surgery for a brain tumor, and Clare, suffering from diabetes, are both doomed, and finds in himself powerful feelings for both as he becomes deeply entangled in their lives and struggles to realize himself as an artist. Clare seems to speak for Williams when she sadly notes, “We all live on half of something—some on less.” However, Williams does not leave it at that—at one point, listening to music emanating from August’s Victrola, Kip exclaims that “this makes even tonight’s sky clearer than it is.” See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. SOMMER, JOSEF (1934– ). Maximilian Josef Sommer, born in Greifswald, Germany, began his acting career as a child at the University of North Carolina, where his father was an art professor. Sommer studied theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before beginning a career on Broadway and in films and television. His career began playing Brabantio in a 1970 Broadway revival of Othello and has appeared in numerous regional theatres. He won Obie Awards for Lydie Breeze (1982) and Largo Desolato (1986) and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for a 1991 Off-Broadway production of Hamlet. On Broadway, Sommer appeared in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1971), Children! Children! (1972), Enemies (1972), a 1973 revival of The Merchant of Venice, Full Circle (1973), Who’s Who in

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Hell (1974), The Shadow Box (1977), Spokespong (1979), The 1940’s Radio Hour (1979), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1980), and Racing Demon (1995). Sommer’s other Off-Broadway credits include Hapgood (1994) and he has appeared in many films, including Dirty Harry (1971), The Front (1976), Reds (1981), Silkwood (1983), Witness (1985), Shadows and Fog (1991), Nobody’s Fool (1994), and Patch Adams (1998), as well as many television programs. SOUDEIKINE, SERGEI (1882–1946).† Born in Russia, Sergei Soudeikine studied art in Moscow and designed productions for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov before moving to Paris. He came to the United States as designer of Nikita Baileff’s Chauve-Souris revue.* For many years, Soudeikine designed for the Metropolitan Opera, Radio City Music Hall, and Broadway productions of New Faces of 1934, The Chinese Nightingale (1934), and Porgy and Bess (1935). SOURCE THEATRE COMPANY (STC). Founded in 1977 as a not-forprofit theatre in Washington, D.C., the STC, one of the smallest professional company’s in D.C., has been led by artistic director Joe Banno with attention paid to the diversity of the surrounding community in its choice of a season of five productions, along with coproductions, a festival of new plays, readings, and other outreach activities. The STC ceased operations in 2006 due to facilities issues, but reopened in 2008 under the management of the Cultural Development Corporation. SOUTH COAST REPERTORY (SCR). David Emmes and Martin Benson guided several young theatre artists in founding the SCR in 1964, presenting their first production, Molière’s Tartuffe, at the Newport Beach Ebell Club. They set up the SCR in a converted store on the Balboa Peninsula in Orange County, California, creating a 75-seat proscenium theatre. In 1967, the theatre relocated to a bigger space in Costa Mesa, and developed grants and won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award in 1970 for “consistent achievement in production.” By the mid-1970s, the theatre aimed for a larger space, The Fourth Step Theatre, and it opened in 1978 with a production of The Time of Your Life. Corporate funding and endowment campaigns led to further growth and in 1988, the SCR was presented with the regional theatre Tony Award. Plays by Margaret Edson, David Margulies, Howard Corder, Craig Lucas, Amy Freed, Keith Reddin, Richard Greenberg, Octavio Solis, and others, premiered at SCR. In the late 1990s, the SCR expanded again into the Folino Theatre Center in Costa Mesa. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT; REPERTORY THEATRE.

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SOVEY, RAYMOND (1887–1966). An actor (he appeared in A Burgomaster of Belgium in 1919) turned scene designer, Sovey was born in Torrington, Connecticut, and studied at Columbia University. In the mid-1920s, he began his prolific Broadway designing career (he is credited with over 130 productions), winning plaudits especially for the sumptuous interior scenes he created. Sovey was nominated for Tony Awards for his scene designs for The Great Sebastians (1956) and All the Way Home (1960). His credits include The Butter and Egg Man* (1925), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1926), Coquette* (1927), The Ladder* (1928), The Front Page* (1928), Little Accident* (1928), Animal Crackers* (1928), Strictly Dishonorable* (1929), Strike Up the Band (1930), Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), Counsellor-atLaw (1931), Gay Divorce (1932), Her Master’s Voice (1933), The Distaff Side (1933), The Petrified Forest (1935), Yes, My Darling Daughter (1937), Babes in Arms (1937), Our Town (1938), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), Tomorrow the World (1943), Over 21 (1944), State of the Union (1945), The Hasty Heart (1945), The Heiress (1947), Edward, My Son (1948), Ring Round the Moon (1950), The Cocktail Party (1950), Gigi (1951), Witness for the Prosecution (1954), and Under Milk Wood (1957). SPACEY, KEVIN (1959– ). Born Kevin Spacey Fowler in South Orange, New Jersey, to a writer and a secretary, Spacey began acting in high school and continued his education as an actor at the Juilliard School. He debuted in a small role in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Henry IV, Part 1 in 1981, but a year later played Oswald to Liv Ullmann’s Mrs. Alving in a 1982 revival of Ghosts on Broadway. He stepped in as a replacement in Hurlyburly (1984) and played James Tyrone, Jr., opposite Jack Lemmon in a 1986 revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was subsequently filmed for television. Spacey won Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Louie in Lost in Yonkers (1991) and appeared as Hickey in an acclaimed revival of The Iceman Cometh in 1999 (following 1998 performances in London), garnering a Tony nomination. Spacey again played James Tyrone, Jr., in a 2007 revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. In 2003, Spacey took on the directorship of London’s Old Vic Theatre, appearing in the company’s productions of National Anthems (2004), revivals of The Philadelphia Story and Richard II in 2005, Speed-the-Plow in 2007, and Inherit the Wind in 2009. On film, Spacey became a major star, winning Academy Awards for The Usual Suspects (1995) and American Beauty (1999), and also appeared in Looking for Richard (1996), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), Hurlyburly (1998), Beyond the Sea (2004), and The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009).

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SPINELLA, STEPHEN

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Spacey was nominated for Emmy Awards for two TV films, Bernard and Doris (2006) and Recount (2008), the latter bringing him one of his five Golden Globe Award nominations. SPEWACK, BELLA COHEN (1899–1990) and SAM SPEWACK (1899– 1971). These writing partners were married in 1922. Samuel Spewack was born in the Ukraine and studied at Columbia University, and Bella Cohen was born in Bucharest, Romania, and worked as a journalist for left-wing newspapers. Following their marriage, the Spewacks worked as reporters in Russia for a few years before they returned to the United States, settling in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where they began collaborating on plays and screenplays. They won Tony Awards for Kiss Me, Kate (1948), collaborating with Cole Porter on a show about a battling couple even as their own marriage was in trouble. They had produced several hits, including their libretto for the musical Leave It to Me!, also in collaboration with Porter, based on their comedy Clear All Wires (1932). They also scored a long-running hit with Boy Meets Girl (1935) and My Three Angels (1953), both of which were adapted to the screen. On his own, Sam wrote Two Blind Mice (1949) and Once There Was a Russian (1961), and together they also collaborated on The War Song (1928), Poppa (1928), Spring Song (1934), Miss Swan Expects (1939), Woman Bites Dog (1946), The Golden State (1950), and Festival (1955). For Hollywood, the Spewacks were nominated for an Academy Award for My Favorite Wife (1940), adapted several of their plays, and also wrote WeekEnd at the Waldorf (1945). SPIDERWOMAN THEATRE. Founded in 1975 by Muriel Miguel as a workshop of Native American (and non-Native American) women at the Washington Square Methodist Church in New York, this feminist organization is the longest running Native American theatre company in the United States. Miguel and her two sisters, Lisa Mayo and Gloria Miguel, three Cuna-Rappahannock American Indians, formed the nucleus of the company and created loosely structured, ritual-oriented plays in their own particular storytelling technique to illuminate the experiences of Native American and non-Native American women. SPINELLA, STEPHEN (1956– ). Born Stephen Nicholas Spinella in Naples, Italy, where his father was in the U.S. Navy. In the United States, he was raised in Glendale, Arizona, and studied drama at the University of Arizona. His Broadway debut as Prior Walter in both parts of Tony Kushner’s twoplay epic Angels in America (1993) brought him stardom. He won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for both parts of Angels, as well as a Theatre World

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Award. He subsequently appeared in revivals of A View from the Bridge in 1997 and Electra in 1998, won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for James Joyce’s The Dead (2000), a 2002 revival of Our Town, and Spring Awakening (2006). Among his regional theatre appearances, Spinella appeared in Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009) at the Guthrie Theatre. Spinella has appeared in several films, including Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997), The Jackal (1997), Cradle Will Rock (1999), Bubble Boy (2001), and Milk (2008), and on television, including the TV film And the Band Played On (1993). SPINNING INTO BUTTER. Rebecca Gilman’s drama opened at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre on 16 May 1999 under the direction of Les Waters, prior to a New York production at Lincoln Center, where it opened on 27 July 2000, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan and with scene designs by John Lee Beatty. The play, which generated some controversy over its treatment of racism on a college campus, and inspired critics to compare it favorably and unfavorably to David Mamet’s Oleanna, in a conflict among students and administration over terminology used to describe racial and ethnic differences, including the explosive name “Little Black Sambo,” a title taken from a late nineteenth-century children’s story. Mark Brokaw directed a 2007 film version starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Miranda Richardson, and Beau Bridges. SPLIT BRITCHES. This feminist and lesbian theatre company, founded in 1981, was inspired, in part, by the Spiderwoman Theatre. Led by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin, Split Britches first performed at WOW (Women’s One World) Café and combines realism with more theatrical techniques to merge realism, epic theatre, and fantasy in performances in which aspects of popular culture and mainstream political values are confronted and deconstructed to explore the experiences of women. Some of their most notable productions include Split Britches (1981), Beauty and the Beast (1982), Upwardly Mobile Home (1984), Little Women: The Tragedy (1988), Belle Reprieve (1991), Lesbians Who Kill (1992), Salad of the Bad Café (2000), Double Agency (2001), It’s a Small House and We Lived in it Always (2001), Miss Risque (2001), What Tammy Needs to Know (2006), and Miss America (2008). SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA. This massive festival, founded in 1977 by composer Gian Carlo Menotti, was set up with the goal of bringing together over 120 performances (over 17 days) by emerging international companies

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STAGE DOOR

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and artists in the areas of opera, dance, theatre, classical music, and jazz. Modeled on the Festival Dei Due Mondi (the Festival of Two Worlds) held annually in Spoleto, Italy, the festival showcases young talents. Among the American plays that have premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA are Tennessee Williams’s Creve Coeur (1978) and Arthur Miller’s The American Clock (1980). More recently, the festival has presented works by Ping Chong, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, and others. STADLEN, LEWIS J. (1947– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of voice actor Allen Swift, this versatile, often unsung character actor studied at The Neighborhood Playhouse and the Stella Adler Studio before debuting on Broadway in the musical Minnie’s Boys (1970), playing a young Groucho Marx,* and winning Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards. He was subsequently nominated for Tony Awards for revivals of Candide in 1974 and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1996, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for a 2000 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner. Stadlen, who excels in comedy, also appeared on Broadway in The Sunshine Boys (1972), in the female version of The Odd Couple (1985), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), and 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), and replaced Nathan Lane in The Producers (2001). On screen, Stadlen has appeared in Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), Serpico (1973), The Verdict (1982), To Be or Not to Be (1983), Windy City (1984), The Imposters (1998), and he has appeared frequently on television, including in the recurring role of Dr. Ira Freid in The Sopranos (2000–2007). STAGE DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS SOCIETY, THE (SDCS). Formerly known as the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, this independent national labor union was founded in 1959 to represent theatre directors and choreographers employed on Broadway, OffBroadway, national tours, regional, stock, and dinner theatres with the goal of elevating standards, opening lines of communication, disseminating information, and assisting in training. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, a not-for-profit affiliated organizations, exists to acknowledge outstanding work and to develop opportunities and educational materials on the art and craft of directing and choreography. STAGE DOOR. George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s three-act comedy-drama about young actresses residing in a theatrical boarding house opened at the Music Box Theatre in a Sam H. Harris production on 22 October 1936 for 169 performances under Kaufman’s direction with scene design by Donald Oenslager. Margaret Sullavan played Terry Randall,

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an aspiring actress, who takes up residence at the Footlights Club, a New York City boarding house for actresses. The play captures the aspirations and heartbreaks of a diverse group of young women living, as one of them tartly describes it, in a “female seminary.” Ferber suggested the idea for Stage Door to Kaufman after she visited a real-life counterpart of the Footlights Club. Terry is an amalgam of many aspiring actresses known to Kaufman and Ferber, while other characters in the play, most obviously Terry’s boyfriend and aspiring dramatist Keith Burgess, are more obvious reflections of real people (in this case, politically radical playwright Clifford Odets). Terry’s love of theatre and aspirations for a life working nobly in it are severely challenged by the continued difficulty of finding stage work of any sort, by financial constraints resulting from that difficulty, and by those around her who fail to live up to her idealistic expectations. When Burgess flees Broadway for Hollywood, abandoning Terry and, presumably, his progressive political principles in the process, Terry resents it. As Kaufman and Ferber’s mouthpiece, she refuses to sell out, despite various circumstances of her peers. With the economic struggles of the Great Depression hanging over the play, Kaye Hamilton, another young actress, becomes disheartened by the loss of a much-desired role and commits suicide, a catalytic event for Terry and the other residents of the Footlights Club. The large cast included Frances Fuller as Kay, Phyllis Brooks, Richard Kendrick, Tom Ewell, Mary Wickes, Lee Patrick, and Leona Roberts. Stage Door became a hit RKO Studios film in 1937, starring Katharine Hepburn as Terry, with Ginger Rogers, Andrea Leeds, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, and Constance Collier among the cast, but many changes in the play were made and Kaufman, on seeing the film, referred to it derisively as Screen Door. STAGE DOOR CANTEEN. Formed by the New York theatrical community in the early days of World War II, the canteen, which was in the basement of the 44th Street Theatre, offered food and entertainment to service personnel moving through New York City during the war. Broadway workers, including major stars, served as hosts, waiters, cooks, and entertained the service personnel free of charge. Established by the American Theatre Wing and the United Service Organization (USO), the Stage Door Canteen was immortalized in the Irving Berlin song, “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” in the musical This Is the Army (1942), and a film called Stage Door Canteen (1943), directed by Frank Borzage, featured many Broadway and Hollywood stars associated with the Canteen. Among those appearing are rare cinematic glimpses of stage stars Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Cornell (in her only screen appearance), Tallulah Bankhead, and others.

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STAPLETON, JEAN

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Similar organizations were established in several cities, including Los Angeles, California, where the Hollywood Canteen, set up by Bette Davis and John Garfield, provided food and entertainment. Hollywood Canteen (1944), another all-star film directed by Delmar Daves, starred Davis and Garfield, along with a host of major film and stage stars, including Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, the Andrews Sisters, and others. STANLEY, KIM (1925–2001). Born Patricia Beth Reid in Tularosa, New Mexico, although she often claimed to be a Texan, Stanley was educated at the University of New Mexico and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. She appeared with distinction in a handful of movies, but was widely regarded as one of the finest stage actresses of her generation. She debuted on Broadway as Julie Harris’s replacement in Montserrat (1949) and continued her training at The Actors Studio. She appeared on Broadway in The House of Bernarda Alba (1951) and won a Theatre World Award in her second appearance in The Chase (1952). She subsequently received two Tony Award nominations, in A Touch of the Poet (1958) and A Far Country (1961). She was associated with the plays of William Inge, appearing as Millie in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic (1953), playing nightclub chanteuse Cherie in Bus Stop (1955), and Sue Barker in Natural Affection (1963). She also appeared in The Traveling Lady (1954), A Clearing in the Woods (1957), Chéri (1959), and a 1964 revival of The Three Sisters, playing Masha to Geraldine Page’s Olga. She was nominated for Academy Awards for Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), for which she won a New York Film Critics Award, and Frances (1982), and she also appeared in the films The Goddess (1958), The Three Sisters (1966), and The Right Stuff (1983), and she won an Emmy Award playing Big Mama in a TV version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1984 (she had appeared as Maggie in the 1958 London production of the play). On television, Stanley appeared in many anthology series dramas beginning in 1950 and she was Emmy-nominated for a guest role on the series Ben Casey in 1963. From the mid-1960s, Stanley rarely acted, but taught acting. STAPLETON, JEAN (1923– ). Jeanne Murray was born in New York, educated at Hunter College, and began her career in the Robert Shaw Chorale before becoming an actress in stock in 1941. Stapleton became a familiar character actress on Broadway and in films and television before achieving stardom on television as Edith Bunker in the long-running series All in the Family (1971–1979), for which she won three Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. She appeared Off-Broadway in American Gothic (1953) and on Broadway in In the Summer House (1953) before landing featured roles

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in several Broadway musicals, including Damn Yankees (1955), Bells Are Ringing (1956), Juno (1959), and Funny Girl (1964), appearing in the film versions of the first two in 1958 and 1960, as well as the premiere of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1961) and a 1986 revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. On stage, much of her career was spent in stock at the Totem Pole Theatre in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was run by her husband, William Putch, and, following her television fame, Stapleton appeared in Bon Appétit (playing Julia Child) at the Classic Stage Company in 1991 (where she also appeared in The Birthday Party in 1989 and The Learned Ladies in 1991) and the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in 1993, Blithe Spirit at the South Coast Repertory in 1995, Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker at the ACT in 1996, Eleanor: Her Secret Journey at the Westport Country Playhouse in 1998, Curtain Call (2000) at the Hartford Stage Company (HSC), and The Carpetbagger’s Children (2002) at Lincoln Center. Stapleton was also nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award for the 1982 television film Eleanor: First Lady of the World. Stapleton’s movie appearances include roles in Up the Down Staircase (1967), Klute (1971), Michael (1996), You’ve Got Mail (1998), and Pursuit of Happiness (2001). STAPLETON, MAUREEN (1925–2006). Born of Irish American heritage as Lois Maureen Stapleton in Troy, New York, she left home at age 18 to become an actress (inspired by an infatuation with film star Joel McCrea), but worked first as a model. She made her first Broadway appearance in 1946 opposite Burgess Meredith in a revival of The Playboy of the Western World. She acted in small roles in the Katharine Cornell revival of Antony and Cleopatra in 1947, Detective Story (1949), and The Bird Cage (1950), before stepping in to the lead in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1951) when Italian actress Anna Magnani bowed out fearing her inability to perform in English. Stapleton won a Tony Award and a Theatre World Award for her performance, leading to a distinguished Broadway career in which her strong presence and emotional acting did not prevent her from being as effective in comedy as she was in drama. Stapleton followed her success in The Rose Tattoo with Tony nominations for The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958), Toys in the Attic (1960), Plaza Suite (1968), and a 1981 revival of The Little Foxes. Stapleton won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady (1971), playing a Judy Garland-like alcoholic singer written for her by Simon. Stapleton also appeared as a replacement for Beatrice Straight as Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible (1953) and Jessica Tandy as Fonsia Dorsey in The Gin Game (1977). On Broadway, she also appeared in The Emperor’s Clothes (1953), a 1953 revival of Richard III, All in One (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957),

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STATE OF THE UNION

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revivals of The Glass Menagerie in 1965 and 1975, a 1966 revival of The Rose Tattoo, Norman, Is That You? (1970), a 1972 revival of The Country Girl, and The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1972). Despite the fact that she rarely had the opportunity to play her stage roles on screen, Stapleton won an Academy Award for Reds (1981), playing Emma Goldman, and was nominated for Oscars for Lonelyhearts (1958), Airport (1970), for which she won a Golden Globe Award, and Interiors (1978), for which she won the New York Film Critics Award. She also appeared in the films The Fugitive Kind (1959), Bye Bye Birdie (1963), The Runner Stumbles (1979), Johnny Dangerously (1984), Cocoon (1985), and Addicted to Love (1997), among others. Stapleton received seven Emmy Award nominations, winning one for the TV film Among the Paths to Eden (1967). STAR-WAGON, THE. Maxwell Anderson’s three-act fantasy drama set in Ohio between 1902 and the 1930s opened at the Empire Theatre on 29 September 1937 for 223 performances under the direction of Guthrie McClintic, with scene design by Jo Mielziner. The play starred silent screen legend Lillian Gish as Martha Minch, who criticizes her husband, Stephen (Burgess Meredith) for being a poor provider. Stephen, an absent-minded inventor, also faces criticism from his boss (Kent Smith), but he has invented a “star wagon,” a time machine that permits him to return to his youth with his wife to see if other life choices would have been preferable. They discover that they made the right decisions. The cast also included Russell Collins, Mildred Natwick, and Edmund O’Brien. A 1966 television production of The Star Wagon (dropping the hyphen from Anderson’s original title) featured Orson Bean and Joan Lorring as Stephen and Martha, with Marian Seldes, Dustin Hoffman, and Eileen Brennan among the supporting cast. STATE OF THE UNION. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning three-act comedy opened in a Leland Hayward production at the Hudson Theatre on 14 November 1945 for 765 performances under Bretaigne Windust’s direction, with scene design by Raymond Sovey and costumes by Emeline C. Roche and Hattie Carnegie. Ralph Bellamy played Grant Matthews, a presidential candidate and decent man who has made too many compromises of his integrity in the eyes of his wife, Mary (Ruth Hussey). For the sake of Grant’s campaign, Mary is coaxed into pretending to be happy in their marriage, even though they are estranged due to Grant’s involvement with Kay Thorndyke (Margalo Gillmore), a newspaper publisher and behind-the-scenes power broker in partnership with Republican political boss James Conover (Minor Watson), who has been chafing at his party’s

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lengthy exile from power. Ultimately, Grant refuses any further compromises of his integrity, withdraws his candidacy, and returns wholeheartedly to Mary. Lindsay and Crouse were inspired by Wendell Wilkie’s quick political rise and fall in 1940 and during the run and tour of the play, they tweaked the text in response to political news stories. Filmmaker Frank Capra directed a 1948 screen version starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Angela Lansbury, Adolphe Menjou, and Van Johnson. On the set, Hepburn refused to talk with Menjou because he had cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the anti-Communist “witch hunt” of the era. STAVIS, BARRIE (1906–2007). Stavis was born in New York and educated at Columbia University, becoming a playwright whose life spanned the twentieth century, but who was drawn to write plays about historical figures and events. As a reporter, Stavis covered the Spanish Civil War, the setting for his play Refuge (1938). His earlier plays include In These Times (1932) and The Sun and I (1933). Stavis’s subsequent plays include Lamp at Midnight (1942), chronicling Galileo’s struggle with the collision of science and religious belief; The Man Who Never Died (1958), which focused on Joe Hill’s martyrdom creating a labor union; Harpers Ferry (1967), about John Brown’s use of guerrilla warfare to abolish slavery; Coat of Many Colors (1968), about the biblical Joseph; The Raw Edge of Victory (1986), concerning George Washington’s efforts to lead the American colonies to independence; and House of Shadows (1992), again focusing on the Spanish Civil War. These plays were produced in regional theatres, Off-Broadway, and in television productions, and Stavis also authored two novels and collaborated with his wife, Bernice Coe, who he married in 1950. The National Theatre Conference established the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Award for Emerging Playwrights in 1988 to honor Stavis’s achievement. STEADY RAIN, A. Keith Huff’s play about two Chicago cops and a Jeffrey Dahmer-like serial killer opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on 29 September 2009 for 80 performances under the direction of John Crowley and starring Daniel Craig (in his Broadway debut) and Hugh Jackman, following an initial production at Chicago Dramatists in 2007. With scene and costume design by Scott Pask, the play focuses on an incident in which the two policeman, Joey and Denny, who are lifelong friends, return a Vietnamese child to a man they believe to be the boy’s uncle. The uncle turns out to be a cannibalistic killer and when the boy becomes the next victim, the relationship of Joey and Denny is challenged.

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STEIN, DOUGLAS

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STEEL MAGNOLIAS. Robert Harling’s comedy-drama about the friendship of six small-town Southern women opened at the WPA Theatre on 22 March 1987 under the direction of Pamela Berlin, prior to a move to the Lucille Lortel Theatre on 19 June 1987. Shelby, a beautiful Southern girl, is at Truvy’s beauty parlor preparing for her wedding with her mother, M’Lynn, and Annelle, Clairee, and Ouisa. The women enjoy Shelby’s excitement and exchange catty remarks, but when tragedy strikes, the women demonstrate the depth of their strength and friendship. The play was produced on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, where it opened on 4 April 2005 for 136 performances starring Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole, Rebecca Gayheart, Marsha Mason, Lily Rabe, and Frances Sternhagen. A highly popular 1989 film version, directed by Herbert Ross, starred Julia Roberts (in an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning performance), Sally Field (Golden Globe-nominated), Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Dolly Parton, and Darryl Hannah. STEIN, DANIEL (1952– ). A corporeal mime, Stein, who was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, demonstrated creative skills from childhood, including constructing a multimedia presentation on the life of French pantomimist Jean-Gaspard Deburau. Stein attended Carnegie Mellon University, but spent 20 years in Paris studying with legendary mime/teacher Etienne Decroux before returning to the United States to present his first work, Timepiece (1978) Off-Broadway. He has taught at the Juilliard School, Tokyo’s Institute of Dramatic Arts, at his own school in Paris, and he is the Director of Movement and Physical Theatre at Brown University/Trinity Repertory Theatre Consortium. Stein is also the director of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California. In 2000, Stein performed Measuring Man, inspired by the life of Leonardo da Vinci. STEIN, DOUGLAS (1948– ). Trained at the Yale School of Drama, Stein has designed scenery for many regional theatres, including the Guthrie Theatre, where he has done numerous productions. Stein won an Obie Award for his designs for Through the Leaves (1984) and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and won a Lucille Lortel Award for 36 Views (2002) Off-Broadway. On Broadway, Stein has designed The Regard of Flight (1987), a 1988 revival of Our Town, Largely New York (1989), Falsettos (1992), Fool Moon (1993), revivals of Timon of Athens in 1993 and The Government Inspector in 1994, The Molière Comedies (1995), Freak (1998), and Dirty Blonde (2000). Stein has taught at New York University, Princeton University, and at the School of Visual Arts, and designs for dance companies as well as theatre.

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STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874–1946).† A major figure in American letters, poet Stein also wrote more than 75 plays, some of which were first collected in Geography and Plays (1922), with subsequent collections Operas and Plays (1932) and Last Operas and Plays (1949). Most of her dramatic output went unproduced, except for three works, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (1944) and, in collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1945). STEINBECK, JOHN (1902–1968). John Ernest Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and attended Stanford University, although he never graduated. He wrote 27 books, including 16 novels, 6 non-fiction works, and 5 collections of short stories, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He also wrote three plays, all based on his novels. The first was the most acclaimed, Of Mice and Men (1937), a frequently revived tragedy of two migrant workers, directed by George S. Kaufman; The Moon is Down (1942), a play attacking Nazism, which had a short run; and, Burning Bright (1950), a morality play about an old man longing for a child, which was a quick failure. Most of Steinbeck’s novels were dramatized by others, including Jack Kirkland who made a short-lived play of Tortilla Flat (1938); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Sweet Thursday into the moderately successful musical Pipe Dream (1955); Terrence McNally asked to withdraw his name from publicity for the musical Here’s Where I Belong (1968), adapted by Alex Gordon from East of Eden; and Frank Galati, in collaboration with the Steppenwolf Theatre, adapted The Grapes of Wrath as a play in 1990, winning numerous awards. STEINBERG, PAUL (1946– ). A prolific scene designer, Steinberg, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, was educated at the Pratt Institute and the Central School of Art and Design in London, where he studied environmental design. Steinberg has designed for major international opera companies and regional theatres in the United States, often in close collaboration with director JoAnne Akalaitis, for whom he has designed The Trojan Women in 1999, The Iphigenia Cycle in 1999, and The Birthday Party in 2004. OffBroadway, Steinberg has designed The Tricky Part (2004) The Black Eyed (2007), the latter at the New York Theatre Workshop. He has taught at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts since 1996. STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY (STC). In 1974, Gary Sinise and two high school friends, Rick Argosh and Leslie Wilson, staged a few theatre productions in a Unitarian church in Deerfield, Illinois, which was

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the genesis of Steppenwolf. It takes its name from a Herman Hesse novel Argosh was reading during the beginnings of the theatre. Incorporated as a not-for-profit theatre in 1975, the STC worked from a Catholic high school in Highland Park, Illinois, and played in several locations around Chicago until 1991, when STC’s facility at 1650 North Halsted Street in Chicago opened. The original company members of STC were Sinise, Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, H. E. Baccus, Nancy Evans, Moira Harris, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Alan Wilder, with others, including Joan Allen, John Mahoney, and Glenne Headley, joining later. One of the most respected companies in the United States, Steppenwolf received the 1985 regional theatre Tony Award and the National Medal of Arts in 1998, among many other honors. Steppenwolf’s most acclaimed productions include The Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Frank Galati, which was first performed in 1988 and won multiple Tonys when it transferred to Broadway in 1990, and August: Osage County (2007), Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, which also won numerous Tonys when it transferred to New York. Other Broadway transfers include a revival of The Caretaker in 1986, The Song of Jacob Zulu (1993), The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1994), My Thing of Love (1995), revivals of Buried Child in 1995 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 2001, and Superior Donuts (2009). STC also premiered such plays as True West (1980), And a Nightingale Sang (1982), Orphans (1985), Coyote Ugly (1985), Burn This (1987), and notably revived Lanford Wilson’s 1965 play, Balm in Gilead, in a 1984 production. STERNER, JERRY (1938–2001). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Sterner attended City College of New York and sold tokens for the New York City Transit Authority. A businessman turned playwright, Sterner is best known for Other People’s Money (1989), winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award, which became a 1991 film directed by Norman Jewison starring Gregory Peck and Danny DeVito. The play and film center on a corporate raider, “Larry the Liquidator,” whose attempted takeover of a family company leads to considerable maneuvering on both sides and reveals not only the motives of those involved, but the economic changes in the United States in the last decade of the twentieth century which lead to what Sterner describes as creative destruction. Sterner had previously written Be Happy for Me (1986), which was produced Off-Broadway, and his other plays included Crossing the Double White Line (2001), which he was working on at the time of his death. STERNHAGEN, FRANCES (1930– ). Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a United States Tax Court judge.

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She attended the Madeira School and Vassar College, where she became involved in campus theatre. Following graduation from Vassar, Sternhagen studied acting at the Perry Mansfield School and The Neighborhood Playhouse. She worked as a drama teacher at the Milton Academy and made her professional stage debut in summer theatre at Bryn Mawr prior to working with Arena Stage in 1953–1954. Sternhagen made her first Broadway appearance in a small role in a 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth and won Tony Awards in The Good Doctor (1973) and a 1995 revival of The Heiress. Sternhagen was also Tony-nominated for a 1972 revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Equus (1974), Angel (1978), On Golden Pond (1979), and 2002 revival of Morning’s at Seven. She won a Drama Desk Award for Equus and was Drama Desk-nominated for On Golden Pond. Among Sternhagen’s many other Broadway credits are All Over (1971), Enemies (1972), a 1981 revival of The Father, Grown Ups (1981), Home Front (1985), Steel Magnolias (2005), and a 2005 revival of Seascape. OffBroadway, Sternhagen took over the lead in Driving Miss Daisy (1988), appeared in A Perfect Ganesh (1993), and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for a 1998 revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Echoes of the War (2005). Sternhagen has appeared in the films Romantic Comedy (1983), Misery (1990), Doc Hollywood (1991), Raising Cain (1992), The Laramie Project (2002), and Julie & Julia (2009). On television, Sternhagen began appearing in TV dramas in the mid-1950s and has been nominated for three Emmy Awards, twice (1991, 1992) for a recurring role on Cheers, and for a guest appearance on Sex and the City in 2002. STEVEDORE. Paul Peters and George Sklar’s leftist drama about an African American dockworker who leads a strike by bringing black workers and white union members together opened in a Theatre Union production at the Civic Repertory Theatre on 18 April 1934 for 111 performances under the direction of Michael Blankfort and Irving Gordon. Lonnie Thompson (Jack Carter) rallies the black community in New Orleans to join with white unionized dockworkers to defeat a lynch mob in a play considered to be the first commercial play on Broadway to feature an integrated cast in which white and black cast members performed as equals. Cast members included Gordon and Rex Ingram. After a summer hiatus, the play reopened on 1 October 1934 for an additional 64 performances with Canada Lee and Juanita Hall joining Carter and the original cast. The Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project produced the play in Seattle in 1936. STEVENS, ASHTON (1872–1951). San Francisco-born drama critic Ashton Stevens began his writing career in his hometown for the News-Letter,

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and other local publications, in 1894. After three years as critic for the New York Evening Journal, Stevens moved to Chicago where he became a fixture, first on the Herald and Examiner (1910–1932) and then the Herald-American (1932–1951). Known as an exacting critic, Stevens was as critical of audiences and his fellow critics as he was of the qualities of Chicago theatre productions and touring shows. STEVENS, ROGER L. (1910–1998). Born Robert Lacey Stevens in Detroit, Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan, but did not complete a degree. Working in real estate, Stevens made a fortune and began producing plays in 1949 with a Broadway revival of Twelfth Night. He joined The Playwright’s Company in 1951 and founded the Producers Theatre in 1954, as well as serving as a cofounder of the American Shakespeare Festival. He also had a long association with the Phoenix Theatre and was head of the Kennedy Center beginning in 1971. Stevens produced such Broadway plays as a 1950 revival of Peter Pan,* Tea and Sympathy (1953), The Golden Apple (1954), Bus Stop (1955), The Dark Is Light Enough (1955), A View from the Bridge (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), West Side Story (1957), A Clearing in the Woods (1957), Under Milk Wood (1957), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1960), The Importance of Being Oscar (1961), Mary, Mary (1961), A Man for All Seasons (1961), Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (1962), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), The Private Ear/The Public Eye (1963), Indians (1969), Old Times (1971), Finishing Touches (1973), Jumpers (1974), A Matter of Gravity (1976), A Texas Trilogy (1976), No Man’s Land (1976), Deathtrap (1978), Betrayal (1980), The West Side Waltz (1981), The Petition (1986), A Few Good Men (1989), The Speed of Darkness (1991), Park Your Car in Harvard Yard (1991), The Kentucky Cycle (1993), and Broken Glass (1994). STEWART, ELLEN (1919–2011). Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, she moved to New York and worked as an elevator operator before becoming a fashion designer. In 1961, she established herself in a combination boutique/theatre in a basement on East 9th Street which evolved into a seminal Off-Off-Broadway theatre company, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. After some moves, La MaMa was permanently established in 1968 on East 4th Street, serving as the theatre’s producer, director, and inspirational force in nurturing the careers of writers, including Lanford Wilson, Tom O’Horgan, Sam Shepard, Harvey Fierstein, Tom Eyen, Elizabeth Swados, directors and designers, including Andrei Serban and Wilford Leach, and actors such as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Danny DeVito, Diane Lane, Billy Crystal, Nick Nolte, and others, working at La MaMa. Stewart won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1985, was inducted into

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the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1993, and was the recipient of Actors’ Equity Association’s Rosetta LeNoire Award for non-traditional casting. Stewart has also been recognized with a special Tony Award in 2006, two special Drama Desk Awards (1980, 2004), and a special 1991 Theatre World Award. Plays originally produced at La MaMa that moved to Broadway include Gloria and Esperanza (1970), Godspell (1976), Torch Song Trilogy (1982), André DeShield’s Harlem Nocturne (1984), and Safe Sex (1987). STEWART, JAMES (1908–1997). A native of Indiana, Pennsylvania, he was born James Maitland Stewart, the son of a hardware store owner. Educated at Princeton University, he became involved with the University Players and their stock company on Cape Cod, where he met Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, Henry Fonda, and Margaret Sullavan. He appeared on Broadway in Carry Nation (1932), Goodbye Again (1932), Spring in Autumn (1933), All Good Americans (1933), Yellow Jack (1934), Divided By Three (1934), Page Miss Glory (1934), and A Journey By Night (1935) before being signed to a film contract by MGM in 1935. He appeared in a few small roles, but became a major movie star, appearing in such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Philadelphia Story (1940), for which he won an Oscar. After his highly decorated service in the military during World War II, Stewart returned to Broadway to replace Frank Fay as Elwood P. Dowd in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Harvey (1944), but returned to the screen where, among other roles, he filmed Harvey, garnering an Oscar nomination for his performance. Stewart was also Oscar-nominated for It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and he was presented with an honorary Oscar in 1985. He was the recipient of an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1980 and won numerous other honors for his film work, which includes such films as You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Made for Each Other (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1939), The Mortal Storm (1940), No Time for Comedy (1940), Ziegfeld* Girl (1941), Rope (1948), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Shenandoah (1965), and dozens of others. Stewart dabbled in television with a short-lived series and a few television films and appearances on variety shows, but he returned to Broadway only once, to reprise the role of Dowd in a 1970 revival of Harvey, costarring with Helen Hayes, and for which he won a Drama Desk Award. STICKNEY, DOROTHY (1896–1998). A daughter of a country doctor born in Dickinson, North Dakota, Stickney attended acting school in Min-

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neapolis, Minnesota, before touring with stock companies prior to her Broadway debut in 1926 in The Squall.* Her first notable success came as the streetwalker Molly Malloy in The Front Page* (1928). She spent most of her long career in character roles, including George Kelly’s Philip Goes Forth (1931), Rose Franken’s Another Language (1932), George Ade’s* The County Chairman (1936), Granny in Paul Osborn’s fantasy On Borrowed Time (1938), and, most importantly, as Vinnie in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s adaptation of Clarence Day’s stories, the long-running hit, Life with Father (1939), and its less successful sequel, Life with Mother (1948). Stickney, who was married to Lindsay, also appeared occasionally in films. Her later Broadway appearances include roles in The Small Hours (1951), To Be Continued (1952), Kind Sir (1953), The Honeys (1955), A Lovely Light (1960), The Riot Act (1963), The Mundy Scheme (1969), and replacing Irene Ryan in the musical Pippin (1973). STICKS AND BONES. Following an Off-Broadway run at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre beginning on 7 November 1971, David Rabe’s Tony Award-winning surreal two-act drama opened at the John Golden Theatre on 1 March 1972 for 246 performances under the Tonynominated and Drama Desk Award-winning direction of Jeff Bleckner, with scene designs by Santo Loquasto (Drama Desk winner). Sticks and Bones depicted an American family confronted with the brutal realities of the Vietnam War in 1968. A typical middle-aged couple, Ozzie and Harriet, played by Tom Aldredge (Tony-nominated and Drama Desk Award-winner) and Elizabeth Wilson (a Tony winner), welcome their soldier son, David (David Selby), home from Vietnam, but he is profoundly changed. Blind, David converses with a Vietnamese girl, whom no one else can see, and cannot seem to reacclimate to the prejudices and conventionality of the family. David, with the assistance of his brother, Rick, commits suicide. This play was the second in a trilogy of Vietnam-related plays written by Rabe, including The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Streamers (1976). Rabe had written Sticks and Bones while a student at Villanova University, where an early version was performed in 1969. A 1973 CBS-TV film version caused some of the network’s affiliates to choose not to air the controversial work. STILL LIFE. First produced at the Goodman Theatre’s Studio Theatre in 1980, Emily Mann’s Obie Award-winning three-character drama opened at the American Place Theatre in February 1981 under Mann’s direction, with scene and costume design by Tom Lynch and lighting by Annie Wrightson. Taking a documentary drama approach to the legacy of the Vietnam War, Mann focuses on Mark (John Spencer), a veteran who learned to kill with

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pleasure, and his abused wife and mistress, played by Mary McDonnell and Timothy Near, all of whom demonstrate the emotional baggage left behind by the war on domestic life. Spencer, McDonnell, and Near all won Obies. STOCK.† Both year-round and in summers, from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, this kind of theatre was performed throughout the country (often, in the summers, in vacation areas) with theatres presenting both classic and recent plays (usually lighter fare) for short runs (usually a week or two). Stock companies were made up of an ensemble of actors led by a manager or director, typically in residence in a theatre to present a season of plays. Between 1880 and 1930, stock company actors ranged from stars or lesser-known actors. Typically, the leading players dominated (and often managed the company), but in some cases, as with Augustin Daly’s* company, the ensemble as a whole was more important than any single player. Stock benefited young actors, many of whom had their first professional opportunities in stock, and older players no longer sought for new works or otherwise between engagements. See also SUMMER STOCK. STOPPARD, TOM (1937– ). An acclaimed British-based playwright whose works have been as popular and critically applauded in the United States, Tomás Straussler was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, and left with his family during the Nazi invasion in 1939. In India, Stoppard studied at the Mount Hermon School and, once in England, at the Pocklington School in Yorkshire. He quit school to work as a newspaper reporter during the mid-1950s, with one of his responsibilities being writing drama reviews. He joined the Bristol Old Vic and completed his first play, A Walk on the Water (1960). After a stint writing drama criticism for Scene magazine in London, using the pseudonym William Boot, Stoppard completed a one-act play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear (1964), which he ultimately rewrote as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a work often described as an absurdist tragicomedy. Its 1967 Broadway production brought him a Tony Award for Best Play. Many of Stoppard’s plays, which are often first performed in England, appear on Broadway, including his other Tony winners, Travesties (1975), The Real Thing (1984), which also won a Drama Desk Award, and the threepart The Coast of Utopia (2006–2007). He also received Tony nominations for Arcadia (1995), The Invention of Love (2001), and Rock ‘n’ Roll (2007), and a Drama Desk nomination for Night and Day (1979). Stoppard’s other plays produced on Broadway include Jumpers (1974), Dirty Linen & NewFound-Land (1977), Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), and Artist Descending a Staircase (1989). He won an Academy Award, Golden Globe

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Award, and New York Film Critics Award for his collaboration with Marc Norman on the film Shakespeare in Love (1998) and was Oscar-nominated for Brazil (1985). STRAIGES, TONY (1942– ). A scene and costume designer applauded for the spare elegance of his settings, Straiges began his career designing Glance of a Landscape (1975) for Playwrights Horizons. On Broadway, Straiges has mostly designed scenery and costumes for musicals, including Sunday in the Park with George (1984), for which he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and Into the Woods (1987), which brought him Tony and Drama Desk nominations. Much of his design work has been for regional theatres and Off-Broadway. Straiges has designed Timbuktu! (1978), A History of the American Film (1978), a 1979 revival of Richard III, Harold and Maude (1980), Copperfield (1981), a 1986 revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Rumors (1988), Dangerous Games (1989), Artist Descending a Staircase (1989), I Hate Hamlet (1991), Shimada (1992), Golden Child (1998), and Enchanted April (2003), all on Broadway. STRAIGHT, BEATRICE (1914–2001). Born Beatrice Whitney Straight in Old Westbury, New York, she was the daughter of a banker who died during the 1918 influenza epidemic while serving in the military during World War I. When her mother remarried, Straight moved to England and became involved in amateur theatre. Her second husband was actor Peter Cookson. She debuted on Broadway in The Possessed (1939), followed by the opportunity to play Viola in a 1941 revival of Twelfth Night. Other Broadway appearances included Land of Fame (1943), The Wanhope Building (1947), Eastward in Eden (1947), a 1948 revival of Macbeth, The Innocents (1950), The Grand Tour (1951), and she won a Tony Award as Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). Her only other Broadway appearance was as Mrs. Toothe in Edward Albee’s Everything in the Garden (1967). Beginning in the 1950s, Straight made frequent appearances on television anthology dramas and won an Emmy Award for The Dain Curse (1978). She also won a Supporting Actress Academy Award for Network (1976) and appeared in such films as Patterns (1956), The Nun’s Story (1959), The Formula (1980), and Poltergeist (1982). STRASBERG, LEE (1901–1982). Israel Lee Strassberg was born in Budaniv, Ukraine, to a Jewish family. His father, a tailor, left the family for the United States where, once he was established, he sent for the family, who were reunited in 1909 on the Lower East Side of New York. When his older brother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, Strasberg dropped out of high

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school and was cast in a small part in a Yiddish theatre production. He worked at odd jobs, including as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper, before he enrolled in the Clare Tree Major School of the Theatre. Strasberg worked initially for The Theatre Guild, but was a founder of The Group Theatre in 1931 where, as a director and actor, he worked closely with the other Group members, including Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, Luther Adler, and Elia Kazan. As an acting teacher, both with the Group and after its demise in 1940, Strasberg based his techniques in the theories of Russian director/actor Constantin Stanislavsky, from whose writings, including An Actor Prepares, Strasberg emphasized a psychologically based “method” through which the actor achieved a deeper emotionalism. He conflicted with other Group members, including most notably Stella Adler, on his approach. In 1947, a few years after the ending of the Group, Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford established The Actors Studio, a not-for-profit workshop for actors permitting them to develop their craft away from the pressures of the commercial stage. Strasberg took over leadership of the Studio in 1951 and through the end of his life taught acting at the Studio to several generations of leading American actors, including Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Hunter, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, James Dean, Patricia Neal, Rod Steiger, Mildred Dunnock, Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Arthur Kennedy, Sidney Poiter, Ben Gazzara, Karl Malden, Shelley Winters, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, and many others. In 1966, Strasberg set up Actors Studio West in Los Angeles, California, a branch of the Studio initially led by Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel, and in 1969 he founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. On Broadway, Strasberg’s own work as an actor included roles in Processional* (1925), Garrick Gaieties (1925), Four Walls (1927), Red Rust (1929), and Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). As a director, Strasberg staged The House of Connelly (1931), 1931– (1931), Night over Taos (1932), Success Story (1932), Men in White (1933), Gentlewoman (1934), Gold Eagle Guy (1934), Paradise Lost (1935), Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), and Johnny Johnson (1936), all for The Group Theatre, as well as Many Mansions (1937), Roosty (1938), All the Living (1938), Dance Night (1938), Summer Night (1939), The Fifth Column (1940), revivals of A Kiss for Cinderella and R.U.R., both in 1942, Apology (1943), South Pacific (1943), Skipper Next to God (1948), The Big Knife (1949), The Closing Door (1949), revivals of Peer Gynt in 1951 and Strange Interlude* in 1963, and a 1964 revival of The Three Sisters. Late in his life, Strasberg appeared in several films, receiving Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations playing Jewish mobster Hy-

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man Roth in The Godfather: Part II (1974). He also appeared in The Cassandra Crossing (1976), . . . And Justice for All (1979), Boardwalk (1979), and Going in Style (1979), and in the television films The Last Tenant (1978) and Skokie (1981). Strasberg was the father of actress Susan Strasberg and acting teacher John Strasberg. STRATHAIRN, DAVID (1949– ). David Russell Strathairn was born in San Francisco, California, son of a doctor, and studied at Williams College. He also worked as a circus clown following training at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He is best known for his work in films and television, but Strathairn has appeared on stage, often in the plays of Harold Pinter, such as the Classic Stage Company production of The Birthday Party in 1988, Mountain Language (1989), and Ashes to Ashes (1999). He also appeared in New York productions of Hapgood (1994). On Broadway, he appeared in Einstein and the Polar Bear (1981) and revivals of The Three Sisters in 1997, Dance of Death in 2001, and Salome in 2003. He was nominated for an Academy Award playing Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and his other films include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Silkwood (1983), Eight Men Out (1988), A League of Their Own (1992), The Firm (1993), Lost in Yonkers (1993), Dolores Claiborne (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and The Tempest (2010). STREAMERS. Following a 1975 premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre (LWT), David Rabe’s Tony Award-nominated and Drama Desk Awardwinning two-act drama opened in a New York Shakespeare Festival and LWT coproduction at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre on 21 April 1976 for 478 performances under Mike Nichols’s direction. Paul Rudd played Billy, an idealistic soldier, who moves into a barracks rife with conflict and problems ranging from racial divisions to suicidal desires. This barracks, under the command of Sgt. Cokes (Dolph Sweet) and Sgt. Rooney (Kenneth McMillan), is a microcosm of American society of the turbulent era of the 1960s–1970s. When Carlyle (Dorian Harewood), an angry African American soldier, joins them, the soldiers recognize that his bitter, confrontational ways threaten their society. Robert Altman directed a 1984 film version starring Matthew Modine as Billy. The play was the last in a trilogy of Vietnam War-related plays written by Rabe, including The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972). STREEP, MERYL (1949– ). Generally regarded as the leading American actress of stage and screen since the 1970s, she was born Mary Louise Streep

