Playwrights Bios

Anthony Barsha WRITING: The Saltimbanques, Stockholm Express, Lobster Bisque, The Vicki Tapes, An American Champion, Sunshine Dream Dies In Hail of Bullets, Shares, 10 Rounds of Love, Dutch Schultz’s Last Words, The Velvet Swing, Testimonies of a Rape and Killing, Amos and Ann, Lawless William, Stone, The Golem, Metaphysical Circus, Tragedy of Homer Stills, Aleph, Forgotten American, The Assassination of Nigger Nate, Dead Body/New Body, The Hawk (w/ Keystone Co), Smash, The Trunk, The Pattern, The Hearing. DIRECTING: Writer/Director: Testimonies of a Rape and Killing, Amos and Ann (Best Directing – L.A. Weekly), Lawless William, Stone, The Hawk, The Tragedy of Homer Stills, Metaphysical Circus, Aleph, Vision: Dead Body/New Body, The Hearing; Sam Shepard’s Unseen Hand, Back Bog Beast Bait; Michael McClure’s Spider Rabbit, The Growl, The Button; Len Jenkin’s Kid Twist; Robert Patrick's Kennedy’s Children; Murray Mednick’s Solomon’s Fish; David Garvin’s High Jolly, Lawless William; Anton Checkov's The Three Sisters. FILM: Writer/Director: The Hole, The Door, The Letter, Avocado; Screenplays: Veronica, Blame It On the Night, Crowd, Blue Deal, Sabbath of the Goat, The Unseen Hand, Raga. Currently teaching English, English as a Second Language and Cinema at Palisades Charter High School (L.A.).

Diane di Prima was born in 1934 in New York City, where she lived and worked till 1968. She founded the New York Poets Theatre in 1961 with James Waring, Amiri Baraka, John Herbert MacDowell and Alan Marlowe. While in NY she was also typesetter, editor, printer & published of Poets Press. In 1968, she moved to northern California, where she writes and teaches privately. She has published 43 books, and been translated into more than 20 languages. A collection of her plays, ZipCode, was due to be published in the 1970s but has still not seen the light of day.

Tom Eyen wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical Dreamgirls for which he won both the Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Book of a Musical in 1982. Eyen was a pioneer of the Off-Off Broadway theater movement in the 1960s and a prolific experimental playwright. His first commercial success came in 1970 with his satirical comedy, The Dirtiest Show in Town. Other plays include Why Hanna's Skirt Won't Stay Down, Who Killed My Bald Sister Sophie?, Sarah B. Divine, Ms. Nefertiti Regrets and Women Behind Bars.

Paul Foster is an author and award-winning dramatist whose plays have been presented on Broadway, in London's West End, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, and in Paris, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Bucharest, and Vienna. He co-founded LaMama Theater and was its president for fifteen years. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild in New York and Societé des Auteurs, Paris. He has authored seventeen plays and twelve books, published in six languages. He has written specials for American, British, French, and German television.

Jean Genet was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Genet, associated with the Theatre of Cruelty, wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including Querelle de Brest, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Maids. His works came from intense personal experiences when, early in his life, he was at jailed numeerous times for being a vagabond, petty criminal and prostitute. He published many works while in prison including Miracle of the Rose. His dishonorable discharge from the Army became the subject of his 1949 work The Thief's Journal. With the help of arts figures Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, Genet avoided potential life sentences. He maintained his strong spirit through his political activism including immigrant conditions in Paris, the causes of the Black Panthers in the US, and the plight of the Palestinian refugees.

Ilsa Gilbert poet, librettist, playwright, lyricist has had over 60 productions and staged readings of her plays here and abroad. During the 60s and 70s, she was active in the Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in NYC. Her plays and musicals were presented at the Old Reliable Theatre Tavern, Quaigh Theater, Omni Theater Club, St. Clements, Theatre for the New City, Excentric Circles Theater (playwright-in-residence), Riverside Church, the Eugene O’Neill Cultural Center of San Jose, Costa Rica. Pardon the Prisoner was published by Stanley Nelson in his annual theatre book, The Scene. Her poems have won awards and appeared in such publications as And Then, Poet Lore, Atlantic Monthly, Voices, Landscapes and Quartet. Her poetry chapbooks Survivors & Other New York Poems was published by Bard Press. Opera libretti Phoenix Park (D. Strickland), The Bundle Man (M. Coid), Auto de Fe (M. Grant), The First Word (K. Cameron) and One Night Together (D. Burwasser). Song cycles: Current (D. Burwasser), Homeless Children (D. Hollister). Two CDs with music by Frederick Koch available on Trumedia Records Ltd. She is founder-director of the PEN Women’s Literary Workshop, now in its 15th year. In March '06, her play The Bundle Man was presented at Westbeth. Nov. '07, her opera The Bundle Man will be presented by Elodie Lauten’s Video Festival at the Hudson Park Library and in Jan. '08, her opera One Night Together will have three concert readings at Duo Theater and her cabaret music will be presented at Westbeth.