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in Summit, New Jersey, daughter of a pharmaceutical executive and a commercial artist. Streep studied at Vassar College and received an M.F.A. in acting from the Yale School of Drama. Upon her graduation, she worked for the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT), appearing in Shakespearean roles, most notably opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale, her fiancé, in Measure for Measure in 1976. Cazale was diagnosed with cancer and succumbed in 1978. Streep’s Broadway appearances have been few and are all associated with the NYSF/PT, including revivals of Trelawny of the “Wells” in 1975, A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton in 1976, which brought her a Tony Award nomination, Secret Service* in 1976, for which she won a Theatre World Award, The Cherry Orchard in 1977, and Happy End in 1977, all of which brought her Drama Desk Award nominations. Off-Broadway, Streep appeared in Alice at the Palace (1978), as Katharina to Raul Juliá’s Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew in 1978, and Taken in Marriage (1979). After a long hiatus from the stage resulting from her film success and raising a family with her artist-husband Don Gummer, Streep returned to the stage and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for The Seagull in 2002 and Mother Courage and Her Children in 2006, both for the NYSF/ PT and the latter bringing her a Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance. As a major movie star since the 1970s, Streep has won two Academy Awards, for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), and was Oscar-nominated for The Deer Hunter (1978), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Silkwood (1983), Out of Africa (1985), Ironweed (1987), A Cry in the Dark (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), One True Thing (1998), Music of the Heart (1999), Adaptation (2002), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and Doubt (2008). She also appeared in Mamma Mia! (2008), Julie & Julia (2009), and It’s Complicated (2010). She has been nominated for 25 Golden Globe Awards, winning six. On television, Streep won Emmy Awards for the TV films Holocaust (1978) and Angels in America (2003), with an Emmy nomination for . . . First Do No Harm (1997). STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A. Tennessee Williams’s searing, lyrical drama exploring the tragic mental disintegration of the deeply troubled Blanche DuBois opened on 3 December 1947 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for 855 performances under Elia Kazan’s direction. The play was awarded the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as numerous other honors. For many Broadway critics, Williams reached the pinnacle of his achievement as a dramatist with this poetic study of a fragile, mentally unstable woman

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unable to cope with the losses of her past, her present reduced circumstances, and the harsh realism of the world which are in stark conflict with her frequent retreats into romantic illusion. “I want magic,” Blanche insists, but the colored paper lanterns she hangs to dim and soften the light around her does not keep reality, as represented by the brutality of her animalistic brother-inlaw, Stanley Kowalski, from exposing and destroying her. Blanche arrives in the steamy French Quarter of New Orleans on the streetcar named “Desire,” seeking the home of her only sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley. She is distressed to discover Stella married to a man she regards as beneath her in class. Despite the fact that she is nearly destitute and in need of a safe haven with Stella, Blanche cannot resist being mockingly critical of Stanley’s crude ways. Blanche’s affected air of superiority and Stanley’s low-brow vulgarity strain relations in the close quarters of the flat. Stanley’s coworker, Mitch, a gentle man who lives with his ailing mother, is attracted to Blanche’s sensitivity and charm. She encourages a relationship with Mitch in hopes that a marriage with him will provide safety and security, carefully hiding her age and the harsh facts of her life behind a variety of illusory effects. The intense sexual bond between Stanley and Stella, not to mention Stanley’s animalistic sensuality, disturbs Blanche, and she is horrified when she learns that Stella is pregnant. Despite the impending arrival of a child, and to Stanley’s intense annoyance, Stella allows Blanche to stay on with them. He demands to know the status of Belle Reve, the family home, half of which, he believes, belongs to Stella—and, thanks to the “Napoleonic code,” to him. When Blanche admits that the property has been lost due to the expenses of caring for dying family members (and, perhaps, her own excesses), Stanley is unconvinced that the loss was necessary. He secretly contacts a friend in Blanche’s hometown and learns that she has been sexually promiscuous. Worse yet, she was fired from her high school teaching job on the suspicion of an inappropriate relationship with a male student, culminating in her departure from town. Blanche is also troubled by the past. The memory of her young husband, Alan, whom she caught in bed with a man, haunts her. In shame, Alan shot himself, and the incidents surrounding his death continually replay themselves in her turbulent mind as her hold on reality grows more and more tenuous. Blanche’s attraction to inappropriately young men is demonstrated by a brief encounter with a newspaper delivery boy, but Williams makes it clear that the heartbroken, guilt-ridden Blanche is in a futile search for the young husband she has lost. When Stanley tells Mitch of Blanche’s background, Mitch at first refuses to accept it. He drunkenly confronts Blanche and finally sees through the illusions in which she has enveloped herself. Blanche’s hopes of a marriage

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are dashed as Mitch flees. When Stella goes to the hospital to give birth, the animosity between Stanley and Blanche explodes, and he sexually assaults her. Unhinged by this trauma, Blanche is subsequently unable to convince Stella of the rape. As Mitch watches helplessly, Stella reluctantly goes along with Blanche’s commitment to a mental institution. The play ends as Blanche is escorted away by a nurse and doctor, to whom she sadly states, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Stella’s passions drive her back to Stanley’s arms, despite her lingering suspicion that Blanche’s version of events may be true. The original cast of A Streetcar Named Desire was led by Tony Awardnominated Jessica Tandy, a British actress who had impressed Williams and director Kazan acting in a West Coast production of Williams’s oneact Portrait of a Madonna. Tandy’s performance was matched by Marlon Brando’s star-making interpretation of Stanley, an image of potent and overt male sexuality previously unseen on a Broadway stage. The play’s frankness smashed taboos that had been firmly in place on American stages, bringing to serious drama the possibility of exploring themes and attitudes previously unavailable to dramatists. Homosexuality, rape, promiscuity, the sexualizing of the male image, and the revelation of women’s sexual desires—as seen in Stella’s passionate attraction to Stanley—had not been seriously explored in such an overt and serious way on Broadway stages prior to Streetcar. A Streetcar Named Desire was filmed in 1951 with most of its original stage cast, including Karl Malden as Mitch and Kim Hunter as Stella, under Kazan’s direction. Vivien Leigh, in an Academy Award-winning performance (Malden and Hunter also won Oscars), replaced Tandy on screen, but Brando again played Stanley, and his performance launched him as one of the iconic male stars of post-World War II Hollywood films. A Streetcar Named Desire has been revived frequently and there have been other filmed versions. In 1956, a Spanish-language television version was broadcast, directed by Luis Mottura and featuring Mecha Ortiz as Blanche and Fernando Siro as Stanley. Ann-Margret gave an acclaimed Golden Globe Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated performance as Blanche opposite Treat Williams’s Stanley in a 1984 television film version. Following a 1992 revival on Broadway, Jessica Lange (a Theatre World Award and Golden Globe Award winner) and Alec Baldwin (in a Tony-nominated performance) appeared in a 1995 television film that preserved their performances. In 1998, an operatic adaptation of Streetcar starring diva Renée Fleming, and featuring original music by André Previn and libretto by Philip Littel, won critical approval. Broadway revivals have included a brief 1950 City Center revival starring Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn, who had appeared in the national tour, and another brief City Center revival in 1956, notoriously starring Tallulah

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Bankhead, whose audience responded more to her off-stage camp manner; the performance distressed Williams. Ellis Rabb directed a Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center revival in 1973 featuring Rosemary Harris (who won a Drama Desk Award) and James Farentino (a Theatre World Award-winning performance). Later that year, Lois Nettleton and Alan Feinstein took over the leads, and the production played for a few months at the St. James Theatre. A 1988 Circle in the Square revival starred Blythe Danner (in a Tonynominated performance), Aidan Quinn (a Theatre World Award winner), and Frances McDormand (Tony-nominated), the Lange-Baldwin production in 1992, and a 2005 Roundabout Theatre revival directed by Edward Hall starred Natasha Richardson, John C. Reilly, and Amy Ryan (who was Tonynominated). In late 2009, Australian film and stage actress Cate Blanchett won critical acclaim in a Brooklyn Academy of Music production staged by Liv Ullmann. See also MEN/MASCULINITY; WOMEN/FEMININITY. STRITCH, ELAINE (1925– ). Born in Detroit, Michigan, to a devoutly Roman Catholic family, she studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research under Erwin Piscator. She made her Broadway debut in the failed comedy Loco (1946), followed by roles in Angel in the Wings (1947) and Yes, M’Lord (1949) prior to serving as understudy for Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam (1950) and simultaneously appearing in a 1952 revival of Pal Joey, in which she scored a personal success as Melba. She had another hit in a 1954 revival of On Your Toes, followed by playing Grace in Bus Stop (1955), which brought her first Tony Award nomination. Stritch was subsequently nominated for Tonys for the Noël Coward musical Sail Away (1961), Company (1970), and a 1996 revival of A Delicate Balance, for which she won a Drama Desk Award. She was also Drama Desk-nominated for a 1994 revival of Show Boat and won a special Tony and two Drama Desk Awards for her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002). Stritch’s other Broadway appearances include The Sin of Pat Muldoon (1957), Goldilocks (1958), and playing Martha for the matinees of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). In her mid-eighties, she appeared in a 2008 revival of Endgame at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the Papermill Playhouse revival of The Full Monty in 2009, and in 2010 she replaced Angela Lansbury in a hit revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music. In films, Stritch appeared in A Farewell to Arms (1957), Kiss Her Goodbye (1959), The Spiral Staircase (1975), September (1987), Cocoon: The Return (1988), Out to Sea (1997), Same Time Crooks (2000), and Monster-in-Law (2005). She appeared on television from 1948 and starred on the popular British comedy Two’s Company (1975–1979), and has won three Emmy

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Awards, in 1993 as a guest star on Law & Order, in 2004 for the TV version of Elaine Stritch At Liberty, and in 2007 for her recurring role as Alec Baldwin’s mother on 30 Rock, which also brought her Emmy nominations in 2008 and 2009. STUDIO ARENA THEATRE (SAT). This Buffalo, New York-based notfor-profit League of Resident Theatres (LORT) theatre was established in 1965 by Neal DuBrock, an extension of the Studio Theatre School of Buffalo, which had been founded in 1927. The SAT’s first season in 1965–1966 featured 12 productions, mostly American and European classics, but also produced many premieres, including works by Tom Dudzick, Alan Ayckbourn, Lynn Nottage, Howard Brenton, Donald Driver, Robert Schenkkan, Oliver Hailey, Howard Sackler, Paul Giovanni, James Kirkwood, Truman Capote, Lawrence Roman, A. R. Gurney, Lanford Wilson, Edward Albee, and others. By 2007–2008, budget cuts led to a season of only four productions, and in 2009 the theatre was idle. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT; REPERTORY THEATRE. SUBBER, ARNOLD SAINT (1918–1994). A native New Yorker, Subber studied at New York University prior to beginning his career as an assistant to John Murray Anderson on Laffing Room Only (1944). He began producing in 1948 with Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, winning a Tony Award as Best Producer. Seven of his subsequent Broadway productions received Best Play Tony nominations, including The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), The Tenth Man (1959), Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971). The last five of these were written by Neil Simon, with whom Subber had a long relationship that included producing those and other Simon plays, including The Star-Spangled Girl (1966) and The Gingerbread Lady (1970). Among Subber’s other productions were Out of This World (1950), The Grass Harp (1952), My Three Angels (1953), House of Flowers (1954), A Loss of Roses (1959), Look, We’ve Come Through (1961), Harold (1962), Dr. Cook’s Garden (1967), There’s a Girl in My Soup (1967), a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights (1968), Weekend (1968), and Gigi (1973). SUBJECT WAS ROSES, THE. Frank D. Gilroy’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning two-act family drama set in the aftermath of World War II opened in an Edgar Lansbury production at the Royale Theatre on 25 May 1964 for 832 performances under Ulu Grosbard’s Tony Award-nominated direction, with scene design by Lansbury, lighting by Jules Fisher,

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and costumes by Donald Foote. The three-character play featured Jack Albertson in a Tony-winning performance as John Cleary, and Irene Daily as his wife, Nettie, who battle for the affections of their returning soldier son, Timmy (Martin Sheen in a Tony-nominated performance). The dysfunctional battling, a different war than the one Timmy experienced in the military, drives him to move out on his own. Grosbard directed a 1968 screen version with Albertson, in an Academy Award-winning performance, and Sheen repeating their performances, with Oscar-nominated Patricia Neal as Nettie. SUBSTANCE OF FIRE, THE. Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama about a childhood Holocaust survivor who attempts to convince his children that the only way to save the family publishing business is by publishing six volumes of scholarship on medical experiments perpetrated by Nazi doctors opened on 17 March 1991 at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Daniel Sullivan. Ron Rifkin won a Drama Desk Award for his performance as Isaac Geldhart and the supporting cast included Sarah Jessica Parker, Patrick Breen, Jon Tenney, and Maria Tucci. A 1996 screen version starred Rifkin and Parker. SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Tennessee Williams’s long one-act grotesquerie originally performed on a double bill, Garden District, with another Williams one-act, Something Unspoken, was first staged at New York’s York Theatre on 7 January 1958, although some critics considered it a minor work by a major playwright. Suddenly Last Summer offers perhaps the darkest vision of all Williams’s plays. Set in a sinister primeval garden on a crumbling Southern gothic estate owned by the imperious Violet Venable, Suddenly Last Summer’s gruesome portrait of a predatory universe—as represented by a monstrous Venus flytrap dominating Mrs. Venable’s garden—examined madness, homosexuality, family dysfunction, the artistic temperament, and even cannibalism. Mrs. Venable intends to employ her vast wealth to arrange for her disturbed niece, Catherine Holly, to undergo a lobotomy. The previous summer, Catherine accompanied Sebastian, Mrs. Venable’s poet son, on a European tour during which Sebastian died under mysterious circumstances. Catherine’s version of Sebastian’s demise outrages Mrs. Venable for, as Catherine ultimately explains, he was a promiscuous homosexual whose only interest in Catherine was as bait for prospective lovers. In past years, Mrs. Venable had accompanied Sebastian on his annual tour, so the implication of Catherine’s account is that Mrs. Venable served a similar purpose when she was still able to attract young men. Mrs. Venable’s romanticized view of herself as muse for Sebastian’s writing drives her to want to permanently silence Catherine.

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She makes a lucrative offer to the financially strapped Lion’s View Hospital if one of its surgeons, Dr. Cukrowicz, will perform the lobotomy aimed at expunging Catherine’s version of Sebastian’s death. Despite considerable pressure, Cukrowicz refuses to accommodate Mrs. Venable’s wishes until he has examined Catherine. He manages to draw out the partially blocked Catherine, who finally recalls the ghastly events in their entirety. Sebastian, she divulges, died at Cabeza del Lobo as a result of a cannibalistic attack by a mob of young men he had sexually exploited. As the recounting of this horror releases Catherine from her disturbed state, the defeated Mrs. Venable descends into madness. Suddenly Last Summer remains one of Williams’s most-produced plays and it has been filmed twice, first in 1959 with an impressive cast, including Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift, and a screenplay by Williams and Gore Vidal under the direction of Joseph Mankiewicz. The play was filmed again for a well-received television production in 1993 starring Maggie Smith, Rob Lowe, and Natasha Richardson. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. SULLAVAN, MARGARET (1909–1960). Margaret Brooke Sullavan was born in Norfolk, Virginia, to a successful stockbroker, but spent much of her childhood as an invalid. After a period in boarding school, Sullavan studied dance at the Denishawn studio in Boston and theatre at the Copley Theatre. She made her way working at the Harvard University Bookstore and appeared in Harvard Dramatic Society productions and, briefly, in the chorus of the failed musical Hello, Lola (1926). She appeared with the University Players on Cape Cod, where she became friends with Henry Fonda. They were briefly married from 1931–1932. On Broadway, Sullavan appeared in Sideshow (1931), A Modern Virgin (1931), If Love Were All (1931), Happy Landing (1932), stepped in as a replacement in Dinner at Eight (1933), Chrysalis (1932), and Bad Manners (1933). In 1933, she appeared in her first film, Only Yesterday (1933), rising to stardom. She was nominated for an Academy Award and a New York Film Critics Award for Three Comrades (1938). When she appeared in director William Wyler’s The Good Fairy (1935), they became involved and were married from 1934–1936, Her other major films include The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Shining Hour (1938), The Shop around the Corner (1940), The Mortal Storm (1940), Back Street (1941), So Ends Our Night (1941), Appointment for Love (1941), Cry “Havoc” (1943), and No Sad Songs for Me (1950), her last. While making films and after, Sullavan appeared with frequency on Broadway, scoring major successes as Terry Randall in Stage Door (1936),

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Sally Middleton in The Voice of the Turtle (1943), Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina Fair (1953), and Jessica in Janus (1955). She was also married to producer Leland Hayward from 1935–1948 and Kenneth Wagg from 1950–1960. Sullavan appeared in a few television dramas in the early 1950s and was in New Haven, Connecticut, for the out-of-town tryout of a new play when she died from an overdose of sleeping pills, ultimately ruled a suicide. SULLIVAN, DANIEL (1940– ). A native of Wray, Colorado, Sullivan was educated at San Francisco State University and began his career as an actor in the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop before moving to New York to work as an actor/director with the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. He acted in revivals of Tiger at the Gates in 1968, Camino Real in 1970, and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1973, among others, before he won a Drama Desk Award directing Suggs (1972) Off-Broadway. On Broadway, Sullivan directed Narrow Road to the Deep North (1972) and a 1973 revival of The Plough and the Stars prior to becoming artistic director at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1981, a post he held until 1997, directing over 60 productions there. On Broadway, Sullivan won a Tony Award for his direction of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof (2000), and was nominated for Tonys for The Heidi Chronicles (1989), Conversations with My Father (1992), The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), a 2002 revival of Morning’s at Seven, and Rabbit Hole (2006). Sullivan’s other Broadway credits include I’m Not Rappaport (1985), An American Daughter (1997), revivals of Ah, Wilderness! in 1998, A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000, Major Barbara in 2001, and Morning’s at Seven in 2002, The Retreat from Moscow (2003), Sight Unseen (2004), Brooklyn Boy (2005), a 2005 revival of Julius Caesar, After the Night and the Music (2005), revivals of Prelude to a Kiss in 2007, The Homecoming in 2007, Top Girls in 2008, and Accent on Youth in 2009, Time Stands Still (2010), and a 2010 revival of The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino. Off-Broadway, Sullivan received Drama Desk Award nominations for Dinner with Friends (2000) and Stuff Happens (2006). Sullivan is the Swalund Chair at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. SUMMER AND SMOKE (1948). This drama by Tennessee Williams won only moderate critical approval under Margo Jones’s direction in its original production, which opened on 6 October 1948 at the Music Box Theatre for 102 performances, but the play featured one of Williams’s quintessential heroines, Alma Winemiller, effectively portrayed by Margaret Phillips. Jo Mielziner won a Tony Award for his scene design and Tod Andrews, who played John Buchanan, won a Theatre World Award, and the cast

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also included Anne Jackson and Ray Walston. The back-to-back triumphs of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 tended to obscure the merits of Summer and Smoke, a disappointment that kept Williams revising the play well into the 1970s. Williams addresses the relationship of love and sexuality in his portrait of Alma, another variation on the sexually repressed, dysfunctional heroines of his oeuvre. She is a woman caught between the social constraints of a rigid time and her own passions. Alma lives in the straitjacket of rigid Christian morality in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, a small Southern small town in 1916. She is the pure-minded daughter of the distant, pompous Rev. Winemiller and his mentally disturbed wife whose problems stem, in part, from the stifling repressions of their lives. Despite the fact that she is keeping company with the effeminate Roger Doremus, Alma is powerfully drawn to the virile, sexually liberated Dr. John Buchanan, her next-door neighbor. Williams uses Alma and John to debate the differences between spiritual love and carnality. John’s credentials as a doctor and his worldliness lead him to conclude that spiritual love does not exist and that sex is merely a matter of biology. He spends much of his time drinking and indulging himself at a local brothel. Alma is shocked by John’s behavior, which she equates with bestiality; for her, love is in the meeting of minds and in a mutual appreciation of beauty and goodness. Alma longs to find a fulfilling spiritual love, but gets little guidance from her family. Her fear (and expectation) of sinking into arid spinsterhood or a lifeless marriage to Roger incites a crisis in her attitudes. She has rejected John’s advances and lectured him on morality, but when she can resist him no longer it is too late. When she learns that John has changed his views and plans to marry an innocent young woman from a local family, the revelation sends Alma into an emotional tailspin ending with her seduction of a strange man in the local park. Some critics described Summer and Smoke as an allegory of good (Alma) versus evil (John), but others found it a rehashing of themes Williams had explored to greater effect in earlier plays, particularly A Streetcar Named Desire. Summer and Smoke had previously been filmed in 1961 under the direction of Peter Glenville, with Geraldine Page as Alma and Laurence Harvey as John. Williams’s own dissatisfactions with this talky, structurally conventional work led him to revise the play in 1976. Renaming it The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Williams maintained the central strengths of Summer and Smoke—its characters, language, and central theme—while streamlining the play’s language and structure. Despite a fine production featuring Blythe Danner and Frank Langella, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale ran only briefly at New York’s Morosco Theatre before being filmed for television.

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Summer and Smoke was revived on Broadway in a 1996 Roundabout Theatre production featuring Mary McDonnell and Harry Hamlin. SUMMER STOCK.† From the early nineteenth century, country playhouses and outdoor gardens featured plays and other entertainments during the summer months when indoor theatregoing was curtailed by the heat. The golden age of summer stock may have begun with the opening of Elitch’s Gardens Theatre* in Denver, Colorado, in 1890. Other such summer theatres sprang up around the country, particularly in the east, offering a season of plays, most often comedies and musicals. In the years prior to World War I, the Provincetown Players* on Cape Cod merged the penchant for summer entertainment with the New Stagecraft* and provided opportunities for cutting-edge dramatists (including Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell) and emerging directors and actors. Summer playhouses like the Hedgerow Theatre (Moylan, Pennsylvania) or the Williamstown Theatre Festival (Massachusetts), were similarly ambitious, but most summer stock theatres were less inclined toward experimentation, preferring instead to present recent Broadway successes or pre-Broadway tryouts. Some theatres packaged stars in familiar vehicles, while other summer stock companies were made up of young actors and technicians gaining practical experience. Many summer stock theatres were established prior to 1930 and continued operation until well into the 1960s. Comparatively few survived significant changes in audience tastes, as well as economic realities, post-1960. See also STOCK. SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO. Dore Schary’s inspirational three-act drama of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s resurrection as a major political figure following a near-fatal bout with polio opened at the Cort Theatre on 30 January 1958 for 556 performances under the direction of Vincent J. Donehue, with scene and lighting design by Ralph Alswang and costumes by Virginia Volland. The play won a Tony Award, as did director Donehue and star, Ralph Bellamy, who scored a personal success as Roosevelt. In 1921, upand-coming politician Roosevelt is stricken with polio while vacationing with his family. His mother, Sara (Anne Seymour), wants him to retire from public life to the ease and comfort of wealth, but Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor (Mary Fickett, in a Tony-nominated performance), and adviser, Louis Howe (Henry Jones, who won a Tony), encourage him to rise above his affliction and continue his career. The cast also included Mary Welch, James Earl Jones, and Vincent Dowling. Bellamy reprised his role in a 1960 screen version, with Greer Garson, in an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award performance, as Eleanor.

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SUNSHINE BOYS, THE. Neil Simon’s Tony Award-nominated two-act comedy about two mismatched elderly vaudevillians* opened in an Emanuel Azenberg and Eugene V. Wolsk production at the Broadhurst Theatre on 20 December 1972 for 538 performances under Alan Arkin’s Tony-nominated direction, with scene design by Kert Lundell, lighting by Tharon Musser, and costumes by Albert Wolsky. Jack Albertson (who won a Drama Desk Award and was nominated for a Tony) starred as Willie Clark, an aging vaudevillian,* desperate to return to his career. He hounds his long-suffering nephew and agent, Ben (Lewis J. Stadlen), to find him work, but Ben is only able to excite interest if Willie will agree to appear with his old partner, Al Lewis (Sam Levene), despite the fact that the two have not spoken in years. A reunion is arranged, but the two old men fall back into old arguments, leading Willie to suffer a heart attack. Al comes to visit him during his recuperation, but Willie suffers a new shock when he learns that he and Al will be residing in the same retirement home. The play won critical kudos, although some reviewers carped that the play was little more than a senior citizen version of Simon’s The Odd Couple. The Sunshine Boys was revived in 1997 starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of the television version of Simon’s The Odd Couple. Walter Matthau and George Burns (in an Academy Award-winning performance) appeared in a 1975 screen version. An updated television remake in 1995 starred Woody Allen and Peter Falk. SUPERIOR DONUTS. Under the direction of Tracy Landau, Tracy Lett’s comedy opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on 1 October 2009 for 109 performances, following a run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2008. Set in a Chicago donut shop, the play deals with the relationship of the shop’s owner Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean) and Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), a young African American 21-year-old employed in the shop. Their discussions explore present-day race tensions and other contemporary issues. He was nominated for a Tony Award and won a Theatre World Award for his performance. SUSAN AND GOD. Rachel Crothers’s three-act comedy about a vain woman who confuses religious faith with selfish meddling opened in a John Golden production at the Plymouth Theatre on 7 October 1937 for 288 performances under Crothers’s direction, with scene design by Jo Mielziner. Gertrude Lawrence starred as Susan Trexell, a recent convert to the Oxford movement, whose “holier than thou” attitudes lead her to meddle in the life of her friend Irene Burroughs (Vera Allen) and to alienate her alcoholic husband, Barrie (Paul McGrath) and daughter (Nancy Kelly). Ultimately,

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Susan confronts the true meaning of faith. Edith Atwater and Eleanor Audley were among the cast, and Lawrence appeared in a brief 1943 revival. A 1940 screen version, directed by George Cukor, starred Joan Crawford and Fredric March, as its advertisements asked about Susan: “Saint . . . or Screwball?” See also RELIGIOUS DRAMA. SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Tennessee Williams’s three-act drama of a fading actress and a male hustler opened in a Cheryl Crawford production at the Martin Beck Theatre on 10 March 1959 for 375 performances under the direction of Elia Kazan, with scene and lighting design by Jo Mielziner and costumes by Anna Hill Johnstone. Drifter Chance Wayne (Paul Newman) reluctantly returns to his hometown, where he had been involved with Heavenly Finley (Diana Hyland), daughter of the local political boss, Finley (Sidney Blackmer), who hates Chance because he had once infected Heavenly with venereal disease. Chance is a male hustler in the service of Princess Kosmonopolis (Geraldine Page), an aging movie actress whose real name is Alexandra del Lago, and who has promised to help Chance start an acting career. Chance and Heavenly are drawn back together, the Princess betrays Chance when a shot at a film role materializes, and Finley exacts his revenge against Chance. Williams’s themes of self-delusion and the intersections and discordances of love and sex are centrally present in Sweet Bird of Youth. Critics were divided over the play’s merits, some finding it inferior to Williams’s best work, while others applauded the lyricism of its language and the richness of its characters. Rip Torn won a Theatre World Award and along with Page and Kazan, he was also nominated for a Tony Award. Paul Bowles contributed incidental music to the production. Sweet Bird of Youth was revived on Broadway in 1975 starring Irene Worth (in a Tony-winning performance) and Christopher Walken. Lauren Bacall and Michael Beck starred in the 1985 London premiere of the play, directed by Harold Pinter. A 1962 film version directed by Richard Brooks permitted Newman, Page, and Torn to recreate their stage performances and Ed Begley won an Academy Award as Finley, with nominations for Page (who won a Golden Globe Award) and Shirley Knight, who played Heavenly. A 1989 television version starred Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon, with Torn taking on the role of Finley. SYRACUSE STAGE (SS). Founded by Arthur Storch in 1974 on the campus of Syracuse University with the mission of offering innovative productions of new plays and bold interpretations of classics and musicals, the SS,

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a League of Resident Theatre (LORT) theatre, produces as many as nine productions each season. Its first featured productions of Waiting for Lefty, Noon, An Enemy of the People, and Of Mice and Men, while more recent seasons include new works and children’s plays, as well as musicals.

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T 12 ANGRY MEN. Reginald Rose’s tense drama set in a 1954 New York jury room during a murder trial is one of the more frequently revived American plays from the mid-twentieth century. The play began its life as a 1954 television drama, followed by a 1957 film version starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, a 1997 television film, and it finally made it to Broadway, where it opened at the Roundabout Theatre on 28 October 2004 for 228 performances under the direction of Scott Ellis, winning a Drama Desk Award as Best Revival and several Tony Award nominations. The cast included Tom Aldredge, Philip Bosco, Larry Bryggman, Peter Friedman, Boyd Gaines, John Pankow, Robert Prosky, and others. The story concerns one lone dissenter who must, over the period of a long deliberation, convince the other jurors of the innocence of an accused killer. In the process, he unveils the bigotry of one juor and the various foibles of the others. TAKE A GIANT STEP. Louis Peterson’s drama opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 24 September 1953 for 76 performances under the direction of John Stix, with scene design by Eldon Elder and costumes by Ruth Morley. Louis Gossett played African American teenager Spencer Scott, who struggles to negotiate the racial and sexual tensions of the civil rights era in a predominantly white neighborhood in Connecticut. The cast included Frederick O’Neal, Warren Berlinger, Helen Martin, Estelle Hemsley, and Jane White. O’Neal and Hemsley (in a Golden Globe-nominated performance) repeated their roles in the 1959 film version, which also included Johnny Nash, Ruby Dee, Frances Foster, and Beah Richards among its cast. The movie version had been preceded by a highly successful Off-Broadway revival in 1956. Harold Clurman, writing in the Nation, described Take a Giant Step as profiting from “the particular color, immediacy and urgency of its feeling—a kind of emotional frankness, a wry naiveté and a rough goodness of heart that smack of something truly native, original in tone and unmistakably lived.” TAKE ME OUT. Richard Greenberg’s Tony, Drama Desk, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning two-act drama-comedy exploring the

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impact of an openly gay player on a major league baseball team opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 27 February 2003 for 355 performances under the direction of Joe Mantello (who won a Tony), with scene design by Scott Pask, and costumes by Jess Goldstein. The play had its first performances at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2002, followed by a late 2002 run at the Public Theatre. Set in the locker room of a fictional New York baseball team, tensions surround Darren Lemming (played by Drama Desk and Theatre World Award winner Daniel Sunjata), a mixed-race star of the team who chooses to “come out” publicly. Lemming’s revelation sets in motion an examination of homophobia, racism, and social class among team members. Denis O’Hare, as a die-hard fan, won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. TAKEN IN MARRIAGE. Thomas Babe’s two-act play about a group of women discussing marriage on the day of a wedding that never happens premiered at the Public Theatre on 26 February 1979 for 46 performances under the direction of Robert Allan Ackerman. The extraordinary cast included Colleen Dewhurst (later replaced by Nancy Marchand), Dixie Carter, Kathleen Quinlan, Meryl Streep, and Elizabeth Wilson. The play, which reflected changing views on marriage and women’s rights, subsequently appeared in regional theatres, including a 2009 Public Theatre revival, but critics found the play dated. In the original production, Quinlan won a Theatre World Award and Wilson won an Obie Award for their performances. TALE OF THE ALLERGIST’S WIFE, THE. Actor-playwright Charles Busch’s Tony Award-nominated comedy opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 2 November 2000 for 777 performances under the direction of Lynne Meadow, with scene design by Santo Loquasto and costumes by Ann Roth. The play was first performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club where it opened on 29 February 2000 for 56 performances before moving to Broadway. Busch, a cross-dressing star and successful playwright in OffBroadway theatres, sought mainstream acceptance with this play, which centers on an Upper West Side matron, Marjorie Taub (played by Tony nominee Linda Lavin), whose comfortable life does not protect her from the conclusion that she is a mediocre person. Marjorie sinks into her midlife crisis until she is forced to confront her demons with the arrival of a flamboyant childhood friend, Lee (played by Tony-nominated Michelle Lee). The cast also included Tony Roberts, Shirl Bernheim, and Anil Kumar. TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS. Constance Congdon’s satiric comedy-drama premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) on 19 March 1989, following a workshop production at River Arts Repertory. Rob-

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ert Levitow directed the ATL production of a play about aliens observing— and manipulating—the unhappy lives of a present-day suburban American family. Tony Kushner described the play as “an unmistakably impressive achievement.” The play has had frequent productions by regional, academic, and community theatres. TALLEY’S FOLLY. The second of Lanford Wilson’s trio of “Talley plays,” also including Fifth of July (1978) and Talley & Son (1985), this two-character one-act comedy-drama won a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award when it opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 20 February 1980 for 286 performances under the direction of Marshall W. Mason, with scene design by John Lee Beatty (who won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award), costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser, and lighting by Dennis Parichy (who won a Drama Desk Award). Matt Friedman (played by Tony-nominated Judd Hirsch) and Sally Talley (Trish Hawkins), meet in a dilapidated boathouse on the Talley family farm in Missouri on the 4th of July 1944. Matt, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who has experienced persecution firsthand, and Sally, a liberal-minded “old maid” with a secret in a conservative family, find that their individual feelings of loss and being outsiders brings them together. TALLY, TED (1952– ). Born William Theodore Tally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he grew up in nearby Greensboro before attending Yale University and the Yale School of Drama. Mostly known for his work as a screenwriter, which brought him an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Tally gained his first notice as an Off-Broadway playwright, winning an Obie Award for Terra Nova (1977) and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Coming Attractions (1980). Tally’s other plays include Night Mail (1977), Hooters (1978), Word of Mouth (1978), Silver Linings (1983), Little Footsteps (1986), Taxi from Hell (1988), and The Gettysburg Sound Bite (1989). Tally’s other films include White Palace (1990), The Juror (1996), Before and After (1996), All the Pretty Horses (2000), and Red Dragon (2002). TAMIMENT PLAYHOUSE. Between 1921 and 1960, this resident summer theatre at Camp Tamiment, a resort camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania (near Bushkill), served as a proving ground for many popular Broadway, Hollywood, and television performers, including Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, Carol Burnett, Barbara Cook, Beatrice Arthur, Dick Shawn, Pat Carroll, Larry Kert, and others, as well as such writers and directors as Woody Allen, Jerry Bock, Fred Ebb, Joe Layton, Herbert Ross, Neil Simon,

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Sylvia Fine, Jerome Robbins, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Jonathan Tunick, and others. At its height, the playhouse, which was managed by Max Liebman, produced an original revue* each week, a feat that moved to early television when Liebman produced Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), which followed the same formula. TANDY, JESSICA (1909–1994). This acclaimed stage and screen actress was born in London, England, as Jessie Alice Tandy, daughter of Harry and Jessie Helen (Horspool) Tandy, a salesman and a teacher of mentally-handicapped children. On stage, her most famous role was as the first Blanche DuBois in the Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Tandy’s interpretation of Blanche, under Elia Kazan’s guidance, emphasized, as she later told writer Marguerite Steen, Blanche’s “intricate and complex background—her indomitable spirit—her innate tenderness and honesty—her untruthfulness or manipulating truth— her inevitable tragedy.” Critics and scholars particularly praised Tandy’s ability to give Blanche’s descent into madness a nobility, that her mastery of Blanche’s neuroses and hysteria were at once clinically real and theatrically majestic, and that she imbued the character with a memorable fragility against which Marlon Brando’s acclaimed performance as Stanley Kowalski could register with particular effectiveness. A Streetcar Named Desire won Tandy acclaim (and a Tony Award nomination) and stage stardom, but she was passed over for the role when the 1951 film was made because she had only had comparatively minor success in supporting roles in movies prior to this time, including The Seventh Cross (1944), The Valley of Decision (1945), The Green Years (1946), Dragonwyck (1946), and Forever Amber (1947). Tandy worked occasionally as a movie actress, but screen success eluded her during most of her career, although near the end of her life she became one of Hollywood’s most beloved character actresses, appearing most significantly in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), for which, at age 80, she became the oldest recipient ever to receive an Academy Award as Best Actress (she also won a Golden Globe Award for this performance). Tandy’s stage career was more distinguished, often in partnership with her husband, Hume Cronyn, who had directed her in Williams’s Portrait of a Madonna, a one-acter that suggested to Williams and Kazan that Tandy could play Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Cronyn and Tandy married in 1942, following her divorce from actor Jack Hawkins (they were married from 1932–1942). Tandy won Tony and a Drama Desk Awards playing opposite Cronyn in the two-character The Gin Game (1977) and in Foxfire (1983), the latter written by Cronyn and Susan Cooper. She was nominated for both awards for Rose (1981). Tandy was also nominated for a Tony for

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her final Broadway appearance in The Petition (1986) and was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 1994. Off-Broadway, Tandy won a Drama Desk Award appearing in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Not I in 1973, and she and Cronyn were presented with a Drama Desk Special Award in 1986. Tandy’s other major Broadway credits include Hilda Crane (1950), The Fourposter (1951), Madam, Will You Walk? (1953), The Honeys (1955), A Day By the Sea (1955), The Man in the Dog Suit (1958), Triple Play (1959), Five Finger Exercise (1959), The Physicists (1964), A Delicate Balance (1966), a 1970 revival of Camino Real, Home (1970), All Over (1971), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), and a 1983 revival of The Glass Menagerie. For her other screen appearances, Tandy was Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated for Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and received Golden Globe nominations for Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962) and The Story Lady (1991), and she appeared in The Birds (1963), Butley (1974), The World According to Garp (1982), The Bostonians (1984), Cocoon (1985), and Nobody’s Fool (1994). Tandy’s television appearances brought her an Emmy Award for the 1987 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Foxfire, recreating her stage role, and she was nominated for Emmys for a 1956 TV production of The Fourposter and the TV film To Dance with the White Dog (1993). Her TV appearances began in 1950 in the early days of live television. Tandy’s daughter, Tandy Cronyn, is an actress. TAVEL, RONALD (1936–2009). A New York-born actor, director, and writer, Tavel was educated at Brooklyn College and the University of Wyoming. He is best-known for his collaborations with Andy Warhol and his involvement with the Play-House of the Ridiculous, for whom he established the mantra, “We have passed beyond the Absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous.” As a writer, his over 40 plays include the Obie Awardwinning Their Town (1969) and Bigfoot (1973) and several films, including Kitchen (1965), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), Vinyl (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and Hedy (1966). TAYLOR, LAURETTE (1884–1946). Laurette Cooney was born in New York and made her stage debut in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as a child in vaudeville* billed as “La Belle Laurette.” She worked continually in various stock companies with her first husband, Charles A. Taylor,* whose surname she took as her stage name. Taylor achieved stage immortality in her signature role, the title character in Peg O’My Heart* (1912), written by her second husband, J. Hartley Manners,* a role she returned to frequently on

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tour, in stock, and in a 1925 film version. When Manners died in 1928, Taylor retired from the stage and descended into alcoholism. After a dark period, she returned to the Broadway stage in 1938 in the role of Mrs. Midget in a revival of Outward Bound, an acclaimed performance that set the stage for her final appearance, a legendary turn as Amanda Wingfield in the original production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945). Many contemporaries remembered it as the greatest performance they had ever seen. Following a year-long run in The Glass Menagerie, Taylor died in 1946. TAYLOR, REGINA (1960– ). This Dallas, Texas-born African American actress and playwright began acting at Southern Methodist University while studying there. She was the first black woman to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in 1986 and also appeared in revivals of Macbeth and As You Like It in 1986. Her many plays, which deal with issues of race and the experiences of black women, include Drowning Crow (2004), a free adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which was produced on Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club under Marion McClinton’s direction. Her many other plays include Watermelon Rinds (1993), Escape from Paradise (1994), Between the Lines (1995), Oo-Bla-Dee (1999), A Night in Tunisia (2000), Crowns (2002), The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove (2004), and Magnolia (2009). TAYLOR, SAMUEL (1912–2000). Born Samuel Albert Tanenbaum in Chicago, Illinois, Taylor worked as a play reader before scoring a Broadway success with The Happy Time (1950). Among his best-known plays is Sabrina Fair (1953), and he won a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination adapting it to the screen as Sabrina (1954). His other Broadway plays and musicals to which he contributed librettos include Nina (1951), The Pleasure of His Company (1958), First Love (1961), No Strings (1962), for which he received a Tony Award nomination, Beekman Place (1964), Avanti! (1968), and Legend (1976). TAYMOR, JULIE (1952– ). Noted for the diversity of her talents as director, designer, writer, and composer/lyricist, Taymor, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and studied at Oberlin College, spent much of the 1970s studying Asian art and puppetry and working in international theatres. Upon her return to the United States, Taymor worked in regional theatres and Off-Broadway, where she was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for scenery and costumes for The Green Bird (1996), which was revived on Broadway in 2000. On Broadway, Taymor received Tony Award nominations for both direction and scene design for Juan Darien (1996) and won

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Tonys for direction and costumes, and shared another for her contributions to the score, for The Lion King (1997). In late 2010, Taymor directed a new musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge. She was the first woman to receive a Tony for directing a musical. Typically, Taymor’s contributions to a theatre production include virtually every area involving visual elements, including puppets and masks, along with scenery, costumes, and direction, and she often involves herself in helping to create music for the production. She also directs films, including Titus (1999), Frida (2002), Across the Universe (2007), and The Tempest (2010). She was nominated for an Academy Award for her lyrics for “Burn It Blue,” a song featured in Frida, and she won an Emmy Award for her costumes for a television production of Oedipus Rex in 1993. TAZEWELL, PAUL (1964– ). A native of Akron, Ohio, Tazewell studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He worked as a costume designer for numerous regional theatres, and designed the Off-Broadway production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage (2002), for which he received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination. Tazewell has been nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway costume designs for three musicals, Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996), The Color Purple (2006), and In the Heights (2008). His other Broadway designs include a 1998 revival of On the Town, The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm (1999), Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002), Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam (2002), Drowning Crow (2004), a 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Caroline, or Change (2004), Hot Feet (2006), a 2009 revival of Guys and Dolls, and Memphis (2009). Tazewell has also designed for opera companies. TEA AND SYMPATHY. Robert Anderson’s three-act drama opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 30 September 1953 for 712 performances in a Playwrights’ Company production directed by Elia Kazan, with scene and lighting design by Jo Mielziner. John Kerr won a Tony Award as Tom Lee, a shy and sensitive student at a New England school, whose classmates suspect he may be a homosexual. Tom gets little support from the hypermasculine views of his father (John McGovern) and the school’s headmaster (Leif Erickson), but finds sympathy from Laura Reynolds (played by film star Deborah Kerr), the headmaster’s wife, who confronts her husband about his insecurity over his own masculinity and for his lack of concern for Tom’s welfare. In the play’s memorable final scene, Laura invites Tom’s sexual advances with the line, “Years from now—when you talk about this—and you will!—be kind.” Though the play’s stereotypical views of homosexuality

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have lessened its impact over time, Tea and Sympathy was widely produced and discussed in the 1950s for approaching a taboo topic. A 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli, preserves the performances of both Kerrs (who were not related) and Erickson. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE; MEN/MASCULINITY. TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON, THE. Robert Patrick’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning three-act comedy about a wily American United States Army captain and the similarly crafty Okinawan villager who set up a teahouse fronting as a bar during World War II opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on 15 October 1953 for 1,027 performances under the direction of Robert Lewis, with scene and lighting design by Peter Larkin and costumes by Noel Taylor. John Forsythe played Captain Fishby, who, with the assistance of Sakini (David Wayne in a Tony-winning performance), outsmarts his pompous superior, Colonel Wainwright Purdy III (Paul Ford), and opens a teahouse as a front for a bar, causing havoc while also exploring the values of democracy and free enterprise. Marlon Brando played Sakini in a 1956 movie version, receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination, as did his costars Glenn Ford, Machiko Kyô (repeating her stage performance), and Eddie Albert. Ford also appeared as Col. Purdy. A 1970 musical version, Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, was a failure. TECTONIC THEATRE PROJECT (TTP). A New York City-based theatre company founded by playwright and director Moisés Kaufman and Jeffrey LaHoste in 1991, it takes its name from the troupe’s interest in construction. Exploring how plays are made and how they might be made differently, and with an emphasis on the social, political, and human issues of the present, the TTP rose to prominence with a few distinctive projects, including the Obie Award-winning Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), The Laramie Project (2000), and Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prizewinning I Am My Own Wife (2004). The TTP has also produced plays by Samuel Beckett, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Sophie Treadwell,* and Naomi Iizuka. TTP company members include Steven Belber, Leigh Fondakowski, John McAdams, Andy Paris, Greg Pierotti, Barbara Pitts, and Kelli Simpkins. The TTP also created a sequel to The Laramie Project called The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2009), based on a revisit to Laramie, Wyoming, to interview the same people in the town a decade after the murder of gay college student, Matthew Shepard. The new play was presented nationwide on the anniversary of Shepard’s death to raise awareness of hate crimes. TELLER, RAYMOND. See JILLETTE, PENN AND TELLER, RAYMOND.

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TENNEY, JON (1961– ). Jonathan F. W. Tenney was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and educated at Vassar College and the Juilliard School before working as a stage actor in New York and regional theatres. On Broadway, Tenney debuted as a replacement in Biloxi Blues (1985) and played opposite Cherry Jones in a 1995 revival of The Heiress. Tenney appeared OffBroadway in The Substance of Fire (1991). He acted in numerous films, including You Can Count on Me (2000) and Rabbit Hole (2010), and television programs prior to becoming a regular on the series The Closer (2005–2009). Tenney was married to actress Teri Hatcher from 1994 to 2003. TENTH MAN, THE. Paddy Chayefsky’s Tony Award-nominated three-act play opened at the Booth Theatre on 5 November 1959 for 623 performances under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie and scene design by David Hays, both of whom were Tony-nominated. Nine old men gather in a synagogue to exorcise demons from Evelyn (Rissa Schwartz), a troubled young woman, but require a tenth man in order to proceed. They invited a passerby, Arthur (Donald Harron), and the exorcism vanquishes his troubles, but not Evelyn’s. However, Arthur has fallen in love with her and believes his love can cure her ills. The cast featured several notable character actors, including Jacob Ben-Ami,* George Voskovec, Jack Gilford, Lou Jacobi, and Gene Saks. The Tenth Man was revived on Broadway in 1989 under Ulu Grosbard’s direction, with a cast including Ron Rifkin, Peter Friedman, Bob Dishy, Jack Weston, Joseph Wiseman, and Phoebe Cates. TER-ARTUNIAN, ROUBEN (1920–1992). Born to Armenian parents in Tiflis, Russia, Ter-Artunian spent his childhood in Paris and Berlin prior to studying at the Reimann Art School in Berlin, the Hochschule for Musik in Berlin, and the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, also in Berlin, and the University of Vienna. He began his work as a costume designer with the Berlin Staatsoper in 1940 and designed for opera and dance companies prior to moving to Paris in 1947 and New York in 1951, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1957. He designed opera and dance productions in the United States and worked with the American Shakespeare Festival beginning in 1956, designing their productions of Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Duchess of Malfi, all seen on Broadway in 1957. Of the art of stage design, Ter-Artunian said that it is “an art which can transform an open, empty cube—the stage—into an arena of dramatic tension.” He adapted easily among genres and forms. Ter-Artunian’s numerous Broadway credits in scene and/or costume design include his Tony Award-winning costume designs for the musical Redhead (1959), and he was subsequently Tony-nominated for his costumes

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for Arturo Ui (1964) and for scene design for Advice & Consent (1961), A Passage to India (1962), and Goodtime Charley (1975). Ter-Artunian’s other Broadway credits include New Girl in Town (1957), Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958), Maria Golvin (1958), Donnybrook! (1961), Hot Spot (1963), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1964), The Deputy (1964), The Devils (1965), a 1966 revival of Ivanov, Exit the King (1968), I’m Solomon (1968), The Dozens (1969), All Over (1971), revivals of The Lady from the Sea and Days in the Trees in 1976, The Lady from Dubuque (1980), and Goodbye Fidel (1980), as well as Rudolf Nureyev’s 1977 Broadway appearance. Ter-Artunian won an Emmy Award for his art direction of Twelfth Night (1958) on the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV series and served as production designer on a few films, including The Loved One (1965) and Such Good Friends (1971). TERRY, MEGAN (1932– ). Born in Seattle, Washington, Terry became interested in theatre as a child, was educated at the University of Washington, and emerged in the 1960s as a playwright of the moment, emphasizing issues of the sociopolitical and sexual changes of the time. Her most noted work of that period, Viet Rock (1966), was produced by the Open Theatre and is regarded as the first rock musical and the first play to openly challenge American involvement in the Vietnam War. Terry began a long association with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where she developed avant-garde techniques in which actors could play multiple—and cross-gender—roles and time and place could shift quickly throughout a play. Terry’s other plays include Approaching Simone (1970), for which she won an Obie Award, The Dirt Boat (1955), Seascape (1955), Go Out and Move the Car (1955), New York Comedy: Two (1961), Eat at Joe’s (1963), When My Girlfriend Was Still All Flowers (1963), Calm Down Mother (1964), Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place (1965), The Gloaming (1965), Grooving (1972), Babes in the Bighouse (1974), The Pioneer (1974), Sleezing toward Athens (1977), Goona Goona (1979), Advances (1980), Family Talk (1986), Dinner’s in the Blender (1987), Headlights (1988), Retro (1988), Do You See What I’m Saying? (1990), and Breakfast Serial (1991). Of the merging of politics with theatre in her work, Terry has said, “The essential core of theatre is action. I believe in taking creative action. What else is there to do?” See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. TESICH, STEVE (1942–1996). Stojan Tesic was born in Uzice, Yugoslavia, and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1957. He grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, prior to attending Indiana University and Columbia University. He began writing plays, receiving a Drama Desk Award for

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Baba Goya (1973) and films, winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for Breaking Away (1979). The following year, his play Division Street (1980) opened on Broadway for a short run and was revived in 1987. Tesich’s The Speed of Darkness (1991) also played on Broadway, and his other plays include The Carpenters (1970), Lake of the Woods (1971), Gorky (1975), Passing Game (1977), Touching Bottom (1978), Square One (1990), The Road (1990), Baptismal (1990), On the Open Road (1992), and Arts & Leisure (1996). Tesich also wrote novels, television films, and screenplays for Eyewitness (1981), Four Friends (1981), The World According to Garp (1982), American Flyers (1985), and Eleni (1985). TEXAS TRILOGY, A. Preston Jones’s three related plays set in Bradleyville, Texas, were first performed in 1973 as separate works at the Down Center Stage in Dallas, Texas. The plays, The Oldest Living Graduate, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, and Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, were performed as a bill in 1974 at Playmarket Theatre and moved to Broadway through the interest of legendary theatrical agent Audrey Wood and director Alan Schneider. As A Texas Trilogy, it opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 23 September 1976 for 20 performances under Schneider’s direction (he won a Drama Desk Award) following a run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Despite its short run, the play won a Drama Desk Award and cast members Fred Gwynne, Diane Ladd, Ralph Roberts, Everett McGill, and Patricia Roe were nominated for Drama Desk Awards. The Oldest Living Graduate was filmed before a live audience for television in 1980 with a stellar cast, including Henry Fonda, Cloris Leachman, George Grizzard, Timothy Hutton, and John Lithgow winning Emmy Awards. THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON. Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning three-act drama of the reunion of a high school basketball team and their coach opened at the Booth Theatre on 14 September 1972 for 700 performances under the direction of A. J. Antoon (who won a Tony and Drama Desk Award), with scene design by Santo Loquasto (who was Tony-nominated), and costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge. The original cast, Charles Durning, Walter McGinn, Michael McGuire, Richard A. Dysart, and Paul Sorvino (who was Tony-nominated) shared a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. The aging, ailing Coach (Dysart) spends a long evening with four of the five players of his high school championship team. One of the players has consistently refused to return to the reunion, a fact that ultimately helps to reveal that the Coach encouraged the team to cheat to win. The unhappiness of their present lives appears to result from this major moral

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lapse in their youth. A film version, starring Robert Mitchum, Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, Bruce Dern, and Sorvino (repeating his stage role) appeared in 1982, and Sorvino directed a 1999 television production, playing the coach opposite Terry Kinney, Tony Shalhoub, Gary Sinise, and Vincent D’Onofrio as the players. The play was revived on Broadway in 2011. THEATRE ARTS.† Founded by critic/scholar Sheldon Cheney* in Detroit, Michigan, in 1916, Theatre Arts was a quarterly devoted to the art of theatre, but it evolved into a monthly under its subsequent editors, Edith J. R. Isaacs and Rosamund Gilder. Its founding was perfectly timed to capture all aspects of theatrical endeavor during the golden age of American drama, including the influence of modernist European theatre, the New Stagecraft,* the evolution of Broadway, and the emergence of a generation of significant American dramatists including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Robert E. Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller. Theatre Arts was lavishly illustrated and regularly included complete texts of new plays and musicals. Theatre Arts Monthly, as it became known, merged with The Stage, a magazine previously published by The Theatre Guild, in 1948, but changing times forced its discontinuation in 1964. See also PERIODICALS. THEATRE COLLECTIONS. Public and private libraries across the United States have amassed small and large collections of theatre materials since the late nineteenth century, including play scripts, promptbooks, programs, posters, photographs, correspondence, records of theatres and companies, recordings, and in more recent years, filmed and videotaped performances and oral histories. One of the earliest collections, at New York’s Players Club,* established the enduring value of preserving often ephemeral evidence of theatre performances and careers, but by the twenty-first century, major collections were housed at academic institutions, with the first such important collection established at Harvard University with the guidance of George Pierce Baker* in 1901. Other major collections are housed in the Hoblitzelle Library at the University of Texas at Austin, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the William Seymour Theatre Collection at Princeton University. Among the major collections with a focus on American theatre, and Broadway in particular, are the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Shubert Archive (housed at the Lyceum Theatre), and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The Library of Congress has significant holdings relevant to American

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theatre, and many small collections can also be found on college campuses, such as the Channing Pollock Theatre Collection at Howard University, and in regional libraries, including the Free Library in Philadelphia and the Curtis Theatre Collections in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among others. THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, INC. (TCG). Established in 1961 with the support of a Ford Foundation grant, TCG’s mission as a national organization is to foster communication among all areas of American theatre: professional, academic, and community. TCG boasts 700 member organizations, with 12,000 individual members. TCG also publishes the monthly American Theatre magazine and plays and theatre books, also serving its membership with the publication Artsearch, which announces employment opportunities in the field. Under the guidance of TCG executive director Teresa Eyring, TCG was presented with a special Tony Award in 2005. THEATRE DE LA JEUNE LUNE. Between 1978 and 2008, this French/ American theatre company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, won acclaim for its performances in the areas of clowning, mime, dance, and opera, beginning with its first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1978. The company produced as many as five productions per year at its height between 2001 and 2006, but a deep financial deficit brought about its closing in 2008. The company won a 2005 Regional Theatre Tony Award. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. THEATRE DEVELOPMENT FUND (TDF). TDF was founded in 1968 as a not-for-profit organization with the aim of fostering relations between Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres. By 2010 the TDF had subsidized 28 Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and over 800 productions of plays and musicals. TDF supports TKTS (Tickets) booths in New York, gives awards in various aspects of theatre, and otherwise aids in the development of an audience for theatre in New York. THEATRE FESTIVALS. Since the 1930s, but particularly after World War II, theatre festivals of various kinds have encouraged the diversity of theatre in America either by focusing specific topics or kinds of theatre or simply bringing together as many theatre troupes and artists as possible in one place at one time. Shakespeare festivals were among the first and most successful of these—by 2010, most states boasted at least one Shakespeare festival. Some of the most enduring include the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and

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the Utah Shakespeare Festival, among others. Many theatres are devoted to Shakespeare’s work (the Folger Shakespeare Theatre), but are not technically festivals, and the works of other playwrights, most notably George Bernard Shaw, have inspired festivals, but do not exclusively feature Shaw’s work. Also not technically festivals, some longtime summer theatres, including the Berkshire Theatre Festival and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, simply offer a season of varied plays for vacationing audiences. Annually, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., sponsors the American College Theatre Festival, bringing together productions selected from regions of the country to represent the best of college and university theatres. Major cities—most notably New York and Chicago—sponsor annual or occasional international theatre festivals, hosting theatre companies from many countries over the course of several weeks or months. “Fringe” festivals have also become commonplace, with avant-garde and experimental companies offering samplings of their work as part of an overarching event, and community and amateur theatre groups have also organized festivals with regularity. THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE (TFANA). Jeffrey Horowitz founded in 1979, and continues to serve as artistic director, for this organization whose purpose is to aid in the development of the performance of classical drama, particularly the works of Shakespeare. TFANA established a relationship with the Royal Shakespeare Company and arranged exchanges of performances between London and Off-Broadway, although TFANA does not have a permanent home. TFANA has established a program to bring Shakespeare’s plays to New York City’s public schools and hosts the American Directors Project, among other programs. THEATRE FOR THE NEW CITY (TNC). A leading Off-Off-Broadway theatre company founded in 1971, TNC has premiered major works by such dramatists as Sam Shepard, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child (1978) was first produced there—and other plays produced by TNC have won over 40 Obie Awards, including works by Richard Foreman, Charles Ludlam, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Miguel Piñero, Romulus Linney, Harvey Fierstein, Maria-Irene Fornés, Tom O’Horgan, Charles Busch, and Moisés Kaufman. TNC also hosts New York City performances by major theatre groups, including The Bread & Puppet Theatre and the Thunderbird American Indian Dance Company. THEATRE GUILD, THE.† A producing organization founded at the end of World War I, in part to replace the Washington Square Players,* which had closed due to the war. The Guild was established by its board members, in-

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cluding mostly theatrical practitioners such as Lawrence Langner, Philip Moeller, Rollo Peters,* Lee Simonson, and Helen Westley,* with Theresa Helburn and Dudley Digges joining later and becoming longtime members. The Guild’s first production, The Bonds of Interest (1919), was a succès d’estime, but the reception accorded its second production, John Ferguson (1919), inaugurated a remarkable era of producing that continues to the present, although the Guild’s significance declined after the 1950s. The Guild produced some of the most important American plays of the mid-twentieth century, including Liliom (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1922), Back to Methuselah (1922), R.U.R. (1922), The Adding Machine* (1923), Saint Joan (1923), The Guardsman (1924), They Knew What They Wanted* (1924), The Silver Cord* (1926), The Second Man* (1927), Porgy* (1927), Marco Millions* (1928), Strange Interlude* (1928), and Dynamo.* After 1930, the Guild continued to produce with great success. Among the important works they mounted were several plays by Eugene O’Neill, including Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah, Wilderness! (1933), Days without End (1934), and The Iceman Cometh (1946), and the first two groundbreaking musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). Other significant productions included Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Idiot’s Delight (1936) and There Shall Be No Night (1940), the acclaimed Paul Robeson revival of Othello in 1943, George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), and such varied plays as Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (1931), S. N. Behrman’s Biography (1932), Anderson’s Both Your Houses (1933), Mary of Scotland (1933), and Valley Forge (1934), Behrman’s End of Summer (1936), Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1939), William Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life (1939), and William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). THEATRE HALL OF FAME. See AMERICAN THEATRE HALL OF FAME. THEATRE OF THE RIDICULOUS. See RIDICULOUS THEATRICAL COMPANY, THE. THEATRE RHINOCEROS. Established in San Francisco, California, Theatre Rhinoceros is the oldest continuously producing professional gay theatre company in the United States. Founded by Allan B. Estes, Jr., its first production, Doris Wilson’s The West Street Gang, was staged in a leather bar, the

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Black and Blue. In its first few years of existence, “Rhino,” as it is known, produced works by Wilson, Robert Patrick, Lanford Wilson, Terrence McNally, C. D. Arnold, Robert Chesley, Cal Youmans, Philip Rea, Dan Curzon, Pat Bond, Jane Chambers, Adele Prandini, and Harvey Fierstein (including early performances of the one-act plays that became Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy) and moved to its present location at the Redstone Building in the Mission District. In 1984, Estes died of AIDS, and Rhino produced The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival, which brought the theatre international attention and several awards, as well as inspiring a 1987 PBS-TV documentary film. Following Estes’s death, Kristine Gannon took over artistic directorship until 1987, underscoring Rhino’s commitment to both gay and lesbian theatre. Brief periods of leadership by Charles Solomon and Kenneth R. Dixon in the late 1980s expanded the theatre’s mission to focus on interracial productions. In 1990, playwright Adele Prandini became artistic director, and the theatre moved into a period of significant diversity, bringing in the work of Latino and Asian American artists as well. Doug Holsclaw became artistic director in 1999, followed by John Fisher in 2002. THEATRE ROW. Located on West 41st and 42nd Streets, this collection of renovated historic theatres in the Times Square area of New York, including the Acorn Theatre, Beckett Theatre, Harold Clurman Theatre, Kirk Theatre, Lion Theatre, and Studio Theatre, is owned and operated by the 42nd Street Development Corporation, under general manager Erika Feldman. Numerous Off-Broadway companies make use of these theatre spaces and supporting rehearsal studios. THEATRE UNION, THE. Formed in 1932, this not-for-profit company with a mission to produce socially relevant theatre with a leftist political bent at popular prices, presented works at Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (CRC), including George Sklar and Albert Maltz’s Peace on Earth (1933), Maltz’s Black Pit (1935), Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring (1935), adapted from Grace Lumpkin’s novel To Make My Bread, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother (1935), based on a novel by Maxim Gorky, with music by Hanns Eisler, Jerome Moross, and Alex North, Victor Wolfson’s Bitter Stream (1936), adapted from Ignazio Silone’s novel, Fontamara, and John Howard Lawson’s Marching Song (1937). The company disbanded in 1937 due to short runs of its last productions. THEATRE WORLD. Edited by Daniel Blum, this heavily illustrated annual series surveys the year’s theatre activity, including production information. The series began in 1944–1945 with a focus on Broadway, but has increas-

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ingly expanded to include Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions, as well as activity on the road* and in regional theatres. John Willis subsequently took over editorship following Blum’s death and continued in that role for many years. Each production is represented by at least one photograph, although plot synopses are not included, and short biographies of theatre personnel and obituaries are featured as well. The Theatre World Awards are presented annually to talented newcomers appearing in breakthrough roles in New York theatre. THEATRE WORLD AWARDS. See THEATRE WORLD. THEATRE X. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this company, which formed in 1969, began as a workshop at the University of Milwaukee before expanding to become a professional company. It established a resident company and initially featured improvisatory, experimental productions in the style of The Living Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski, but ultimately chose to produce more diverse works (including 60 new plays and a total of 180 productions). The theatre folded in 2004 due to significant internal strife. One of its productions, John Schneider’s A Fierce Longing, won a 1978 Obie Award for scene and lighting design, and the theatre produced tours across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Willem Dafoe had been a company member early in the theatre’s existence. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. THEATRES. From 1930 essentially one type of theatre space was prevalent in the United States and had been so since the first permanent American theatres were built in the eighteenth century. These were proscenium theatres of various sizes, each featuring a proscenium arch framing an invisible “fourth wall” separating the audience from the action of the play. With the rise of realism in the late nineteenth century, such theatres served well in support of the creation of the illusion of a detailed realistic world for a play and, with the addition of elevator stages and other technological developments, the proscenium stage continued to dominate. Broadway theatres were exclusively proscenium spaces and continue to be so into the twenty-first century, although occasionally a major Broadway theatre will be rearranged to suit thrust, arena, or environmental staging concepts, such as in a hit 1974 revival of the musical Candide for which the Broadway Theatre was essentially gutted to permit the use of runways and staging areas spread through the entire auditorium. A Broadway theatre is required to seat at least 500 people; in 2010, the following 40 theatres were in operation: Ambassador Theatre, American Airlines Theatre, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Belasco Theatre, Booth Theatre, Broadhurst Theatre,

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Broadway Theatre, Circle in the Square Theatre, Cort Theatre Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, George Gershwin Theatre, John Golden Theatre, Helen Hayes Theatre, Hilton Theatre, Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Imperial Theatre, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, Walter Kerr Theatre, Longacre Theatre, LuntFontanne Theatre, Lyceum Theatre, Majestic Theatre, Marquis Theatre, Minskoff Theatre, Music Box Theatre, Nederlander Theatre, New Amsterdam Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Theatre, Palace Theatre, Richard Rodgers Theatre, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, Shubert Theatre, Neil Simon Theatre, Stephen Sondheim Theatre, St. James Theatre, Studio 54, August Wilson Theatre, and Winter Garden Theatre. Some Broadway theatres have been renamed—in many cases more than once—with the names of more recent theatre greats like Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim, and August Wilson replacing nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury stage figures such as Henry Miller* or Billy Rose whose names once adorned theatres. Many Broadway theatres are magnificent architectural landmarks. For example, the elegant New Amsterdam Theatre, built in 1903 by architects Henry B. Herts* and Hugh Tallant, and producers A. L. Erlanger* and Marcus Klaw,* for years hosted the annual Ziegfeld* Follies and was considered a showplace. The theatre was neglected for many years after the late 1930s, but Disney Theatrical Productions took it over in the early 1990s for a major renovation that restored the theatre’s unique aspects and made it, once again, a viable Broadway theatre. Other theatres have been less fortunate and between the 1960s and 1980s; a few were torn down or converted for other uses. Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres have frequently been developed from existing spaces such as abandoned movie theatres, garages, schools, storefronts, and churches. Regional and academic theatres have proven to be among the most unique theatre spaces designed and constructed since the mid-twentieth century, many breaking away from the longstanding proscenium model. Some have been constructed in the thrust or arena style, with audience sections on three sides of the acting area or, in some cases, completely surrounding the acting area. These theatres also make use of flexible “black box” spaces, either as a main theatre space or as second or third spaces in a theatre complex. Many regional and university theatres boast multiple spaces of various sizes and configurations; among “cutting edge” regional theatre buildings is the new Guthrie Theatre, opened in 2006, featuring three major theatre spaces: an 1,100-seat thrust space echoing their original theatre, a 700-seat proscenium theatre, and a flexible black-box space. The complex also features dressing rooms, offices, and meeting and rehearsal spaces, as well as various dining options, shops, and galleries, all designed to enhance the theatregoing experience.

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THEATREWORKS/USA (TW/USA). Established in 1961, this prolific not-for-profit company has created and toured theatre works across the United States aimed at young audiences, becoming one of the most honored theatre organizations in the country, recognized with Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards, among others. Annually, TW/USA tours 16 productions from a repertoire including 117 plays and musicals for young audiences. The company, under the supervision of artistic director Barbara Pasternack and managing director Ken Arthur, also offers summer theatre and a guest artist roster, including actors, storytellers, puppeteers, poets, and magicians. The company’s alumni includes F. Murray Abraham, Henry Winkler, Judy Kuhn, Jerry Zaks, Michael Mayer, Roger Bart, Chuck Cooper, John Glover, and many others. See also CHILDREN’S THEATRE; REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT; REPERTORY THEATRE. THERE SHALL BE NO NIGHT. Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prizewinning three-act drama opened on 29 April 1940 for 115 performances in a Playwrights’ Company production directed by Alfred Lunt, with scene design by Richard Whorf and costumes by Valentina. Lunt played Finnish Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen opposite his wife, Lynn Fontanne, playing Valkonen’s American wife Miranda. They are convinced the Russians will not invade Finland, but their son Erik, played by a young Montgomery Clift, joins the Army when war breaks out and Valkonen joins the medical corps with a rueful sense of the meaning of the conflict. Thomas Gomez, Sydney Greenstreet, Phyllis Thaxter, and Whorf were in the supporting cast. THIS. New York Times critic Charles Isherwood described Melissa James Gibson’s comedy as the “best new play” to open Off-Broadway in 2009, “moving, deeply funny and verbally adroit” in its exploration of marital infidelity and social mores in the early twenty-first century. The play opened in December 2009 in a Playwrights Horizons production directed by Daniel Aukin. The cast featured Julianne Nicholson, Louis Cancelmi, Eisa Davis, Glenn Fitzgerald, and Darren Pettie. THOMAS, RICHARD (1951– ). Richard Earl Thomas was born in New York, the child of professional dancers. As a child actor, Thomas appeared on television, in films, and on Broadway as a replacement in the role of one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sons in Sunrise at Campobello (1958) and in a 1963 revival of Strange Interlude,* The Playroom (1965), and Everything in the Garden (1967). He won acclaim as “John Boy” Walton in the popular television series, The Waltons (1972–1978), which brought him an Emmy

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Award and, from childhood, he appeared in numerous television programs and occasional films. As an adult, Thomas returned to Broadway to replace Christopher Reeve in 5th of July (1980) and also appeared in a 1986 revival of The Front Page,* Democracy (2004), A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005), and Race (2009). He has also developed a distinguished career in regional theatres, appearing at the Hartford Stage in revivals of Hamlet in 1987, Peer Gynt in 1989, Richard II in 1994, and Tiny Alice in 1996. He also appeared in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It in 2005, at the Primary Stage in Terrence McNally’s The Stendhal Syndrome (2004), and in a national tour of a 2006 revival of 12 Angry Men. THOMPSON, SADA (1929– ). Sada Carolyn Thompson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, but raised in New Jersey and educated at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she worked as an actress in regional theatre. A versatile actress able to move easily from classical to contemporary roles, and from comedy to drama, Thompson debuted Off-Broadway in Under Milkwood (1955) and also appeared in early live television in the 1950s. Off-Broadway, Thompson won a 1957 Drama Desk Award for The River Line and a revival of The Misanthrope, and she won again for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1970), which also brought her an Obie Award, and Twigs (1972), for which she also won a Tony Award. Thompson’s other Off-Broadway roles include U.S.A. (1956), Save Me a Place at Forest Lawn/The Last Minstrel (1963), a 1964 revival of Othello, An Evening for Merlin Finch (1968), and Real Estate (1987). Thompson’s Broadway roles include The Carefree Tree (1955), Juno (1959), a 1965 revival of Tartuffe, Johnny No-Trump (1967), The Death of Bessie Smith/The American Dream (1968), Happy Days (1968, Saturday Sunday Monday (1974), and Any Given Day (1993). She was nominated for an Emmy Award nine times, winning for the television series Family (1976–1980) in 1978, which also brought her three Golden Globe Award nominations. Thompson received an Emmy nomination as Mrs. Gibbs in a 1977 television production of Our Town and also played as Mrs. Antrobus in a live television broadcast of a 1983 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth from the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California. THOMPSON, TAZEWELL (1948– ). Born Tazewell Alfred Thompson, Jr. in New York, Thompson was educated at the Actors Company School. He taught high school drama. Working as a director, playwright, and actor, Thompson began his career in The National Health (1974) and Checking Out (1976) on Broadway prior to becoming associate artistic director of the Arena Stage from 1988–1991 and artistic director of Syracuse Stage from

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1992–1995. He was artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse from 2005 to 2008 and wrote the play Constant Star (2001) about the life of Ida B. Wells, which premiered there. Thompson’s direction of a television production of Porgy and Bess in 2002 brought him an Emmy Award nomination. THREE DAYS OF RAIN. Richard Greenberg’s drama, set in a Manhattan loft in 1960 and 1995, was first produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1997 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize prior to a Broadway production, which opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in a Shubert Organization production on 19 April 2006 for 70 performances under the direction of Joe Mantello, with Tony Award-nominated scene and costume designs by Santo Loquasto and Tony-nominated lighting by Paul Gallo. The major attraction was the Broadway debut of film star Julia Roberts in the central roles of Nan, who meets with her brother, Walter (Paul Rudd) and childhood friend, Pip (Bradley Cooper), to divide the possessions of their deceased fathers, both partners in a celebrated architectural company. As they attempt to sort out the conflicts of the previous generations, the play shifts to the interactions of the two architects and the woman in their lives in 1960 during a highly charged “three days of rain” during which their destinies were decided. Roberts received mixed reviews from critics, but the limited run brought many of her cinema fans to the theatre. THREE MEN ON A HORSE. This slight three-act farce, coauthored by John Cecil Holm and George Abbott, who also directed, centers on Erwin Trowbridge, a milquetoast greeting card poet with an uncanny gift as a racetrack tout. It opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 30 January 1935 for 835 performances. Erwin, played in the original production by William Lynn, is secretly aware of his magical ability to forecast winners at the racetrack, but his conscience will not allow him to exploit his talent despite the fact that his lack of monetary success—and his more general lack of confidence—may cost him the love of his wife, Audrey (Joyce Arling). Erwin’s depression over his wife’s annoyance sends him to the local bar for a few drinks, leading to a gang of small-time hoods becoming aware of Erwin’s predictive abilities, which they decide to exploit. Innumerable revivals on both the professional and amateur stages have made the play a minor classic, including three Broadway revivals, in 1942 (with Lynn again playing Erwin), 1969 (with Jack Gilford as Erwin), and 1993 (starring Tony Randall). A 1936 film version featured character actor Frank McHugh as Erwin, but only found mild success, although a 1970 French remake, Trois hommes sur un cheval, directed by Marcel Moussy,

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won international approval. In 1941, Three Men on a Horse was adapted to the musical form as Banjo Eyes, a loosely constructed vehicle for stage legend Eddie Cantor, who made his final Broadway appearance as Erwin, singing the popular “We’re Having a Baby” and some patriotic interpolations as America’s involvement in World War II began. Another musical adaptation, Let It Ride! (1961), starring George Gobel as Erwin, was only a modest success. THREE TALL WOMEN. Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-, New York Drama Critics Circle-, and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning examination of three women (or three stages of one woman’s life) opened at Vienna’s English Theatre in Austria on 14 June 1991 before its Off-Broadway premiere at the Vineyard Theatre, where it opened on 27 January 1994 for 47 performances before moving to the Promenade Theatre on 13 April 1994 for an additional 582 performances. Albee described the play as an “exorcism” of his adoptive mother while critics heralded the play as a return to form for Albee, whose plays since the 1970s had failed to excite critical or commercial interest. New York Times critic Ben Brantley called Three Tall Women a “startlingly personal work” and “essential viewing for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped this influential writer.” Beginning with a 92-year-old character identified only as A, played by Myra Carter (who won Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for her performance), Albee explores her arrogance and disorientation as she sinks into Alzheimer’s disease and struggles to retain control of her life and a prodigal son (Michael Rhodes) with whom she is locked in an eternal battle of wills. Two younger women, B and C (played by Marian Seldes. who moved into the role of A during the Off-Broadway run, and Jordan Baker), seem to be A at earlier times in her life, providing different shadings on the elderly A. THREE’S A FAMILY. Phoebe and Henry Ephron’s wartime comedy opened at the Longacre Theatre on 5 May 1943 for 497 performances under Henry Ephron’s direction, with scene designs by Stewart Chaney. A young wife, played by Katharine Bard, quarrels with her husband and returns to her parents’ small apartment with her new baby. She is forced to share the limited space with her parents, brother and his pregnant wife. Elderly Dr. Bartel (William Wadsworth) comes out of retirement because of the wartime shortage of doctors and despite being nearly blind and often confused, he helps the characters sort out their disagreements. A 1944 movie version, with a slight title change to Three Is a Family, starred Marjorie Reynolds, Charles Ruggles, and Fay Bainter.

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THURBER, JAMES (1894–1961). A native of Columbus, Ohio, James Grover Thurber studied at Ohio State University and spent some time as a code clerk for the State Department before working as a reporter and columnist for the Columbus Dispatch. He moved to Greenwich Village in 1925 and took a job with the New York Evening Post before becoming a regular contributor and cartoonist for the New Yorker. Thurber dabbled in theatre, and with Elliott Nugent he scripted the popular comedy The Male Animal (1940), and his stories and drawings inspired the hit revue* comedy A Thurber Carnival (1960), which featured an ensemble cast, including Tom Ewell, Paul Ford, Peggy Cass, and Alice Ghostley under the direction of Burgess Meredith. The Broadway production won a special Tony Award. TILLINGER, JOHN (1939– ). Born in Tabriz, Iran, Tillinger was raised in England, where he was trained at the Bristol Old Vic before becoming an actor, appearing in London and on Broadway in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1968), revivals of Othello in 1970 and Hay Fever in 1970, and The Changing Room (1973). He largely abandoned acting for directing in the 1970s and established himself with stints at the Long Wharf Theatre and Off-Broadway. Tillinger was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1982) and It’s Only a Play (1986), and nominated for Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Awards for his direction of a 1986 revival of Loot. He has won two Lucille Lortel Awards for his direction of Love Letters (1989) and The Lisbon Traviata (1991). Tillinger’s other Broadway directing credits include Solomon’s Child (1982), The Golden Age (1984), Corpse! (1986), Sweet Sue (1988), revivals of Born Yesterday in 1989, Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), The Price in 1992, and Three Men on a Horse in 1993, Broken Glass (1994), revivals of Inherit the Wind in 1996 and The Sunshine Boys in 1997, Getting and Spending (1998), a 1999 revival of Night Must Fall, Judgment at Nuremberg (2001), Say Goodnight, Gracie (2002), and a 2005 revival of Absurd Person Singular. Tillinger, who has directed many of Terrence McNally’s plays Off-Broadway, was married to actress Dorothy Lyman from 1972–1977. TIME OF THE CUCKOO, THE. Arthur Laurents’s bittersweet romantic play opened at the Empire Theatre on 15 October 1952 for 263 performances under the direction of Harold Clurman, with scene and lighting design by Ben Edwards and costumes by Helene Pons. Shirley Booth, in a Tony Award-winning performance, starred as Leona Samish, an unmarried secretary nearing middle age, who travels to Venice where she reluctantly becomes involved in an affair with Renato Di Rossi (Dino Diluca), an un-

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happily married shopkeeper. Despite her feelings for Renato, Leona sadly ends the relationship and returns to the United States. Geraldine Brooks, Jane Rose, and Daniel Reed were among the supporting cast. The play was adapted into director David Lean’s Summertime (1955), starring Katharine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi (with Rose repeating her Broadway role), and Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim adapted it as a musical, Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965). TIME OF YOUR LIFE, THE. This deeply humanistic three-act drama by William Saroyan opened on 25 October 1939 in a Theatre Guild production at the Booth* Theatre, where it ran for 185 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize, which Saroyan controversially rejected. The play has since become regarded as one of the most enduring plays of the 1930s. Coproduced on Broadway by Eddie Dowling, who played Saroyan’s protagonist Joe, a warm-hearted, generous man who encourages his own eccentricities and those around him in Nick’s bar, the play is set in a rundown San Francisco establishment populated by a varied assortment of characters, some mysterious, who reflect on life as Joe observes their individual struggles to realize their dreams and to battle their fears and imperfect natures. Joe helps Harry, a struggling dancer, find work at Nick’s and engineers a pained romance between his good-natured assistant Tom and Kitty Duval, an unhappy prostitute. Kit Carson, either an old Indian scout or a madman, spins tales of an imaginative past as a gunman, and proves it by killing Blick, a vicious, corrupt cop who regularly bullies the bar’s habitués, particularly the women of the street. When Willie, a pinball player, wins the jackpot, Joe philosophizes on his view of existence: “In the time of your life, live, so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.” The Time of Your Life was filmed with James Cagney as Joe in 1948, but the screen version failed to capture the elusive spirit of Saroyan’s philosophical musings, illusory theatricality, and moral idealism. A 1970s’ production of John Houseman’s The Acting Company featuring Patti LuPone won more approval when it was filmed for television. Among many revivals, a 2002 production staged by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and directed by Tina Landau won enthusiastic reviews. TIME OUT FOR GINGER. Ronald Alexander lightweight three-act comedy opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 26 November 1952 for 248 performances under Shepard Traube’s direction, with scene and lighting design by Eldon Elder. Melvyn Douglas starred as Howard Carol, a banker who makes an

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admirable speech defending freedom of expression, only to have it tested by his three daughters, particularly his youngest, Ginger (Nancy Malone), who tries out for the high school football team, winning the big game and setting off a national news feeding frenzy. The cast also included Conrad Janis, Lois Smith, and Philip Loeb. A television adaptation was broadcast in 1962, and the play was popular with stock companies and community theatres. TIMES SQUARE. Originally known as Longacre Square, this area of Manhattan was renamed in honor of the New York Times building, a huge structure necessitating a subway stop to this part of the city in the early twentieth century. The area became synonymous with Broadway theatre as the rowdier amusements that had been part of Longacre Square’s rambunctious history receded and the area was revitalized. Many theatres were built in the immediate vicinity. By World War I, it had become the center of New York’s theatrical activity. Times Square remains the geographic center of the Broadway community into the twenty-first century, with traffic now blocked off for several blocks to allow pedestrians to move more freely among the theatres, restaurants, and other amusements, including a busy TKTS (Tickets) booth in the area. TINY ALICE. Edward Albee’s Tony Award-nominated and controversial three-act play opened at the Billy Rose Theatre on 29 December 1964 for 167 performances under the direction of Alan Schneider, who was Tonynominated, with scene design by William Ritman, lighting by Martin Aronstein, and costumes by Mainbocher. Irene Worth won a Tony for her performance in the title role, a woman wanting to give a fortune to the Catholic Church, while a lawyer and a Cardinal display an intense rivalry. John Gielgud (who was Tony-nominated) played the Cardinal’s celibate secretary, Brother Julian, who is implicated in a Faustian battle between the Cardinal and Alice and her lawyer. Critics and audiences were divided over the visual and verbal metaphors of the play, many finding it incomprehensible. Under the direction of William Ball, Tiny Alice was revived for 10 performances in 1969 as part of a three-play repertory produced by American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), and New York’s Second Stage revived the play in 2000 starring Richard Thomas and Laila Robins under the direction of Mark Lamos. TIPTON, JENNIFER (1937– ). Born in Columbus, Ohio, Tipton studied at Cornell University, where she became interested in dance and studied with lighting designer Thomas Skelton. She designed for the dance company of Paul Taylor and developed a long-term creative relationship with Twyla

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Tharp, beginning in 1965. Tipton also designed for such diverse choreographers as Robert Joffrey, Jerome Robbins, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and began to design for theatre with the New York Shakespeare Festival and for Broadway. She was able to adapt a striking style to a wide range of genres, from classics to musicals. Tipton won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for a 1977 revival of The Cherry Orchard, another Tony for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), and was Tony-nominated for Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and La Bête (1991). Tipton won additional Drama Desk Awards for for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977) and revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Waiting for Godot, both in 1989. Tipton also received Drama Desk nominations for Lunch Hour (1981), Whoopi Goldberg (1985), and a 1986 revival of Hamlet, Worstward Ho! (1987). Among Tipton’s numerous Broadway designs are Rex (1976), revivals of Happy End and Agamemnon in 1977, Runaways (1978), a 1981 revival of The Pirates of Penzance, Sophisticated Ladies (1981), The Wake of Jamey Foster (1982), a 1982 revival of Alice in Wonderland, Hurlyburly (1984), Singin’ in the Rain (1985), revivals of Ah, Wilderness! in 1988 and In the Summer House in 1993, James Joyce’s The Dead (2000), and Wrong Mountain (2000). In 1998, Tipton received an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence. TKTS BOOTH (TICKETS). The first of these walk-up ticket booths, which are now prevalent in both New York and London, sell discounted theatre tickets on the day of the performance. It was opened in Duffy Square by the Theatre Development Fund in 1973 and two others— one in Lower Manhattan (to replace the one previously opened in the World Trade Center until its destruction on 11 September 2001) and the other in downtown Brooklyn— soon followed. Tickets are discounted by up to 25–50 percent of their face value on the days of the performance. First known as the Half-Price Ticket Booth, the name was subsequently changed to TKTS Booth. TOBACCO ROAD. Jack Kirkland’s three-act drama based on Erskine Caldwell’s novel of the sordid lives of poverty-stricken Georgia farmer Jeeter Lester and his family opened at the Theatre Masque on 4 December 1933 for a phenomenal run of 3,182 performances, closing in 1941 after having moved to two subsequent theatres, the 48th Street Theatre and the Forrest Theatre. Directed by Anthony Brown with scene design by Robert Redington Sharpe, Henry Hull played Jeeter, with Margaret Wycherly in support as his wife, Ada. Hull was well-received in the role, but when he left the production he was replaced by James Barton, who won greater kudos for his performance as the ignorant, amoral sharecropper whose life is redeemed, to some

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extent, by his faith in the land providing sustenance despite the abject poverty his family faces. Tobacco Road was revived on Broadway in 1942, 1943, and 1950, and a somewhat expurgated and more comic film version directed by John Ford was released in 1941. There is little about the play that explains its extraordinary success in the 1930s and although the play is occasionally revived in regional and university theatre, it is not regarded among the finest dramas of the era. TOILET, THE. A one-act drama by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) first produced in 1964 at St. Mark’s Playhouse, the play generated controversy over what some deemed as obscenity in its language and content, not to mention its view of racial conflict in America. The play dramatizes a gang of African American high school students who beat a white homosexual boy for writing a love letter to their leader and, like other Jones works of the period, examined racial tensions and the struggle of a sensitive individual, often crippled by self-hatred, to survive within the given social code. The Toilet was published with other Jones works in 1967 and has been performed widely and is acknowledged as an early play to address homosexuality in a serious vein. See also GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. TOMEI, MARISA (1964– ). A native of Brooklyn, New York, born to an Italian American family, she won an Academy Award playing Joe Pesci’s Brooklynese girlfriend in My Cousin Vinny (1992), but has also demonstrated a great diversity in her acting on screen and stage. Tomei began her studies at Boston University, but transferred to New York University while also acting on the TV soap opera, As the World Turns. While making numerous film and television appearances, Tomei appeared Off-Broadway in Daughters (1986), winning a Theatre World Award, and also appeared in Tony Kushner’s Slavs! (1994) and in Dark Rapture (1996). On Broadway, Tomei has appeared in revivals of Wait Until Dark in 1998 and Salome in 2003, and she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Top Girls (2008). Aside from her Oscar win, Tomei also received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for In the Bedroom (2001) and The Wrestler (2008). Her other film appearances include Chaplin (1992), Untamed Heart (1993), The Paper (1994), Alfie (2004), and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). TOMLIN, LILY (1939– ). Mary Jean Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a factory worker and a nurse’s aide. Educated at Wayne State University, Tomlin found her way into performing there and began doing stand-up comedy in Detroit nightclubs before moving to New York. She was successful enough to appear on television beginning in the mid-1960s, including as

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a regular on The Garry Moore Show in 1966–1967. She won fame on the Rowan and Martin Laugh-In (1960–1973) television series where her facility at playing multiple characters was showcased. Laugh-In brought her an Emmy Award nomination. Tomlin is best known for her film and television appearances, but she won a special Tony Award in 1977 following her hit Broadway show, Appearing Nightly, and she won a Best Actress Tony and a Drama Desk Award for playing more than a dozen characters in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985), written by her longtime partner, Jane Wagner. The show’s run at the Plymouth Theatre racked up 391 performances. In 2000, Tomlin appeared in a revival of the show for 184 performances. Tomlin was nominated for an Academy Award for Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and received Golden Globe nominations for Nashville, The Late Show (1977), All of Me (1984), and shared an ensemble award for Short Cuts (1993). Her other films include And the Band Played On (1993), Tea with Mussolini (1999), I Heart Huckabees (2004), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Among a dozen additional Emmy nominations, Tomlin won for Lily (1973), The Lily Tomlin Special (1975), The Paul Simon Special (1977), Lily: Sold Out (1981), and she won a Daytime Emmy for The Magic School Bus (1994). TOMORROW AND TOMORROW. Philip Barry’s three-act domestic drama set in Indiana opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 13 January 1931 for 206 performances under Gilbert Miller’s direction. Psychology professor Nicholas Hay (Herbert Marshall) falls in love with Eve Redman (Zita Johann), a colleague’s wife, who refuses to run away with him. Years later, Eve reestablishes contact with Hay when her son, who has been in a traumatic accident, needs help and Hay may be the only one with the skills to cure him. Hay learns from Eve that the boy is his son, but she remains loyal to her husband, who is unaware the boy is not his son. The cast also included Osgood Perkins, John T. Doyle, Drew Price, and Harvey Stephens. Ruth Chatterton and Paul Lukas starred in a 1932 film version. TOMORROW THE WORLD. James Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau’s threeact drama set on a Midwest college campus opened in a Shubert production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 14 April 1943 for 500 performances under the direction of Elliott Nugent. Ralph Bellamy played Michael Frame, a college professor who takes in his German nephew, Emil (Skip Homeier), a boy brainwashed with Nazi values and spewing hate-filled rants. With the aid of his wife (Dorothy Sands) and a kind schoolteacher, played by Shirley Booth, the boy is slowly rehabilitated. Homeier, Fredric March, Betty Field, and

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Agnes Moorehead appeared in the 1944 film version directed by Leslie Fenton, with its title changed to Tomorrow, the World! TONE, FRANCHOT (1906–1968). A New York native born Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone at Niagara Falls who attended Cornell University, Tone gave up working in his family’s electrochemical business to try acting. On Broadway from the late 1920s, Tone appeared in three flops, The Belt (1927), Centuries (1927), and The International (1928), before scoring a success as Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence (1928). His subsequent successes on Broadway included Hotel Universe (1930), Pagan Lady (1930), and Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) before he became involved with The Group Theatre, for whom he appeared in The House of Connelly (1931), Night Over Taos (1932), and Success Story (1932). In 1932, he went to Hollywood and became a moderately popular leading man and married actress Joan Crawford in 1935 (their marriage ended in 1939). He returned to The Group and Broadway to appear in The Gentle People (1939) and while continuing to appear in movies, and subsequently television, Tone made periodic returns to Broadway for The Fifth Column (1940), Hope for the Best (1945), Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), a 1955 revival of The Time of Your Life, A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957), Mandingo (1961), a 1963 revival of Strange Interlude,* and Bicycle Ride to Nevada (1963). Among Tone’s film credits are his Academy Award-nominated appearance in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), as well as The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Dangerous (1935), Suzy (1936), They Gave Him a Gun (1937), Quality Street (1937), Advise & Consent (1962), In Harm’s Way (1965), and Mickey One (1965). TONY AWARDS. Established in 1947 and named in honor of producer, director, and actress Antoinette Perry, whose recent death following her leadership of wartime efforts of the American Theatre Wing (ATW) moved the theatrical community, the first “Tony Award” ceremony was held on 6 April 1947 in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and broadcast on radio. Brock Pemberton served as host, and 11 Tonys were presented in seven categories, plus eight special awards. Among the recipients were Arthur Miller as author of All My Sons and Kurt Weill as composer of Street Scene,* with acting awards to José Ferrer, Ingrid Bergman, Patricia Neal, and David Wayne, with directing honors to Elia Kazan; choreographers Agnes de Mille and Michael Kidd were also recipients. In the design areas, David Folk and Lucinda Ballard were acknowledged and among the special awards, Broadway restaurateur Vincent Sardi and critic Burns Mantle were chosen.

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The ATW’s goal in presenting Tonys was to honor excellence in the theatre, specifically Broadway, but once the Tonys were broadcast annually on national television (New York local TV broadcast the ceremonies beginning in 1956) in 1967, the show became an essential advertising tool for Broadway, allowing national audiences to glimpse songs, scenes, and stars from the year’s outstanding productions. Categories evolved over the years, with straight dramas and musicals more clearly separated. In 2009, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage and the musical Billy Elliot won Best Play and Best Musical respectively. See also AWARDS. TONY ‘N’ TINA’S WEDDING. The Artificial Intelligence comedy troupe created this interactive play set at a traditional (and stereotypical) Italian American wedding reception in which audience members become the guests. The play opened at Waverly Place and St. John’s Church on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in New York on 14 February 1988 and has become a cottage industry, spawning productions in major cities across the United States and in international theatres. The play was originally conceived by Mark Nasser and Nancy Cassaro, the original Tony and Tina, while they were undergraduates at Hofstra University. With the Artificial Intelligence troupe, their idea evolved into the play. A screen version directed by Roger Paradiso was released in 2004. TOOTH OF CRIME, THE. Sam Shepard’s drama with music tracking a near-gladitorial combat between aging rock singer Hoss and his young rival Crow premiered at the Open Space Theatre in London on 17 July 1972 under the direction of Charles Marowitz. The play made its American debut at New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre on 11 November 1972 with Frank Langella as Hoss, followed by a 1973 production by The Performance Group directed by Richard Schechner. The La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club produced a well-received revival in 2006 directed by George Ferencz with Ray Wise and Nick Denning. New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted of the 2006 revival that The Tooth of Crime is “perhaps the best American play on the cancerous nature of fame.” The Performance Group production was filmed for the Whitney Museum. TOPDOG/UNDERDOG. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre, where it opened on 26 July 2001 under the direction of George C. Wolfe, with scene design by Riccardo Hernandez, lighting by Scott Zielinski, and costumes by Emilio Sosa. The production moved to Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre on 7 April 2002 for 144 performances, receiving Best Play Tony and Drama Desk Award

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nominations. Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright (who was nominated for a Tony and Drama Desk Award) played two African American brothers, Lincoln and Booth, whose exchanges illuminate their individual struggles with racism, poverty, and a dysfunctional family, and expose the ways in which their troubled backgrounds influence their relationships with women and the society in which they live. Mos Def replaced Cheadle for the Broadway run and won a Theatre World Award. Director Oren Jacoby filmed a documentary, Stage on Screen: The Topdog Diaries (2002), featuring Parks, Wolfe, Cheadle, and Wright. TORCH SONG TRILOGY. Harvey Fierstein’s three one-act plays, beginning with The International Stud (first produced Off-Broadway in 1976), followed by Fugue in a Nursery and Widows and Children First! in 1979, are connected as a trilogy by a central character, Arnold Beckoff, a role Fierstein tailor-made for himself. Arnold, a gay drag queen, is seen in the three oneacts in encounters with lovers, an adopted gay child, and his stereotypical Jewish mother. Arnold’s experiences reflect the struggles of a gay man in the years just prior to the AIDS pandemic. Following Off-Broadway productions of each of the plays, they were joined together under the title Torch Song Trilogy for a large-scale production starring Fierstein, Matthew Broderick, Estelle Getty, Diane Tarleton, Paul Joynt, and Joe Crothers, under the direction of Peter Pope. It opened on 16 October 1981 at New York’s Richard Allen Center in a production by the Glines, a group organized to promote the work of gay writers, before extending its run by moving on 15 January 1982 to the Greenwich Village Actors Playhouse. The production’s final move to Broadway’s Little Theatre on 10 June 1982 racked up 1,222 performances. Fierstein won two Tony Awards (for the play and his acting), a Theatre World Award, and a Drama Desk Award, and in 1983 he also received an Oppenheimer Award, Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, as well as the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award in 1984. A 1988 film version, starring Fierstein and Broderick, with Anne Bancroft in Getty’s role, was a modest success. TORN, RIP (1931– ). Elmore Rual Torn, Jr., was born in Temple, Texas, and educated at Texas A&M University before beginning an acting career in a supporting role in the 1956 film Baby Doll scripted by Tennessee Williams. He made his Broadway debut in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), winning a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination. He also appeared on Broadway in Daughter of Silence (1961), was a replacement in the 1963 revival of Strange Interlude,* Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), The Cuban Thing (1968), Dance of Death (1971), Look Away (1973), a 1975

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revival of The Glass Menagerie, Mixed Couples (1980), a 1993 revival of Anna Christie,* and The Young Man from Atlanta (1997). Off-Broadway, Torn appeared in a 1963 revival of Desire under the Elms,* The Kitchen (1966), and The Deer Park (1967), for which he won an Obie Award, and Seduced (1979). He has also appeared in regional theatre and directed the Off-Broadway production of The Beard, for which he won an Obie. Torn was nominated for an Academy Award for Cross Creek (1983) and appeared in Tropic of Cancer (1970), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), Defending Your Life (1991), Men in Black (1997), The Insider (1999), Wonder Boys (2000), and Marie Antoinette (2006). On television, Torn won an Emmy Award for The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998), for which he received six other nominations, and was also Emmy-nominated for The Atlanta Child Murders (1985) and guest appearances on Chicago Hope in 1996 and 30 Rock in 2008. Torn was married to actresses Ann Wedgeworth (1955–1961) and Geraldine Page (1963–1987). TOUCH OF THE POET, A. Eugene O’Neill’s four-act tragedy, set in 1828, was part of a cycle of nine plays, A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, he had planned tracing an American family generation by generation. The only play he managed to complete for the cycle, A Touch of the Poet, was written in 1935 but was not produced until five years after O’Neill’s death, when it opened at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 2 October 1958 for 284 performances. Directed by Harold Clurman, the play starred Hayes as Nora Melody in the first production in the theatre named for her, costarring with Eric Portman as Con Melody. The cast also included Kim Stanley, Betty Field, and Art Smith. Focused on the Irish immigrant experience, A Touch of the Poet centers on a battle of wills between Melody, who has delusions of grandeur and excessive pride, and his strong-willed daughter, Sara (Stanley). The play has been revived three times on Broadway. The first, in 1967, featured Denholm Elliott, Priscilla Morrill, and Jeanne Hepple, and managed a mere five performances; the second, in 1977, was directed by José Quintero and starred Jason Robards (in a Tony Award-nominated performance), Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Kathryn Walker and ran for 141 performances; and the third, in 2005, staged by Doug Hughes, starred Gabriel Byrne, Dearbhla Molloy, and Emily Bergl and managed 50 performances. A 1974 PBS-TV version of the play starred Fritz Weaver, Nancy Marchand, and Roberta Maxwell. O’Neill also completed a long draft of another play, More Stately Mansions, intended for the cycle. It survived O’Neill’s attempt to destroy the completed work for the trilogy in 1950 when he concluded that his health would not permit him to ever complete the cycle.