Robert Heide's plays include West of the Moon and Hector off Broadway; The Bed, Moon at the Caffe Cino; Why Tuesday Never Has a Blue Monday at LaMama; Suburban Tremens at NY Theater Strategy; Tropical Fever in Key West and Crisis of Identity at Theater for the New City. His plays have been published in The Best of Off Off Broadway, edited by Michael Smith; American Hamburger in Greenwich Village: A Primo Guide to True Bohemia (St. Marks' Press); and most recently in Return to the Caffe Cino (Moving Finger Press). With co-author John Gilman, Heide has published 13 books on subjects from Mickey Mouse to cowboys to homefront America in World War II to New Jersey, and has written articles in periodicals like The Village Voice, The Native and Other Stages. The Bed was filmed by Andy Warhol (his first split-screen), and he wrote Lupe for Warhol to direct with Edie Sedgwick. Heide and Gilman were also interviewed by Katie Couric for their book, Disneyana, on the Today show, viewed by 40 million people.

William M. Hoffman is best known for his Broadway play As Is (1985), which earned him a Drama Desk Award, an Obie, as well as a Tony and Pulitzer nominations. He also wrote the libretto to the opera The Ghosts of Versailles (music by John Corigliano), which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1991. The Met has slated it again for 2010. Recent works include Shoe Palace Murray, Chico de Jazzzz, Cyberian Nights, The Stench of Art, an adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's Blue Monster, and the opera Morning Star (music by Ricky Ian Gordon). Hoffman attended the City College of New York and started writing for the theater at the legendary Caffe Cino. He is Associate Professor at Lehman College, where his popular CUNY television interview show, Conversations with William M. Hoffman, originates.

Israel Horovitz, one of America's most celebrated dramatists, has written more than 50 produced plays, many of which have been translated and performed in more than 30 languages, worldwide. Among his best-known plays are Line (play) (which is now in its 33rd year of continuous performance at off-Broadway's 13th St Repertory Theatre), Park Your Car In Harvard Yard, The Primary English Class, The Widow's Blind Date and Indian Wants the Bronx. Horovitz has won numerous awards for his work, including two OBIEs, The Drama Desk Award, The Sony Radio Academy Award (for Man In Snow, BBC-Radio 4), an Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Governor of Massachusetts' Leadership Award, and many others. Horovitz is artistic director of the Gloucester Stage Company, Gloucester, MA, which he founded in 1979. He founded The New York playwrights Lab in 1975, and still serves as the NYPL's Artistic Director. He divides his times between the USA and France, where he is the most-produced American playwright in French theatre history.

Jean-Claude Van Itallie was a playwright-in-residence the the Open Theatre during the 60s, winning an Obie for The Serpent: A Ceremony with director Joseph Chaikin. He was perhaps the first playwright to draw considerable attention to the OOB phenomenon. A native of Belgium he became a US Citizen and wrote in unconventional dialogue to explore the sources of unhappiness and violence in his new country, believing people can expand beyond their self-imposed restrictions. His efforts earned him a Drama Desk and Outer Circle Critics awards for America Hurrah! Other works include Nightwalk (a collaboration with Megan Terry and Sam Shepard), Bag Lady, and Early Warnings.

Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Michael Locascio (A Corner of a Morning) is a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City where he studied acting with Sanford Meisner and dance with Martha Graham and Pearl Lang. One of the pioneers of Off-Off Broadway, Michael wrote A Corner of a Morning, the first original play presented at La MaMa ETC. He worked as assistant to producer John C. Wilson on the first production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer at the York Theatre, and co-produced 35 English-language productions in Mexico (directing and performing in them as well). Off Broadway credits include There is No End, The Holy Terrors and The Archbishop is Coming. Workshop production in New York include Mr. Arcularis, Nine Innings, The Ballads of Brookville, Love Turns on a Dime and The Sanitation Chronicles. Films include The Stop is Here, Troma's War, Urban Jungle, Terror Firmer, Marilyn's Diaries, Killing Time, HeadSpace and The Hoax, as well as nearly a dozen short films including David Korn's The Wait which is receiving favorable attention on IFC's Media Lab on the Internet. On television, Michael has appeared in commercials, music videos, and was Old Man Winter in Comedy Central's Escape from Old Man Winter.