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TOWER BEYOND TRAGEDY, THE. Poet Robinson Jeffers adapted Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a tragic trilogy on the House of Atreus, as something of a follow-up to his 1947 adaptation of Euripides’ Medea in which Judith Anderson scored a personal triumph in the title role. Anderson starred as Clytemnestra in The Tower beyond Tragedy, which opened at the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) Playhouse on 26 November 1950 for a mere 32 performances under the direction of Robert Ross. Marian Seldes appeared as Electra, Frederic Tozere played Agamemnon, and the large supporting cast included Rosemary Murphy and Harvey Korman. Despite the long run achieved by Medea, and excellent reviews, The Tower Beyond Tragedy failed to find an audience for its tale of Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband, Agamemnon, and the revenge of their son, Orestes. TOYS IN THE ATTIC. Lillian Hellman’s semi-autobiographical threeact drama, set in New Orleans during the Great Depression, opened at the Hudson Theatre on 25 February 1960 for 456 performances under Arthur Penn’s direction, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award-nomination as Best Play. The stellar cast included Anne Revere, who won a Best Featured Actress Tony, and Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton, and Irene Worth were all Tony-nominated for their performances. Howard Bay won a Tony for his scene design. The action of the play centered on two unmarried, middle-aged sisters, the Berniers, who abandon their own desires to look after their brother, Julian, who returns home with a childlike bride and his aristocratic mother-in-law, unsettling the lives of the sisters. Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller, Gene Tierney, and Dean Martin appeared in a 1963 film version. TRACY, LEE (1898–1968).† A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Tracy moved freely between stage and screen, and made his theatrical debut as the inventor brother Joe in George Kelly’s The Show-Off* (1924). Tracy scored in two late 1920s Broadway hits, playing hoofer Roy Lane in Broadway* (1926) and as crack newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson in The Front Page* (1928). He spent much of his time making movies after the arrival of the “talkies” (including Dinner at Eight [1933] and The Lemon Drop Kid [1934]), but he also appeared on Broadway in The Book of Charm (1925), Glory Hallelujah (1926), Oh, Promise Me (1930), Louder, Please (1931), Bright Star (1935), Every Man for Himself (1940), The Traitor (1949), Metropole (1949), Mr. Barry’s Etchings (1950), revivals of The Show Off in 1950 and Idiot’s Delight in 1951, and, most notably, The Best Man (1960), for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor. Tracy was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his performance in the screen version of The Best

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Man (1964), and he appeared frequently on television. His last Broadway appearance was in the failure Minor Miracle (1965). TRACY, SPENCER (1900–1967).† This legendary film star was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and while attending Ripon College, he began acting and was encouraged to continue his training at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He played a robot in the Broadway production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1921) and was mentored by George M. Cohan, but spent most of the 1920s in flops and stock. Tracy finally scored with his performance as ruthless convict “Killer” Mears in John Wexley’s hit drama The Last Mile (1930), which led to his singular Hollywood career, which brought him two Academy Awards (and nine Oscar nominations) for over 80 films. Tracy returned to Broadway only once, in Robert E. Sherwood’s wartime drama, The Rugged Path (1945). TRINITY REPERTORY COMPANY (TRC). Founded in 1963 in Providence, Rhode Island, the TRC has produced nearly 60 world premieres of new plays and trained actors and directors via its Master of Fine Arts programs in tandem with Brown University. The TRC was presented with the Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre in 1981. The TRC’s current artistic director, Curt Columbus, followed such figures as Adrian Hall, Anne Bogart, Richard Jenkins, Oskar Eustis, and Amanda Dehnert. TROUBLE IN MIND. Alice Childress’s first produced three-act play, which she also directed, opened on 5 November 1955 at the Greenwich Mews Theatre for 91 performances. Childress became the first African American woman to receive an Obie Award for the production which centers on the cast of a fictional antilynching play, Chaos in Belleville, and the struggle black cast members have making their points with their racist white director. The Negro Ensemble Company revived the play in 1998, inspiring New York Times critic D. J. R. Bruckner to write that it concerned the “aspirations, passions and resentments of black women.” TRUE WEST. Sam Shepard’s drama of sibling rivalry premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, California, on 10 July 1980 under the direction of Robert Woodruff, with Peter Coyote as Austin, a screenwriter, and Jim Haynie as Lee, his petty-thief brother. Austin is tending their mother’s home in her absence, and the two brothers go through an intense attempt to reconnect centered around Austin’s attempt to sell a script to a Hollywood producer. The play was subsequently seen at New York’s Public Theatre, featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle in 1980, but its

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TSYPIN, GEORGE

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revival by the Steppenwolf Theatre, directed by Gary Sinise and starring Sinise as Austin with John Malkovich as Lee, ran for 762 performances at the Cherry Lane Theatre in October 1982 (and was filmed for television in 1984). The play had its first Broadway production in 2000 featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, who demonstrated their versatility by switching parts on occasion during the run under the direction of Matthew Warchus. TRUEX, ERNEST (1889–1973).† Born in Rich Hill, Missouri, Truex made his stage debut billed as a child prodigy in 1894. His career spanned nearly 70 years and although he appeared frequently in films and television, Truex often returned to the theatre. After working in stock for several seasons, he made notable appearances in an array of mostly comedies and musicals, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm* (1910), Very Good Eddie (1915), and Six-Cylinder Love* (1921), among others. After 1930, Truex appeared notably in Whistling in the Dark (1932), but had his biggest hit as Newton Fuller in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s George Washington Slept Here (1940). He also spent a season in various roles with Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster’s American Repertory Theatre (ART) in 1946. Truex’s final Broadway appearance, in Ruth Gordon’s A Very Rich Woman (1965), was short-lived. TSU, SUSAN (1950– ). Born at State College, Pennsylvania, Tsu studied at Carnegie Mellon University before embarking on a costume design career. She won a Drama Desk Award for her costume designs for Godspell (1971), which were also seen in the 1976 Broadway production. On Broadway, she also provided costume designs for Elizabeth I (1972). Most of her designs have been seen at regional theatre in the United States and in international theatres, including a collaboration on a stage production of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1993) between the Long Wharf Theatre and the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre in a rare exchange. For many years, Tsu has taught at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas at Austin. TSYPIN, GEORGE (1954– ). A native of Soviet Kazakhstan, Tsypin studied architecture in Russia before emigrating to the United States. At New York University, he studied theatre design before beginning his work with many opera companies and on Broadway. Tsypin provided scene designs for two Broadway productions, a 1993 revival of In the Summer House and The Little Mermaid (2008), both of which brought him Drama Desk Award nominations. He is also a sculptor and video artist, and his work has been shown in many galleries.

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TWENTIETH CENTURY. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s threeact comedy set in the observation car of the Twentieth Century Limited, was produced by George Abbott (who directed) and Philip Dunning, and starred Moffat Johnson as crazed theatrical producer Oscar Jaffe, who is trying to lure his ex-protegée and lover, Lily Garland (Eugenie Leontovich), back to the stage after she has become a Hollywood star. Their tempestuous relationship causes Jaffe to try every ruse he can to wear down Lily’s resistance to returning to him and the stage. The supporting cast included William Frawley and Etienne Giradot, with the latter playing a religious zealot who adds extra chaos to the farcical action. The popular play was somewhat eclipsed by its classic 1934 film version starring John Barrymore* and Carole Lombard in their finest comic performances under the direction of Howard Hawks. Twentieth Century has had two Broadway revivals; the first, in 1950, starred Gloria Swanson and José Ferrer, under Ferrer’s direction, and the second, in 2004, featured Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche, in a Tony Award-nominated performance. A musical adaptation, On the Twentieth Century (1978), ran a year on Broadway. TWO-CHARACTER PLAY, THE. Scholars suggest that Tennessee Williams may have begun working on The Two-Character Play, later revised as Out Cry and then again as The Two-Character Play, as early as 1959. The Two-Character Play was published in 1969 by New Directions, following its first staging in December 1967 at London’s Hampstead Theatre in a production directed by James Roose-Evans and starring Peter Wyngarde and Mary Ure. Critics were uniformly dismissive. In 1971, revised with the new title Out Cry, the play was produced at London’s Ivanhoe Theatre under George Keathley’s direction, featuring Donald Madden and Eileen Herlie. The actors won praise, but again the play did not. Revised once more and still titled Out Cry, the play was produced at New York’s Lyceum Theatre on 1 March 1973 for 12 performances. This Broadway production featured Michael York and Cara Duff-MacCormick under Peter Glenville’s direction and with scenic design by Jo Mielziner, but these formidable talents did not succeed in making the play successful. The obvious connections among all versions of this play with Williams’s masterwork, The Glass Menagerie (1944), as well as other overtly autobiographical Williams plays, are evident. The two central characters, Felice and his sister Clare, represent, as some critics claim, Williams’s conflicted responses to what he viewed as the madness of modern society, the struggle to understand another being, the isolation of the individual, and the illusory and transitory nature of existence. Felice embodies a Beckettian determination to go on in the face of the absurdities of existence and human tragedy, while Clare represents another in the gallery

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of Williams portraits of romantic, fragile beings who face the very real possibility of disintegrating under the weight of life’s confusions and pressures. The Broadway revision of Out Cry was also published by New Directions and featured Williams’s most significant change. In the original version of The Two-Character Play, Felice and Clare were middle-aged, but in Out Cry they are made considerably younger. In 1974, another revision had a short run at New York’s Thirteenth Street Repertory Company under the direction of Laura Zucker. Yet another version, under the original title The Two-Character Play, was produced at New York’s Quaigh Theatre under Bill Lentsch’s direction, and this production was followed by a short-lived 1976 staging in San Francisco. TWO FOR THE SEESAW. William Gibson’s Tony Award-nominated three-act, two-character drama opened at the Booth Theatre on 16 January 1958 for 750 performances under the direction of Tony-nominated Arthur Penn. Henry Fonda appeared as Jerry Ryan, who has left his wife and career as a lawyer to come from Nebraska to New York, where he meets an insecure Greenwich Village dancer, Gittel Mosca. Together, Jerry and Gittel struggle to come to grips with their individual problems. Anne Bancroft, in her Broadway debut, won a Tony and a Theatre World Award as Gittel. Robert Wise directed the 1962 screen version, which starred Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine. A musical version, Seesaw (1973), starred Michelle Lee and Ken Howard, and ran for 296 performances on Broadway. TWO MRS. CARROLLS, THE. Martin Vale’s two-act melodrama* opened at the Booth Theatre on 114 August 1944 for 585 performances under the direction of Reginald Denham. Starring Elisabeth Bergner with a supporting cast including Victor Jory, Philip Tonge, and Irene Worth, the play is set in the South of France where a deranged painter (Jory) is preparing to murder his unaware wife (Bergner) with hopes of seducing a young widow (Worth) living nearby. Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Alexis Smith appeared in a 1947 screen version of the play adapted by Thomas Job, turning it into a minor film noir classic. TWO TRAINS RUNNING. Following initial performances at the Yale Repertory Theatre, August Wilson’s Tony Award-nominated comedy-drama opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 13 April 1992 for 160 performances under the direction of Lloyd Richards. The seventh in Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Two Trains Running is set in 1969 at the height of racial conflict and the anti-Vietnam War sentiments in the United States. At a Pittsburgh lunch counter, Memphis Lee, the owner, and its regulars, including

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Holloway, a retired house painter, Sterling, an ex-con, and Risa, a waitress, explore the issues of the time in monologues and exchanges revealing African American attitudes about race and the explosive era in which the play is set. Actor Laurence Fishburne won a Tony, Drama Desk, and Theatre World Award for his performance as Sterling, and Al White, who played Memphis, also won a Theatre World Award, with Tony nominations going to Roscoe Lee Browne as Holloway and Cynthia Martells as Risa. TYNAN, KENNETH (1927–1980). The English-born drama critic for the London Observer (1954–1958; 1960–1963) and the New Yorker (1958–1960; 1976–1980), known for witty and caustic reviews, rose to prominence in support of the “angry young men” plays of the mid-1950s, beginning with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). Laurence Olivier invited Tynan to become the first literary manager of the National Theatre of Great Britain (1963–1969), and on Broadway he conceived and contributed sketches for the taboo-shattering Oh! Calcutta! (1969). See also CENSORSHIP; NUDITY.

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U UHRY, ALFRED (1936– ). An Atlanta, Georgia, native, Alfred Fox Uhry was educated at Brown University and went to New York on a grant from Frank Loesser to study lyric writing. He worked on the 1968 musical flop Here’s Where I Belong with a score by Robert Waldman, but they found success with The Robber Bridegroom in 1975. When Uhry turned his attention to non-musical playwriting, he scored a notable success with Driving Miss Daisy (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize when it was produced Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. The play, depicting the relationship of a Southern Jewish woman and her African American chauffeur spanning several decades, was the first of Uhry’s “Atlanta Trilogy,” which subsequently included The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1996), which is set in Atlanta in 1939 when the film Gone with the Wind premiered there won the Tony Award as Best Play on Broadway, and Parade (1998), a musical about the 1913 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank which won Uhry a Best Book of a Musical Tony. Uhry contributed the book for LoveMusik (2007) with the music of Kurt Weill. Uhry has also written screenplays, including winning an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award for adapting Driving Miss Daisy to the screen in 1989, cowriting Mystic Pizza (1988), Rich in Love (1993), and Tugaloo, planned for filming in 2009. UNCLE HARRY. A three-act play by Thomas Job, Uncle Harry opened on 20 May 1942 for 430 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre. Joseph Schildkraut played the title character, a milquetoast bachelor living with two domineering unmarried sisters, Lettie and Hester, played by Eva Le Gallienne and Adelaide Klein. Harry wants to marry Lucy Forrest, but his sisters interfere, so Harry tricks Lettie into poisoning Hester to be rid of them both. Hester dies and Lettie is given a death sentence. But Harry is unable to get Lucy to marry him anyway. Although he remorsefully admits his actions regarding the poison, but the police will not believe him, assuming he is trying to protect his sister, so Harry is left to live alone. Critics applauded the play as an effective thriller and hailed the performances of the distinguished cast.

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UNFINISHED WOMEN CRY IN NO MAN’S LAND WHILE BIRD DIES IN A GILDED CAGE

UNFINISHED WOMEN CRY IN NO MAN’S LAND WHILE BIRD DIES IN A GILDED CAGE. This play by Aishah Rahman was first produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) Mobile Theatre in June 1977 and is set in 1955 on the day of jazz musician Charlie Parker’s death. Rahman’s highly symbolic and somewhat surreal play merges the story of five teenage girls in a home for unwed mothers with Parker’s last days. The girls attempt to decide whether or not to keep their babies while the drug-addled Parker dies in the apartment of a European noble woman who was once his lover. The unhappy decision facing these ordinary girls is set against Parker’s extraordinary life and the impact his music had on them. UNIONS. The predominant theatrical union in the United States post-1930 remained the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), founded in 1913 and strengthened by a major strike in 1919 aimed at improving working conditions for actors. By 2009, AEA boasted a membership of over 40,000, representing both actors and stage managers to negotiate working conditions, salary minimums, and to enforce contracts and AEA rules. Many stage actors also belong to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA), the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), and the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). The Dramatist Guild (DG), founded in 1920 as an offshoot of the Authors’ League of America, tends to the concerns of playwrights, as does the Screen Writers Guild. The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSCD) has 1,500 members and holds jurisdiction over employment matters for theatre directors and choreographers. United Scenic Artists (USA) formed in 1918 to respond to concerns of designers. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada (IATSE), which has been in existence for over 100 years, has a membership exceeding 105,000 and represents the interests of technicians, artisans, and crafts persons in show business, including live theatre. In 2002, the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds (COBUG), encompassing more than 75,000 members of 13 different unions or guilds opted for strength in numbers. UNITED STATES INSTITUTE FOR THEATRE TECHNOLOGY (USITT). Established in 1960 to promote the skills and interests of theatre professionals in the areas of design, production, and technology, USITT, which has a membership of more than 3,500, has held an annual conference since 1961 and is a non-profit organization headquartered in Syracuse, New York. USITT publishes a magazine, TD&T (Theatre Design and Technology), and provides job contact services to its membership.

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UTAH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL (USF). Founded in 1961 by Fred C. Adams, the festival in Cedar City, Utah, presented its first season in 1962, producing The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, and The Merchant of Venice. The season was presented on the campus of the College of Southern Utah (later Southern Utah University). An outdoor theatre, the Adams Theatre, opened in 1977, modeled on Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and the Randall L. Jones Theatre, a modern space, was opened in 1989, permitting the festival to add performances of classics of world drama to the Shakespearean canon. Adams retired in 2005, but the UTF continues to thrive as it moves toward its fiftieth anniversary.

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V VAGINA MONOLOGUES, THE. Feminist playwright/actress Eve Ensler was born in New York and graduated from Middlebury College in 1975. She rose to prominence with this play first produced in 1996 in a basement space at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village before moving OffBroadway to the Westside Theatre. The Vagina Monologues met with acclaim when performed in London, where it received a 2002 Olivier Award nomination. An HBO-TV film of Ensler performing the play was first shown in 2002. Since its first appearance, the play has been translated into nearly 50 languages and has been produced in over 120 countries. Ensler performed the play’s multiple monologues, each presenting women’s perspective on personal and cultural attitudes regarding sexuality, love, rape, menstruation, mutilation, masturbation and orgasm, giving birth, and the varied names for the vagina. Ensler’s goal is empowering women (of all ages) to respond to social injustices and inequality—and to more fully understand their relationship to their own bodies. Ensler drew much of her source material from interviewing women from many countries, particularly those with particularly oppressive attitudes about women and sexuality. Performances of The Vagina Monologue have often met with controversy, but is now performed annually on Valentine’s Day, renamed V-Day. By Valentine’s Day 2008, over 4,000 documented performances of the play were presented in various venues, from professional and academic theatres to community centers and churches. See also CENSORSHIP. VALDÉZ, LUIS (1940– ). Born in Delano, California, to migrant farm workers, Valdéz’s theatrical interests began early when as a child he observed a schoolteacher making masks for a school performance. Valdéz graduated from San Jose State University in 1964. His first play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, was produced at the university. Following his graduation, Valdéz worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, learning agit-prop techniques in preparation for founding El Teatro Campesino, a farm workers’ theatre company which included among its goals the improvement of working and living conditions for migrant farm workers. The success of

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Valdéz’s Zoot Suit (1978), the first play by a Chicano writer to succeed on Broadway, earned Valdéz the unofficial title of father of American Chicano theatre. His other plays include Bandido! (1981), Mummified Deer (2000), and Corridos Remix (2005), coauthored with his son, Kinán Valdéz. Valdéz also writes and directs for film, beginning with the 1981 screen version of Zoot Suit, and including La Bamba (1987) and The Cisco Kid (1994). VALLEY FORGE. Maxwell Anderson’s three-act blank verse drama in a Theatre Guild, opened at the Guild Theatre on 10 December 1934 for a disappointing 58 performances. General George Washington (Philip Merivale*) faces the dilemma of helping his starving Continental Army survive a brutal winter and lack of resources in Valley Forge. Considering surrender when Congress is apathetic in response to his pleas for help, Washington changes his mind when he comprehends the sacrifice and bravery of his soldiers. Anderson included a fictional meeting between Washington and British General William Howe. The New York critics were largely approving even though poor box office returns suggested that audiences were disinterested. Richard Basehart played Washington in a 1975 television adaptation of the play. VAMPIRE LESBIANS OF SODOM. This long-running Off-Broadway play by Charles Busch gave its first performance in 1984 at the New York’s East Village Limbo Lounge prior to a move to the Provincetown Playhouse* on 19 June 1985 on a double bill with Busch’s Sleeping Beauty, or Coma. Busch himself appeared in drag as one of two vampiresses locked in rivalry that begins in ancient Sodom and continues for two thousand years as the women become actresses in 1920s silent films and present-day Las Vegas. New York Times critic D. J. R. Bruckner enthused that “Nothing escapes the demolition of laughter. . . . The audience laughs at the first line and goes right on laughing at every line to the end, and even at some of the silences. That’s no mean achievement.” The play has had numerous productions in regional, fringe, and university theatres throughout the United States. See also FEMALE/MALE IMPERSONATION; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. VAN DRUTEN, JOHN (1901–1957). Playwright, novelist, and director, Van Druten was born in London and studied law at the University of London before becoming a solicitor in 1923, after which he taught law at the University College of Wales and began his playwriting. His first produced play, The Return Half, was staged with modest success in 1924. In 1926, Van Druten decided to write full-time and moved to America (becoming a United States citizen in 1944). His earliest dramas were in the “problem play” mode, including Young Woodley (1925) and After All (1929). Van Druten’s maturing

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works shifted to a focus on character over theme, as exemplified by There’s Always Juliet (1932), The Distaff Side (1933), and Old Acquaintance (1940). Van Druten also experimented with comic potboilers, most lucratively with Bell, Book, and Candle (1950). However, Van Druten’s most representative plays examined changing sexual mores, including The Damask Cheek (1943; cowritten with Lloyd Morris), The Voice of the Turtle (1943), and I Am a Camera (1951), based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, which was later adapted as the musical Cabaret (1966). Van Druten’s other notable dramatic adaption, I Remember Mama (1944), based on Kathryn Forbes’s recollections of her Norwegian family, became a long-running Broadway success and spawned a movie version and perennial radio and television dramas. Van Druten also wrote several lauded screenplays, including Night Must Fall (1937), The Citadel (1938), Johnny Come Lately (1943), and Gaslight (1944), and worked on screen versions of his own plays, including Young Woodley (1930), Old Acquaintance (1943), and The Voice of the Turtle (1948). He wrote several novels and memoirs and dabbled in directing, most notably for several of his own plays and the original Broadway production of The King and I (1951). Van Druten’s obituary in the New York Times described him as “a gentle man who wrote gentle plays.” VAN ITALLIE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1936– ). Born in Brussels, Belgium, Van Itallie grew up in Great Neck, New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1958. A trilogy of Van Itallie one-acts, presented under the title America Hurrah at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1964–1965, seemed to capture the roiling social changes of the era, as did the ensemble performance piece, The Serpent (1968), he created for Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre. Van Itallie has continued to write plays for various troupes and theatres, including The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1983), The Traveler (1987), Struck Dumb (1988), Ancient Boys (1991), War, Sex, and Dreams (1999), Light (2004), and Fear Itself: Secrets of the White House (2005), among others. He has taught playwriting at several major universities, including Harvard and Yale, is a painter, and published a book on playwriting, The Playwright’s Workbook, in 1997. VANITIES. This three-character comedy-drama by Jack Heifner opened at Off-Broadway’s Chelsea Theatre in March 1976 and ran to mid-1979, a surprising success but one that reflected its times. The first of the play’s three acts is set in 1963 as three high school cheerleaders hear the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Their interaction reflects their hopes and dreams, which are seen in two subsequent acts set at intervals of

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five years as the discontents of the late 1960s and early 1970s are explored through their troubled lives. The play became a staple of university and community theatres, but reviewers in the early twenty-first century tend to find the play dated. A musical adaptation of Vanities had a brief Off-Broadway run at Second Stage in 2009. VARIETY.† This trade newspaper, founded in 1905 by Sime Silverman,* publishes weekly reports on all aspects of American show business as it evolved over the decades, beginning with minstrel shows,* vaudeville,* and burlesque at the time of its founding, but ultimately covering Broadway theatre (and Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway, as well as regional theatre), films, radio, television, and video games as earlier forms died away. See also PERIODICALS. VAUGHAN, STUART (1925– ). Born John Walter Vaughan in Terre Haute, Indiana, this noted director studied with Harold Clurman and began his career as an actor, including playing Algernon in a Phoenix Theatre revival of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1961. His early directing experience was for Shakespearean productions with regional companies and OffBroadway, but by the mid-1960s he was busily directing all manner of plays for regional theatres across the country. Vaughan was the founding artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre (SRT), the Repertory Theatre of New Orleans (RTNO), and was artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre. On Broadway, he directed Pictures in the Hallway (1956), I Knock at the Door (1957), and revivals of Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown* (1959), Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1960), Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1960), Dion Boucicault’s* The Octoroon (1961), and several Shakespearean plays, although Vaughan remained most devoted to repertory theatre and in 2007 noted that to devote oneself to live theatre mean “a life of fighting, soul and body, for what you believe.” VICTORIA REGINA. Laurence Housman’s historical drama on the life of Queen Victoria opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 26 December 1935 for 203 performances under the direction of Gilbert Miller, who also produced. Helen Hayes scored a personal triumph, playing the monarch from girlhood in 1837 to old age in 1897. The large cast also featured Vincent Price as Prince Albert, George Zucco as Disraeli, Lewis Casson as Lord Melbourne, and George Macready as Prince Ernest. Hayes toured in the play and returned to Broadway for two brief return engagements in 1936 and 1938, and played the role on television in 1951.

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VICTORY GARDENS THEATRE (VGT). At the height of the Chicago Theatre Movement of the 1970s–1980s, this theatre company with the mission of supporting playwrights and presenting new works was founded in 1974. In 1996, the theatre established the Playwrights Ensemble, a group of 12 dramatists of diverse backgrounds to supply new works for the theatre’s stage, which is populated each year by no fewer than 50 percent new work. Victory Gardens Theatre won the 2001 Tony Award for regional theatres in acknowledgment of its contribution to, as the New York Times noted, aiding Chicago in creating “a theatre scene as vibrant as New York’s.” The company is located in Chicago’s historic Biograph Theatre, where outlaw John Dillinger was gunned down in the 1930s. VIDAL, GORE (1925– ). This major American literary lion and political commentator also made a mark writing plays and screenplays. Born in West Point, New York, Vidal scored a major Broadway success with Visit to a Small Planet (1957), a satiric comedy about a politically militant alien on a visit to contemporary America. He followed this with a taut political drama, The Best Man (1960), depicting the behind-the-scenes battle over the nomination of a presidential candidate. He adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Romulus (1962) and returned to politics with Weekend (1968), about a young man blackmailing his presidential candidate father, and the satiric An Evening with Richard Nixon and . . . (1972), assailing the embattled Nixon as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal escalated. Vidal’s numerous screenplays include an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, released in 1959, and his own plays, Visit to a Small Planet in 1960 and The Best Man in 1964. VIERTEL, JACK (1948– ). After graduating from Harvard University, Viertel has been creative director of Jujamcyn Theatres since 1987. Viertel develops production ideas for the company and has worked on plays by August Wilson, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and several musicals. Since 2001, he has been artistic director of City Center’s Encores!, also serving as dramaturg, a job he had previously held for the Mark Taper Forum. As Viertel has said, “The art of dramaturgy is the art of asking questions about things you don’t understand.” His brother, Thomas (1942– ) is also a producer. VIET ROCK. Megan Terry’s satiric protest play, assailing America’s military involvement in Vietnam, made its premiere in a Open Theatre production at the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club café on 25 May 1966 under the direction of Terry, Peter L. Feldman, and Joseph Chaiken and with

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designs by Esther Gilman. The young cast included Gerome Ragni, soon to gain fame as one of the authors of the counterculture musical, Hair (1968). Similarly described as a rock musical, Viet Rock captured the emotions and sounds of a turbulent era and spawned a decade of plays and musicals protesting not only the Vietnam War, but other significant cultural struggles of the time. Variety’s critic called the original production an “acid indictment” and applauded its ensemble approach and novel staging effects. VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, A. Arthur Miller’s one-act verse drama opened on 29 September 1955 at the Coronet Theatre for 148 performances in a Kermit Bloomgarden, Roger L. Stevens, and Robert Whitehead production. Directed by Martin Ritt and presented on a double bill with Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays, the play focuses on Eddie Carbone (Van Heflin), a Brooklyn longshoreman with inappropriate feelings for his niece. When she becomes involved with an illegal Italian immigrant, Eddie desperately attempts to make her believe that the young man is a homosexual. Failing at that, Eddie reports the young man to the immigration authorities, which causes the young man’s angry brother to murder Eddie. In 1956, Miller expanded A View from the Bridge into a two-act prose play, the version commonly produced. A 1962 film version was directed by Sidney Lumet, Broadway revivals appeared in 1983 and 1997, and an operatic adaptation with music by William Bolcom, premiered in 1999. A Drama Desk Award-winning revival starring Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson (who won a Tony Award), produced by the Roundabout Theatre, appeared in 2010 and New Yorker critic John Lahr described it as “a singular astonishment,” stressing that A View from the Bridge “may not be Miller’s best play, but this is one of the best productions of his work that I’ve seen.” VINEYARD THEATRE. Barbara Zinn Kreiger founded this not-for-profit Off-Broadway theatre in 1981 near Union Square. Choosing a tight focus on a few selected artists, under the guidance of artistic director Douglas Aibel, the Vineyard has produced several works each by Nicky Silver and David Warren, and productions staged by Mark Brokaw. Among important works nurtured by the Vineyard are Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (1994), Becky Mode’s Fully Committed (1999), and Avenue Q (2003). VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET. Gore Vidal’s three-act satiric comedy opened on 7 February 1957 at the Booth Theatre for 388 performances. An alien named Kreton, played by Cyril Ritchard (who also directed the original production), dressed in mid-nineteenth-century clothes, arrives on earth in hopes of observing the Civil War. Unfortunately, it is 1957, and he finds

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refuge in the home of a television personality. Kreton has made a hobby of studying the Earth, which he smugly considers a backward planet and when he learns of new and terrifying weapons, he tries to start a world war to see how it turns out. Fortunately for Earth, he is unsuccessful. Vidal scripted a 1960 film version of the play starring Jerry Lewis as Kreton. VOELPEL, FRED (1927– ). Born in Peoria, Illinois, Voelpel attended the University of Illinois and the Yale School of Drama, where he studied with Donald Oenslager and Frank Poole Bevan. For Broadway, Voelpel has designed scenery, lights, and/or costumes for plays and musicals, including From A to Z (1960), Vintage ’60 (1960), No Strings (1962), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), Sophie (1963), A Murderer among Us (1964), Absence of a Cello (1964), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), Peterpat (1965), Drat! The Cat! (1965), a revival of Tiger at the Gates in 1968, Cop-Out (1969), Oh! Calcutta! (1969), The Rothschilds (1970), Two By Two (1970), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Hurry, Harry (1972), Smith (1973), Seascape (1975), a revival of Very Good Eddie in 1975, Bring Back Birdie (1981), and Einstein and the Polar Bear (1981). Among his most noted designs are his costumes for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1971), for which he won an Obie Award. Voelpel has also won two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for his design work and won the 1970 Drama Desk Award for The Memory Bank at Tambellini’s Gate Theatre. He was costumer for The Lost Colony outdoor drama from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has also been master designer at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut and has designed for cabaret performers. VOGEL, PAULA (1951– ). Born in Washington, D.C., Vogel began her education at Bryn Mawr, but graduated from Catholic University with a B.A. in 1974 and from Cornell University with an M.A. in 1976. She began playwriting at that time, but it was her comedy-drama The Baltimore Waltz (1992), concerning the AIDS pandemic, that brought her an Obie Award. She won even greater acclaim for her controversial play on the subject of incest, How I Learned to Drive (1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize and Drama Desk Award. Among Vogel’s other plays are Swan Song of Sir Henry (1974), Meg (1977), Apple-Brown Betty (1979), Desdemona, A Play about A Handkerchief (1979), The Oldest Profession (1981), Bertha in Blue (1981), And Baby Makes Seven (1984), “Hot ‘N Throbbing” (1994), The Mineola Twins (1996), The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003), and Civil War Christmas (2008). In 2003, the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival created an annual playwriting award for undergraduates named the “Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting.” She received the Award for Literature from the

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American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. Vogel teaches playwriting at Yale University and has mentored Bridget Carpenter, Adam Bock, Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz, and Lynn Nottage, among others. VOICE OF THE TURTLE. Alfred de Liagre, Jr.’s production of John Van Druten’s three-act comedy opened on 8 December 1943 at the Morosco Theatre for a remarkable 1,557 performances. Unique for its time in having only three characters, played by Elliot Nugent, Margaret Sullavan, and Audrey Christie, the play’s main attraction was its comparatively frank exploration of contemporary values. When a young actress, Sally Middleton (Sullavan), is left by her friend Olive, who has made another date, to spend an evening with Bill Page, a soldier (Nugent) she has never met the interaction tests Sally’s upbringing in regard to sexuality. However, by the play’s end, she and Bill have fallen in love. The play became a movie in 1947 starring Ronald Reagan and Eleanor Parker and was popular on stock, university, and community theatre stages. VON MAYRHAUSER, JENNIFER (1948– ). Trained at Northwestern University and the Yale School of Drama, Von Mayrhauser began her career as costume designer with the Circle Repertory Company. On Broadway, her costumes have been seen in nearly 30 productions, including Knock, Knock (1976), Da (1978), Talley’s Folly (1980), Beyond Therapy (1982), Steaming (1982), Angels Fall (1983), Baby (1983), The Boys in Autumn (1986), The Heidi Chronicles (1989), Rabbit Hole (2006), and many revivals. Von Mayrhauser has also designed many films and television shows, including the long-running series Law & Order, for which she received an Emmy Award nomination. She has headed the costume department at Brandeis University since 1990. VOSKOVEC, GEORGE (1905–1981). Born in Czechoslovakia as Jirí Wachsmann, in 1925 he partnered with Jan Werich to found the Liberated Theatre, where they pioneered in the area of politically inspired clowning. He fled to America in 1939 following the Nazi occupation, and he appeared in over 70 Hollywood films in a range of character roles. He also acted on Broadway in contemporary and classical plays, including The Love of Four Colonels (1953), His and Hers (1954), Festival (1955), The Tenth Man (1959), Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), A Call on Kuprin (1961), Do You Know the Milky Way (1961), The Physicists (1964), The East Wind (1967), The Penny Wars (1969), and All Over (1971), as well as revivals of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo in 1967, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 1977, and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in 1977, and appeared as the Player King in Hamlet starring Richard Burton in 1964.

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W WAGNER, ROBIN (1933– ). A native of San Francisco, California, Robin Samuel Anton Wagner turned to theatre design in his home town after studying art, designing productions of Don Pasquale, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Tea and Sympathy, and Waiting for Godot for the Actor’s Workshop before moving to New York where he served as assistant to designer Ben Edwards for Big Fish, Little Fish (1961) on Broadway. Known for imaginative, witty designs, Wagner has won Tony Awards for the musicals On the Twentieth Century (1978), City of Angels (1990), and The Producers (2001), and nominations for Jesus Christ Superstar (1972), Mack & Mabel (1975), Dreamgirls (1982), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1993), a revival of Kiss Me, Kate in 2000, and Young Frankenstein (2008). He has also won Drama Desk Awards for Lenny (1971), On the Twentieth Century, Dreamgirls, City of Angels, Kiss Me, Kate, and The Producers, and nominations for Merlin (1983), Crazy for You (1992), Victor/ Victoria (1996), Big (1997), and Young Frankenstein. On Broadway, he has also designed a revival of Galileo (1967), The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1967), Hair (1968), Lovers and Other Strangers (1968), The Great White Hope (1968), Angels in America: Perestroika (1993), and many others. He has also designed for many international opera houses. In an interview, Wagner spoke of his attraction to design: “It’s the idea that a play or musical can be seen and contained in this little cubic space. We make models of sets in half-inch scale, and the models always come to life for me. And then you see them onstage, and you walk around in them. To me, that’s magical.” WAITING FOR LEFTY. Clifford Odets’s play in six scenes, famously produced by The Group Theatre on 26 March 1935 at the Longacre Theatre, ran for 168 performances. The play centers on a meeting of a taxi drivers’ union led by Lefty Costello. While awaiting his arrival for a meeting, the membership is addressed by those opposing a strike, followed by others insisting on the necessity of a strike in a corrupt capitalist society. When news arrives that Lefty has been killed, the union is inspired to go out on strike. This play, like many of The Group’s productions and Odets’s work,

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tapped into social sentiments at the height of the Great Depression. According to contemporary accounts, audience members leapt to their feet shouting “Strike!” along with the actors in response to the play’s pro-labor message. Directed by Odets and Sanford Meisner, the cast included Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Lewis, and Odets himself. WALKEN, CHRISTOPHER (1943– ). Born in Astoria, Queens, New York as Ronald Walken, this versatile actor best known for sinister roles on movie screens has occasionally returned to the stage, where he got his start. He received a Theatre World Award for a revival of The Rose Tattoo in 1967, a Drama Desk Award for his performance in Lemon Sky (1970) OffBroadway, and a Tony Award nomination for James Joyce’s The Dead (2000). He began his career on Broadway (and television) as a child actor under his birth name, appearing in The Climate of Eden (1952), The Visit (1958), J.B. (1958), High Spirits (1964), Baker Street (1965), The Lion in Winter (1966), The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (1967), Enemies (1972), revivals of The Plough in the Stars (1973), The Merchant of Venice (1973), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1975), and he replaced Ron Silver in Hurlyburly (1984). In 2010, Walken appeared on Broadway in Anglo-Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane and reaped a Tony nomination. Walken won a 1978 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for The Deer Hunter, and has appeared in many films and television programs, including becoming one of the most popular guest hosts of Saturday Night Live. WALKER, JUNE (1900–1966).† A native of Chicago, Illinois, she made her Broadway debut in the chorus of Hitchy-Koo of 1918 (1918), but scored successes in Six-Cylinder Love* (1921), The Nervous Wreck* (1923), Processional* (1925), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1926). After 1930, Walker made notable appearances in more diverse roles in Robert E. Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge* (1930), as farm girl Laurey Williams in Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), and in Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) directed by Max Reinhardt. Walker later appeared in mostly failures, including Dorothy Parker and Arnaud D’Usseau’s The Ladies of the Corridor (1953), but she had one final success as the mother in Paddy Chayefsky’s The Middle of the Night (1956). She also acted in films and television and was the mother of actor John Kerr. WALKER, NANCY (1921?–1992). Born Anna Myrtle Swoyer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Walker’s mother died when she was an infant, and she grew up around theatres where her father was a vaudevillian.* She found success on stage, screen, and television over a long career, often in

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musicals, such as Best Foot Forward (1941), her Broadway debut, and in a series of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films of the 1940s. Among her most notable stage successes were On the Town (1944), Phoenix ’55 (1956), and Do Re Mi (1960), receiving Tony Award nominations for the last two. Her other Broadway credits, both musicals and straight plays, included Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! (1948), Along Fifth Avenue (1949), an acclaimed revival of Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels (1956), Folies Bergère 1964 (1964), UTBU (1966), and revivals of The Cherry Orchard (1968) and The Cocktail Party (1968). Walker also directed the film Can’t Stop the Music (1980) and was married to vocal coach David Craig. She is perhaps best remembered as Ida, Rhoda’s smothering mother, on the television series The Mary Tyler Moore and its spin-off, Rhoda. WALLACE, NAOMI (1960– ). This Prospect, Kentucky-born writer has found more success with her plays in England than in the United States. Her plays, which often merge political concerns with issues of gender and sexuality, include her most acclaimed work, One Flea Spare (1995), first produced in England, which won a Best Play Obie Award in 1997 when it was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre. Wallace’s other plays include In the Fields of Aceldama (1993), The War Boys (1993), Heart of America (1994), The Girl Who Fell through a Hole in Her Jumper (1994), Slaughter City (1996), Birdy (1996), In the Sweat (1997), Manifesto (1998), The Trestle of Pope Lick Creek (1998), Standard Time (1999), The Retreating World (2003), Two into War (2003), Things of Dry Hours (2004), A State of Innocence (2005), One Short Sleepe (2008), and No Such Cold Thing (2009). She has also written screenplays and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999. WALLACH, ELI (1915– ). Born in Brooklyn, New York, this highly respected stage, film, and television actor was educated at the University of Texas at Austin and City College of New York. He also studied at The Neighborhood Playhouse, where he met his wife, Anne Jackson. They married in 1948. Wallach studied acting at the New School with Erwin Piscator and debuted on Broadway in Skydrift (1945). Despite his Jewish heritage, he won a Tony Award and Theatre World Award playing a lusty Italian in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1951). Wallach also received Drama Desk Award nominations for his performances in a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price in 1993 and Visiting Mr. Green (1998) Off-Broadway. Among his other notable Broadway credits, Wallach originated the role of Kilroy in Williams’s Camino Real (1953) and appeared in Rhinoceros (1961), Luv (1964), a revival of The Waltz of the Toreadors in

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1973, Saturday Sunday Monday (1974), Twice around the Park (1982), Café Crown (1989), and a 1994 revival of The Flowering Peach. Wallach has also appeared in over 150 television shows and films, including the controversial Baby Doll (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Misfits (1961), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), The Godfather: Part III (1990), and Wall Street: The Money Never Sleeps (2010). Wallach was presented with a lifetime achievement Academy Award in 2010. He won a Supporting Actor Emmy Award in 1966 for the television drama Poppies Are Also Flowers, and it was announced in 2010 that he would receive a special Academy Award to honor his film career. WALSTON, RAY (1914–2001). Born Herman Walston in New Orleans, Louisiana, he began acting in bit parts in New Orleans theatre in his youth. When his family moved to Houston, Texas, he worked for Margo Jones’s Civic Theatre repertory company beginning in 1938. He subsequently spent three years in the company at the Cleveland Play House before making his Broadway debut in Maurice Evans’s Hamlet in 1945. Despite the fact that much of his career was spent in films and television, Walston accumulated Broadway credits from the 1940s to the 1960s, including winning a Tony Award for his role as Mr. Applegate, the devil, in the musical Damn Yankees (1956). Other Broadway roles included a revival of The Front Page* in 1946, The Survivors (1948), Summer and Smoke (1948), Richard Whorf’s Richard III (1949), The Rat Race (1949), Me and Juliet (1953), House of Flowers (1954), Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (1958), and Agatha Sue, I Love You (1966). Walston won two Emmy Awards for the series Picket Fences in 1995 and 1996 and appeared as an alien on the long-running TV series, My Favorite Martian in the 1960s. WALTON, TONY (1934– ). Among the most honored scene and costume designers working in theatre, film, and television, Anthony John Walton was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England. Once married to Julie Andrews, Walton has worked regularly in both Broadway and West End theatres. He won Tony Awards for the musical Pippin (1973), and revivals of The House of Blue Leaves in 1986 and Guys and Dolls in 1992, and received Drama Desk Awards for Shelter (1973), Pippin, Social Security (1986), and Guys and Dolls. His numerous Broadway credits also include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), The Apple Tree (1966), a revival of Uncle Vanya (1973), The Good Doctor (1974), Streamers (1976), Woman of the Year (1981), The Real Thing (1984), Hurlyburly (1984), I’m Not Rappaport (1985), a revival of Anything Goes (1987), Lend Me a Tenor (1989), Grand Hotel (1989), Six Degrees of Separation (1990),

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Death and the Maiden (1992), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), a revival of Our Town (2002), Well (2006), and A Tale of Two Cities (2008). Walton won an Academy Award for Art Direction for the Bob Fosse film All That Jazz (1979) and an Emmy Award for the television production of Death of a Salesman (1985). In recent years, Walton has added directing credits to his multiple design accomplishments. WANAMAKER, SAM (1919–1993). Born Samuel Wanamaker in Chicago, Illinois, he studied at the school of the Goodman Theatre and worked in various stock companies and toured in the 1930s. While appearing in Counterattack (1943) at Washington’s National Theater, Wanamaker joined the American Communist Party. His Broadway credits include Café Crown (1942), This, Too, Shall Pass (1946), Joan of Lorraine (1946), The Gentleman from Athens (1947), Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), Parisienne (1950), a revival of The Lady from the Sea (1950), Borned in Texas (1950), a revival of Arms and the Man (1950), and A Far Country (1961). Wanamaker directed Children from Their Games (1963), A Case of Libel (1963), and A Murderer among Us (1964) on Broadway. He was also nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in the television drama Holocaust (1978). Wanamaker joined the United States Army during the latter part of World War II, but despite distinguished military service, his early 1940s membership in the American Communist Party drew the attention of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). During the early 1950s’ Red Scare, Wanamaker was blacklisted by HUAC and he moved to England in order to make a living. After 1960, he was able to work on occasion on Broadway and in films and television. In England, Wanamaker became director of Liverpool’s New Shakespeare Theatre in 1957, and in 1959 he became a member of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. He produced or directed several West End productions as well and founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust, which raised funds to build the New Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank, near the site of Shakespeare’s Globe, but he died before the structure was completed. He was the father of actress Zöe Wanamaker. WARCHUS, MATTHEW (1966– ). An English-born director and playwright, he studied theatre and music at Bristol University prior to directing for a range of theatre and opera companies, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, and in the West End. On Broadway, he directed the 2009 Best Play Tony Award winner, God of Carnage (2009), for which he won a Tony. He has also been Tonynominated for Art (1998), revivals of True West in 2000, Boeing-Boeing in

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2008, and The Norman Conquests in 2009. Warchus also directed a 2001 revival of Follies, Life (x) 3 (2003). Off-Broadway, he received Drama Desk Award nominations for The Unexpected Man (2001) and a 2008 revival of Boeing-Boeing, and he won the award for a 2009 revival of The Norman Conquests. WAR.† American playwrights have found the wars involving the United States a fertile topic for plays. Between 1880 and 1930, the wars most often represented on the stage were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great War (World War I). After 1930, as war loomed again in Europe with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the fascists in Italy, American dramatists looked to past wars, particularly World War I, as a setting for reflection on more contemporary concerns. Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’s* comedy-drama What Price Glory* (1924) captured the experiences of World War I soldiers, while Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935) reflected disenchantments resulting from the First World War and the Great Depression. It emphasized the struggle between liberty, as reflected by a disaffected, doomed poet, and fascism embodied by a John Dillinger-style hoodlum on the lam from the law. Sherwood addressed similar concerns in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Idiot’s Delight (1936), which, like another of his Pulitzer Prize-winning works, There Shall Be No Night (1940), marked a transition from dramas dealing with World War I to those more specifically anticipating World War II. Prior to America’s entry into World War II, other such works including Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column (1940) and Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), focused on the growing strife in Europe. Hellman’s The Searching Wind (1944) dealt with diplomatic mistakes prior to the war, but the war itself was reflected in all manner of theatrical works during the conflict, from musicals (This is the Army [1943]) and light comedies (Dear Ruth [1944]) to propaganda plays (Winged Victory [1943]), light dramas (A Bell for Adano [1944]) and a few serious dramas such as James Gow and Arnaud D’Usseau’s Tomorrow the World (1943) and John Patrick’s The Hasty Heart (1945). Following the end of the war, a series of plays and musicals about the war period emerged, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical South Pacific (1949), comedies like Mister Roberts (1948), and dramas, including A Sound of Hunting (1945), Home of the Brave (1945), Command Decision (1947), and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), among others. Numerous plays about the Vietnam War began appearing in the mid1960s, beginning with Megan Terry’s Viet Rock (1966), although it is difficult to separate specific works about the conflict from the many “counterculture” plays and musicals reflecting the vast social changes roiling American

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culture between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Most of these works assailed the government and its policies regarding the war and race, and challenged traditional values and changing attitudes about sexuality. This was most evident in the musical Hair (1968), but also in satiric plays aimed at the U.S. presidents of the Vietnam era. Barbara Garson’s MacBird! (1967) targeted President Lyndon B. Johnson in a rewrite of Macbeth, and Gore Vidal’s An Evening with Richard Nixon and . . . (1972), but other satires followed with similar lines of attack. David Rabe’s trio of dramas, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971), and Streamers (1976), offered a savagely grim and surreal portrait of the impact of the war on those serving in the military and on their families and the country at large. Gentler, tragic portrayals of the human toll of the war could be found in Ron Cowen’s Summertree (1968). The Iraq War has inspired satiric works as well, most of them aimed at President George W. Bush and his administration. Among the first of these, Tim Robbins’s Embedded (2003), provided highly topical glimpses of the media presentation of the war, while David Hare, whose Stuff Happens (2004) was produced in London and America, described it as a “history play” in which he skewered British Prime Minister Tony Blair for going along with Bush’s war. When Bush left office, comedian Will Ferrell appeared on Broadway (and HBO-TV) in You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush (2009) and, aside from drawing comedy from Bush’s many malapropisms, Ferrell introduced a few poignant moments in imagining Bush’s response to the war. Tony Kushner’s Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy (2003), which he described as a scene for an as-yetunfinished work, imagined First Lady Laura Bush visiting a classroom only to discover that the children are all Iraqi and all are dead—killed by American bombings. See also STAGE DOOR CANTEEN; WATERLOO BRIDGE. WARD, DOUGLAS TURNER (1930– ). Following his birth in Burnside, Louisiana, actor, director, and playwright Ward studied at New York’s Paul Mann Theatre Workshop. Inspired by the example of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ward cofounded (with Robert Hooks and Gerald A. Krone) the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1965. Ward’s Day of Absence and Happy Ending (1965), both produced by the NEC, won a Drama Desk Award, as the company itself did in 1968, along with a special Tony Award. Ward also won a Drama Desk Award as an actor in Lonne Elder III’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969). The NEC produced Ward’s The River Niger (1972) and, under Ward’s direction, it moved to Broadway, winning a Best Play Tony in 1974. Ward was Drama Desk-nominated for his direction of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play (1982) Off-Broadway.

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Among Ward’s other plays are The Reckoning (1969), Brotherhood (1970), The Harangues (1970), The Brownsville Raid (1977), The Offering (1977), and “The Redeemer” (1983). He has acted in and/or directed most of his own plays throughout his career, and he understudied the role of Walter Lee in the original production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959). On Broadway, his directing credits include Leslie Lee’s The First Breeze of Summer (1975) and Samm-Art Williams’s Home (1980). Critic Mel Gussow described Ward as “a man of great force, dedication, and verbosity.” WARD, WINIFRED (1884–1975). Born Winifred Mary Ward in Eldora, Iowa, she began her career as a voice teacher, but following World War I, she devoted her attention to working with ex-soldiers suffering from shell shock. She completed a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago before establishing a creative dramatic curriculum in the Evanston, Illinois, public school system in 1924. In 1925, Ward founded the Children’s Theatre of Evanston, and in 1944 she established the Children’s Theatre Conference, which ultimately evolved into the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. Her pioneering work in children’s theatre and creative dramatics was established not only through this work, but in four books: Creative Dramatics (1930), Theatre for Children (1939), Playmaking with Children (1947), and Stories to Dramatize (1952), which not only provided techniques and resources, but served to encourage the growth of theatre for youth in the United States. WARRILOW, DAVID (1934–1995). Born in Staffordshire, England, this stage and film actor worked as an editor before turning to a stage career. He won critical approval in the plays of Samuel Beckett in England and the United States. With JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, and Philip Glass, Warrilow worked on Beckett’s Play (1965) in Paris and along with them founded the experimental Mabou Mines in New York. Warrilow acted in Breuer’s The Red Horse Animation (1970) and The B. Beaver Animation (1974) and in Beckett’s 1972 play The Lost Ones in 1975. Warrilow parted with Mabou Mines in 1978, after which he toured in A Piece of Monologue (1979), a “play about death” Beckett wrote for Warrilow, and, under Alan Schneider’s direction, American premieres of Ohio Impromptu (1980), Catastrophe (1982) in and What Where (1983) in 1983. On screen, he appeared in Barton Fink (1991), Radio Days (1987), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). WASHINGTON, DENZEL (1954– ). A native of Mount Vernon, New York, Denzel Hayes Washington, Jr., was the son of a Pentecostal minister

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and a beauty parlor owner. He attended Oakland Military Academy after a stint in grammar school. After high school, Washington earned a B.A. in Drama and Journalism from Fordham University. Working at odd jobs for a time, he subsequently attended graduate school at the American Conservatory Theatre. Following some experiences in stock and television, Washington appeared in the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) production of A Soldier’s Play (1981), sharing a Distinguished Ensemble Obie Award with his NEC castmates. He appeared on Broadway in Ron Milner’s Checkmates (1988), but gained fame as a first-rank film star after his breakout performance in Glory (1989), which brought him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. He won a Best Actor Oscar for Training Day (2001) and has reaped Oscar nominations for Cry Freedom (1987), Malcolm X (1992), and The Hurricane (1999). Washington’s other screen roles include Mississippi Masala (1991), Much Ado about Nothing (1993), Crimson Tide (1995), Courage Under Fire (1996), He Got Game (1998), Remember the Titans (2000), Antwone Fisher (2002), Out of Time (2003), Inside Man (2006), American Gangster (2007), and The Book of Eli (2010). Despite his film work, Washington made occasional theatre appearances, including the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre’s revival of Richard III in 1990. Washington has returned to Broadway on two occasions, to appear in a modern dress revival of Julius Caesar in 2005 and in an acclaimed 2010 revival of August Wilson’s Fences, which brought him a Tony Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. WASSERSTEIN, WENDY (1950–2006). Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a well-to-do Jewish family, Wasserstein was educated at Mount Holyoke College, City College of New York, and Yale School of Drama. Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others (1977) was produced Off-Broadway and later filmed for PBS-TV with a cast including Meryl Streep. With a feminist perspective, Wasserstein’s plays focus on women and their complicated lives at the end of the twentieth century, emphasizing their struggles toward self-worth in a society that despite progress remains malecentered. Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989) won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and a Drama Desk Award as Best Play and The Sisters Rosensweig (1992) was Tony-nominated. Wasserstein’s other major works include Any Woman Can’t (1973), Tender Offer (1983), Isn’t It Romantic? (1983), The Man in a Case (1985), An American Daughter (1997), Old Money (2000), Psyche in Love (2003), and Third (2005). Wasserstein also wrote the screenplay for The Object of My Affection (1998). Her death from lymphoma in early 2006 prematurely silenced a unique voice in millennial American drama.

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WATCH ON THE RHINE. With the outbreak of World War II, Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine in response to world events. Produced by Herman Shumlin, the play opened on 1 April 1941 at the Martin Beck Theatre for 378 performances. A taut, three-act anti-Nazi drama, the play expressed Hellman’s respect for the resolve of a German underground hero and his deep bond with his wife and family, challenging America’s commitment to defeating fascism. Its cast included Paul Lukas, Lucile Watson, George Coulouris, Mady Christians, and Ann Blyth, and the play won the New York Critics Circle Award. Watch on the Rhine was subsequently adapted to the screen in 1943 starring Bette Davis, with Lukas (in an Academy Award-winning performance), Coulouris, and Watson repeating their roles. The play was revived on Broadway for a short run in 1980 with George Hearn, Joyce Ebert, and Harris Yulin in the cast WATERLOO BRIDGE. Robert E. Sherwood’s two-act tragic romance of World War I, produced by Charles Dillingham,* opened on 6 January 1930 for 64 performances at the Fulton Theatre. Despite its short Broadway run, this play provided the source for an enduringly popular 1940 film as World War II loomed and its tale of Myra, a dancer, who believes her lover, Roy, has been killed in the war, took on new resonance. Heartbroken over the news of Roy’s death, Myra turns to prostitution, only to discover that her young man is alive. June Walker and Glenn Hunter* played the leads under Winchell Smith’s* direction. A 1931 film version inspired little interest, but the 1940 remake, starring Vivien Leigh, in her first film following her personal triumph in Gone with the Wind (1939), and Robert Taylor, became a cinematic classic. WATERS, ETHEL (1896–1977). Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, this legendary singer and actress moved from all-black vaudeville* and musicals into the show business mainstream in the late 1920s, an era in which stardom for an African American performer on Broadway was not usually accessible. Waters’s natural gifts as a musical performer, and her versatility, undoubtedly opened doors to her, even if white costars were not always pleased to share the stage with her. Her earliest Broadway performances were in musical revues,* including Africana (1927), Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (2930), Rhapsody in Black (1931), As Thousands Cheer (1933), and At Home Abroad (1935), impressing critics and audiences, who were even more impressed when she moved with seeming ease into dramatic performances, first in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters (1939). Waters made intermittent appearances on movie screens from the dawn of the sound era, including in the all-black MGM musical Cabin in the Sky (1940), but she

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scored a major critical success on stage and screen in Carson McCullers’s drama The Member of the Wedding (1950), in which she gave a memorable performance as Bernice Sadie Brown, a caring black maid, playing opposite a young Julie Harris as a troubled adolescent. Occasional revue* appearances, as well as work in nightclubs, vaudeville, television, recordings, and in Billy Graham crusades, kept her before appreciative audiences until the end of her life. WATERSTON, SAM (1940– ). A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lanky, intellectual Samuel Atkinson Waterson attended Yale University and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the American Actors Workshop before embarking on a stage career in several of the major repertory theatres. He won a Drama Desk Award for a revival of Much Ado about Nothing in 1973 and was nominated for another, as well as a Tony Award, for a revival of Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1994, playing the title role as he had in a 1988 film based on Gore Vidal’s novel, Lincoln. Waterston played Hamlet for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1975, and his Broadway appearances include his debut in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1963), Halfway Up the Tree (1967), Indians (1969), a revival of Hay Fever in 1970, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1971), a revival of A Doll’s House in 1975, Lunch Hour (1980), Benefactors (1985), and A Walk in the Woods (1988). He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Killing Fields (1984) and won an Emmy for Lost Civilizations (1995) along with numerous nominations, including his first for the 1974 television adaptation of The Glass Menagerie. Beginning in 1994, Waterston starred in the television series Law & Order from 1990–2010, for which he received several Emmy nominations and a Screen Actors Guild Award. WATT, DOUGLAS (1914–2009). Born in New York, this drama critic studied at Cornell University before beginning his career as a copy boy for the New York Daily News in 1937. He worked as a radio columnist and drama reporter between 1937 and 1971, before ascending to the post of senior drama critic for the Daily News in 1971. A songwriter on the side, he published several popular tunes and also served as a staff writer for New Yorker magazine. In 2008, the lifetime achievement award presented annual as the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards for dancer and choreographers was named for Watt. WATTS, RICHARD, JR. (1898–1981). From the mid-1930s, this Parkersburg, Virginia, native, educated at Columbia University, served as drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune beginning in 1936 (taking over for

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Percy Hammond*). Following service as a foreign correspondent during World War II, Watts became the longtime drama critic for the New York Post until 1976. He also contributed a regular column to the Post covering show business activity, “Random Notes on This and That.” WAYNE, DAVID (1914–1995). Born Wayne James McKeekan in Traverse City, Michigan, Wayne began his career in the mid-1930s in stock and small roles on Broadway between 1938 and the late 1940s. His fortunes improved when Wayne scored a personal success in the role of Og, a leprechaun turning human, in the musical Finian’s Rainbow (1947), for which he won the first Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award. He appeared occasionally in musicals, including Say, Darling (1958) and The Happy Time (1968), and made numerous film and television appearances, but his most notable stage work came in a variety of dramas and comedies in which he emerged as a versatile character actor, again scoring personal successes as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1948) and Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953), for which he won a Tony. His other major Broadway appearances included The Ponder Heart (1956), The Loud Red Patrick (1956), Send Me No Flowers (1960), and in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Too True to Be Good in 1963. During 1964, Wayne appeared with the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center in After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, But for Whom Charlie, and a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions.* WEAVER, FRITZ (1926– ). A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Weaver began his acting career in the company of Virginia’s Barter Theatre before appearing in an Off-Broadway production of The Way of the World in 1954. Weaver’s Broadway debut, in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden (1955), won him a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination. He later won a Tony for Child’s Play (1970), but only after stacking up a considerable number of stage appearances, as well as film and television. On Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s, this versatile actor appeared in Protective Custody (1956), Miss Lonelyhearts (1957), The Family Reunion (1958), The Power and the Glory (1958), in revivals of The Great God Brown* in 1959, Peer Gynt in 1960, and Henry IV, Parts I and II in 1960, A Shot in the Dark (1961), All American (1962), Lorenzo (1963) The White House (1964), and Baker Street (1965). He appeared less frequently after the early 1970s, but stepped into the role of Ronald in the long-running Absurd Person Singular (1974) and received a Tony nomination in a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price in 1979. After 1980, Weaver’s stage appearances diminished, but he appeared in Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall (1983) and revivals of Miller’s The Crucible (1991) and Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon (1999). In 2006, he

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returned to the stage to appear in a revival of The Voysey Inheritance for the Atlantic Theatre Company. On television, Weaver was nominated for an Emmy Award for the miniseries, Holocaust (1978), and was still acting into his eighties. WEAVER, SIGOURNEY (1949– ). Susan Alexandra Weaver was born in New York, daughter of legendary television pioneer Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver and Elizabeth Inglis, an English actress. She attended Sarah Lawrence, Stanford University, and the Yale School of Drama, but often faced rejection due to the fact that she is six feet tall. She collaborated with Yale classmates Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, appearing in their works and others Off-Broadway, including Gemini (1977), Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1977), and Das Lusitania Songspiel (1979), which brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination. On Broadway, she began as an understudy in a 1975 revival of The Constant Wife and was nominated for a Tony Award in Hurlyburly (1984). She also appeared on Broadway in Sex and Longing (1996). She married director Jim Simpson and appeared in his production of The Guys (2002) at the Flea Theatre, also appearing in a film version that same year. Much of Weaver’s career has been spent in films, and she has been nominated for Academy Awards for Aliens (1986), Working Girl (1988), and Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and won Golden Globe Awards for the last two. She also appeared on screen in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Half Moon Street (1986), Jeffrey (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), A Map of the World (1999), and Avatar (2009). On television, Weaver received Emmy Award nominations for Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997) and Prayers for Bobby (2009). WEBSTER, MARGARET (1905–1972). Born in New York to British parents notable in the theatrical profession, Ben Webster and May Whitty, this occasional actor made her Broadway debut as Masha in a revival of The Seagull (1938). Webster devoted much of her career to directing, winning accolades in the realm of Shakespearean plays, although her penchant for altering the texts did not always meet with critical approval. She made her directorial debut on Broadway staging Maurice Evans’s Richard II in 1937 and Hamlet in 1938. Greater success followed for Webster when she directed Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen in Othello in 1943, playing Emilia herself. Other notable Webster-directed Shakespeare productions on Broadway included Twelfth Night in 1940, Macbeth in 1941, and The Tempest in 1945, among others. Webster also directed revivals of other classics,

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including The Trojan Women in 1941, The Cherry Orchard in 1944, and, in partnership with Cheryl Crawford and Eva Le Gallienne in forming the American Repertory Theatre (ART), she directed What Every Woman Knows, John Gabriel Borkman, Androcles and the Lion, Ghosts, Alice in Wonderland, and Hedda Gabler between 1946 and 1948. Following the collapse of ART, Webster staged occasional revivals of the plays of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, as well as new works, including The Strong Are Lonely (1953) and The Aspern Papers (1962). Despite her prolific output on Broadway, Webster directed and acted in numerous productions in England. WEDDING BAND. This drama of a mixed-race romance by Alice Childress was written in the early 1960s under its full title, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Despite some interest in mounting a Broadway production, the play was not produced in a major venue until the New York Shakespeare Festival staged it in 1972. The play’s theme of racism reaches beyond racist attitudes against African Americans in its demonstration that blacks can also be racist. Set in South Carolina in 1918, where state law prohibits interracial marriage, a young black woman, Julia, is in love with a white man, Herman. His circumstances prevent them from leaving the South, so the lovers, despite being together for 10 years, are forced to face all manner of problems. With a screenplay by Childress, Wedding Band was broadcast by ABC-TV, but its subject matter caused several affiliates to refuse to air the program even as the show contributed to destroying many race-based broadcast taboos. WEISSLER, BARRY (1939– ) and FRAN (1929– ). Among the more active producing teams of the late twentieth century, the Weisslers began their producing partnership in 1963 and ran the National Shakespeare Company for 15 years before their first Broadway production, the James Earl Jones-Christopher Plummer revival of Othello in 1982. This production established a pattern for them of mounting mostly revivals (often with star actors) of classic plays, including the Zoe Caldwell Medea in 1983 and the Kathleen Turner Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990. They produced Falsettos (1992), a rare production of a new work since they are most known for a series of modestly produced musical revivals, including Zorba in 1983, Gypsy in 1989, Fiddler on the Roof in 1990, My Fair Lady in 1993, Grease in 1994, Chicago in 1996, Annie Get Your Gun in 1999, Wonderful Town in 2003, Sweet Charity in 2005, and La Cage aux Folles in 2010. The Weisslers also produced Lucy Prebble’s play Enron (2010) for a short Broadway run and the musical drama The Scottsboro Boys (2010).

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WELLER, MICHAEL (1942– ). This Off-Broadway playwright was born in New York and educated at Windham College and Brandeis University, where he studied music. Weller achieved recognition for Moonchildren (1971), for which he won a Drama Desk Award, and Loose Ends (1979), both of which reflected the counterculture attitudes and disaffections of the 1970s, and although these were Weller’s most successful plays, his output is somewhat more diverse, including the musicals More than You Deserve (1973) and Zhivago (2006), as well as the plays Fishing (1974), Split (1979), Dwarfman, Master of a Million Shapes (1982), The Ballad of Soapy Smith (1984), Ghost on Fire (1986), Spoils of War (1988), Lake No Bottom (1989), Buying Time (1991), Help (1992), What the Night Is For (2002), Approaching Moomtaj (2005), Side Effects (2007), and Beast (2008). Weller’s Fifty Words brought him a Drama Desk nomination in 2009 for an Off-Broadway production directed by Austin Pendleton. Weller teaches at New York’s New School for Drama, and a theatre named for him houses the Broken Watch Theatre Company in New York. WELLES, ORSON (1915–1985). Born George Orson Welles in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this stage and screen prodigy began acting as a child, but gained his first recognition playing supporting roles opposite Katharine Cornell in 1933. Continuing to act, Welles quickly moved into directing, producing, and writing, first for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), for whom he staged Shakespeare’s Macbeth with an all-black cast in 1936, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus in 1937 and a noted production of Julius Caesar that same year in which Welles drew parallels with the rise of fascism in Europe in a modern-dress staging. Among his other FTP productions staged under his Mercury Theatre banner, Welles staged and/or acted in Horse Eats Hat (1936), Ten Million Ghosts (1936), and a revival of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1938), but his direction of Marc Blitzstein’s musical, The Cradle Will Rock (1938), generated a famous controversy that shuttered the theatre on its opening day, leading Welles and his collaborators to move the production to a vacant theatre where, without sets or costumes, the production was performed in defiance of attempts to censor it. Welles’s returns to Broadway were less frequent after his years with the FTP and, particularly, after his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), made him a major screen star, director, and writer, but his subsequent Broadway work included a revival of Danton’s Death (1938), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941), Around the World (1946), and Moby Dick (1962), and he performed in and directed King Lear for a short run in 1956. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE; CENSORSHIP.

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WELLMAN, MAC (1945– ). This prolific poet and playwright with over 40 plays to his credit, has never had a Broadway production of any of his politically charged, language-driven, culture-challenging plays, but he has been a fixture Off-Broadway since the late 1970s. In 1990, Wellman won a Best New American Play Obie Award for three of his works, Bad Penny, Crowbar, and Terminal Hip, and the following year he won again for Sincerity Forever. Wellman’s other works include Harm’s Way (1978), The SelfBegotten (1982), The Bad Infinity (1983), Dracula* (1987), Whirligig (1988), 7 Blowjobs (1991), Murder of Crows (2000), and Description Beggared or the Allegory of WHITENESS (2000). In 2003, Wellman received a Life Achievement Obie, and in the same period he offered his opinion that theatre involves “the whole problem of text against context and the interplay between them. That’s what makes something theatrical or dramatic—a complex relationship between the dialogue and the setting. Basically, I’m trying to argue for a theater that’s a little more interested in ideas and texture.” WESTON, JACK (1924–1996). Born Jack Weinstein in Cleveland, Ohio, Weston made his Broadway debut as a replacement and understudy in the musical South Pacific (1949), but emerged as a character actor with a particular flair in comic roles on stage and screen, beginning with Season in the Sun (1950) and Bells Are Ringing (1956). He scored personal successes in Terrence McNally’s farce, The Ritz (1975), playing an Italian-American schnook hiding out from gangsters in a gay bathhouse, and in Neil Simon’s bill of one-acts, California Suite (1976). His other Broadway appearances included Cheaters (1978), Break a Leg (1979), and a revival of The Tenth Man (1989), as well as his Tony Award-nominated role in Woody Allen’s The Floating Lightbulb (1981). He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the film version of The Ritz in 1976 and appeared in 100 film and television roles. WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE. Lawrence Langner and his wife, Armina Marshall, established this stock theatre in 1931. Designer Cleon Throckmorton* converted a barn into a playhouse where major stars appeared in a season of plays, often transferring a good production to Broadway. The theatre thrived until the late twentieth century, hosting the leading actors of Broadway during the summers. When the building fell into disrepair, Joanne Woodward became artistic director and spearheaded a renovation and a burst of new energy until she stepped down in 2005. Tazewell Thompson replaced Woodward and the theatre marked its 75th anniversary with a lavish book by Richard Somerset-Ward rich with photographs and text surveying the theatre’s illustrious history.

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WEXLER, PETER (1936– ). Born in New York as Peter John Wexler, this scene, lighting, and costume designer studied at the University of Michigan’s School of Architectural Design before beginning his theatrical career with the New York Shakespeare Festival, designing Antony and Cleopatra in 1959. He accumulated numerous Off-Broadway and regional theatre credits, including work in opera, ballet, and national tours during the 1960s and 1970s, and he was nominated for a Tony Award for Scenic Design for The Happy Time (1968). Wexler’s other Broadway credits, for straight plays and musicals, include A Joyful Noise (1966), In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969), a revival of Camino Real in 1970), Minnie’s Boys (1970), The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1971), Murderous Angels (1971), and A Broadway Musical (1978). He has designed a few films and television series, including The Merv Griffin Show in 1965. Wexler has produced outdoor music festivals, consulted on designs of theatre spaces, and staged exhibitions for the Smithsonian Institute. After the early 1980s, he increasingly shifted his attention to pursuits in art, photography, and design. WEXLEY, JOHN (1907–1985). John Wexley’s reputation as a dramatist rests almost solely on the runaway success of his 1930 prison drama, The Last Mile, a Broadway hit that, among other things, provided a young Spencer Tracy with the break that took him to Hollywood stardom in the role of “Killer” Mears, a hardened death row inmate leading a futile prison riot. Clark Gable, another actor to find greater success in movies, got his first significant opportunity in the Los Angeles production of The Last Mile playing the same role. Wexley, a New Yorker by birth, worked as an actor and was the nephew of Maurice Schwartz,* the “John Barrymore* of the Yiddish Theatre.” Wexley’s other major plays, Steel (1931), concerning the labor movement, and They Shall Not Die (1934), depicting the Scottsboro case, were both well-received, and his output included many one-act plays and screenplays. WHAT A LIFE! Clifford Goldsmith’s three-act comedy, produced by George Abbott, opened at the Biltmore Theatre on 13 April 1938 for 538 performances. Ezra Stone scored a personal success as Henry Aldrich, a high school student nearly expelled for drawing a rude picture of the principal. His parents hope he will attend Princeton University, as his father had, so his mother makes him a deal. If Henry passes his history test, she will give him the funds he needs to attend the junior prom (he manages to pass by copying another student’s answers). Henry is unjustly accused of selling the school’s band instruments, but he is exonerated and goes to the prom. The innocuous plot proved remarkably durable, first in its long Broadway run and again

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when a radio program, with Stone playing Henry, became a major hit. A series of films based on the character, featuring Jimmy Lydon as Henry, were also popular during the 1940s. WHEELER, DAVID (1925– ). A noted director in regional theatres and on university campuses, Wheeler studied at Harvard University and studied with José Quintero in the 1950s. From 1963 to 1975, Wheeler directed over 80 productions as artistic director of the Theatre Company of Boston, which he founded, where he worked with numerous noted actors on a range of major American plays, past and present, as well as contemporary European classics. Beginning in 1984, Wheeler became resident director at the American Repertory Theatre and also has directed more than a dozen productions for the Trinity Repertory Company, among others. His major Broadway credits were for collaborations with Al Pacino, who starred in Wheeler-directed revivals of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in 1977 and King Richard III in 1979. While directing Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2007, Wheeler explained to an interviewer that his job is to “track the writer’s mind. We make important discoveries every day in rehearsal.” WHEELER, HUGH (1912–1987). Born Hugh Callingham Wheeler in London, he moved to the United States in 1934, beginning his stage career with his play Big Fish, Little Fish (1961). Other Broadway productions of Wheeler plays include Look, We’ve Come Through (1961) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1966), but he made his most definitive mark writing books for musicals composed by Stephen Sondheim, including A Little Night Music (1973), for which he won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award, Pacific Overtures (1976), and Sweeney Todd (1979), which also garnered Wheeler a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. In 1974, Wheeler’s new book for the 1956 musical Candide, won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and he was nominated for another Tony for his book for Meet Me in St. Louis (1989). Under the nom de plume Patrick Quentin, Wheeler published many mystery novels and short stories. He also wrote for television and films, including Travels with My Aunt (1972) and Nijinsky (1980). WHEN LADIES MEET. This three-act comedy by Rachel Crothers opened in a John Golden production on 6 October 1932 at the Royale Theatre for 191 performances. Frieda Inescort played a novelist who has written about a woman in love with a married man who gets to know the man’s wife. The novelist finds that her story becomes true in her own life. When the two women become acquainted through Bridget, a mutual friend played by Spring Byington, both reassess their circumstances. Selena Royle and Walter Abel

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were also in the cast. Two screen adaptations subsequently appeared, one in 1933 with Myrna Loy, Alice Brady, and Robert Montgomery, and another, starring Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, and Byington in her original role, was released in 1941. WHEN YOU COMIN’ BACK, RED RYDER? Mark Medoff’s play opened Off-Broadway at the East Side Playhouse on 6 December 1973 for 302 performances. Directed by Kenneth Frankel, with Kevin Conway and Brad Dourif in the cast, the play won an Obie Award. Set in a rundown New Mexico diner, two couples confront some of the sociopolitical issues of the era, as an affluent pair are set against Teddy, a disturbed Vietnam War veteran, and his drug-addled girlfriend, who hold up the clientele of the diner. A 1979 film version excited little interest, but the play has endured on regional theatre and university stages. A New York production in 2009 was staged by the Spoon Theatre. WHITE, EDGAR NKOSI (1947– ). Born in Monserrat, White, who was educated at New York University and the Yale School of Drama, has worked mostly in the United States and England as a writer, musician, and composer. His 15-scene fantasy, The Mummer’s Plays (1969), was staged at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre (NYSF/PT), and explores the struggles of African American artists. Several other White plays were also staged at the NYSF/PT, including The Life and Times of J. Walter Smintheus (1971), The Burghers of Calais (1971), Les Femmes Noires (1974), Lament for Rastafari (1975), The Defense (1976), I, Marcus Garvey (and the Captivity of Babylon) (1987), The Generation (1990), Orfeo in a Night World (1990), and Ghosts: Live from Galilee (1999). Some of his later works were staged by La MaMa and the Caribbean Arts Festival Ensemble, among others. White’s style ranges from realism to the surreal, inspired by medieval plays, commedia dell’arte, and black theatre traditions. WHITE, JANE (1922– ). New York-born and educated at Smith College and the New School, White made her first Broadway appearance in Strange Fruit (1945) based on a recommendation from a family friend, Paul Robeson. She has appeared with frequency on stage, as well as film and television. She spent much of the 1960s with the New York Shakespeare Festival, reaping an Obie Award for her performances in Coriolanus and Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1965. White also scored on Broadway as the evil Queen Aggravain in the musical Once Upon a Mattress (1959). White’s Broadway appearances include The Insect Comedy (1948), Razzle Dazzle (1951), The Climate of Eden (1952), Take a Giant Step (1953), Jane Eyre (1958), The

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Power and the Glory (1958), The Cuban Thing (1968), and the 2001 revival of Follies. She also appeared in a one-woman cabaret show, Jane White, Who (1979) and was occasionally making cabaret appearances as late as 2008. WHITEHEAD, PAXTON (1937– ). This definitively British character actor was born in East Malling, Kent, England and trained for an acting career at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, prior to joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1958. In 1961, in the United States, Whitehead, also a director, staged Doric Wilson’s And He Made A Her prior to serving as artistic director of the Shaw Festival from 1967 to 1977. He made his Broadway debut in The Affair (1962), subsequently demonstrating his versatility in a variety of roles in all manner of plays, including revivals of Candida in 1970 and Chemin de Fer in 1973, There’s One in Every Marriage (1972), Habeas Corpus (1975), and he scored a personal success playing Sherlock Holmes* in The Crucifer of Blood (1978). Whitehead frequently appeared on television and in films, but returned to Broadway for Run for Your Wife (1989), Artist Descending a Staircase (1989), Lettice and Lovage (1990), and revivals of A Little Hotel on the Side (1992), My Fair Lady (1993), and Absurd Person Singular (2005). Whitehead was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award playing King Pellinore in the 1981 revival of Camelot and he shared in a Drama Desk Award presented to the ensemble of Noises Off (1984). He has long-standing involvements with the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, and the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, where he appeared in Relatively Speaking in 2007. WHITEHEAD, ROBERT (1916–2002). A native of Montreal, Canada, where he attended Trinity College School, Whitehead moved to the United States to study acting at the New York School of the Theatre, beginning his career with Virginia’s Barter Theatre before acting on Broadway in Night Must Fall (1936), Mr. Big (1941) and The Heart of the City (1942). His first critical success as a producer came with a 1947 production of Robinson Jeffers’s free adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, starring Judith Anderson, followed by The Member of the Wedding (1950) and revivals of Crime and Punishment (1947) and Night Music (1951). In 1952, as managing director of American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), he oversaw productions of Mrs. McThing, Sunday Breakfast, and revivals of Golden Boy (1952) and Four Saints in Three Acts (1952). With the Producers Theatre, Whitehead produced a range of plays, including The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), The Flowering Peach (1954), The Waltz of the Toreadors (1957), A Hole in the Head (1957), Orpheus Descending (1957), The Visit (1958), A Touch of the Poet (1958), and The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958).

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For the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Whitehead worked closely with Elia Kazan on productions of After the Fall, Marco Millions,* But for Whom Charlie, The Changeling, and Incident at Vichy in 1964 and Tartuffe (1965). On his own, Whitehead produced Bus Stop (1955), a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth (1955), A View From the Bridge (1955), Where’s Daddy? (1966), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), The Price (1968), Old Times (1971), a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1974, A Texas Trilogy (1976), No Man’s Land (1976), Bedroom Farce (1979), and The West Side Waltz (1981). Following the death of his first wife, Whitehead married noted actress Zoe Caldwell in 1968 and he produced a revival of the Jeffers Medea starring her in 1982, with Anderson in support as the Nurse. During the 1980s and 1990s, Whitehead’s prolific output slowed, but his productions included the Dustin Hoffman revival of Death of a Salesman in 1984, Lillian (1986), The Petition (1986), A Few Good Men (1989), Broken Glass (1994), and Master Class (1995), among others. He won a Tony Award as Best Producer for A Man for All Season (1962), and several plays produced by Whitehead won Tony or Drama Desk Awards, or nominations. Whitehead was given a life achievement Tony in 2002 and Maureen Stapleton described him as “a prince among men.” WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Edward Albee’s first fulllength play, a harrowing three-act drama, opened on 13 October 1962 at the Billy Rose Theatre for 664 performances, where it won the Tony Award as Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Alan Schneider (who also won a Tony) directed Albee’s assault on marriage, delusions, and sexuality, as George and Martha, a middle-aged professor and his wife, invite Nick and Honey, a young colleague and his wife, home for a drink following a campus dinner. Fueled by alcohol and recriminations, George and Martha drag Nick and Honey into an evening of “fun and games” that reveals the anger, sadness, and fear embedded in the personas of each. Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, as George and Martha, won Tonys for their performances. The play has had two major Broadway revivals, in 1976 with Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara as George and Martha, and in 2005 starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin—both productions won critical kudos and awards. A 1966 film version directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton also won acclaim. WHORF, RICHARD (1906–1966). A somewhat unique figure in American theatre given the diversity of his skills, Whorf, born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, found success as an actor, writer, director, and designer who, late in his career, won a Tony Award for his costume designs for Ondine

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(1954). He acted and directed on Broadway, in Hollywood films, and on television, occasionally writing scripts for episodic TV. His Broadway debut as an actor was in the forgotten melodrama* The Banshee (1927), followed by appearances in a range of minor plays before he played Lyngstrand in a revival of The Lady from the Sea in 1934. He played supporting roles with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in their 1935 revival of The Taming of the Shrew, Idiot’s Delight (1936), Amphitryon 38 (1937), a revival of The Seagull in 1938, and There Shall Be No Night (1940). Whorf also designed scenery for Old Acquaintance (1940), as well as a short-lived revival of Shakespeare’s King Richard III, in which he starred. Among his Broadway directing credits are a revival of The Royal Family* in 1951, Seventeen (1951), Faithfully Yours (1951), The Genius and the Goddess (1957), and Julia, Jake, and Uncle Joe (1961). Whorf played producer Sam H. Harris in the screen classic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and appeared in several other films. WIEST, DIANNE (1948– ). A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Wiest hoped to become a dancer, but studied theatre at the University of Maryland prior to winning supporting roles with the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Long Wharf Theatre. Following a four-year stint in the company of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Wiest’s Broadway appearances include Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970), Solitaire/Double Solitaire (1971), Frankenstein (1981), a revival of Othello in 1982, Beyond Therapy (1982), a revival of In the Summer House (1993), Salome (2003), and a revival of All My Sons in 2008. During much of her career, she devoted herself to many roles in various repertory companies, winning particular acclaim in Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theatre in the 1980s and in The Seagull OffBroadway. Wiest won a 1980 Obie Award and Theatre World Award for Tina Howe’s The Art of Dining Off-Broadway, and appeared in Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare (1997). She won two Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards for Woody Allen films, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and has appeared frequently on television, including a recurring role on the series Law & Order. WILBUR, RICHARD (1921– ). Richard Purdy Wilbur, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (1957, 1989), was born in New York and studied at Amherst College and Harvard University. His theatrical work is limited to acclaimed verse translations of several plays by Molière and Jean Racine. Wilbur’s Molière translations have been widely produced in American theatres, and he won a Drama Desk Award for his translation of The Misanthrope in 1983. Wilbur also contributed lyrics to “Glitter and Be

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Gay” and “Make Our Garden Grow” for the 1956 musical Candide, with music by Leonard Bernstein. WILDER, CLINTON (1920–1986). A native of Irvine, Pennsylvania, Wilder attended Princeton University. His Broadway career began as a replacement stage manager for the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Moving into the role of producer Off-Broadway in association with Richard Barr, Wilder won a 1961 Drama Desk Award for Theatre ’61 productions by new playwrights. Wilder and Barr had championed work by writers out of the mainstream, including such notables as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Jean-Claude Van Itallie, William Hanley, A. R. Gurney, Terrence McNally, Jack Richardson, John Guare, and Paul Zindel. It was their work producing Edward Albee plays that won them most notice. Wilder won a Tony Award as Best Producer for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and several of his productions were nominated for Tonys and/or Drama Desk Awards, including Tiny Alice (1965), A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1976. Wilder’s other productions of Albee’s plays on Broadway include Malcolm (1966), Everything in the Garden (1967), and All Over (1971). His non-Albee productions included Regina (1949), Now You See It (1954), The Tender Trap (1954), a revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1955, A Visit to a Small Planet (1957), Johnny No-Trump (1967), and Home (1970). WILDER, THORNTON (1897–1975). Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Thornton Niven Wilder spent his early years as an intellectual child interested in music and with a passion for literature and theatre. Following his graduation from Yale University, Wilder spent time at the American Academy in Rome, where he attended the first performance of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921. The overt theatricality of Pirandello’s play, especially its fracturing of the unities of time, place, and action, and blurring of reality and illusion, fascinated Wilder and, ultimately, were among the influences on his two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Wilder was further influenced by classical tragedy and epic poetry, Molière’s comedy, English philosopher Francis Bacon, many aspects of German literature and culture, Austrian comic playwright Johann Nestroy, and James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, a central inspiration for The Skin of Our Teeth. The elimination of scenery in the original production of Our Town and the cartoonish, surreal approach to The Skin of Our Teeth labeled Wilder as the major “theatricalist” working on Broadway in the pre-World War II years.

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Prior to his theatrical success, Wilder, who was also a novelist, won his first Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). Wilder’s recurrent themes take shape in this novel; his characters, some of whom he based on real people, must face—and even long for—apocalypse, even as they wish to survive. The vain, unhappy Marquesa says, “Let me live now. Let me begin again,” a concept explored more fully in Wilder’s comparatively few plays, including Our Town. For example, as Emily Webb Gibbs, following her death, returns to life for a day or, more significantly, as the human race persistently rebuilds after catastrophes, including the Ice Age, the biblical flood, and an apocalyptic war in The Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder’s other dramatic works include collections of one-acts, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1927) and The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931), The Merchant of Yonkers (1938; later revised as The Matchmaker [1955] which, ultimately, was the source material for the hit musical, Hello, Dolly! [1964]). Wilder rarely returned to playwriting after a period of distinguished military service during World War II, and he otherwise wrote novels until shortly before his death in 1975, although he occasionally took on the role of the Stage Manager in stock productions of Our Town. WILLIAMS, SAMM-ART (1946– ). Burgaw, North Carolina was the birthplace of this stage, film, and television actor and Tony Award-nominated playwright born Samm Williams. A sparring partner for Muhammad Ali, his New York stage career began in Black Jesus (1973) prior to developing an association with the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), for whom he acted in Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide (1974), Liberty Calland (1975), Argus and Klansman (1975), and Waiting for Mongo (1975). He appeared on Broadway in The First Breeze of Summer (1975) and Off-Broadway in Eden (1976), The Brownsville Raid (1976), and Night Shift (1977). In regional theatre he appeared in Nevis Mountain Dew (1979) at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Among his own plays, Home (1980), produced by the NEC, moved to Broadway for a season, garnering Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. His Off-Broadway plays include Welcome to Black River (1975), The Coming and Do Unto Others (1976), A Love Play (1976), The Last Caravan (1977), Brass Birds Don’t Sing (1978), Friends (1983), The Dance on Widow’s Row (2000), and The Waiting Room (2006). He is artist-in-residence at North Carolina Central University. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE (1911–1983). Certainly one of the foremost American dramatists of the twentieth century, Thomas Lanier Williams was

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a theatrical innovator equaled only by Eugene O’Neill. Honored with two Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Williams’s poetic, often impressionistic, character-driven dramas probed repressed tensions and sexual confusions often shocking to mid-twentieth-century audiences. His plays initiated a period of renewed energy and excitement to post-World War II American drama, inspiring theatrical artists in both form and content. Born in Columbus, Mississippi, to a traveling shoe salesman father who ridiculed his sickly, effeminate son, and a domineering, overprotective mother, Williams retreated into literature, with particular admiration for D. H. Lawrence and Anton Chekhov. After attending several colleges, he finally completed a degree at the University of Iowa. Williams had begun playwriting, including such works as Spring Storm (1938), Not about Nightingales (1938), and Stairs to the Roof (1941). With the assistance of his longtime agent, Audrey Wood, Williams’s The Battle of Angels (1940) was produced, but failed on the road* before getting to Broadway. Wood secured Williams a position as screenwriter for MGM, where he completed the screenplay The Gentleman Caller before losing the job. Revising it and renamed The Glass Menagerie (1945) and thanks to an incandescent performance by Laurette Taylor, the play was one of the most acclaimed of its time. Williams’s next important play, A Streetcar Named Desire, confirmed critical judgment of Williams as a major playwright. The play won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and became an Academy Award-winning film in 1951. For the next decade, Williams’s prolific output generally led to critical acclaim, except Camino Real (1953), a highly imaginative, surreal work deemed too experimental for postwar Broadway. His other plays of the era include Summer and Smoke (1948) and The Rose Tattoo (1951), and in this era he wrote his first novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1951), which, a decade later, became a film. Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof brought Williams a second Pulitzer Prize and became one of his most frequently revived works and a popular 1958 film. Williams began writing screenplays with regularity in this period, including the controversial Baby Doll (1956), which tested the tolerance for depictions of sexuality on movie screens of the period. Other Williams plays include Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), a long one-act first presented as part of a bill called Garden District, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). From the early 1960s, there was a steep downturn in the critical response to Williams’s work, due in part to his experimentation in form and content, including increasing overt depictions of homosexuality which, at the time,

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remained a controversial topic, and because of personal difficulties, including the death of his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, and Williams’s increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol. Most subsequent Williams plays failed to find critical approval or commercial success, including The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), Slapstick Tragedy (1964), The TwoCharacter Play (1967), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1972), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975), This Is (An Entertainment) (1975), Vieux Carré (1977), Tiger Tail (1978), Creve Coeur (1979), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? (1980), The Notebook of Trigorin (1981), Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and A House Not Meant to Stand (1982). Williams frequently revised even his most finished works, sometimes with variant titles. A full accounting of his work remains somewhat elusive (for example, a forgotten Williams screenplay, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, was found, filmed, and released in 2009), but the influence of his plays, particularly in their rich characterizations and lyric language, and his bold themes, continue to inspire theatrical artists. See also CENSORSHIP; GAY AND LESBIAN THEATRE. WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL. In 1955, Ralph Renzi and David C. Bryant founded this esteemed, Tony Award-winning theatre company in Williams College’s Adams Memorial Theatre. With local support, they established a 26-member company drawn from professionals, Yale students and alumni, and Williams students. After the first year, Bryant was succeeded as artistic director by Nikos Psacharopoulos. who built the theatre’s reputation in the 1960s and 1970s through strong productions of modern classics, revitalizing many in innovative productions with major and emerging actors. During the 1980s, the theatre expanded its repertoire to include new works, a late-night cabaret, an apprentice workshop, and an experimental second company. Following the death of Psacharopoulos in 1989, Peter Hunt took over as artistic director and shifted the season selections toward American classics, including musicals. Hunt was succeeded in 1996 by Michael Ritchie and during his tenure, which lasted until 2004, the theatre transferred a number of its productions to Broadway and Off-Broadway, receiving a 2002 Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre. Roger Rees assumed the post of artistic director in 2005, encouraging new works, the training of apprentices, and seasons of American and European modernist works. In 2008, Nicholas Martin took over as artistic director, overseeing a summer company of over 400.

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WILSON, AUGUST (1945–2005). This African American dramatist, whose plays have won two Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, and innumerable critics awards, was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Calling himself a “black nationalist,” Wilson became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and his writing reflects the dialects and unique rhythms of speech and jazz music he had heard in his early years in Pittsburgh. Wilson’s themes concern the circumstances of black Americans, past and present, and although some are often ruminations on the power struggles of race between black and white, he also focuses on the inner turmoil within the African American community and in the lives of black families and communities. Wilson founded the Black Horizon Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, where, in 1972, he began writing Jitney, a play set in a gypsy cab station that was produced at his theatre in 1978 before it was more fully developed in 1982 at the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Playwrights Conference. Wilson’s other early plays include The Homecoming (1979), The Coldest Day of the Year (1979), Fullerton Street (1980), Black Bart and the Sacred Hill (1981), and The Mill Hand’s Lunch Basket (1983). Moving to Minneapolis, Wilson established the Playwrights’ Center and continued to write plays until his first critical and commercial success with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1983). It was the first Wilson play to reach Broadway, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The first of his ambitious 10-play, decade-by-decade cycle on twentieth-century African American life, the cycle includes Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984), which also won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Fences (1987) followed and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Piano Lesson (1987), Wilson’s next play, brought Wilson his second Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s cycle also includes Two Trains Running (1990), Seven Guitars (1995), and King Hedley II (1999), which won a Tony for Best Play, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Drama Desk Award. In 1997, Wilson inspired a theatrical controversy when he argued for a separatist black American culture on the grounds that white cultural institutions would never enthusiastically or effectively nurture black artists. After exchanging opposing views in print, Wilson publicly debated Robert Brustein on the subject. Wilson continued to work on plays for the cycle into the twenty-first century, adding Gem of the Ocean (2003) and Radio Golf (2005), the latter completed shortly before his death from cancer. WILSON, EDWIN (1927– ). A scholar and teacher educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of Edinburgh, and Yale University, Wilson

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taught at several institutions, including Yale, before directing the Center for Advanced Study in the Theatre Arts at the City University of New York Graduate Center and serving as drama critic for the Wall Street Journal for over 20 years. He has also published criticism and textbooks on theatre, most notably, with Alvin Goldfarb, The Living Theatre (1982). WILSON, ELIZABETH (1921– ). Born Elizabeth Welter Wilson in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and with Sanford Meisner at The Neighborhood Playhouse. A versatile stage, screen, and television actress, Wilson won a Tony Award for her performance in David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones in 1972 and shared in an ensemble Drama Desk Award for a revival of Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven in 1980, for which she received a Joseph Jefferson Award. Wilson made her Broadway debut in Picnic (1953), following by a long list of credits in diverse plays, including The Desk Set (1955), The Tunnel of Love (1957), Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), Sheep on the Runway (1970), a revival of The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1970, The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1972), revivals of Uncle Vanya in 1973, Threepenny Opera in 1976, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1977, You Can’t Take It with You in 1983, Ah, Wilderness! in 1988, A Delicate Balance in 1996, and Waiting in the Wings in 1999. Her many television and film appearances include The Birds (1963), The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970), and Quiz Show (1994). WILSON, JOHN CHAPMAN (1899–1961). Lawrenceville, New Jerseyborn producer and director Wilson was educated at Yale University and worked as a stockbroker. He met Noël Coward during the run of Coward’s sensational hit drama The Vortex in 1924 and became the playwright’s business manager and sometime lover. This led to his work as general manager on the original production of Coward’s Private Lives (1931) and ultimately producing Coward’s Design for Living (1933), Tonight at 8:30 (1936), and Set to Music (1939), as a silent partner. Wilson’s subsequent Broadway productions, many of which he also directed, included his first directorial venture, Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941), as well as Lovers and Friends (1943), Bloomer Girl (1944), O Mistress Mine (1946), Present Laughter (1946), The Winslow Boy (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* (1949), The Lady’s Not for Burning (1950), Make a Wish (1951), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), The Little Hut (1953), Quadrille (1954), and Seventh Heaven (1955), among many others. He also produced Ruth Draper’s solo show in 1947. WILSON, LANFORD (1937–2011). Born in Lebanon, Missouri, the setting for several of his plays, Wilson briefly attended San Diego State University,

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but completed his education in playwriting at the University of Chicago. His initial reputation was based on his significant involvement in the evolution of the Off-Off-Broadway movement where, at the Caffe Cino, his earliest oneact plays, So Long at the Fair, Home Free!, and The Madness of Lady Bright premiered in 1963–1964. The latter is regarded as a milestone in gay-themed drama. Wilson’s first full-length plays, Balm in Gilead (1965) and The Rimers of Eldritch (1967), which won a Drama Desk Award, were well-received Off-Broadway. In 1969, Wilson and his collaborative partner, Marshall W. Mason, founded the Circle Repertory Company (CRC), where much of his subsequent work was first produced, including The Hot l Baltimore (1973), for which Wilson won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and an Obie Award. Other major Wilson plays of the 1970s produced by the CRC include Lemon Sky (1970), Serenading Louie (1970), and The Mound Builders (1975), but his three-play Talley trilogy, Fifth of July (1978), Talley’s Folly (1979), and A Tale Told (1981), brought significant honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for Talley’s Folly. Subsequent Wilson plays include Angels Fall (1983), Burn This (1986), Redwood Curtain (1992), Sympathetic Magic (1998), Book of Days (2000), and Rain Dance (2002). Wilson has also written for films and television, including adaptations of his own plays. He was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2001, and he also translated the plays of Anton Chekhov, whose plays, along with those of Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and William Inge, are frequently cited as an inspiration to Wilson. WILSON, MARY LOUISE (1936– ). New Haven, Connecticut, was the birthplace of versatile stage, film, and television actress Wilson, who late in her career had her most notable success, as Edith Ewing “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale in Grey Gardens (2006). Her numerous Broadway credits began with her debut in the failed musical Hot Spot (1963), followed by a range of character roles in Flora, The Red Menace (1965), Lovers and Other Strangers (1968), Promises, Promises (1968), revivals of The Women in 1973, Gypsy in 1974, The Royal Family* in 1975, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1977, The Philadelphia Story in 1980, Alice in Wonderland in 1982, the all-women rewrite of The Odd Couple in 1985, Cabaret in 1998, and The Women in 2001. She appeared in Neil Simon’s Fools (1981) and has acted in many films and television shows since the early 1970s. She often found her most intriguing roles Off-Broadway, where she won a Drama Desk Award for Full Gallop (1996), and received Drama Desk nominations for Bosoms and Neglect (1999), The Beard of Avon (2004), and Grey Gardens which, when it transferred to Broadway, won Wilson a 2007 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

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WILSON, ROBERT (1941– ). An avant-garde director and playwright, Wilson, who was born in Waco, Texas, studied business at the University of Texas before seeking a degree in architecture from the Pratt Institute. In 1968, he established the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds where, using his interests in dance, music, architecture, sound, and lighting, he created his first important works, The King of Spain and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, both in 1969. Working in both the United States and Europe, his unique achievements depend on alternative uses of language, movement, and visual elements. Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) ran over 12 hours and his similarly epic 1986 work, the CIVIL wars: A Tree Best Measured When It Is Down, was unanimously selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury, but its supervisory board chose to give no prize for drama that year. He is perhaps best known for Einstein on the Beach (1976), created in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, and his production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1986). He has staged numerous operas, plays by Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, and Georg Büchner, and in 2009 collaborated with Rufus Wainwright on Sonnets, based on Shakespeare’s sonnets, for the Berliner Ensemble. The New York Times described Wilson as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theatre and an explorer in the uses of time and space onstage. Transcending theatrical convention, he draws in other performance and graphic arts, which coalesce into an integrated tapestry of images and sounds.” WIMAN, DWIGHT DEERE (1894–1951). This notable Broadway producer was born in Moline, Illinois, where he inherited a fortune from his manufacturing family. He attended Yale University, studying under Monty Woolley, and worked in films before partnering with William A. Brady, Jr.* to produce several plays in the 1920s, including Lucky Sam McCarver* (1925), The Road to Rome* (1927), and The Little Show (1929). On his own, he produced numerous plays and musicals, occasionally with other partners, including The Vinegar Tree (1930), Gay Divorce (1932), She Loves Me Not (1933), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), On Borrowed Time (1938), Morning’s at Seven (1939), Old Acquaintance (1940), The Damask Cheek (1942), Street Scene* (1947), The Big Knife (1949), and The Country Girl (1950). WINCHELL, WALTER (1897–1972).† Born in New York as Walter Wincheles, he learned about theatre as a child in vaudeville* with Gus Edwards’s “kid” act. Winchell ultimately became one of the most powerful Broadway newspaper columnists of the mid-twentieth century. He worked for the Vaudeville News (1922–1924), the New York Graphic (1924–1929), after which he moved to the New York Mirror in 1929, syndicating his

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column through the William Randolph Hearst newspaper empire. Winchell’s jargon-filled writings and radio broadcasts (he had a regular program from 1929 to 1956) covering theatre, and later movies and all aspects of show business, made him a powerful force able to close or save shows through his commentary. His power diminished in the 1950s, in part as a result of his rabid anti-Communist views in support of the McCarthy-era “witch hunts,” and partly through his inability to change with rapidly changing times. When his regular column ended in 1963, Winchell’s raspy voice and slangy narratives were heard in films and television shows evoking the 1920s and 1930s. His ruthless ways were fictionalized in the character of J. J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). See also CRITICS/CRITICISM. WINDUST, BRETAIGNE (1906–1960). This French-born director studied at Princeton University and was in the company of the Theatre Intime. He served as stage manager for Strange Interlude* (1928) and Elizabeth the Queen (1930), acted in I Was Waiting for You (1933), Oliver Oliver (1934), The Distaff Side (1934), and the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne revival of The Taming of the Shrew in 1935, before transitioning to directing with Idiot’s Delight (1936), starring the Lunts. Among his numerous Broadway directing credits, Windust staged Amphitryon 38 (1937), Great Lady (1938), and the long-running hits Life with Father (1939) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1941). Windust did not offer many hits during World War II, but following the war he scored with The Hasty Heart (1945), the Pulitzer Prize-winning State of the Union (1945), the musical Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Remains to Be Seen (1951), and The Great Sebastians (1956), again with the Lunts. WINER, LINDA (1946– ). She began her career in Chicago, Illinois, reviewing classical music before becoming chief theatre and dance critic for the Chicago Tribune from 1969–1980, after which she was a cultural affairs writer for the New York Daily News (1980–1982) and critic-at-large for USA Today (1982–1987). Winer has been the drama critic and arts columnist for Newsday since 1987, although she frequently publishes for other periodicals and hosts the “Women in Theatre” series on CUNY-TV. Winer also teaches critical writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and was the first woman invited to participate as a master critic at the National Critics Institute of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. WINGED VICTORY. This two-act play with music produced by the United States Army Air Force was written and directed by Moss Hart and tried out in Boston in the fall of 1943, where it was well received before it opened on

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20 November 1943 at New York’s 44th Street Theatre for 212 performances. Winged Victory was a benefit for the Army Emergency Relief Fund and raised considerable sums when the production toured to various cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Richmond, Washington, D.C., for limited runs. The wartime propaganda play follows three young men from their enlistment in the air force to their training and on to a bomber plane where one is injured. The large cast featured servicemen, many of whom became theatre and film professionals, including Keith Andes, Don Beddoe, Whit Bissell, Red Buttons, Lee J. Cobb, John Forsythe, Peter Lind Hayes, Mario Lanza, Karl Malden, Kevin McCarthy, Gary Merrill, Ray Middleton, Barry Nelson, Edmond O’Brien, George Reeves, Martin Ritt, David Rose, Don Taylor, and Victor Sen Yung, among others. Twentieth Century-Fox released a film version in 1944 featuring most of the original cast. WINGLESS VICTORY, THE. Katharine Cornell produced and starred in this three-act drama by Maxwell Anderson that opened at the Empire Theatre on 23 December 1936 for 110 performances. Cornell’s husband, Guthrie McClintic, directed, with scenery by Jo Mielziner, but Cornell was rather improbably cast as a Malayan princess, Oparre, who has married the wealthy captain of a ship (The Wingless Victory) played by Walter Abel. Oparre has come to live with him in staid Salem, Massachusetts, in 1800. Over time, Oparre comes to believe that she stands in the way of her husband’s happiness, with the result that she kills her children and commits suicide. When the play tried out at Washington, D.C.’s National Theatre during Thanksgiving week, it was, according to the New York Times, “applauded and cheered at the end until the house lights went on and the steel curtain rolled down,” but Broadway audiences were far less enthusiastic, and critics found Anderson’s play to be melodramatic* and beneath Cornell’s talents. WINGS. Veteran actress Constance Cummings won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for her performance as a paralyzed stroke victim responding to her therapist and other caregivers and contending with the problems caused by her damaged body. Originally written as a radio play, Arthur Kopit adapted it for the stage, and it was first produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in early 1978. It moved to the Public Theatre in the summer prior to another move, this time to Broadway, on 28 January 1979, where it played at the Lyceum Theatre for 113 performances and met with critical approval and a Tony nomination as Best Play. Cummings played the role again in a 1983 television production.

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WINTERS, SHELLEY (1920–2006). Born Shirley Schrift in East Saint Louis, Illinois, she was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and eventually studied acting at the Actors Studio and had a brief stint as a “glamour girl” in small parts in Hollywood films before scoring a notable success for her performance as Montgomery Clift’s pregnant girlfriend in A Place in the Sun (1951). Most known for her numerous screen appearances, Winters also made occasional Broadway and regional theatre appearances. On Broadway, she had begun her career in small roles in The Night Before Christmas (1941), Rosalinda (1942), and she replaced Celeste Holm as Ado Annie during the long run of the musical, Oklahoma! (1943). Her periodic returns to Broadway included A Hatful of Rain (1955), Girls of Summer (1956), Under the Weather (1966), Minnie’s Boys (1970), and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1978), as well as replacing Bette Davis in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1961). She also wrote a collection of one-acts produced Off-Broadway under the title One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger (1970). For her screen work, Winters won two Supporting Actress Academy Awards, for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965) and was Oscar-nominated for A Place in the Sun (1951) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the latter bringing her a Golden Globe Award (she was nominated five additional times). Winters won an Emmy Award for Two Is the Number (1963) and received two other nominations. WINTERSET. Maxwell Anderson collaborated with Harold Hickerson on Gods of the Lightning* in 1928, a play dramatizing the controversial SaccoVanzetti case, but the play had only a brief run. Without Hickerson, Anderson revisited the Sacco-Vanzetti story in his blank-verse fictionalization Winterset, which opened to critical acclaim on 25 September 1935 at the Martin Beck Theatre for 195 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best play of the year. When his father, Bartolomeo, is unjustly sentenced to death for the murder of a pay clerk, Mio visits Gaunt, the presiding judge, to plead for his father’s life. When he realizes that the judge is insane, Mio turns to Miriamne, a young woman whose brother witnessed the crime and knows that gangsters committed the murder. Mio and Miramne fall in love while he comes to the conclusion that his only hope is to reveal the truth publicly. The gangsters kill Mio to prevent this and when Miriamne threatens to avenge Mio’s murder by revealing the truth of both murders, the gangsters kill her as well. Winterset is a grim portrait of a corrupt society in which decency and idealism cannot survive. The play generated considerable critical interest over its use of blank verse for a contemporary story, which Anderson had previously applied only in historical dramas. Winterset was filmed in 1936 with

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its original cast, including Burgess Meredith (Mio), Margo (Miramne), and Richard Bennett* (Gaunt), but this allegorical tragedy has rarely been revived out of its time. WINWOOD, ESTELLE (1883–1984).† This British-born actress, whose real name was Estelle Ruth Goodwin, could boast one of the longest acting careers on record, from her stage debut in 1898 to her last television appearance in 1980. The length of her career enhanced her versatility as she ranged from a leading lady known for her beauty to an elderly character actress, equally adept in comedy and drama. She debuted on Broadway in 1916 in Hush! and played a leading role in the first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Why Marry?* (1917). Winwood appeared with Mrs. Leslie Carter* in The Circle (1921) and numerous other plays, scoring a hit in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels (1927). She married twice, including to director Guthrie McClintic, and her other Broadway credits include Too Many Husbands (1919), The Distaff Side (1934), a revival of The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1938, Ladies in Retirement (1940), The Pirate (1942), Ten Little Indians (1944), a revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1946, and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948), among many others. In old age, she gave several memorable screen performances, most notably as the object of Zero Mostel’s affection (“Hold me! Touch me!”) in The Producers (1968) and as Elsa Lancaster’s ancient nurse in Murder by Death (1976). WISEMAN, JOSEPH (1918–2009). Born in Montreal, Canada, this versatile character actor has had a long career on stage, film, and television. On Broadway, he made his debut in a small role in Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). Wiseman won a Drama Desk Award for his performance in the title role of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969). His other Broadway credits include Journey to Jerusalem (1940), Candle in the Wind (1941), Joan of Lorraine (1946), Katharine Cornell’s revival of Antony and Cleopatra (1947), Detective Story (1949), the John Garfield revival of Golden Boy (1952), The Lark (1955), Incident at Vichy (1964), Enemies (1972), Zalmen, or The Madness of God (1976), a revival of The Tenth Man (1989), and Judgment at Nuremberg (2001). Wiseman has also acted frequently in Off-Broadway and regional theatre productions, including Tony Kushner’s Slavs! (1994) at the New York Theatre Workshop and he won an Obie Award for Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember Anything (1998) at the Signature Theatre. WIT. Margaret Edson, a grammar school teacher from Atlanta, Georgia, won a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for this

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drama about Vivian Bearing, a John Dunne scholar dying of ovarian cancer. Edson based her play, which is also known as W;t, in part, on her own experiences working in the health care industry. The play premiered in 1995 at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, prior to a production at the Long Wharf Theatre featuring Kathleen Chalfant, in an Obie Award-winning performance, as Vivian. In September 1998, the play moved to New York’s MCC Theatre before shifting to the Union Square Theatre in December 1998. A 2001 HBO-TV film version starring Emma Thompson and directed by Mike Nichols won much critical praise. WITHOUT LOVE. Philip Barry’s three-act comedy about an arranged marriage opened at the St. James Theatre on 10 November 1942 for 113 performances under the director of Robert B. Sinclair and Arthur Hopkins (who stepped in after Sinclair joined the United States Army), with scene and lighting design by Robert Edmond Jones. Katharine Hepburn starred as Jamie Coe Rowan, a late senator’s widowed daughter, who enters into an agreement with scientist Patrick Jameson (Elliott Nugent) to marry, but without the complications of love and sex. It seems an excellent arrangement for the needs of both, but love asserts itself despite their intentions. Barry wrote this play at Hepburn’s behest, following their successful collaboration on The Philadelphia Story in 1939. Hepburn starred in a 1945 MGM film version of Without Love, costarring with Spencer Tracy. WITTSTEIN, ED (1929– ). Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Wittstein studied at Erwin Piscator’s Drama Workshop, the Parsons the New Schools for Design, and New York University before beginning a successful scene design career on Broadway, in regional theatre, and in film and television. His Broadway credits, which include a Tony Award nomination for Ulysses in Nighttown (1974), begin with a flop, Transposed Heads (1958), but include Kean (1961), Enter Laughing (1963), And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running (1967), The Man in the Glass Booth (1968), Celebration (1969), Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970), and King of Schnorrers (1979). His designs were seen at the Cincinnati Playhouse, Center Stage Theatre, American Shakespeare Festival, and in opera houses and international theatres. WOLFE, GEORGE C. (1954– ). Born George Costello Wolfe, this African American director and playwright attended Kentucky State University before transferring to Pomona College, followed by an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University. Among his plays, The Colored Museum (1986), garnered most attention, but his directing work began in earnest with his Obie

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Award-winning staging of Spunk (1989). He won a Drama Desk Award for directing Jelly’s Last Jam (1991). He won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for directing Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in 1993 and followed up later that year directing the second Angels play, Perestroika, for which he won a Drama Desk Award. Wolfe was named artistic director and production of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre in 1993 and continued there until 2004. During that period, Wolfe won a second Tony for directing Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996). His other Broadway directing credits include Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), revivals of The Tempest in 1995 and On the Town in 1998, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (2000), The Wild Party (2000), Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002), Topdog/Underdog (2002), Caroline, or Change (2004), and Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in 2006. He also produced Golden Child (1998) and Take Me Out (2003), but in 2004 Wolfe moved toward directing films. WOMEN/FEMININITY. Between 1930 and 2010, few of the many changes in American life were as radical as the status of women. In society, and as depicted in drama, the evolution of the status of women can be traced vividly within both fictional stage lives and the realities for women working within the theatrical profession. By the twenty-first century, female characters found in American plays reflected diversity not evident in the work of dramatists a mere 80 years before. In this period, women moved from secondclass citizenship and the domestic realm into all facets of American society. Women in professional roles were no longer the exception, but increasingly the rule, and women theatre workers conquered every facet of the profession during this era. The long struggle for equality and full citizenship for women had begun in the United States at its virtual beginning, as exemplified when Abigail Adams cautioned her husband John to “remember the ladies” while articulating the rights and laws of the new nation. However, from the birth of America to the early twentieth century, and despite the accomplishments of singular women who broke with traditional roles, women were, in most respects, denied basic rights (suffrage, for example, was not granted until 1920) and largely relegated to lives as wives and mothers. The romantic and melodramatic* plays of the nineteenth-century stage exalted women in domestic life, frequently with their virtue threatened by outside forces, or depicted them as “spinsters” or “fallen women,” women relegated to the shadows either as objects of pity or illicit desire. Women characters in contemporary plays during the nineteenth century were rarely seen in non-traditional ways, although the classics (Shakespeare) and, ultimately, modernist European plays, including those

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of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, provided images outside the narrow norms of mainstream plays, at least in depicting women of power or those chafing at repressions and oppressions. In nineteenth-century America, the stage provided an arena in which theatrical women could break free of constraints. As actresses and, occasionally, managers and dramatists after the middle of the nineteenth century, women could function professionally, although typically had to at least present the image of traditional womanhood varied by local color, ethnicity, and fashion. Many actresses added a “Mrs.” to their billing to ensure audiences knew they were socially acceptable women. International star actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt,* Ellen Terry, Eleonora Duse, and others, frequently toured America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, like American women stars, presented an admiring public with varied portrayals of women onstage (increasing in diversity in plays by modernist writers and women dramatists) and off, where their often non-traditional lives were surprisingly accepted. However, when James A. Herne* wrote Margaret Fleming* (1890) in the Ibsenite mold, depicting a wife questioning her troubled marriage and errant husband, the play caused significant controversy and was only performed once in private in Boston. Mainstream American audiences clung to traditional views of womanhood in most forms of drama well into the mid-twentieth century, although more dimensioned images slowly emerged. This was, in part, a result of modern women playwrights from the 1910s to 1930s, including Zoë Akins, Rachel Crothers, Zona Gale,* Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell,* and others, whose plays depicted women more diversely and/or emphasized the trap of traditional roles or the perversion of them, as in Glaspell’s Trifles* (1916), an early feminist work in which a woman who has murdered an abusive husband refuses to speak, confounding police investigating the case. The police miss all of the domestic clues pointing to the cause of the murder, while two of her women neighbors are able to decipher the evidence in the domestic environment of the abused woman’s home. Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires* (1915) satirized a woman taken with Freudian psychology who believes she sees unspoken feelings between her sister and husband. Other plays by women dramatists between 1910 and 1940 dealt with repressed desires and the limitations of the domestic sphere, as in Gale’s Pulitzer Prize play (the first awarded to a woman), Miss Lulu Bett* (1920), in which a lonely spinster is tricked into a sham marriage, but shows kindness to those who have mocked her. The prolific Crothers wrote well-constructed plays assailing double standards faced by women in a male-dominated society in A Man’s World* (1909), a trial marriage in Young Wisdom (1914), the “flapper” generation in Nice People* (1921), divorce in As Husbands Go (1931) and When Ladies

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Meet (1932), and the spiritual obsessions of idle society women in Susan and God (1937). Critics acknowledged Crothers’s plays for offering the most accurate dramatic depiction of women’s lives available in this period, and her women characters, like those of Zoë Akins, whose The Old Maid (1935) examined the tribulations of a woman left pregnant by a deceased Civil War soldier, tended to be set among educated middle- and upper-class women. A few playwrights, like Lula Vollmer,* examined poor rural women in The Shame Woman* (1923), in which a North Carolina mountain woman, Lize, is chastised by her neighbors because she had been raped by a man years before. Caring for an adopted daughter who, she learns, has been sneaking out to meet the same man who abused her, Lize kills the man to prevent him from shaming the girl by bragging of his conquest. Treadwell’s Machinal* (1928), a fictional treatment of real-life murderer Ruth Snyder, focuses on an unhappy wife and mother whose life has been controlled by a mechanized society. When she takes a lover who liberates her, she cannot face a return to her husband and murders him. Maurine Dallas Watkins also dealt with dissatisfied wives, but in satiric terms, in Chicago* (1926), a cynical look at a Jazz Age flapper who shoots her lover and wins instant celebrity. Women pressed for significant changes in the 1910s, leading the women’s suffrage movement to prevail, and as World War I drew to a close and the Jazz Age began, many changes became visible in fashion, as corsets and bustles vanished to be replaced by dress lengths above the knee and bobbed hair. Young women openly smoked cigarettes and were generally more liberated, but many professions still remained closed to women and salary equity was generally not possible. However, theatrical women had increasing visibility and power. Laurette Taylor, Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Eva Le Gallienne, and Alla Nazimova, among many other actresses, became household names via major Broadway successes and national tours, and most were significant between the two world wars that they provided images of strong women, both through their onstage roles and in their offstage lives. Beyond acting, several of these women were also managers; for example, Le Gallienne established the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1926 with the goal of bringing classics and serious modern works to audiences in repertory style. Her leadership with this company provided a model adopted by regional theatres across the country after the 1950s. Few actresses of subsequent generations could match stars like Cornell and Hayes for their longevity as stage stars, partly because later actresses divided their time between the stage and film, although Katharine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, Angela Lansbury, and Julie Harris, among others, had long and distinguished stage careers. Between World War I and the 1960s, women also moved into professional positions that had been virtually

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unattainable before World War I. Their accomplishments included producing, as in the case of Theresa Helburn, producer and founder of the prestigious Theatre Guild, or such women as Cheryl Crawford, a founder of The Group Theatre, or Lucille Lortel, a seminal producer of Off-Broadway, as well as Jean Dalrymple, Elizabeth McCann, Lynne Meadow, Nelle Nugent, Hildy Parks, and Daryl Roth, among others, who were major producing forces from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries. Women also broke through as directors, with actresses (Le Gallienne) or playwrights (Crothers) often staging plays, but more so with such early figures as Margo Jones, Antoinette Perry, and Margaret Webster to later diverse women directors, including Pamela Berlind, Anne Bogart, Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, Tina Landau, Elizabeth LeCompte, Judith Malina, Carey Perloff, Lisa Peterson, Julie Taymor, and Mary Zimmerman. Women also stepped into design (Theoni V. Aldredge, Lucinda Ballard, Aline Bernstein, Peggy Clark, Pat Collins, Peggy Eisenhauer, Beverly Emmons, Jane Greenwood, Susan Hilferty, Ann Hould-Ward, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, Willa Kim, Florence Klotz, Heidi Ettinger Landesman, Franne Lee, Adrianne Lobel, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Motley, Tharon Musser, Nancy Potts, Carrie Robbins, Jean Rosenthal, Ann Roth, Irene Sharaff, Jennifer Tipton, Susan Tsu, Jennifer Von Mayrhauser, Patricia Zipprodt, Catherine Zuber), criticism (Rosamund Gilder, Edith Oliver), and as agents (Audrey Wood). In addition, women took leadership roles in teaching acting (Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, Maria Ouspenskaya) and in the establishment of children’s theatre (Charlotte Chorpenning, Constance D’Arcy Mackay, Winifred Ward). Between the world wars, a woman’s place remained in the home in mainstream moral views, though women were somewhat freer to explore their sexuality. Actress and playwright Mae West* shocked 1920s’ audiences with her characterizations of Diamond Lil and other racy women, all extensions of her own carefully crafted personality: sexually aggressive, powerful in business, and usually dominating male peers. However, West was not the norm by any means and most mainstream male dramatists tended to present women characters in a more traditional way. But with the 1920s, many social attitudes were tested and evolved, leading even male playwrights to present more dimensioned and varied portrayals of women. Among the most successful woman writers of the 1920s and 1930s was Edna Ferber, whose 1926 novel Show Boat was the source of the classic 1927 musical of the same name. In partnership with George S. Kaufman, Ferber wrote four successful plays, Minick* (1924), The Royal Family* (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936), the last set in a hotel for young aspiring actress during the Great Depression.

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Eugene O’Neill’s plays usually offer women only as wives, mothers, or whores, but in such works as Strange Interlude* (1928), in which he depicts a modern woman chafing under the constraints of traditional roles and mainstream morality, O’Neill expands his vision. In his classically inspired Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), O’Neill takes a more tragic approach, focusing on Christine Mannon, the murderous, adulterous wife of a Union general at the end of the Civil War, and the unhappy daughter, Lavinia, who unmasks her crimes and, simultaneously, her own. Early in his career, O’Neill wrote a one-act, Abortion (1914), raising a topic more frequently examined in plays after the 1970s, most notably in Jane Martin’s Keely and Du (1993), but also in many works by feminist writers and performance artists beginning late in the twentieth century (it should be noted that “Jane Martin” was a pseudonym used by Jon Jory during his tenure as artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville). O’Neill also raised the subject of interracial marriage in All God’s Chillun Got Wings* (1924), as well as prostitution in Anna Christie* (1920) and drug addiction as the hidden shame of Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939). Other 1920s to 1940s male playwrights followed O’Neill in expanding their visions of women, whether in the sophisticated comedies of Philip Barry, whose poor little rich girl Linda Seaton in Holiday* (1928) yearns for a more meaningful, fulfilled life than that of merely a pampered debutante, or in the discontents of the artistically-inclined Gaby Maple with the mundane life she faces in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935). Darker views of the discontents of women could be found in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939), in which the rapacious Regina Giddens seems prepared to do anything to gain wealth and the resultant control she envisions it affording her. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town (1938) kept the women characters of a turn-of-the-century small New England town within traditional roles, but his approach emphasized the inherent frustrations, something made even more vivid, albeit in satiric form, in his The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), wherein the archetypal family includes a nurturing mother and a sexy home-wrecking maid. One of the most successful plays by a woman dramatist prior to World War II was Clare Boothe’s aptly titled and frequently revived The Women (1936), a semi-satiric work featuring a large all-female cast of New York society women encompassing a range of stereotypes, from the virtuous wronged wife and loyal friend to the man-hungry gold digger. Boothe wrote a few other plays, but largely abandoned the theatre for a political career. Other women writers arriving on the scene in the 1930s and 1940s included Rose Franken whose Another Language (1932) focused on a childish woman and her relationship with her mother, and the long-running comedy-drama

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Claudia (1941), concerning a young woman and the joys and tribulations of her marriage. Actress Ruth Gordon authored the hit wartime comedy Over 21 (1944) and reflected on her own past in Years Ago (1947), otherwise teaming with her husband, Garson Kanin, to write successfully for stage and screen. Dorothy Parker, known more for her work as a critic, also wrote a few plays, including Close Harmony (1924), After Such Pleasures (1934), and The Ladies of the Corridor (1953), the last concerning single women and widows in individual struggles with loneliness. In the late 1940s, Fay Kanin, who wrote frequently for the screen, also scored a Broadway hit with Goodbye, My Fancy (1948), concerning a congresswoman encountering an old lover, and His and Hers (1954), about a husband-wife writing team that divorces. It was clear that by the 1930s, there were fewer images of damsels in distress, blushing virgins, or quietly loyal wives, at least insofar as such characters being depicted with the one-dimensionality typical of romantic and melodramatic plays. Passing from the liberated flapper phase of the 1920s through the more dimensioned portraits of traditional women of the 1930s, an emphasis on the complexity of sexuality and gender arrived with the plays of Tennessee Williams in the 1940s. Often admired for his strong women characters beginning with his first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams extended beyond Mae West’s lighthearted, sensationalized approach to sex and instead probed deeply into female sexual desire in his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), in which the animalistic Stanley Kowalski liberates a robust sexuality in his wife, Stella, but does tragic harm to Stella’s sister, Blanche DuBois, whose distorted sexual desires fall victim to Stanley’s cruelty. Williams, in exploring sexuality and its relation to and perversion of the “love impulse,” as he describes it, created some memorable women characters, all of whom grapple with their sexual desires and/or past, including the repressed Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke (1948), the overheated desire of “Maggie the Cat” for her alcoholic husband in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and in numerous other plays. Williams’s breakthroughs regarding sexuality—and especially his exploration of sexual desire in women (and the male body as a source of that desire)—opened the door for other playwrights, but comparatively few in the 1950s followed suit. William Inge was an exception in that his major plays of the era, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955), works in which he provided memorable women characters who, like Madge in Picnic, reject the comforts of a safe life to follow their hearts and libidos. During World War II, women had moved into virtually every field in the American workforce in significant numbers, a fact that would suggest a forward progression for the status of women. However, during the

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first decade following the war, women were largely compelled to revert to traditional domestic roles as men returned from the war to reclaim their jobs. A postwar baby boom also tied many women to domestic lives, although increasingly women strove for professional opportunities in tandem with marital and domestic roles. Finding such opportunities were a challenge in the male-dominated and conformist 1950s, and those women with careers found that equal pay and benefits were usually not available. Family was a central focus in American drama from the modernist era and, as such, women characters were central. However, until the 1960s, they were locked into traditional roles even in plays by leading playwrights. Arthur Miller focuses on the necessity for moral clarity in the relations between fathers and sons in his first successful play, All My Sons (1947), and the mother, Kate, is a pivotal figure in the relationship, but it is in his modern tragedy Death of a Salesman (1949) that Miller most effectively views the destruction of the father-son relationship in a materialistic society that has distorted the dreams and values of its citizens. In this case, the mother, Linda, is something of an observant figure, but rather passive until she confronts her sons about their treatment of their troubled father. Mothers, in Miller’s world, were mostly well-drawn loyal wives and caring parents, but, like Kate and Linda, often unable to stop the inevitable tragedy arising in the lives of their husbands and sons, even though they are painfully aware of its causes. Miller again returns to the loyal wife in The Crucible (1953), in which he uses the historic sixteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, “witch trials” as a metaphor for the McCarthy-era anti-Communist witch hunt. Here the wife, Elizabeth, whose husband, John, has betrayed her sexually with an unrepentant servant, is ultimately so loyal she breaks her own moral code and lies for John, ironically causing his tragic end. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few women playwrights emerged, although some, like Elaine May, gained greater fame as a performer, and others, such as Jay Presson Allen, wrote more for the screen than the stage, and although her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), Forty Carats (1968), and Tru (1989) were successes, all were adapted from works by others. Carson McCullers adapted her own novel, The Member of the Wedding (1950), dealing with a hyper-sensitive adolescent girl devastated by her older brother’s marriage, but she rarely wrote for the stage, preferring the novel as her medium. Also in this period, Frances Goodrich coauthored the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-based drama The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), with her husband, Albert Hackett, viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of an adolescent Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis. Comparatively few women had plays produced on Broadway in this period, and women of color were even more firmly shut out. However, a major

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breakthrough occurred when Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) won critical and commercial success. Focused on a typical workingclass black family in Chicago, the play explores thwarted dreams in a racist society. These dreams are liberated by an inheritance. The family’s matriarch and her daughter-in-law dream of using the legacy for a real home out of the city, while a daughter wishes to attend medical school and travel to Africa to discover her roots. Other black women dramatists followed Hansberry, although few on Broadway. Instead, like all women playwrights of the midtwentieth century, they found more welcoming stages Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway or, increasingly, in companies begun and run by women. Black women dramatists since Hansberry include such varied voices as Ama Ata Aidoo, Maya Angelou, Vinnette Carroll (who was also the first black woman to direct a Broadway production), Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, among others. In more recent years, two black women dramatists have been acknowledged with Pulitzer Prizes: SuzanLori Parks, who has won acclaim for plays dealing with issues of concern to black women, including Venus (1996) and In the Blood (2000), while Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2009) depicted sexual violence against women in Africa, underscoring parallels with sexual exploitation, rape, and other forms of violence toward women in general. Anna Deavere Smith, also an actress and performance artist, focused on racial strife in Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles (1994), in which she played multiple characters, and Pearl Cleage examined the experience of a young black woman from the rural South who experiences New York during the African American cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance and the diminishments of the Great Depression in Blues for an Alabama Sky (1999). From the 1960s, African American male dramatists, including Ed Bullins, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Douglas Turner Ward, and others, offered more dimensioned images of black women than had been typical before that era, and after 1980, August Wilson, in his 10-play “Pittsburgh cycle,” depicting African American life in the United States during the twentieth century, presented a wide array of black women characters. A major era of change was in the offing as the 1950s ended and the turbulent historical developments in the 1960s led to a new phase of liberation for women. The post-World War II “baby boom” generation came of age in the revolutionary 1960s and women’s liberation groups, including the National Association of Women (NOW), founded in 1966, paralleled the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War unrest as the social fabric of the country unwound. Women burned their bras in symbolic rejection of longstanding repressions, lobbied with success for legislation legalizing abortion, and demanded equal opportunity and pay in the workplace, as well as access to op-

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portunities in virtually every profession. The plays of the period reflect these changes to some extent, particularly as more women dramatists emerged. Comparatively few found opportunities on Broadway, but Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theatres were more welcoming. Dating back to the 1950s, women like Julie Bovasso and Judith Malina, mainstays of the OffBroadway movement, wrote plays, but both were probably better known as actresses or company managers. Women playwrights, including Megan Terry, whose Viet Rock (1966) was an early play to criticize American involvement in the Vietnam War, and Maria Irene Fornés, a feminist writer who began a long career in this era, had plays seen in Off-Broadway and regional theatres almost exclusively. Issues of family dysfunction become more prevalent after 1960, as in Edward Albee’s scalding dramas, particularly his savage Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which features a middle-aged, alcoholic harridan and her ineffectual husband playing out their aggressions and fears over cocktails with a younger couple. The crumbling American family and the macho myth of the Wild West are merged in the plays of Sam Shepard, whose Fool for Love (1979) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), feature battered, sexually abused women tied to troubled, violent men, usually their fathers, husbands, or siblings. Shepard describes the ways in which the sins of an absent, brutal, and/ or morally challenged father brings chaos (in the form of incest, violence, and disconnection) to the lives of his children, with mother and wife characters more present but no less abusive and troubled. The most commercially successful Broadway playwright in history, Neil Simon, wrote a series of hit comedies centered on male camaraderie after 1960, but also provided mainstream images of a young bride in Barefoot in the Park (1963), an all-American girl in Star-Spangled Girl (1966), and a strong urban wife in troubled times in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), but his more autobiographical plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1984), and Broadway Bound (1986), depicting his own painful coming of age as a young Jewish male in a troubled family from the Great Depression to the 1950s, offered memorable portraits of his mother in Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound, and his first love in Biloxi Blues. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers (1991) he depicts a harsh German woman taking care of her grandchildren countered by her mentally challenged but brightly optimistic daughter. These characters were in the traditional mode, but acknowledged changing times and attitudes in the society around them between the 1930s and the present. Some male playwrights in the post-1960s era, most notably David Mamet in his minimalist, cynical dramas, tended to focus on male characters, often who express sexist attitudes. In Mamet’s controversial Oleanna (1992), he

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brings the battle of the sexes to its apotheosis in a primal power game played out between an untenured male college professor and a young woman student who has accused him of sexual harassment. The play generated shouting matches in theatres as audience members debated the meaning of the play’s violent ending. Mamet’s Boston Marriage (1999), depicting the close, possibly sexual relationship of two women at the turn of the twentieth century, seemed to be his response to his misogynist reputation and a demonstration that the critical views that he could effectively write only about men were unfounded. Another contemporary male playwright, Tracy Letts, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, August: Osage County (2007), uses the death of the family patriarch to set off a power struggle between the surviving two generations of women of what is revealed to be a deeply troubled family whose profoundly damaged relationships have occurred largely due to alcohol and drugs. By the 1970s and 1980s, the number of women playwrights seemed to increase significantly, but it is more likely the case that theatres beyond Broadway and the emergence of companies focused on women’s issues explain this development. Some women dramatists broke into the Broadway mainstream, most notably Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein. Henley seemed inspired by Tennessee Williams, not least because her damaged women characters, most particularly in Crimes of the Heart (1980) and The Miss Firecracker Contest (1985), are Southerners and her language is lyrical. Norman focuses on a troubled mother-daughter relationship in ’night, Mother (1983) and Wasserstein’s seriocomic plays, including The Heidi Chronicles (1990) and The Sisters Rosensweig (1992), deal with the personal relationships of confused contemporary urbanites. In the 1990s, Paula Vogel, who began playwriting in the 1970s, stood out among this increasing number of women dramatists. She won a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1997), a wrenching drama about an incestuous relationship between an uncle and his underage niece, and another play, The Baltimore Waltz (1992), concerned, among other things, AIDS. Vogel also dealt with issues of sexuality, pornography, and domestic abuse in Hot ’N Throbbing (1994). Issues of violence against women and sexuality are also central to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), in which women from various backgrounds and of all ages, recount their sexual experiences and responses to their bodies. Ensler, essentially a performance artist (the original production of The Vagina Monologues featured Ensler performing all of the monologues; subsequent productions have made use of a cast of women each performing one monologue), caused controversy, as did similarly inclined performance artists such as Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, and Holly Hughes, all of whom dealt with issues facing late twentieth-century

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women, including access to political power, sexuality, and domestic abuse, and feminist and/or lesbian theatre companies, including At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theatre, and Split Britches, among others, also addressed these and other topics. Women playwrights whose works were produced with regularity in OffBroadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and in regional theatres between 1990 and 2010 demonstrate an ever-widening diversity, with some devoting themselves exclusively to playwriting, while others also act, direct, or associate themselves with specific companies or groups. These women include, among many others, Constance Congdon, Tina Howe, Karen Malpede, Emily Mann, Rochelle Owens, and, since the 1990s, Tisa Chang, Margaret Edson, Melissa James Gibson, Rebecca Gilman, Jessica Hagedorn, Corinne Jacker, Julia Jordan, Lisa Kron, Judi Ann Mason, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. Some, like Edson, are known for one work, in her case the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Wit (1995), while others, like Ruhl, are more prolific, writing on diverse subjects in Eurydice (2003), Passion Play (2003), The Clean House (2004), Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007), and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (2009), all from the perspective of a millennial feminist writer. In the twenty-first century, women have excelled in all aspects of theatre production, and women dramatists continue to bring new perspectives to the American story. WOMEN, THE. This scathing three-act comedy by Clare Boothe Luce, which purported to expose the private lives of pampered, self-centered women of New York’s affluent Park Avenue, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 26 December 1937 for 657 performances. The long run on Broadway was a precursor to numerous touring and international productions, not to mention a now-classic 1939 all-star MGM film version (and an updated 2008 remake) and two Broadway revivals (1973, 2002). With a large, allwomen cast of characters, The Women focuses on Mary Haines, the best of her lot, whose husband strays with a vicious gold digger. Mary’s so-called friends, many divorcees or in unhappy marriages, interfere until Mary takes matters in her own hands. The witty script and well-drawn characters create a portrait, true or false, of an era and a lifestyle that has since vanished, a fact that seems to have only increased the play’s popularity. WOMEN’S PROJECT AND PRODUCTIONS (WPP). Founded in 1978 by Julia Miles, this company has the goal of rectifying the under-representation of women in American theatre. Producing and promoting theatre created by women artists, the WPP season features work not only created by women, but with subject matter of pertinence to women in the areas of culture,

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politics, religion and spirituality, and international issues. Women writers associated with WPP over the years include Joan Micklin Silver, Emily Mann, Naomi Wallace, Maria Irene Fornés, Eve Ensler, and Anne Bogart, and many noted actors began their careers under the auspices of the company, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Mary McDonnell, Linda Hunt, and Anna Deveare Smith. See also FEMINIST THEATRE. WONG, B. D. (1960– ). Born in San Francisco, California, to a Chinese American family, Bradley Darryl Wong rocketed to success as an actor on Broadway in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), winning a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Theatre World Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award. Following his education at San Francisco State University, Wong began his career appearing in an East West Players production of the musical A Chorus Line in 1987. He has spent much of his career in film and television, but his other stage appearances include a New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest in 1989, and revivals of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999 and Pacific Overtures in 2004. He also appeared Off-Broadway in Charles Busch’s Shanghai Moon in 2003 and in films and television, including a recurring role on the series Law & Order: SVU. See also ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE. WOOD, AUDREY (1905–1985). Daughter of the Palace Theatre manager, William H. Wood, Audrey Wood began her career as a play reader for the Century Play Company before partnering with William Liebling,* her future husband, to establish Liebling-Wood in 1937. She mostly represented playwrights, including most notably Tennessee Williams, but also William Inge, Carson McCullers, Robert Anderson, and Arthur Kopit. Liebling-Wood was sold to Music Corporation of America (MCA) in 1954 and she worked at MCA until 1962, when she left to head the drama area of International Creative Management (ICM). A stroke in 1981 ended her career. WOOD, JOHN (1931– ). Born in Derbyshire, England, Wood began his career with the Old Vic in the 1950s before making his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), for which he received a Tony Award nomination, as he did for a revival of Sherlock Holmes* in 1974, but he won the Tony and a Drama Desk Award for Stoppard’s Travesties (1975). Wood also won critical plaudits for his performances in Deathtrap (1978) and Amadeus (1980), but he has spent much of his career in films and in England, where he has frequently acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

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WOODARD, CHARLAYNE (1955– ). A native of Albany, New York, this actress-playwright attended Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama and The Actors Studio. She appeared on Broadway in the original production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), as well as its revival in 1988, but most of her acting has been seen in Off-Broadway theatres, including roles in A . . . My Name is Alice (1984), Hang on to the Good Times (1985), revivals of Twelfth Night in 1989 and The Caucasion Chalk Circle in 1990, and Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002). Her own solo plays, which she has performed in many theatres, including the Manhattan Theatre Club, include Pretty Fire (1993), Neat (1997), In Real Life (2002), and Flight (2006). WOODRUFF, ROBERT (1947– ). Although he has spent much of his career working in San Francisco, California, this avant-garde stage director was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at the University of Buffalo and the City College of New York. He left New York in 1971 and cofounded San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre the following year. In 1976, he established the Bay Area Playwrights Festival where he began a long collaboration with Sam Shepard, directing the premieres of Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980). His 1983 production of The Comedy of Errors, starring the Flying Karamazov Brothers, won acclaim at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre (GT), and he directed numerous productions at regional theatres. Woodruff has directed many productions at the American Repertory Theatre, and served as its artistic director from 2002–2007, where he worked on several plays with Charles L. Mee, most notably Mee’s Full Circle (2000). WOODWARD, CHARLES (1924–1994). Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Woodward, often in association with Richard Barr, produced a dozen Broadway plays and musicals since the late 1960s, including Johnny No-Trump (1967), an all-star revival of The Front Page* (1969), The Grass Harp (1971), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972), Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974), Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Seascape (1975), P. S. Your Cat Is Dead! (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979) and two revivals (1989, 2005), and Home Front (1985). Off-Broadway, Woodward produced The Boys in the Band (1968), What the Butler Saw (1970), Watercolor (1970), and Drat! (1971). WOOLLEY MAMMOUTH THEATRE COMPANY (WMTC). Washington, D.C. is the site of this non-profit theatre company which did not have a permanent facility until 2005, previously performing in church halls and a

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rented warehouse. Founded in 1980 by Howard Shalwitz and Roger Brady with the mission of supporting new works, the WMTC is led by Shalwitz. The company has received over 130 Helen Hayes Award nominations (winning 26) and pioneered the idea of “pay-what-you-can” nights to make theatre accessible to all. WOOLLEY, MONTY (1888–1963). Born Edgar Montillion Woolley in New York, he studied at Yale University and Harvard University before teaching for several years at Yale, where his many students included Thornton Wilder and Stephen Vincent Benét, and where he became close friends of a fellow Yalie, Cole Porter. In 1936, he gave up teaching to become an actor and director. Corpulent and bearded (nicknamed “The Beard”), Woolley became popular on stage, screen, and radio. He appeared on Broadway in On Your Toes (1936) and Knights of Song (1938) before scoring a notable personal success in the title role of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), a role based on flamboyant theatre critic Alexander Woollcott.* Woolley also appeared in the 1942 film version. Woolley directed Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), Second Little Show (1930), The New Yorkers (1930), America’s Sweetheart (1931), Walk a Little Faster (1932), Champagne, Sec (1933), and Jubilee (1935). He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards for The Pied Piper (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944) and most of his 30 other film roles found him playing lovable curmudgeons. WOOSTER GROUP, THE. Founded in 1975 by Elizabeth LeCompte, who had been Richard Schechner’s assistant director, this New York-based theatre was formed around an acting company, including James Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter. The Group’s radical, politically driven productions are drawn from a range of texts and visual elements revised by the group with the goal of creating a theatrical reality rather than an illusion of realism. Among their most noted productions are the trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island (1975–1978), North Atlantic (1984), The Emperor Jones* (1992), The Hairy Ape* (1995), the Obie Award-winning House/Lights (1998), and To You, The Birdie! (2001), Poor Theatre (2003), Who’s Your Dada?! (2006), Hamlet (2007), and La Didone (2008). In 1991, the Group received an Obie for Sustained Achievement. See also ALTERNATIVE THEATRE. WORTH, IRENE (1916–2002). Born Harriet Elizabeth Abrams in Fairbury, Nebraska, this distinguished American actress attended Santa Ana Junior College and the University of California at Los Angeles after her family moved

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to California when she was a child. Her earliest Broadway roles were in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1944), The Cocktail Party (1950), and starring with Eva Le Gallienne in a revival of Mary Stuart (1957), as well as her first Tony Award-nominated role as Albertine Prine in Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1960). Earlier, in England, she became a member of the Old Vic company in 1951 under the guidance of Tyrone Guthrie, playing ingénue roles in Shakespeare. Two years later, she joined the company of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, as leading lady opposite Alec Guinness. In 1962, Worth became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played Goneril to Paul Scofield’s King Lear in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production. Brook directed her again in The Physicists (1964). Back on Broadway in Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice (1965), she won the first of three Tonys for her performance in this controversial work. During the remainder of her long career, Worth moved between New York and London, typically in prestigious roles in both classic and contemporary plays. She won a second Tony for a 1975 revival of Sweet Bird of Youth and another nomination for a revival of The Cherry Orchard in 1977, for which she won a Drama Desk Award. She appeared in Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque (1980) and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for The Golden Age (1984). Worth won her third Tony, and a Drama Desk Award, as Grandma Kurnitz in Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Lost in Yonkers (1991). Worth also appeared in the film version of the play, as well as numerous other film and television roles. WRIGHT, GARLAND (1946–1998). A native of Midland, Texas, Wright considered a career as a painter before attending Southern Methodist University, where he switched to theatre before joining the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, as an actor. He cofounded the Off-Broadway Lion Theatre Company and directed Vanities (1976). Wright staged the Broadway productions of Patio/Porch (1978) and Lone Star & Pvt. Wars (1979). As associate director of the Guthrie Theatre beginning in 1980, he won acclaim for productions of Camille in 1980 and Candide in 1982. He worked in regional theatre, including Arena Stage, and was named artistic director of the Guthrie in 1986, where he was most noted for his productions of Molière and Shakespeare. He left the Guthrie in 1995 to serve as head of the New Directors Program at the Juilliard School and, before his death from cancer, Wright directed Sex and Longing (1996) at Lincoln Center and The Devils (1997) for the New York Theatre Workshop. WRIGHT, JEFFREY (1965– ). Washington, D.C.-born Wright attended Amherst College before winning critical plaudits in Tony Kushner’s

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two-part drama Angels in America (1993), which also brought him a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for his performance in the second part, Perestroika. He repeated his Angels performance in the 2003 HBO film version. Wright demonstrated his versatility in his other Broadway appearances in the musical Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk (1996) and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2002), which brought him a Tony nomination. Wright also appears frequently in film and television. WRIGHT, RICHARD (1908–1960). Known more for his novels than his work in theatre, this African American writer was born in Roxie, Mississippi. As a young man, he moved to Chicago and began his writing career. In 1939, his novel Native Son won acclaim, leading to collaboration with Paul Green on a stage adaptation, directed by Orson Welles and starring Canada Lee in 1941. After Wright’s death, the Negro Ensemble Company produced his little-known comedy, Daddy Goodness, in 1968. Some of Wright’s literary works, including The Long Dream, were also adapted for the theatre by others. See also AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE. WYCHERLY, MARGARET (1881–1956).† Born Margaret De Wolfe in London, she was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before taking the stage name Margaret Wycherly. She produced and acted in new plays by William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw and appeared in several plays by her husband, Bayard Veiller.* Among her Broadway credits are The Verge* (1921), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), and The Adding Machine* (1923). After 1930, she gave notable performances as Mrs. Hallam in Rose Franken’s Another Language (1932) and as Ada Lester in Tobacco Road (1933). Wycherly appeared in the Federal Theatre Project’s production A Hero Is Born (1937) and replaced Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in 1945. She also appeared in numerous films as a character actress, most notably White Heat (1950), playing the notorious “Ma” to James Cagney’s psychopathic gangster.

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Y YALE REPERTORY THEATRE (YRT). Following the establishment of a drama program at Yale University in 1924, noted theatre teacher George Pierce Baker* joined the Yale faculty to head the Drama Department, leaving his longtime post at Harvard. The program prospered, and by 1955, it was reorganized as a graduate program with course offerings burgeoning and a repertory theatre intended to enhance the education of Master of Fine Arts candidates founded in 1966 by Robert Brustein. Brustein remained director of the YRT until 1980, when Lloyd Richards replaced him. The YRT’s production mission is to feature innovative stagings of classics and to provide a forum for new American works. See also REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT. YANKOWITZ, SUSAN (1941– ). A native of Newark, New Jersey, Yankowitz attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Yale School of Drama. She joined Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre, writing Terminal (1969) for them. Her socially conscious plays depend on collaboration with actors and the use of symbolic elements. Among Yankowitz’s other works are The Cage (1965), Nightmare (1967), The Ha-Ha Play (1970), The Lamb (1970), Slaughterhouse Play (1971), Transplant (1971), Basics (1972), Boxes (1972), Positions (1972), Acts of Love (1973), Wicked Woman Revue (1973), Wooden Nickels (1973), America Piece (1974), Portrait of a Scientist as a Dumb Broad (1974), Still Life (1977), True Romances (1977), Qui Est Anna Marks? (1978), A Knife in the Heart (1982), Baby (1983), Alarms (1987), Night Sky (1991), Phaedra in Delirium (1998), and Mukhtaran Mai (2008). Yankowitz is also a novelist and has written several screenplays. YEARGAN, MICHAEL (1946– ). An acclaimed scenic and costume designer, Yeargan was born in Dallas, Texas. He won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for both the musical The Light in the Piazza (2005) and a 2008 revival of South Pacific. He won another Drama Desk Award for a 2006 revival of Awake and Sing! Yeargan’s other Broadway credits include Bad Habits (1974), The Ritz (1975), A Lesson from Aloes (1980), It Had to

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Be You (1981), and revivals of Hay Fever in 1985, Ah, Wilderness! in 1988, Seascape in 2005, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 2009. Yeargan has designed for theatre and opera companies around the world, several ballet and opera productions for PBS-TV, and served as resident designer at Yale Repertory Theatre (YRT). Yeargan stated in a recent interview that, “I tend to work in a lot of different styles. I never know what it’s going to be. When you do a play, or any production, it’s like an equation—the minute you change one of the coordinates of that equation, it’s going to be different at the end, and that’s the way it’s going to be with a production.” YEARS AGO. This three-act comedy by actress-playwright Ruth Gordon, and produced by Max Gordon, opened at the Mansfield Theatre on 3 December 1946 for 199 performances. In Gordon’s bittersweet, highly autobiographical play, which she first wrote in a contemporary setting, was revised and moved back in time to pre-World War I. Patricia Kirkland played Ruth Jones, a young woman inspired by Hazel Dawn’s performance in The Pink Lady to become an actress, much to the concern of her gruff father (Frederic March). With the encouragement of her mother (Florence Eldridge), Ruth persuades her father, an ex-sailor, who sells his memento of his years at sea, a telescope, to provide her a stake in New York to pursue a theatrical career. George Cukor directed a film version, renamed The Actress (1953), starring Jean Simmons as Ruth and Spencer Tracy as her father. YELLOW ROBE, WILLIAM S., JR. (1960– ). Half Native American (Assiniboine-Sioux) and half African American, Yellow Robe, a playwright, actor, director, and teacher, lived on the Fort Peck Indian reservation until coming of age. He has written about his heritage in a semi-autobiographical play, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Children (2005), which premiered at the Trinity Repertory Theatre (TRT). He describes the mixed-race experience depicted in the play as “a psychology that no one has dealt with. People go into this panic of being too native or not being native enough.” Some of his plays have been collected in Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays (2000). YEW, CHAY (1966– ). Born in Singapore, this Chinese American dramatist attended Pepperdine University and served as director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Asian American Theatre Workshop from 1997 to 2005. In 2000, he became artist director of the Northwest Asian American Theatre in Seattle. His plays, which deal with the range of experiences of Chinese Americans, including sexuality, are As If He Hears (1989), A Language of Their Own (1995), Red (1998), A Beautiful Country (1998), and The Long Season

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(2007). Yew is also an accomplished director of plays by other writers and has worked in many of the major regional theatres. YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER. Mark Reed’s three-act comedy was a surprise hit when it opened on 9 February 1937 at the Playhouse in an Alfred de Liagre, Jr., production for 405 performances. The innocuous plot involves a young woman (Peggy Conklin) planning to spend a weekend away from home with her fiancé over the objections of her mother (Lucile Watson). The daughter unveils the mother’s hypocrisy, since in her youth the mother was a Greenwich Village bohemian advocating, among other things, free love. The daughter ultimately has her weekend away, but agrees to marry her fiancé to satisfy proprieties. Priscilla Lane and Fay Bainter played daughter and mother in a 1939 film adaptation directed by William Keighley. YIDDISH THEATRE.† Yiddish theatre, which emerged in Europe in the early eighteenth century, flourished in European capitals and in the United States, particularly New York City, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Focused on dramas by Jews written and performed in Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Ashkenazaic Jewish community, Yiddish theatre proved to be remarkably diverse, including plays in every genre as well as operetta* and musicals, revues,* vaudeville,* and other variety entertainments. In America, Yiddish theatre featured a vast array of classic and contemporary plays from other cultures translated into the Yiddish language and cultural idiom. Avrom Goldfadn* is generally regarded as the founder of the Yiddish theatre in New York. Remarkably, in the years between 1890 and 1940, over 200 Yiddish theatres or touring troupes were operating in the United States and as many as a dozen companies were functioning in New York at any given time. The most noted Yiddish theatre dramatists included Jacob Gordin* (1853–1909), who adapted Shakespeare’s King Lear and works by Tolstoy, Solomon Libin (1872–1955), David Pinski* (1872–1959), and Leon Kobrin (1872–1946) supplied the theatres and actors with dramatic vehicles. This was also an era of great Yiddish theatre actors. Foremost among them was Jacob Adler* (1855–1926), who sought to elevate Yiddish theatre through an emphasis on the classics. After 1930, Adler’s influence was felt through his children, Celia,* Stella, and Luther, all of whom became noted actors (and moved between working in the Yiddish theatre, centered on Second Avenue, and Broadway) and, in Stella’s case, one of the most important American acting teachers of the twentieth century. Yiddish theatre began a slow decline in the 1930s and 1940s, and its demise was hastened by the Holocaust in Europe and the assimilation of Jewish

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culture into mainstream American life, although its remnants continue in occasional performances today, not to mention in a few classic plays, like The Dybbuk, which are regularly produced and adapted. See also ETHNIC THEATRE. YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. This Pulitzer Prize-winning George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy was produced by Sam H. Harris and directed by Kaufman at New York’s Booth Theatre, where it opened on 14 December 1936 for 838 performances. This warm comedy’s popular and critical success inspired a 1938 Academy Award-winning motion picture version directed by Frank Capra, as well as Broadway revivals (1965, 1967, 1983), television adaptations (1945, 1947, 1979, 1984), a television series (1987), and innumerable regional, university, and community theatre productions, making it one of the most produced American plays. In seeking a formula for a working-class reconsideration of high comedy mixed with farcical elements, Kaufman and Hart found it with You Can’t Take It with You. The deceptively simple plot of You Can’t Take It with You involves a rich boy-poor girl love affair nearly destroyed by the socioeconomic and philosophical gulfs between their families. This well-worn romantic plot is enlivened by Kaufman and Hart through a range of rich comic characterizations and gentle satire of Great Depression-era American values. The Vanderhof-Sycamore clan, headed by Martin Vanderhof (known to one and all as Grandpa), is a truly eccentric collection of American originals who live life to the fullest by following their individual dreams and by nurturing each other as a close-knit family. When Vanderhof’s granddaughter, Alice, and her boss’s son, Tony, fall in love, the mismatched families inevitably meet to disastrous effect, and it is up to a bemused Grandpa to provide the wisdom to bridge the socioeconomic gulf separating the lovers. Critics enthused about You Can’t Take It with You, finding its homey philosophizing a tonic for the Depression blues. The cast, including Henry Travers as Grandpa and Josephine Hull as his daffy daughter Penny, won praise, as did Kaufman’s brisk direction, and audiences flocked to the theatre. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson remembered You Can’t Take It with You as a “charming portrait of an amiable, chaotic family” that is, in essence, a genial portrait of the American Every Family circa the 1930s. YOU KNOW I CAN’T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER’S RUNNING. Opening on 13 March 1967 at the Ambassador Theatre for a remarkable 756 performance run, this bill of four diverse one-act plays by Robert Anderson and directed by Alan Schneider defied the odds. One-act bills rarely

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• 889

find Broadway success, but these four plays, The Shock of Recognition, The Footsteps of Doves, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and I’m Herbert, were performed by a virtuoso cast of three, Eileen Heckart, George Grizzard, and Martin Balsam, all of whom won critical plaudits (and Balsam won a Tony Award) and drew audiences to the theatre. The bill found enduring popularity in stock and university theatres. YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA, THE. Horton Foote’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play, also nominated for a Best Play Tony Award, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 27 March 1997 for 84 performances. Directed by Robert Falls, The Young Man from Atlanta took a long route to Broadway, beginning at the Signature Theatre in 1995, followed by productions at Boston’s Huntington Theatre and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Set in Houston, Texas, in 1950, the play featured characters Foote had introduced in his The Orphan’s Home nine-play cycle, and although labeled a comedy, it dealt with two parents attempting to cope with the death of their only child. YOUNG, STARK (1881–1963).† A native of Como, Mississippi, Young attended the University of Mississippi and Columbia University, where he taught English for several years. He began his writing career with the New Republic and was the New York Times drama critic during 1924–1925, during which time he made a rare foray into directing, staging Eugene O’Neill’s Welded (1924). Young joined the staff of Theatre Arts and continued to write reviews for the New Republic, while also writing several plays, of which only The Saint (1924) made it to Broadway (where it failed to find critical or commercial success). Young won more praise for his translations of Anton Chekhov’s plays, including The Seagull, which was produced on Broadway by the Theatre Guild in 1938 with a cast, including Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Uta Hagen, Richard Whorf, and Sydney Greenstreet. Young also wrote several books, including The Flower in Drama (1923), Theater (1927), and Immortal Shadows (1948), as well as a popular novel, So Red the Rose (1934). YULIN, HARRIS (1937– ). Born in Los Angeles, Yulin is most known for his work in films and television, but he appears with some regularity on Broadway, mostly in revivals, including Watch on the Rhine in 1980, The Visit in 1992, The Diary of Anne Frank in 1997, The Price in 1999, and Hedda Gabler in 2001. He also appeared in Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes (1980). He received Featured Actor Drama Desk Award nominations for The Diary of Anne Frank and The Price. His stage roles have permitted him more variety than many of his film and television roles, where he is often

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cast as a corporate executive or a politician. He has also appeared frequently in Off-Broadway and regional theatres and is a director. YURKA, BLANCHE (1893–1974). A versatile, well-respected Czech-born stage actress, Yurka spent most of her career in the United States playing a range of classic and contemporary roles, although she seemed to prefer canonical works and serious modern plays to mainstream commercial boulevard entertainments. Yurka began acting in 1907, making one of her earliest Broadway appearances in Is Matrimony a Failure? (1909) and had a notable success as Gertrude opposite John Barrymore* in Hamlet in 1922. Among her other New York appearances, some of which she directed, were plays by Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen, including the New York premiere of Ibsen’s early verse play on Nordic history, The Vikings (1930). Yurka also appeared in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in 1928, Hedda Gabler in 1929, and The Lady from the Sea in 1929. On Broadway, she also appeared in Lucrece (1932), The Comic Artist (1933), Spring in Autumn (1933), The Wind Is Ninety (1945), Temper the Wing (1946), The Carefree Tree (1955), Diary of a Scoundrel (1945), and Jane Eyre (1958). She made her last Broadway appearance in a short-lived 1966 revival of Dinner at Eight. Yurka also appeared infrequently in the movies beginning in the silent era, but played her most memorable on-screen role as the vengeful Madame De Farge in the 1935 film of A Tale of Two Cities, and she acted in television dramas. Never attaining the fame of such contemporaries as Katharine Cornell or Tallulah Bankhead, Yurka had a long career distinguished by her versatility.

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Z ZAKS, JERRY (1946– ). Born in Stuttgart, Germany, to Holocaust survivors, Zaks graduated from Dartmouth University prior to receiving an M.F.A. from Smith College. As an actor, he made his Broadway debut in Grease (1972), followed by the revue Tintypes (1980), but when he switched to directing for an Off-Broadway production of Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy (1981). He won Tony Awards for directing the Broadway productions of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves (1986), the farce Lend Me a Tenor (1989), Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1991), and the 1992 revival of the musical Guys and Dolls. His other Broadway credits include revivals of The Front Page* in 1986 and Anything Goes in 1987, Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), Smokey Joe’s Café (1995), a 1996 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Epic Proportions (1999), a 2000 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), revivals of Little Shop of Horrors in 2003, La Cage aux Folles in 2004, and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in 2006, and A Bronx Tale (2007). Zaks has directed and occasionally acts in movies and television. He received the George Abbott Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in 1994 and has won considerable critical acclaim, particularly for his work directing comedy. ZEISLER, PETER B. (1923–2005). A native New Yorker and graduate of Columbia University, Zeisler was a cofounder of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the first regional theatres in the country. His theatrical career began in the area of production management on Broadway, working on Candide (1956) and The Sound of Music (1959), but after discussions with Tyrone Guthrie and others he committed himself to regional theatre. From 1972 to 1995, he served as executive direction of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and was a well-known advocate for notfor-profit theatres. ZIGLER, SCOTT (1963– ). A director and actor born in Connecticut, Zigler trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and with David

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Mamet and William H. Macy. He was a cofounder of the Atlantic Theatre Company and directed Mamet’s adaptations of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in 1991 and The Cherry Orchard in 2005. Zigler also directed Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood (1997) at the American Repertory Theatre and on Broadway. He acted in a few of Mamet’s films, but other than his association with the Atlantic Theatre, he has also directed for several regional theatres. Of working in theatre, Zigler has said, “I find the possibility of the next moment always compelling. There’s always the chance something else will happen.” ZIMMERMAN, MARY (1960– ). A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, she studied theatre at Northwestern University and became a significant force in Chicago theatre after winning a MacArthur Fellowship and numerous Joseph Jefferson Awards and a Best Direction Tony Award for Metamorphoses (2002). She directed a 2004 production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre for Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company and staged Argonautika at the Lookingglass Theatre in 2006 where, for many years, she has been a member. She is also an artistic associate of the Goodman Theatre, and for the Metropolitan Opera she directed a new production of Lucia Di Lammermoor in 2007 and La sonnabula in 2009. ZINDEL, PAUL (1936–2003). Born in Staten Island, New York, son of a practical nurse and a police officer, Zindel overcame tuberculosis to attend Wagner College, where he completed a B.S. in chemistry and an M.S. in education. He taught high school and began writing plays, including The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, which was first produced at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in 1965. Its 1971 Off-Broadway production brought Zindel the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Drama Desk Award. Critics compared his work favorably to Tennessee Williams, a view confirmed by his next important play, And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), which starred Estelle Parsons and Julie Harris on Broadway. This was followed by the less successful The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1972), which won plaudits for star Maureen Stapleton, if not the play. Zindel wrote some screenplays, including Up the Sandbox (1972) and Mame (1974), but his subsequent plays, including The Ladies Should Be in Bed (1973) and Ladies at the Alamo (1974) failed to find favor. Despite the fact that he always considered himself a playwright, Zindel spent much of his later career as a pioneering writer of young reader fiction focusing with greater realism on contemporary problems of teenage sexuality and drug use. Among these is his young adult novel, The Pigman (1968). In 1985, Zindel scripted a television special, Alice in Wonderland

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• 893

and Through the Looking-Glass (1985), followed by an adaptation of Babes in Toyland in 1986. ZINN, DAVID (1968– ). A scene and costume designer, he joined the Target Margin Theatre in 1991 and subsequently won an Obie Award for his designs of Mamba’s Daughters in 1998 and another for sustained achievement in 2008. For Broadway, he has designed costumes for Xanadu (2007) and A Tale of Two Cities (2008), but much of his work has been for Off-Broadway and in regional theatre productions. In 2005, Zinn received the Irene Sharaff Young Master Award. ZIPPRODT, PATRICIA (1925–1999). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Zipprodt attended Wellesley College to study psychology and sociology, but after seeing the New York City Ballet in performance, she decided on a career in costume design, studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology and as an apprentice for Charles James and Irene Sharaff. She ultimately designed costumes for more than 50 Broadway productions, including The Potting Shed (1957), Sunday in New York (1961), She Loves Me (1963), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Cabaret (1966), a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, Plaza Suite (1968), Zorba (1968), 1776 (1969), Pippin (1972), Mack & Mabel (1974), Chicago (1975), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Into the Woods (1987), a 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and My Favorite Year (1992), among others. She won Tony Awards for Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, and a 1986 revival of Sweet Charity. She also designed costumes for several film and television productions, including The Graduate (1967). Zipprodt was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1992. ZOO STORY, THE. Edward Albee’s first important play is a long oneact, first produced at the Provincetown Playhouse* on 14 January 1960 for 582 performances. The simple situation of the play involves Peter, a docile book publisher enjoying an afternoon on a park bench, being accosted by a disturbed young man named Jerry, who battles Peter for “ownership” of the bench and tells a harrowing story of his past. This little play has had a remarkably long life in regional and university theatre, and in 2004, Albee wrote a prequel titled At Home at the Zoo, which was produced Off-Broadway with The Zoo Story as a bill called Peter & Jerry. ZOOT SUIT. This play by Luis Valdéz offered a fictionalized account of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial in which some young Mexican Americans were charged with a murder they did not commit. Set in the Los Angeles barrios of the early 1940s, it also depicts the “Zoot Suit Riots” in response to the trial.

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First performed at the Mark Taper Forum on 17 August 1978, it moved to New York’s Winter Garden Theatre on 25 March 1979 for 41 performances, becoming the first Chicano play on Broadway. It also introduced Edward James Olmos in the role of El Pachuco, a mysterious figure in the play who serves as a Greek chorus. The play’s critical success led Valdéz to direct a 1981 film version with Olmos and Daniel Valdez, who contributed incidental music for the play. ZORICH, LOUIS (1924– ). Born in Chicago to Croatian immigrants, Zorich attended Roosevelt College and the Goodman Theatre School of Drama. He spent much of his career in regional theatre, film, and television, often working with his wife, Olympia Dukakis, whom he married in 1962. He was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor for Hadrian VII (1969) and a Drama Desk Award for a revival of They Knew What They Wanted* in 1976. On Broadway, he also appeared in Becket (1960), Moby Dick (1965), The Condemned of Altona (1966), Fun City (1972), Moonchildren (1972), Goodtime Charley (1975), Herzl (1976), and 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), as well as numerous revivals, including Death of a Salesman in 1984 and Follies (2001). ZUBER, CATHERINE (1951– ). Born in England, this much-honored costume designer studied at the Yale School of Drama and has been nominated for Tony Awards for Twelfth Night (1999), Dinner at Eight (2003), and Seascape (2005), and won Tonys for The Light in the Piazza (2005), Awake and Sing! (2006), The Coast of Utopia (2007), South Pacific (2008), and The Royal Family* (2010), and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Ivanov (1998), Triumph of Love (1998), Twelfth Night, Dinner at Eight, Intimate Apparel (2004), The Light in the Piazza, winning for The Coast of Utopia. Zuber’s other Broadway credits include revivals of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994, The Rose Tattoo in 1995, London Assurance in 1997, The Sound of Music in 1998, and A Man for All Seasons (2008), as well as such new works as Frozen (2004), Dracula,* the Musical (2004), Little Women* (2005), Doubt (2005), A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005), In My Life (2005), Mauritius (2007), Cry-Baby (2008), Impressionism (2009), and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (2009). Zuber has also designed for numerous regional theatres, opera, and ballet.

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Bibliography

CONTENTS Introductory Note Bibliographies and Reference Works Historical and Critical Studies General Theatre Studies Cultural and Regional Studies Acting and Actors Playwriting and Playwrights Producing, Directing, Management, and Design Critics and Criticism Theatres and Architecture African American, Yiddish, and Ethnic Theatre Musical and Other Popular Fare Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Men Women Biographies and Memoirs of Theatre Artists Actors and Actresses Playwrights Critics Producers, Directors, Managers, and Designers Plays and Anthologies of Plays

895 898 900 900 902 904 905 912 913 914 914 917 918 920 920 921 921 925 930 930 934

INTRODUCTORY NOTE The era of contemporary theatre, 1930–2010, is one of vast historical change and cultural evolution. In the field of theatre the publication of plays, memoirs of major personalities, criticism, and theatre history largely shifted from a focus on a general audience to professionals and academics. The lavishly illustrated, gilt-edged volumes of plays, often with special signed editions, published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were increasingly replaced by more pedestrian, user-friendly trade editions after World War I, and then paperbacks after World War II. The occasional collection of scene and costume designs, substantial encyclopedic works, and “coffee 895

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table” pictorials appeared irregularly after 1960. Major changes were also seen in periodicals, with the slow disappearance of most popular theatre magazines (for example, the long-running Theatre Arts monthly, which began publication in 1916 and, after World War II, included the script of a new play each month, folded in 1964—it was, however, replaced, after a fashion, by American Theatre magazine beginning in 1984) and newspapers by the 1960s as an increasing number of academic journals emerged after World War II. The once avid readership among the general public for plays and books about theatre and backstage life waned (perhaps due to rising attention focused on film, radio, and television), although major figures continued to offer autobiographies and scholars authored biographies. Scholarship on theatre and the dissemination of information has changed significantly since the 1980s with the appearance of the Internet. Web sites and other tools now offer unprecedented access to international libraries and archives (and many publications), although the monumental task of moving centuries of information online continues and is likely to continue for decades. Internet resources are now necessary and undeniably valuable, but many sites vary in the amount of supervision and quality fact checking. Post-1930 theatre studies by contemporary scholars tends to focus on placing drama in its cultural, economic, and sociological context while embracing a broader definition of theatrical activities as the American stage center shifted away from New York. Most of the bibliographies and general reference works listed are not specific to the contemporary era, but reach back to pre-1930s American drama and, in many cases, to the beginnings of North American theatre. Comparatively few focus on a specific era, as in the case of HDAT: 1930–2010, with many encompassing the whole history of theatre and drama in the United States. The standard ready references for American theatre that reside on every theatre person’s bookshelf are Bordman’s Oxford Companion to American Theatre and Wilmeth and Miller’s Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Although comparable in format, each has distinctive features. Bordman inclines toward the commercial theatre and takes an anecdotal approach. Wilmeth and Miller are more comprehensive, including more extensive coverage of ethnic theatres and contemporary theatre in general, written with an economy of words. Kennedy’s essay-style entries in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance encompass American as well as international theatre. Sherman’s labor of love is interesting for its inclusion of many otherwise neglected figures, but his spelling of names and other data need to be checked against other sources. Details about performers are provided by varied resources, including Variety Obituaries, with the understanding that inaccuracies inevitably lurk in newspaper accounts. Who Was Who in the Theatre, 1912–1976 is a good resource for virtually complete listings of plays in selected artists’ careers (British as well as American) up to the mid-1970s, although dates of productions are not always provided—a good quick source for production information for Broadway plays is the Internet Broadway Database (http://www.ibdb.com), and for Off-Broadway plays the Lortel Archives (http://www.lortel.org//lla_archive/index.cfm) is similarly valuable. Theatrical mem-

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• 897

oirs, autobiographies, and biographies (see the next section of this bibliography) are also useful as theatre artists frequently included references to one another and their production involvements in their stories. Data on plays (theatre, opening, length of run) may be found in Bronner and Mantle, and in various other encyclopedic works. While some offer capsule plot summaries, as is the case in this volume, there is no substitute for reading the entire play. The data in those volumes can also be checked against the reviews reprinted in the series of volumes, New York Times Theatre Reviews, which provide comprehensive coverage from the late nineteenth century to the present. The breakdown of the bibliography into categories is inevitably problematic. For example, the decision whether to place a collection of short biographies of actors under historical studies of actors or under biographies and memoirs of actors was resolved by considering where the reader would be most likely to seek it: under historical studies of actors. Only in very few instances have listings been duplicated under more than one category. A few notes follow regarding some of the categories. For general histories, Wilmeth and Bigsby’s Cambridge History of American Theatre and Londré and Watermeier’s History of North American Theater are complementary and Shattuck’s Shakespeare on the American Stage is a valuable text embellished by a wealth of illustrations. Mary Henderson’s books on New York City’s theatres are excellent visual resources on the architecture and changing urban landscape there. Among a growing list of resources on African American theatre, Hill and Hatch’s History of African American Theatre merits particular attention, and much scholarship on various ethnic and racial groups, women in theatre, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender theatre has emerged since the 1980s. In regard to biographies, the popularity of the theatrical memoir during the modernist period has given way to a contemporary media-obsessed era of celebrity reporting, interviews, and tabloid journalism. The major stars of the stage are often the subjects of biographies and occasionally write autobiographies, but most of the media reporting focuses on film and television performers, some of whom also work in live theatre. Although any memoir is ultimately anecdotal, and despite the artists’ faulty memories and inevitable omissions, there is an immediacy, authenticity, and color to personal recollections that no biographer can completely capture. In the most fascinating memoirs, the artist does not simply chronicle his or her career, but also reminisces about friendships and influences in the profession, and offers reflections on the development of the stage in her or his time. Standout examples of these include the memoirs of Ethel Barrymore, Hume Cronyn, Bette Davis, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Ruth Gordon, Katharine Hepburn, Eva Le Gallienne, Christopher Plummer, Marian Seldes, Eli Wallach, and Shelley Winters, among many others. While the lives of actors attract most interest to publishers and scholars, the memoirs and biographies of playwrights, producers, designers, and other artists can be similarly valuable. Those by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are most cherishable in providing insight into their personal lives and creative processes, but other non-acting memoirs of significance include those by Jed Harris, Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman, Joshua Logan, Elmer Rice, and Neil Simon, among many others.

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This listing of plays and anthologies of plays must necessarily be highly selective, considering the thousands of American plays published since 1930. Many libraries house a plethora of single-play editions and anthologies published in this era. Unpublished plays may often be found in manuscript form in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts or in other theatre archives, which also include videos of Broadway productions since approximately 1970. A few publishers have devoted considerable attention to new plays written since the 1960s, including the Theatre Communications Group, Smith & Kraus, and those publishers issuing acting editions, most notably Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service. The attempt in this bibliography is to include a key collection (if available) or single work(s) from a sampling of major American playwrights since 1930; emphasis has been placed on multi-play volumes on single playwrights and anthologies.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS Bartelt, Chuck, and Barbara Bergeron, compilers. Variety Obituaries, an 11-Volume Set, 1905–1986. New York: Garland, 1989. Bloom, Ken. The Routledge Guide to Broadway. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bonin, Jane F. Prize-Winning American Drama: A Bibliographical and Descriptive Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869– 1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bordman, Gerald, and Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Breed, Paul F., and Florence M. Sniderman, eds. Dramatic Criticism Index: A Bibliography of Commentaries on Playwrights from Ibsen to the Avant Garde. Detroit: Gale, 1972. Brockett, Oscar, and Robert Findlay. Century of Innovation. 2nd ed. New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1991. Bronner, Edwin J. The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre, 1900–1975. San Francisco: A. S. Barnes, 1980. Bryan, George B. Stage Deaths: A Biographical Guide to International Theatre Obituaries, 1850–1990, 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. ———. Stage Lives: A Bibliography and Index to Theatrical Biographies in English. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Hartig, eds. The Facts on Film Companion to American Drama. New York: Facts on File, 2003. Carlson, Marvin, ed. Theatre Research Resources in New York City. New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publishers, 2007. Cassell Companion to Theatre. London: Cassell, 1997.

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Chambers, Colin, ed. The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre. New York: Continuum, 2002. Cody, Gabrielle H., and Evert Sprinchorn, eds. The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Demastes, William W., ed. American Playwrights, 1880–1945: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Fisher, James, and Felicia Hardison Londré. The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater: Modernism. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Gassner, John, and Edward Quinn, eds. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. Greenfield, Thomas A., ed. Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theatre and American Culture. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2009. Griffiths, Trevor R. The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Hill, Anthony D. Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Hischak, Thomas S. American Plays and Musicals on Screen: 650 Stage Productions and Their Film and Television Adaptations. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. ———. Enter the Players: New York Stage Actors in the Twentieth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 2003. ———. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kolin, Philip C., ed. American Playwrights since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. Krasner, David, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Mainiero, Lina, ed. American Women Writers. 4 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Mantle, Burns. The Best Plays. New York: Dodd, Mead (an annual review of plays begun in 1894 and continuing to the present). McGill, Raymond D. Notable Names in the American Theatre. Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1976. Meserve, Walter J. An Outline History of American Drama. New York: Feedback Books & Prospero Press, 1994. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. African American Dramatists: An A-to-Z Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004. The New York Times Directory of the Theater. [1920–1970] Introduction by Clive Barnes. New York: Arno, 1973. Owen, Bobbi. The Broadway Design Roster: Designers and Their Credits. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Patterson, Michael. The Oxford Dictionary of Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Perkins, George, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger, eds. Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960. Foreword by Errol Hill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. Rigdon, Walter, ed. The Biographical Encyclopaedia and Who’s Who of the American Theatre. New York: Heineman, 1966. Robinson, Alice M., Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, eds. Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. Sherman, Robert L. Actors and Authors: with composers and managers who helped make them famous: A chronological record and brief Biography of Theatrical Celebrities from 1750 to 1950. Chicago: Robert L. Sherman, 1951. Stoddard, Richard. Stage Scenery, Machinery, and Lighting: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale, 1977. Whalon, Marion K. Performing Arts Research: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale, 1976. Who Was Who in the Theatre: 1912–1976. 4 vols. Detroit: Gale, 1978. Wilmeth, Don B., and Tice Miller. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993;2nd rev. ed., 2007. ———. The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Argot, Slang, and Terminology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981. Woll, Alan. Dictionary of Black Theatre: Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Selected Harlem Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983.

HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES General Theatre Studies Adler, Thomas P. American Drama 1940–1960: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1994. Berkowitz, Gerald M. New Broadways: Theatre across America: Approaching a New Millennium. New York: Applause, 2000. Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Volumes 1–3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 1984, 1985. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern American Drama. New York: Chelsea House, 2005. Canning, Charlotte, and Thomas Postlewait, eds. Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins, eds. Women in American Theatre. New York: Crown, 2005. Churchill, Allen. The Great White Way: A Re-creation of Broadway’s Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962.

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Crespy, David. Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. New York: Back Stage Books, 2003. Csida, Joseph, and June Bundy Csida. American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978. Engle, Ron, and Tice L. Miller. The American Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Fischer, Iris Smith, and William W. Demastes. Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006. Flexner, Eleanor. American Playwrights, 1918–1938: The Theatre Retreats from Reality. New York: Books for Libraries, 1938. Gerard, Jeremy. Act Two: Creating Partnerships and Setting Agendas for the Future of the American Theater. New York: TCG, 2003. Gilman, Richard. The Making of Modern Drama. New York: Da Capo Press, 1987. Harris, Andrew. Broadway Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hewitt, Barnard. Theatre U.S.A. 1665–1957. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950. New York: Samuel French, 1951. Laufe, Abe. The Wicked Stage. A History of Theater Censorship and Harassment in the United States. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. Leonard, William Torbert. Broadway Bound: A Guide to Show That Died Aborning. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983. Londré, Felicia Hardison, and Daniel J. Watermeier. The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1998. Magruder, James, ed. The American Theatre Reader: Essays and Conversations from American Theatre Magazine. New York: TCG, 2009. McConachie, Bruce A. American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. Mordden, Ethan. All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919– 1959. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Murphy, Brenda. Twentieth-Century American Drama. 4 vols. New York: Routledge, 2006. Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Smith, Susan Harris. American Drama: The Bastard Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Widener, Charlene. The Changing Face of American Theatre. Mauritania: VDM, 2008. Wilmer, S. E. Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II: 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume III: Post-World War II to the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Wilson, Garff B. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Cultural and Regional Studies Barranger, Milly S. Unfriendly Witness: Gender, Theatre, and Film in the McCarthy Era. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Bianco, Anthony. Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-OffBroadway Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Brewer, Mary F. Staging Whiteness. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Brietzke, Zander. American Drama in the Age of Film. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Carr, C. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Chambers, Jonathan. Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Chansky, Dorothy. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964. Demastes, William W. Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. ———. Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, Into Orderly Disorder. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Demastes, William W., and Iris Smith Fischer, eds. Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Eaton, Walter P. Theatre Guild: The First Ten Years. Saint Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1971. Fahy, Thomas, and Kimball King. Peering behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2002. Fearnow, Mark. The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Frick, John W. Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Frome, Shelly. The Actors Studio: A History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Gaines, James R. Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Garfield, David. The Actor’s Studio: A Player’s Place. New York: Macmillan, 1984. Gressler, Thomas H. Theatre As the Essential Liberal Art in the American University. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2002.

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Harrington, John P. The Life of the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Houchin, John H. Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jerz, Dennis G. Technology in American Drama, 1920–1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Jones, Jan. Renegades, Showmen, & Angels: A Theatrical History of Fort Worth, 1873–2001. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2006. Kindelan, Nancy. Shadows of Realism. Dramaturgy, and the Theory and Practices of Modernism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Kubiak, Anthony. Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Kyvig, David E. Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. LoMonaco, Martha Schmoyer. Summer Stock!: An American Theatrical Phenomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Londré, Felicia Hardison. The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870–1930. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. McClymer, John. The Birth of Modern America, 1919–1939. Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2005. Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Nadel, Norman. Pictorial History of the Theatre Guild. New York: Crown, 1969. Plotkins, Marilyn. The American Repertory Theatre Reference Book: The Brustein Years. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Román, David. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Ronayne, Kelly K. Stages of Modernity: The Federal Theatre Project and the New American Welfare State. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2009. Savran, David, and Peter Sellars. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: TCG, 1993. Schmidt, Kerstin. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 2005. Segrave, Kerry. Ticket Scalping: An American History, 1850–2005. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Shank, Theodore. Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

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Somerset-Ward, Richard. An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage Dramas. New York: Facts on File, 2004. Stone, Wendell C. Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Taylor, William R., ed. Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Teague, Frances N. Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Walker, Julia A. Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wertheim, Albert. Staging the War: American Drama and World War II. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Wetmore, Kevin J., ed. Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage: Critical Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. Witham, Barry. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Acting and Actors Blum, Daniel. Great Stars of the American Stage: A Pictorial Record. New York: Greenberg, 1952. ———. A Pictorial History of the American Theatre 1860–1970. New, 3rd ed., enlarged and revised by John Willis. New York: Crown, 1972. ———. A Pictorial History of the American Theatre 1860–1985. New, 6th ed., updated and enlarged by John Willis. New York: Crown, 1986. Bryer, Jackson R., and Richard A. Davison, eds. The Actor’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Cole, Toby, and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds. Actors on Acting. New York: Crown, 1970. Davis, Tracy C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hamilton, Marybeth. When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Long, Robert Emmet, ed. Acting: Working in the Theatre: American Theatre Wing. Foreword by Kate Burton. New York: Continuum, 2006. Margolis, Ellen, and Lissa Tyler Renaud. The Politics of American Actor Training. New York: Routledge, 2009. Rand, Ronald, Luigi Scorcia, and J. Michael Miller. Acting Teachers of America: A Vital Tradition. New York: Allworth Press, 2007. Segrave, Kerry. Actors Organize: A History of Union Formation Efforts in America, 1880–1919. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. Senelick, Laurence, ed. Wandering Stars: Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905–1940. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

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• 905

Simon, Louis M. The History of the Actors’ Fund of America. New York: Theatre Arts, 1972. Teague, Frances. Shakespeare and the Popular American Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vilga, Edward. Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Weber, Anne Nicholson. Upstaged: Making Theatre in the Media Age. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Playwriting and Playwrights Abbotson, Susan C. Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Alexander, Doris. Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924– 1933. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. ———. Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Altwein, Sabine. The Quest for American Manhood: Issues of Race and Gender in David Rabe’s Vietnam Trilogy. Mauritania: VDM, 2008. Anderson, Donald R. Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Philip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Andreach, Robert J. John Guare’s Theatre: The Art of Connecting. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. ———. Understanding Beth Henley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. ———. The War against Naturalism: In the Contemporary American Theatre. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. Balakain, Jan. Reading the Plays of Wendy Wasserstein. New York: Applause, 2010. Barnett, Claudia, ed. Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 1998. Bay-Cheng, Sarah. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2007. Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Bigsby, C. W. E. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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———. Neil LaBute: Stage and Cinema. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Black, Stephen A. Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Blank, Martin. Thornton Wilder. Boston: Twayne, 1996. Blank, Martin, David Garrett Izzo, Dalma Hynyadi Brunauer, eds. Thornton Wilder: New Essays. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999. Bloom, Harold. Dramatists and Dramas. New York: Chelsea House, 2005. Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time; The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Bogumil, Mary L. Understanding August Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Bottoms, Stephen. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Brater, Enoch. Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. ———, ed. Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. ———. Arthur Miller’s Global Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Bray, Robert. Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Brown, John Mason. The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood. Mirror to His Times. 1896–1939. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Bryant-Jackson, Paul, and Lois Overbeck. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Lanford Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1993. Burke, Sally. American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1996. Busby, Mark. Lanford Wilson. Boise: Idaho State University Press, 1987. Bzowski, Frances Diodato. American Women Playwrights, 1900–1930: A Checklist. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Callens, Johan. Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Cantor, Harold. Clifford Odets: Playwright & Poet. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Carpentier, Martha. Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006. Carson, Neil. Arthur Miller. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Castleberry, Marion. Horton Foote: Genesis of an American Playwright. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004.

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• 907

Chaiken, Joseph, and Sam Shepard. Letters and Texts, 1: 1972–1984. Edited by Barry Daniels. New York: TCG, 1994. Chambers, Jonathan L. Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Ciociola, Gail. Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices, and Their Boundaries. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Cole, Toby. Playwrights on Playwriting. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. Crandall, George W., ed. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Cummings, Scott T. Maria Irene Fornés. New York: Routledge, 2009. Curry, Jane Kathleen. John Guare: A Research and Productions Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002. Dafalla, Muawia. Modern American Tragedy: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009. Dean, Anne. David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. ———. Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Demastes, William W. Clifford Odets: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. DiGaetani, John Louis. Stages of Struggle: Modern Playwrights and Their Psychological Inspirations. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Diggins, John Patrick. Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire under Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Dowling, Robert M. Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Dubost, Thierry. Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O’Neill’s Vision of Humanity. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Durham, Frank. Elmer Rice. Boston: Twayne, 1970. Durham, Leslie Atkins. Staging Gertrude Stein: Absence, Culture, and the Landscape of American Alternative Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Elam, Harry J., Jr. The Past and Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. ———. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Elkins, Marilyn, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2000. Falk, Doris V. Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. Fesmire, Julia A., ed. Beth Henley: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002. Firestone, Paul A. Pulitzer Prize Plays: The First Fifty Years, 1917–1967, A Dramatic Reflection of American Life. New York: Limelight, 2008. Fisher, James. The Theatre of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. New York: Routledge, 2001.

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———, ed. Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. ———. Understanding Tony Kushner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Fleche, Anne. Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Fleming, John. Romulus Linney: Maverick of the Theater. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 2009. Flexner, Eleanor. American Playwrights, 1918–1938. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938. Floyd, Virginia. Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays. New York: Ungar, 1988. ———. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Ungar, 1985. Gainor, J. Ellen. Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–1948. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Geis, Deborah R. Suzan-Lori Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Geis, Deborah R., and Steven F. Kruger, eds. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Gill, Brendan, “Introduction,” Philip Barry, States of Grace: Eight Plays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Ginter-Brown, Linda, ed. Marsha Norman: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 1996. Gottlieb, Lois C. Rachel Crothers. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Greene, Alexis, ed. Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Foreword by Marsha Norman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. ———. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Griffin, Alice, and Geraldine Thorsten. Understanding Lillian Hellman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Gross, Robert, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2001. Hart, Lynda. Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. Hay, Samuel A. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Haynes, Robert W. The Major Plays of Horton Foote. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2010. Heintzelman, Greta, and Alycia Smith-Howard. Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams. New York: Checkmark, 2005. Herr, Christopher J. Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Heuvel, Michael Vanden. Elmer Rice: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

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Hinz-Bode, Kristina. Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression: Language and Isolation in the Plays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Hodges, Ben, ed. The American Theatre Wing Present the Play That Changed My Life: America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them. Introduction by Paula Vogel. New York: Applause, 2009. Holmberg, Arthur. The Theatre of Robert Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Horn, Barbara Lee. Lillian Hellman: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. ———. Maxwell Anderson: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Hudgins, Christopher, and Leslie Kane. Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Johnson, Jeff, and Jackson R. Bryer. William Inge and the Subversion of Gender: Rewriting Stereotypes in the Plays, Novels, and Screenplays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Johnson, Robert K. Neil Simon. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Kane, Leslie: The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. Israel Horovitz: A Collection of Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. ———. Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Kent, Assunta Bartolomucci. Maria Irene Fornés and Her Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Kerr, Christopher J. Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Keyishian, Harry. Critical Essays on William Saroyan. Boston: Twayne, 1995. King, Kimball, ed. Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker, Revised. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Kolin, Philip C., ed. Suzan Lori-Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. ———, ed. The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. ———, ed. The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004. ———. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. ———, ed. The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Konas, Gary. Neil Simon: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 1997. Konkle, Lincoln. Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

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Koprince, Susan Fehrenbacher. Understanding Neil Simon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Kreizenbeck, Alan. Zoe Akins: Broadway Playwright. Wesport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Lawson, Do, ed. John Guare: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2001. Lederer, Katherine. Lillian Hellman. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Leeson, Richard M. William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland, 1995. Lifton, Paul. “Vast Encyclopedia”: The Theatre of Thornton Wilder. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Lindroth, Colette, and James Lindroth. Rachel Crothers: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Londré, Felicia Hardison. Tennessee Williams. New York: Ungar, 1980. Long, Robert Emmet. Writing: Working in the Theatre. Foreword by Paula Vogel. New York: Continuum, 2008. Makowsky, Veronica A. Susan Glaspell’s Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mantle, Burns. Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938. Marranca, Bonnie. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: PAJ, 1981. Mason, Jeffrey D. Stone Tower: The Political Theatre of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Maufort, Marc. Eugene O’Neill and the Emergence of American Drama. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 1989. McDonald, Robert, and Linda Rohrer Paige, eds. Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in History and Criticism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Moroff, Diane. Fornés: Theater in the Present Tense. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Murphy, Brenda, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nadel, Alan, ed. August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. ———, ed. May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. Nolan, Paul T. Marc Connelly. Boston: Twayne, 1969. Olauson, Judith. American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization. Albany, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing Co., 1981. Ozieblo, Barbara, and Jerry Dickey. Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. New York: Routledge, 2008. Papke, Mary E. Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993.

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Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Plunka, Gene A. The Plays of Beth Henley: A Critical Study. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Pollock, Rhoda-Gale. George S. Kaufman. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Price, Steven. The Plays, Screenplays, and Films of David Mamet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Prosser, William. The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984. Roberts, Jerry. The Great American Playwrights on the Screen: A Critical Guide to Film, TV, Video and DVD. New York: Applause, 2003. Robinson, Marc. The American Play: 1787–2000. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. The Theatre of Maria Irene Fornés. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Roper, John Herbert. Paul Green, Playwright of the Real South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Roppolo, Joseph Patrick. Philip Barry. Boston: Twayne, 1965. Rosen, Carol. Sam Shepard: A “Poetic Rodeo.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Roudané, Matthew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sauer, Janice A,. and David K. Sauer. David Mamet: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights, 1900–1950. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. ———. August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. Shannon, Sandra Garrett. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1995. Shea, Laura. A Moon for the Misbegotten on the American Stage: A History of the Major Productions. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Shuman, R. Baird. Clifford Odets. Boston: Twayne, 1962. ———. Robert E. Sherwood. Boston: Twayne, 1964. ———. William Inge. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Silverman, Toby. Edward Albee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ———, ed. Terrence McNally: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 1997. Smith, Susan Harris. American Drama: The Bastard Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. August Wilson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

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Solomon, Rakesh Herald. Albee in Performance. With a foreword by Edward Albee. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Sponberg, Arvid F. A. R. Gurney. New York: Routledge, 2007. Svich, Caridad, and Maria Delgado. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornés. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1999. Taav, Michael. A Body across the Map: The Father-Son Plays of Sam Shepard. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Thorson, Greg. The New Grotesque: The Theatre of Martin McDonagh and Tracy Letts. Mauritania: VDM, 2009. Törnqvist, Egil. Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Wade, Leslie A. Sam Shepard and the American Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Watson, Charles S. Horton Foote: A Literary Biography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Weales, Gerald. Odets the Playwright. New York: Methuen, 1985. White, Sidney Howard. Sidney Howard. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Whitmore, Jon. William Saroyan: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Wilcox, Leonard. Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Williams, Philip Middleton. A Comfortable House: Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason, and the Circle Repertory Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993. Wood, Gerald C. Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. ———, ed. Horton Foote: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———, ed. Neil LaBute: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2006. Yavarian, Reza. De-Mythologising Popular American Myths: Critical Reading of David Mamet’s Plays. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2010. Zinman, Toby, ed. David Rabe: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1991.

Producing, Directing, Management, and Design Cole, Toby, and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds. Directors on Directing. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Coven, Brenda, Christine E. King, and Donna M. Albertus. David Merrick and Hal Prince. New York: Garland, 1993. Cummings, Scott T. Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart, and the SITI Company. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Delgado, Maria M., and Paul Heritage, eds. In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

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Dixon, Michael Bigelow, and Joel A. Smith. Anne Bogart: Viewpoints. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1995. Fliotsos, Anne, and Wendy Vierow. American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Gardner, Bonnie Milne. The Emergence of the Playwright-Director in American Theatre, 1960–1983. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2001. Green, Amy S. The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Ilson, Carol. Harold Prince: A Director’s Journey. New York: Limelight, 2004. Long, Robert Emmet, ed. Producing and the Theatre Business: American Theatre Wing. Foreword by Elizabeth I. McCann. New York: Continuum, 2007. McClinton, Calvin A. The Work of Vinnette Carroll: An African-American Theatre Artist. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2000. Milne, Tom. Rouben Mamoulian. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Owen, Bobbi. Lighting Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915– 1990. Westport: Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. ———. Scenic Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915–1990. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. Probst, Gerhard F. Erwin Piscator and the American Theatre. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Schanke, Robert A., Theresa M. Collins, Melanie Blood, and Alexis Greene. Angels in the American Theatre: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Shevtsova, Maria. Robert Wilson. New York: Routledge, 2007. Styan, J. L. Max Reinhardt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Taymor, Julie, and Eileen Blumenthal. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007. Wishna, Victor, and Ken Collins. In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Umbrage Editions, 2006. Yeoman, JoAnn. Dream Dealer: Stuart Walker and the American Theater. Scottsdale, Ariz.: Star Cloud Press, 2007.

Critics and Criticism Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Bennett, Alma J. American Women Theatre Critics: Biographies and Selected Writings of Twelve Reviewers, 1753–1919. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. Besas, Peter. Inside “Variety”: The Story of the Bible of Show Business (1905–1987). New York: Ars Millenii, 2000. Brown, John Mason. Dramatis Personae. New York: Viking, 1963. Cardullo, Bert. Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theatre Critics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Chatterton, Wayne. Alexander Woollcott. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Clurman, Harold. The Collected Works of Harold Clurman. New York: Applause, 2000.

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Connolly, Thomas F. George Jean Nathan and the Making of Modern American Drama Criticism. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Downer, Alan S., ed. American Drama and Its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967. Green, Abel, and Joe Laurie, Jr. Show Biz: From Vaude to Video as seen by Variety. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Heilpern, John. How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway? Writings on Theater—and Why It Matters. New York: Routledge, 1999. Oppenheimer, George, ed. The Passionate Playgoer. A Personal Scrapbook. New York: Viking, 1958. Palmer, Helen H. American Drama Criticism. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1967. Rich, Frank. Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for the New York Times, 1980–1993. New York: Random House, 1998. Senelick, Laurence, ed. The American Stage; Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner. New York: Library of America, 2010. Simon, John. On Theatre: Criticism 1974–2003. New York: Applause, 2005.

Theatres and Architecture Botto, Louis. At This Theatre: 100 Years of Broadway Shows, Stories, and Stars. New York: Applause, 2002. Henderson, Mary C. The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses. Foreword by Gerald Schoenfeld. New York: Back Stage Books, 2004. ———. The New Amsterdam: The Biography of a Broadway Theatre. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Johnson, Stephen Burge. The Roof Gardens of Broadway Theatres, 1883–1942. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. King, Donald C. The Theaters of Boston: A Stage and Screen History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Morrison, William. Broadway Theatres: History and Architecture. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1999. Smith, Eric Ledell. African American Theater Buildings: An Illustrated Historical Directory, 1900–1955. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Van Hoogstraten, Nicholas. Lost Broadway Theatres. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997.

African American, Yiddish, and Ethnic Theatre Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Afro-American Poetry and Drama, 1760–1975: A Guide to Information Resources. Detroit: Gale, 1979.

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Arata, Esther Spring. Black American Playwrights, 1800 to the Present. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1976. ———. More Black American Playwrights: A Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Barrios, Olga. The Black Theatre Movement in the United States and in South America. Valencia, Spain: Publicaciones Universidad de Valencia, 2009. Bean, Annemarie, ed. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance. New York: Routledge, 1999. Berkowitz, Joel. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Bial, Henry. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Brook, Vincent, ed. “You Should See Yourself”: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Elam, Harry J., and David Krasner, eds. African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Estavan, Lawrence. The Italian Theatre in San Francisco. Edited by Mary A. Burgess. San Bernadino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 2009. Furnish, Ben. Nostalgia in Jewish-American Theatre and Film, 1979–2004. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Gavin, Christy, ed. African American Women Playwrights: A Research Guide. New York: Routledge, 1999. Geiogamah, Hanay, and Jaye T. Darby, eds. American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000. Gill, Glenda E. No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Gray, Christine Rauchfuss. Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999. Harrington, John D. The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874–1966. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre. A Historical and Critical Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jiang, Tsui-fen. The American Dream in African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American Drama: August Wilson, Frank Chin, and Luis Valdez. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2009. Kanellos, Nicholas. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Kanfer, Stefan. Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America. New York: Knopf, 2006.

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King, Woodie. The Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture. New York: Applause, 2003. Krasner, David. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Lee, Esther Kim. A History of Asian American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Leiter, Cary. Yiddish Theatre/Modern American Theatre: The Importance of Yiddish Theatre in the Evolution of Modern American Theatre. Mauritania: VDM, 2010. Lieu, Miles. Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002. Lifson, David S. The Yiddish Theatre in America. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965. Marsh-Lockett, Carol P. Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage. New York: Routledge, 1998. Meléndez, Priscilla. The Politics of Farce in Contemporary Spanish American Theatre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Mitchell, Lofton. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967. Molette, Carlton W., and Barbara J. Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation. Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1986. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Novick, Julius. Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Peterson, Bernard L. Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays: A Biographical Directory and Dramatic Index. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988. ———. Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990. ———. Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816– 1960. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Ramos-Garcia, Luis A. The State of Latino Theater in the U.S. New York: Routledge, 2002. Robinson, Cedric J. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Rossini, Jon D. Contemporary Latina(o) Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Sanders, Leslie Catherine. The Development of Black Theatre in America: From Shadows to Selves. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Schechter, Joel. Messiahs of 1933: How American Yiddish Theatre Survived Adversity through Satire. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. See, Sarita Echavez. The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

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Senelick, Laurence. Wandering Stars: Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905–1940. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub. Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Stanlake, Christy. Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tanner, Jo A. Dusky Maidens: The Odyssey of the Early Black Dramatic Actress. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Thompson, George A., Jr. A Documentary History of the African Theatre. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. White, Shane, and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Williams, Dana A. Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. Williams-Witherspoon, Kimmika. The Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meanings Embedded in Public Discourse. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2006.

Musical and Other Popular Fare Allen, R. C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Ashby, LeRoy. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Bell, John. American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bogar, Thomas A. American Presidents Attend the Theatre: The Playgoing Experiences of Each Chief Executive. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. Brecht, Stefan. The Bread and Puppet Theatre. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1988. Canning, Charlotte M. The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua in America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Chemers, Michael M., and Jim Ferris. Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Coppa, Francesca, Lawrence Hass, James Peck, and Eugene Burger. Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Dircks, Phyllis T., and Steve Abrams. American Puppetry: Collections, History, and Performance. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

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Everett, William A. and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Green, Abel, and Laurie, Joe, Jr. Show Biz from Vaude to Video. New York: Holt, 1950. Hirschfeld, Al. Hirschfeld: Art and Recollection from Eight Decades. New York: Scribner, 1991. ———. Hirschfeld on Line. New York: Applause, 2000. Jones, John Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004. Kantor, Michael, and Laurence Maslon. Broadway: The American Musical. New York: Bullfinch, 2004. Keyser, Herbert, and Ted Chapin. Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists. New York: Applause, 2009. Kislan, Richard. The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theatre. New York: Applause, 2000. Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Matlaw, Myron, ed. American Popular Entertainment. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979. McCaslin, Nellie. Historical Guide to Children’s Theatre in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. McPharlin, Paul. The Puppet Theatre in America. A History. New York: Harper, 1949. Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Patinkin, Sheldon. No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance: A History of the American Musical. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Shteir, Rachel. Striptease: The Untold Story of the Girlie Show. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Suskin, Steven: A Must See! Brilliant Broadway Artwork. New York: Chronicle Books, 2004. Wright, Jill Gold. Creating America on Stage: How Jewish Composers and Lyricists Pioneered American Musical Theatre. Mauritania: VDM, 2009. Zeidman, Irving. The American Burlesque Show. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Bak, John. Homo Americanus: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Bernstein, Robin. Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Clum, John M. Acting Gay. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

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———. Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. De Jongh, Nicholas. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. New York: Routledge, 1992. Dolan, Jill. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Fisher, James, ed. “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Harbin, Billy, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke, eds. The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Helbing, Terry. Gay and Lesbian Plays Today. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993. Hodges, Ben. Hidden Acts: Pioneering Gay and Lesbian Plays of the 20th Century. New York: Applause, 2003. Hughes, Holly, and David Román, eds. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance. New York: Grove, 1998. Marra, Kimberley Bell, and Robert A. Schanke. Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Meyer, Moe. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. New York: Routledge, 1993. Miller, Carl. Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History. New York: Cassell, 1999. Minwalla, Framji. The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Nelson, Emmanuel S. Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A-toZ Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Osborn, M. Elizabeth. The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: TCG, 1993. Paller, Michael. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and MidTwentieth-Century Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rapi, Nina, and Maya Chowdhry, eds. Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1998. Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Savran, David. A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Schulman, Sarah. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2000. Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Solomon, Alisa. Redressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1997. Summers, Claude J. The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance, and Musical Theater. Berkeley, Calif.: Cleis Press, 2004.

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Wandor, Michelene. Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Men Clark, Keith. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. McDonough, Carla J. Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Women Anderson, Lisa M. Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Canning, Charlotte. Feminist Theatres in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience. New York: Routledge, 1995. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. ———. Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance. New York: Routledge, 1996. Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Women in American Theatre. New York: TCG, 1987. Cima, Gay Gibson. Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Coven, Brenda. American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1982. Craig, Carolyn Casey. Women Pulitzer Playwrights. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1997. Farfan, Penny. Women, Modernism, and Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fliotsos, Anne, and Wendy Vierow. American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Furtado, Ken. Gay and Lesbian American Plays. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

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Goodman, Lizbeth, and Jane de Gay. The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hall, Ann. A Kind of Alaska: Women in the Plays of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Malpede, Karen, ed. Women in Theatre. Compassion and Hope. New York: Limelight, 1983. Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights, 1900–1950. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS OF THEATRE ARTISTS Actors and Actresses Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. New York: Scribner, 2001. Alexander, Jane. Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. Arce, Hector. The Secret Life of Tyrone Power: The Drama of a Bisexual in the Spotlight. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Ashley, Elizabeth. Actress: Postcards from the Road. New York: M. Evans, 1978. Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. New York: Harper, 1952. Barranger, Milly S. Jessica Tandy: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. Barrow, Kenneth. Helen Hayes: First Lady of the American Theatre. New York: Doubleday, 1985. Barrymore, Ethel. Memories: An Autobiography. New York: Harper, 1955. Beck, Robert. The Edward G. Robinson Encyclopedia. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Bennett, Joan, and Lois Kibbee. The Bennett Playbill. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Black, Stephen A., Zander Brietzke, Jackson R. Bryer, and Sheila Hickey Garvey, eds. Jason Robards Remembered: Essays and Recollections. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Bosworth, Patricia. Marlon Brando. New York: Viking, 2001. Bragg, Melvyn. Richard Burton: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Brando, Marlon, and Robert Lindsey. Songs My Mother Taught Me. New York: Random House, 1994. Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books, 1998. Brian, Dennis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Brown, Dennis. Actors Talk: Profiles and Stories from the Acting Trade. New York: Limelight, 2004. Brown, Jared. The Fabulous Lunts. New York: Atheneum, 1986. ———. Zero Mostel: A Biography. New York: Atheneum, 1989.

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Burke, Billie, and Cameron Shipp. With a Feather on My Nose. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1949. Burrows, Michael. Charles Laughton and Frederic March. n.c.: Primestyle, 1969. Caldwell, Zoe: I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu. New York: Viking, 1996. ———. Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans. New York: Viking, 2006. Carrier, Jeffrey L. Tallulah Bankhead: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. Carson, William G. B. Dear Josephine: The Theatrical Career of Josephine Hull. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Coleman, Terry. Olivier. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005. Cornell, Katharine. I Wanted to Be an Actress. New York: Random House, 1938. Courtney, Marguerite. Laurette: The Intimate Biography of Laurette Taylor. New York: Rinehart, 1955. Cronyn, Hume. A Terrible Liar: A Memoir. New York: William Morrow, 1991. Daniel, Walter C. “De Lawd”: Richard B. Harrison and the Green Pastures. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986. Davis, Bette. The Lonely Life: An Autobiography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1962. Davis, Ossie, and Ruby Dee. Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. New York: William Morrow, 1998. Dewhurst, Colleen, and Tom Viola. Colleen Dewhurst. New York: Scribner, 1997. Duberman, Martin B. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Edelman, Rob, and Audrey E. Kupferberg. Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen. New York: Citadel, 1999. Edwards, Anne. Katharine Hepburn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Eforgan, E. Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor. Middlesex, England: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2010. Englund, George. Marlon Brando: The Way It’s Never Been Done Before. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Fisher, James. Spencer Tracy: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greewood, 1994. Fonda, Henry, and Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life. New York: Dutton, 1981. Gansberg, Alan L. Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson. Kent, England: New English Library, Ltd., 2004. Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972. Gish, Lillian. The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. New York: W. H. Allen, 1969. Gordon, Ruth. My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. ———. Ruth Gordon: An Open Book. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Goudsouzian, Aram. Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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Grobel, Lawrence. Al Pacino. In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel. London: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ———. Conversations with Marlon Brando. New York: Rat Press, 2009. Hayes, Helen. My Life in Three Acts. With Katherine Hatch. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. ———. On Reflection: An Autobiography. With Sandford Dody. New York: M. Evans, 1968. Hayward, Brooke. Haywire. New York: Knopf, 1977. Hepburn, Katharine. Me: Stories of My Life. New York: Knopf, 1991. Higham, Charles. Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Hill, Holly. Actor’s Lives On and Off the American Stage. New York: TCG, 1993. Holden, Anthony. Olivier. London, England: Little Books, 2008. Holtzman, William. Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Horn, Barbara Lee. Colleen Dewhurst: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Howard, Leslie Ruth. A Quite Remarkable Father. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959. Howard, Ronald. In Search of My Father: A Portrait of Leslie Howard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Johnstone, Iain. Meryl Streep: A Life in Film. nc: Psychology News Press Ltd. 2009. Kanfer, Stefan. Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando. New York: Knopf, 2008. Kanin, Garson. Tracy and Hepburn. New York: Viking, 1971. Kear, Lynn. Agnes Moorehead: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. ———. Laurette Taylor: American Stage Legend. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. Kellow, Brian. The Bennetts: An Acting Family. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. King, Richard Abe. Jane Cowl: Her Precious and Momentary Glory. Bloomington: 1st Books Library, 2004. Krampner, Jon. Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley. New York: Back Stage Books, 2006. Lambert, Gavin. Nazimova: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997. Lavery, Brian. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath, England: Absolute Press, 1999. Lawrence, Jerome. Actor: The Life and Times of Paul Muni. New York: Putnam, 1974. Le Gallienne, Eva. At 33. New York: Longmans, Green, 1934. ———. With a Quiet Heart. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974. Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles: A Biography. New York: Limelight, 2004. Lee, Joanna Faung Jean. Asian American Actors: Oral Histories from Stage, Screen, and Television. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady. New York: Regan Books, 2004.

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Louvish, Simon. Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Malvern, Gladys. Curtain Going Up! The Story of Katharine Cornell. New York: J. Messner, 1943. Mango, Jim. Love Is the Reason for it All: The Shirley Booth Story. Albany, N.Y.: BearManor Media, 2008. Manso, Peter. Brando: The Biography. New York: Hyperion, 1994. McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles. New York: Viking, 1972. Molyneaux, Gerard. James Stewart: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Mosel, Tad. Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell. Boston: Little Brown, 1978. Mostel, Zero. Zero by Mostel. Photos by Max Waldman. New York: Horizon, 1965. Munn, Michael. Richard Burton: Prince of Players. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008. Murphy, Donn B., and Stephen Moore. Helen Hayes: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Oderman, Stuart. Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. Olivier, Laurence. Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Pederson, Lucille M. Katharine Cornell: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Peters, Margot. Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2003. Pfaff, Mark. Meryl Streep: A Critical Biography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1987. Plummer, Christopher. In Spite of Myself: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2008. Quinn, Anthony. One Man Tango. With Daniel Paisner. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. With Lloyd L. Brown. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Robeson, Paul, Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898–1939. New York: Wiley, 2001. ———. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939–1976. New York: Wiley, 2010. Robinson, Edward G. All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography. New York: Hawthorn, 1973. Robinson, Jeffrey. Bette Davis: Her Film and Stage Career. Saline, Mich.: Proteus Publishing, 1982. Sainer, Arthur. Zero Dances: A Biography of Zero Mostel. New York: Limelight, 2004. Schanke, Robert A. Eva Le Gallienne: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. ———. Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Scobie, Ingrid Winther. Center Stage: Helen Gahagan Douglas, A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Seldes, Marian. The Bright Lights: A Theatre Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Sheehy, Helen. Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Sheward, David. Rage and Glory: The Volatile Life and Career of George C. Scott. New York: Applause, 2008. Sikov, Ed. Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2007. Skinner, Cornelia Otis. Life with Lindsay & Crouse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Smith, Geddis. Walter Hampden: Dean of the American Theatre. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. Spoto, Donald. Laurence Olivier: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Stapleton, Maureen, and Jane Scovell. Hell of a Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Stevenson, Tyrone. Richard Burton: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992.Sweeney, Kevin. Henry Fonda: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Knopf, 1996. Tucker, David C. Shirley Booth: A Biography and Career Record. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Wallach, Eli. The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage. Orlando, Fla.: Mariner Books, 2006. Ward, Douglas Turner, and Gus Edwards. Advice to a Young Black Actor: Conversations with Douglas Turner Ward. New York: Heinemann, 2004. Weld, John. September Song: An Intimate Biography of Walter Huston. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. Welles, Orson. Orson Welles: Interviews. Edited by Mark W. Estrin. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002. Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdonovich. This Is Orson Welles. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Winters, Shelley. Shelley. Also Known as Shirley. New York: William Morrow, 1980. ———. Shelley II. The Middle of My Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Wood, Bret. Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990. Woods, Jeannie Marlin. Maureen Stapleton: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Yankee, Luke. Just Outside the Spotlight: Growing Up with Eileen Heckart. New York: Back Stage Books, 2006. Yule, Andrew. Al Pacino: Life on the Wire. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Yurka, Blanche. Bohemian Girl. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970. Zolotow, Maurice. Stagestruck: The Romance of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

Playwrights Allen, Woody, and Stig Bjorkman. Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Grove, 2005.

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Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Robert E. Sherwood: Playwright in Peace and War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Anderson, Maxwell. Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912– 1958. Edited by Laurence G. Avery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Bach, Steven. Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart. New York: Knopf, 2001. Baraka, Imamu Amiri. The Autobiography of Leroi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997. ———. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Edited by Charlie Reilly. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Ben-Zvi, Linda. Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering Arthur Miller. London: A&C Black, 2005. Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets—American Playwright: The Years from 1906–1940. New York: Applause, 2002. Brown, John Mason. Moss Hart: A Prince of the Theater. New York: Back Stage Books, 2006. ———. The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. ———. The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896–1939. New York: Harper, 1965. Bryer, Jackson, ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. ———, ed. Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. ———, ed. The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Bryer, Jackson, and Mary C. Hartig, eds. Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Burrows, Abe. Honest, Abe, Is There Really No Business Like Show Business? Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Calhoun, Randall. Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1988. Cole, Stephen: Noël Coward: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Connelly, Marc. Voices Offstage: A Book of Memoirs. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Ensler, Eve. Insecure at Last: A Political Memoir. New York: Villard, 2007. Estrin, Mark W., ed. Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Feibelman, Peter S. Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. Feiffer, Jules. Backing into Forward: A Memoir. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010.

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Foote, Horton. Beginnings: A Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2002. ———. Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood. New York: Scribner, 2008. Franken, Rose. When All Is Said and Done: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. ———. O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause, 2000. Gewirtz, Arthur. Sidney Howard and Clare Eames: American Theater’s Perfect Couple of the 1920s. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Saroyan: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1984. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Goldstein, Malcolm. George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Goodrich, David L. The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: His Life and Work. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Gussow, Mel, ed. Conversations with Miller. New York: Applause, 2002. ———. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Applause, 2000. Hampton, Wilborn. Horton Foote: America’s Storyteller. New York: Free Press, 2009. Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. Hart, Moss. Act One: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1959. Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Hecht, Ben. A Child of the Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954. Hellman, Lillian. An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir. Boston: Little Brown, 1969. ———. Pentimento. Boston: Little Brown, 1973. ———. Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little Brown, 1976. Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Kaufman, David. Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam. New York: Applause, 2005. Kolin, Philip C., ed. American Playwrights since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989. ———, ed. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2009. ———, ed. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. ———, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. Kolin, Philip C., and Colby H. Kullman, eds. Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.

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Kushner, Tony. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Edited by Robert Vorlicky. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Leggett, John. A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan. New York: Knopf, 2002. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. MacAdams, William. Ben Hecht: The Man behind the Legend. New York: Scribner, 1990. Mamet, David. David Mamet in Conversation. Edited by Leslie Kane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Martinson, Deborah. Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2005. Mass, Lawrence D. We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard, 1988. Meredith, Scott. George S. Kaufman and His Friends. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Meserve, Walter J. Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist. New York: Pegasus, 1970. Miller, Arthur. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. ———. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove, 1989. Nadel, Ira Bruce. David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Odets, Clifford. The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets. With an Introduction by William Gibson. New York: Grove, 1988. O’Neill, Eugene. As Ever, Gene: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan. Edited by Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts. New York: Associated University Presses, 1987. ———. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Travis Bogard. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. ———. The Theatre We Worked For: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan. Edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson Bryer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982. ———. A Wind Is Rising: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill. Edited by William Davies King. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Oumano, Ellen. Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Ozieblo, Barbara. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Palmieri, Anthony F. R. Elmer Rice: A Playwright’s Vision of America. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.

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Peterson, Jane T., and Suzanne Bennett. Women Playwrights of Diversity: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. Plimpton, George, ed. The Paris Review: Playwrights at Work. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. I: 1902–1941 – I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. II: 1941–1967 – I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rasky, Harry. Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. New York: Dodd Mead, 1986. Rice, Elmer. Minority Report: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Rollyson, Carl. Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend. Bloomington, Ind.: IUniverse, 2008. Roper, John Herbert. Paul Green, Playwright of the Real South. Athens: University of Georgia, 2003. Savran, David. Playwright’s Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing, and the Politics of Culture. New York: TCG, 1999. Schanke, Robert A.“That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Shafer, Yvonne. Performing O’Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ———. O’Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Shewey, Don. Sam Shepard. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Shivers, Alfred S. The Life of Maxwell Anderson. New York: Stein & Day, 1983. Simon, Neil. The Play Goes On: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ———. Rewrites: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Skinner, Cornelia Otis. Life with Lindsay and Crouse. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Smith, Bruce. Costly Performances: Tennessee Williams: The Last Stage. New York: Paragon, 1990. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Stein, Gertrude, and Thornton Wilder. The Letters of Gertrude Stein & Thornton Wilder. Edited by Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Teichmann, Howard. George S. Kaufman: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Vidal, Gore. Conversations with Gore Vidal. Edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare. New York: Abrams, 2009. ———. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Penguin, 1996. ———. Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 2007.

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Voss, Ralph F. The Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. Wainscott, Ronald Harold. Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920–1934. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. Wilder, Thornton. The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961. Selected and edited by Donald Gallup. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. ———. The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Edited by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: Harper, 2008. Williams, Tennessee. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Edited by Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986. ———. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ———. Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. Selected Letters: Volume I, 1920–1945. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy Marie Patterson Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2000. ———. Selected Letters: Volume II, 1945–1957. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2004. Wright, William. Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Critics Beard, Deanna M. Toten. Sheldon Cheney’s Theatre Arts Magazine: Promoting a Modern American Theatre, 1916–1921. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Curtiss, Thomas Quinn. The Smart Set: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. New York: Applause, 2000. Kauffmann, Stanley. Albums of a Life: A Memoir. New York: Sheep Meadow, 2007. Rich, Frank. Ghost Light: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2001. Thomas, Bob. Winchell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Winchell, Walter. Winchell Exclusive. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Producers, Directors, Managers, and Designers Abbott, George. “Mister Abbott.” New York: Random House, 1963. Adams, Cindy Heller. Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Aronson, Arnold. American Set Design. Foreword by Harold Prince. New York: TCG, 1993. ———. Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Atkinson, W. Patrick, ed. Theatrical Design in the Twentieth Century: An Index to Photographic Reproductions of Scenic Designs. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

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Barranger, Milly S. A Gambler’s Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. ———. Margaret Webster: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. ———. Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Bay, Howard. Stage Design. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974. Bentley, Joanne. Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the Theatre. New York: Knopf, 1988. Bowman, Walter Parker, and Robert Hamilton Ball. Theatre Language: A Dictionary of Terms in English. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961. Brecht, Stefan. Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson. New York: Suhrkamp, 1985. Briggs, Jody. Encyclopedia of Stage Lighting. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2003. Carter, Randolph, and Robert Reed Cole. Joseph Urban. New York: Abbeville, 1992. Dalrymple, Jean. September Child: The Story of Jean Dalrymple. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. Dillman, Tom, and Steve Scott. Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre: The First Twenty Years. Chicago: Goodman Theatre, 2006. Dorbian, Iris. Great Producers: Visionaries of the American Theatre. New York: Allworth Press, 2010. Ebrahimian, Babak. Sculpting Space in Theater: Conversations with the Top Set, Light, and Costume Designers. New York: Focal Press, 2006. Elder, Eldon. Eldon Elder: Designs for the Theatre. New York: Drama Publishers, 1979. Epstein, Helen. Joe Papp: An American Life. New York: Da Capo, 1996. Flanagan, Hallie. Arena. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940. Fletcher, Anne. Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the American Theatre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. Flynn, Robert, and Eugene McKinney, eds. Paul Baker and the Integration of Abilities. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2003. Geddes, Norman Bel. Miracle in the Evening. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Gildzen, Alex, and Dimitris Karageorgiou. Joseph Chaiken: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Gottfried, Martin. Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Granville, Wilfred. The Theater Dictionary: British and American Terms in the Drama, Opera, and Ballet. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952. Guthrie, Tyrone. A Life in the Theatre. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Harris, Andrew B. The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006. Harris, Jed. A Dance on the High Wire: Recollections of a Time and a Temperament. New York: Crown, 1979. Henderson, Mary C. Mielziner: Master of Modern Stage Design. New York: Back Stage Books, 2001. Horn, Barbara Lee. David Merrick: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992.

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———. Ellen Stewart and La Mama: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. ———. Joseph Papp: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992. Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Izenour, George C. Theater Design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. Jakle, John A. City Lights: Illuminating the American Night. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Jones, Robert Edmond. The Dramatic Imagination. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1941. Kazan, Elia. Kazan on Directing. Foreword by John Lahr. Preface by Martin Scorsese. New York: Vintage, 2010. ———. A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988. Kissel, Howard. David Merrick: The Abominable Showman: The Unauthorized Biography. New York: Applause, 2000. Langner, Lawence. The Magic Curtain. New York: Dutton, 1951. Larson, Orville K. Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989. Laurents, Arthur. Mainly on Directing. New York: Borzoi Books, 2009. ———. Original Story: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. New York: Applause, 2001. Leiter, Samuel L. From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the EnglishSpeaking Stage. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. Lewis, Robert. Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life. New York: Stein & Day, 1984. Logan, Joshua. Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life. New York: Delacorte, 1976. ———. Movie Stars, Real People, and Me. New York: Delacorte, 1978. Long, Robert Emmet. Directing: The American Theatre Wing (Working in the Theatre Seminars). New York: Continuum, 2009. Lounsbury, Warren C. Theatre Backstage from A to Z. Rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972. Mann, Theodore. Journeys in the Night: Creating a New American Theatre with Circle in the Square. New York: Applause, 2007. Marowitz, Charles. The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov, the Legendary Actor, Director, and Theorist. New York: Applause, 2004. McCabe, John. George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway. New York: Doubleday, 1973. McClintic, Guthrie. Me and Kit. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. McCready, Sam. Lucille Lortel: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. McNamara, Brooks. The Shuberts of Broadway. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Menta, Ed. The Magic World behind the Curtain: Andrei Serban in the American Theatre. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Mielziner, Jo. Design for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio. New York: Atheneum, 1965.

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Mikotowicz, Thomas J. Oliver Smith: A Bio-Bibliiography. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Mobley, Jonnie Patrica. NTC’s Dictionary of Theatre and Drama Terms. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1992. Mordden, Ethan. Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Morehouse, Ward. George M. Cohan, Prince of the American Theatre. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943. Morrison, Craig. Theaters. New York and Washington, D.C.: W. W. Norton and Library of Congress, 2006. Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Translated by Christine Shantz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pendleton, Ralph, ed. The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958. Pietro, Mary Jo Santo. Father Hartke: His Life and Legacy to the American Theater. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. Prince, Harold. Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974. Quadri, Franco, Franco Bertoni, and Robert Stearns. Robert Wilson. Florence, Italy: Rizzoli International Publications, 1998. Rabkin, Gerald. Richard Foreman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Reinhardt, Gottfried. The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt. New York: Knopf, 1979. Rich, Frank. The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. New York: Knopf, 1987. Rosenthal, Jean, and Lael Wertenbaker. Magic of Light: The Craft and Career of Jean Rosenthal, Pioneer in Lighting for the Modern Stage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Savran, David, ed. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: TCG 1993. Schneider, Alan. Entrances: An American Director’s Journey. New York: Viking, 1986. Sheehy, Helen, and Emily Mann. Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Shevtsova, Maria. Robert Wilson. New York: Routledge, 2007. Shyer, Laurence. Robert Wilson and His Collaborators. New York: TCG, 1993.\ Simonson, Lee. The Art of Scenic Design. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950. ———. The Stage Is Set. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933. Smith, Ronn. American Set Design 2. Introduction by Ming Cho Lee. New York: TCG, 1993. Stagg, Jerry. The Brothers Shubert. New York: Random House, 1968. Trapido, Joel, Edward A. Langhans, James Brandon, June V. Gibson, eds. An International Dictionary of Theatre Language. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. Turan, Kenneth, and Joseph Papp. Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and The Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Unruh, Delbert. The Designs of Jules Fisher. New York: Broadway, 2009.

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———. The Designs of Ming Cho Lee. New York: Broadway, 2008. ———. The Designs of Tharon Musser. New York: Broadway, 2007. White, R. Kerry. An Annotated Dictionary of Technical, Historical, and Stylistic Terms Related to Theatre and Drama: A Handbook of Dramaturgy. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1995.

PLAYS AND ANTHOLOGIES OF PLAYS Acosta, Mercedes de. Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta. Edited by Robert A. Schanke. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Albee, Edward. Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958–1965. 2007. New York: Overlook, 2007. ———. Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1966–1977. New York: Overlook, 2008. ———. Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1978–2003. New York: Overlook, 2008. Anderson, Maxwell. Four Verse Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959. ———. Three Plays. New York: Washington Square, 1962. Anonymous. The Theatre Guild Anthology. New York: Random House, 1936. Barry, Philip. States of Grace: Eight Plays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Berson, Misha, ed. Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays. New York: TCG, 1993. Bogosian, Eric. The Essential Bogosian. New York: TCG, 1994. ———. Humpty Dumpty and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2005. Branch, William B., ed. Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama. New York: Signet, 1992. Cerf, Bennett, and Van H. Cartmell, eds. Sixteen Famous American Plays. New York: Modern Library, 1941. Congdon, Constance. Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1994. Crowley, Mart. The Collected Plays of Mart Crowley. New York: Alyson, 2009. Cruz, Nilo. Anna in the Tropics. New York: TCG, 2003. ———. Two Sisters and a Piano and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1995. D’Aponte, Mimi, ed. Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays. New York: TCG, 1998. Dixon, Michael Bigelow, and Michele Volansky. By Southern Playwrights: Plays from Actors Theatre of Louisville. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Duberman, Martin, ed. Radical Acts: Collected Political Plays. New York: New Press, 2008. Durang, Christopher. Complete Full-Length Plays, 1975–1995. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 2002. Elan, Harry J., and Robert Alexander, eds. Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. New York: Plume, 1996. Ellis, Roger, ed. Multicultural Theatre 2: Contemporary Hispanic, Asian, and African-American Plays. Colorado Springs, Colo: Meriwether, 1998.

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Famous Plays of the 1920s. New York: Dell, 1959. Famous Plays of the 1930s. New York: Dell, 1959. Famous Plays of the 1940s. New York: Dell, 1965. Famous Plays of the 1950s. New York: Dell, 1962. Famous Plays of the 1960s. New York: Dell, 1974. Famous Plays of the 1970s. New York: Dell, 1988. Famous Plays of the 1980s. New York: Dell, 1988. Fierstein, Harvey. Safe Sex. New York: Atheneum, 1987. ———. Torch Song Trilogy. New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1981. Foote, Horton. Four New Plays. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1993. ———. Three Plays. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Fornés, Maria Irene. Fefu and Her Friends. New York: PAJ, 2001. ———. Letters from Cuba and Other Plays. New York: PAJ, 2007. ———. Plays. Preface by Susan Sontag. New York: PAJ, 2001. ———. Promenade and Other Plays. New York: PAJ, 2001. ———.,John Jesurun, Eduardo Machado, Jose Rivera, and Micha Sanchez-Scott Alvarez. On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays. Edited by M. Elizabeth Osborn. New York: TCG, 1989. Geiogamah, Hanay. New Native American Drama: Three Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1980. Gibson, Melissa James. This and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2011. Glancy, Diane. American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Glaspell, Susan. Plays. Edited with an Introduction by C. W. E. Bigsby. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. The Complete Plays. Edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. Gotanda, Philip Kan. Fish Head Soup and Other Plays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Green, Paul. A Paul Green Reader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Greenberg, Richard. Take Me Out. New York: Stage and Screen, 2002. ———. Three Days of Rain and Other Plays. New York: Grove, 1999. Greene, Alexis, and Shirley Lauro, eds. Front Lines: Political Plays by American Women. New York: New Press, 2009. Guare, John. Guare Plays, Vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1999. ———. The War against the Kitchen Sink, Vol. I. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1996. Gurney, A. R. Collected Plays, Vols. I–V. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1995–2001. Halline, Allan, ed. Six Modern American Plays. New York: Modern Library, 1966. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. New York: Vintage, 1995. Hatch, James V., and Leo Hamalian, eds. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre U.S.A.: Plays by African Americans, The Early Period, 1847–1938. New York: Free Press, 1996.

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Havis, Allan, ed. American Political Plays After 9/11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Hellman, Lillian. Six Plays by Lillian Hellman. New York: Vintage, 1979. Henley, Beth. Collected Plays, Vols. 1–2. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 2000–2001. Hodges, Ben, ed. Out Plays: Landmark Gay and Lesbian Plays of the Twentieth Century. Foreword by Harvey Fierstein. New York: Alyson, 2008. Horovitz, Israel. Plays, 1. London: Methuen, 2006. Houston, Velina Hasu, ed. But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Howe, Tina. Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1995. ———. Birth and After Birth and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2010. ———. Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays. New York: TCG, 1993. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Edited with an Introduction by Joseph McLaren. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. ———. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: New American Library, 1988. ———. Trying to Find Chinatown. New York: TCG, 1999. Inge, William. Four Plays. New York: Heinemann, 1960. Ives, David. Polish Joke and Other Plays. New York: Grove, 2004. Johnson, Georgia Douglas. The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Edited with an Introduction by Judith L. Stephens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jones, Theresa, ed. Sharing the Delirium: Second Generation AIDS Plays and Performances. New York: Heinemann, 1994. Kaufman, George S., and Edna Ferber. Three Comedies. New York: Applause, 2000. Kaufman, George S., and Moss Hart. Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart. New York: Modern Library, 1942. Kaufman, George S., Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, Ring Lardner, and Morrie Ryskind. Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies. Edited by Laurence Maslon. New York: Library of America, 2004. Kennedy, Adrienne. The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Kingsley, Sidney. Five Prizewinning Plays. Edited by Nena Couch. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Kopit, Arthur. Three Plays. New York: Hill & Wang, 1997. Kramer, Larry. The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. New York: Grove, 2000. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches/Part Two: Perestroika. New York: TCG, 2003. ———. A Bright Room Called Day. New York: TCG, 1994. ———. Caroline, or Change. New York: TCG, 2004. ———. Death and Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1998. ———. Homebody/Kabul. Revised version. New York: TCG, 2005. ———. Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. New York: TCG, 1995.

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Laurents, Arthur. Selected Plays of Arthur Laurents. Edited by Gabriel Miller. New York: Back Stage Books, 2004. LeBute, Neil. Dirty Talk for Troubled Times and Other Plays. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. Letts, Tracy. August: Osage County. New York: TCG, 2008. ———. Bug. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006. ———. Man from Nebraska. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ———. Superior Donuts. New York: TCG, 2010. Lewis, Victoria Ann. Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights. New York: TCG, 2005. Lindsay-Abaire, David. Fuddy Mears. New York: Overlook Press, 2001. ———. Rabbit Hole. New York: TCG, 2006. Linney, Romulus: Six Plays. New York: TCG, 1993. Lucas, Craig. Prelude to a Kiss and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2000. ———. Reckless and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2002. ———. What I Meant Was: New Plays and Selected One-Acts. New York: TCG, 1998. Ludlam, Charles. The Complete Plays. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ———. The Mystery of Irma Vep and Other Plays. Introduction by Tony Kushner. New York: TCG, 2001. Mamet, David. Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues. New York: Grove, 1994. ———. Plays. 4 vols. London: Methuen, 1994–2002. ———. Race. New York: TCG, 2010. ———. Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations: Two Plays. New York: Grove, 1994. Margulies, Donald. Dinner with Friends. New York: TCG, 2000. ———. Sight Unseen and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1995. ———. Time Stands Still. New York: TCG, 2010. Maslon, Laurence. Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies. New York: Library of America, 2004. McCraney, Tarrell Alvin. The Brother/Sister Plays. New York: TCG, 2010. McNally, Terrence. Collected Plays. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1996. ———. Love! Valour! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh. New York: Plume, 1995. ———. The Stendhal Syndrome: Two Plays. New York: Grove, 2004. ———. Three Plays. New York: Plume, 1990. ———. Vol. I: 15 Short Plays. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1994. ———. Vol. II: Collected Works. Lyme, N.H.: Smith & Kraus, 1996. McNamara, Brooks. Plays from the Contemporary American Theater. New York: Signet, 2002. Miller, Arthur. Collected Plays 1944–1961. Edited by Tony Kushner. New York: Library of America, 2006. Miller, Jason. That Championship Season. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Moore, Honor, ed. The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women. New York: Random House, 1977.

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Nelson, Brian, ed. Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. New York: Hal Leonard, 2000. Norman, Marsha. Four Plays. New York: TCG, 1993. Nottage, Lynn. Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2003. ———. Intimate Apparel/Fabulation. New York: TCG, 2006. ———. Ruined. New York: TCG, 2009. Odets, Clifford. Six Plays of Clifford Odets. Introduction by Harold Clurman. New York: Grove, 1979. ———. Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays. New York: Grove, 1994. O’Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1920–1931. New York: Library of America, 1988. ———. Complete Plays 1931–1943. New York: Library of America, 1988. ———. Nine Plays. New York: Modern Library, 1954. Papa, Lee. Staged Action: Six Plays from the American Workers’ Theatre. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play and Other Works. New York: TCG, 1994. ———. The Red Letter Plays. New York: TCG, 2001. ———. 365 Days/365 Plays. New York: TCG, 2006. ———. Topdog/Underdog. New York: TCG, 2001. Patrick, Robert. Kennedy’s Children. New York: Random House, 1976. ———. Mercy Drop and Other Plays. Boston: Calamus Books, 1979. ———. Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Perkins, Kathy A., and Roberta Uno, eds. Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. New York: Routledge, 1996. Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Rabe, David. Hurlyburly and Those the River Keeps: Two Plays. New York: Grove, 1995. ———. The Vietnam Plays, Vol. I. New York: Grove, 1994. ———. The Vietnam Plays, Vol. II. New York: Grove, 1994. Reznikov, Hanon, and Cindy Rosenthal, eds. Living on Third Street: Plays of the Living Theatre, 1989–1992. New York: Autonomedia, 2008. Rice, Elmer. Three Plays. New York: Hill & Wang, 1965. Richardson, Willis, ed. Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2007 (originally published in 1930). Rivera, José. Marisol and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1997. Rudnick, Paul. The Collected Plays of Paul Rudnick. New York: It Books, 2010. Ruhl, Sarah. The Clean House and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2006. Saroyan, William. Three Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940. ———. The William Saroyan Reader. New York: George Braziller, 1958. Schiff, Ellen, ed. Awake and Singing: Six Great Jewish American Plays. New York: Applause, 2004. Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997.

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———. Three Pieces. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Shanley, John Patrick. Dirty Story and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2006. ———. Doubt: A Parable. New York: TCG, 2008. ———. 13 by Shanley: Thirteen Plays. New York: Applause, 2000. Shawn, Wallace. Four Plays. New York: Noonday Press, 1998. Shepard, Sam. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York: Dial, 1984. ———. Seven Plays. New York: Dial, 1984. ———. The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. New York: Applause, 2000. Sherwood, Robert E. Three Plays. New York: Franklin Library, n.d. Shewey, Don, ed. Out Front: Contemporary Gay & Lesbian Plays. New York: Grove, 1988. Silver, Nicky. Etiquette and Vitriol: The Food Chain and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1996. ———. Raised in Captivity. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998. Simon, Neil. The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, Vol. 1. New York: Plume, 1986. ———. The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, Vol. 2. New York: Plume, 1986. ———. The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, Vol. 3. New York: Random House, 1992. ———. The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, Vol. 4. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Smith, Chuck, ed. Seven Black Plays: The Theodore Ward Prize for African American Playwriting. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Susoyev, Steve, and George Birimisa, eds. Return to the Caffe Cino. San Francisco: Moving Finger Press, 2006. Terry, Megan. Plays by Megan Terry. New York: Broadway Publishing, 1999. Uno, Roberta, ed. Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Valdez, Luis. Early Works. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. ———. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992. Vogel, Paula. The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 1995. ———. The Mammary Plays. New York: TCG, 1997. Wallace, Naomi. In the Heart of America and Other Plays. New York: TCG, 2000. Ward, Douglas Turner. Two Plays: Happy Ending and Day of Absence. New York: Third Press, 1966. Wasserstein, Wendy. The Heidi Chronicles, Uncommon Women and Others, & Isn’t It Romantic? New York: Vintage, 1991. Wellman, Mac. Cellophane: Plays by Mac Wellman. New York: PAJ, 2005. Wellman, Mac, and Young Jean Lee, eds. New Downtown Now: An Anthology of New Theater from Downtown New York. 2006. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Wilder, Thornton. Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. Edited by J. D. McClatchy. New York: Library of America, 2007. Williams, Tennessee. Plays 1937–1955. Edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch. New York: Library of America, 2000. ———. Plays 1957–1980. Edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch. New York: Library of America, 2000.

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About the Author

James Fisher is professor of theatre and head of the Department of Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Prior to joining the faculty of UNCG in 2007, Fisher spent 29 years at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he served as chair of the Theatre Department for 13 years and was twice named the McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Research Scholar (1987–1988, 1999–2000). At Wabash, Fisher gave the LaFollette Lecture in 1992–1993 and, in 1997, was named “Indiana Theatre Person of the Year” by the Indiana Theatre Association, an award for “particular individuals who have contributed to the cooperative development of theatre at all levels within the state of Indiana.” In 2007, Fisher received the Betty Jean Jones Award for Excellence in the Teaching of American Theatre from the American Theatre and Drama Society, and in 2010 he was elected to membership in the National Theatre Conference. Fisher is the author of several books, including Understanding Tony Kushner (University of South Carolina Press, 2008), and, in collaboration with Felicia Hardison Londré, Historical Dictionary of the American Theater: Modernism (Scarecrow Press, 2007) and The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism (Scarecrow Press, 2009). His other books include The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (Routledge, 2001), bio-bibliographies of Al Jolson (1994), Spencer Tracy (1994), and Eddie Cantor (1997) for Greenwood Press, four titles in the “In an Hour” series from Smith & Kraus on playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller (all published in 2010), and Tony Kushner (2011), and The Theatre of Yesterday and Tomorrow: Commedia dell’arte on the Modern Stage (Edwin Mellen, 1992). Fisher edited “We Will Be Citizens”: Gay and Lesbian Drama: New Essays (McFarland, 2008), Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays (McFarland, 2006), and the forthcoming To Have or Have Not: New Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modern Theatre (McFarland, 2011). He edited six volumes of The Puppetry Yearbook for Edwin Mellen and served as book review editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism for 15 years. He also edited book reviews for Broadside, the publication of the

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theatre Library Association, and has published on theatre and film in a wide variety of publications, including Theater Journal, Theater, Films in Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Popular Music and Society, New England Theater Journal, The Eugene O’Neill Review, Theatre Symposium, ARSC Journal, Comparative Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, and numerous others, and he has contributed to several encyclopedic works. Also a stage director and actor, Fisher has acted and/or directed numerous theatrical productions and is the author of two plays, The Bogus Bride, which was produced Off-Broadway at New York’s Primary Stages, and The Braggart Soldier, a free adaptation of Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. Both plays have been published by the Inveresk Play Series.

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