Charles Ludlam received a degree in dramatic literature from Hofstra University in 1964. He joined John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, in 1966 with Screen Test, Indira Ghandi's Daring Device. After a falling out with Vaccaro during The Conquest of the Universe, Ludlam became founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Ludlam usually appeared in his plays, and was particularly noted for his female roles. His most popular play is The Mystery of Irma Vep, in which two actors manage, through a variety of quick-change techniques, to play seven roles in a send-up of gothic horror novels. He won four Obie Awards, earned fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Other works include The Grand Turot, Bluebeard, Corn, Hot Ice, and Stage Blood (an adaptation of Hamlet), and The Ventriloquist's Wife. In addition to working at NYU, Yale and Carnegie Mellon, Ludlam worked in puppetry, theatre, TV and film, including performances in Miami Vice and The Big Easy.

Michael McGrinder has enjoyed working as a playwright and director at numerous Off Off Broadway venues, including The Old Reliable, La MaMa, The Playwrights Workshop Club, Cubiculo, and The WPA. Of his one-act plays, We Hate To See You Go played an extended return engagement in London's West End and The Foreigners was called "one of Off Off Broadway's Best." Michael's awards include The Scene Award for Playwrights, first place in the Writers Forum ( London ) Poetry Competition, and first place in a USAF Short Story Contest (judged by Agatha Christie). His Hypatia 3 was the opening production in the new plays series of the WPAs OBIE-winning season. Recently he organized and led a panel often for the Old Reliable segment of La MaMa's Coffee House Chronicles. Current accomplishments include a full-length play based on the transcripts of a 17th-century Scottish confessing witch The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie, the one-act play The Death of Pirandello, a serio-comic mystery novel set in Greenwich Village The No Name Murders, and a novella Mary, about the mother of Jesus as a human being. He is of course writing about his involvement in the early years of Off-Off Broadway.

Leonard Melfi was one of the Board memembers for Caf? La MaMa, writing and producing many of his plays there including Ferryboat, Times Square, Niagara Falls, and Jack & Jill. He collaborated with Israel Horovitz and Terrence McNally on the trilogy Morning, Noon and Night. He earned outstanding new playwright by the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation after the success of The Birdbath at Theatre Genesis. Critic Joan Simon wrote, "Melfi is essentially a playwright of love, not Luv. He explores not the clashing crudities of modern sex, but the subtleties of modern loving with wit, wonder and infectious good humor."

Murray Mednick, a playwright in residence at Theatre Genesis in the early 70s, wrote by providing a bare scenario and, with his actors as a communal group, created the play. His quality of acting approached the level of a documentary film in its realism and strong tone. He won an Obie for The Deer Kill. Critic Michael Smith said of his play The Hawk, "[It] is a daring experiment and the most important single achievement at Theatre Genesis." Mednick went on to write Willie the Germ and The Hunter for stage to earn grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. His work includes National Council for the Arts winning poetry and the plays for television, Iowa and The Waiter.

A central figure in the international avant-garde for over forty years, Rochelle Owens is a playwright, poet, translator, and video artist. A pioneer of the experimental Off-Broadway theater movement, she is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and controversial writers of her generation, whose groundbreaking work has influenced subsequent experimental playwrights and poets. Since its first publication in 1961, Futz has become a classic of the American avant-garde theater and an international success. The play was made into a film which has itself attained the status of a cult following. Among her other works for the stage are The String Game, Beclch, Istanboul, Homo, He Wants Shih, and The Karl Marx Play. She has published four collections of plays and sixteen books of poetry. Her newest books are New and Selected Poems 1961-1996, and Luca: Discourse on Life & Death. Her plays have been presented at festivals in Avignon, Berlin, Edinburgh, and Paris, and translated into French, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. She has been the recipient of five Village Voice Obie Awards, and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle. She has also been the recipient of grants from the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, The New York Creative Artists in Public Service Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has taught at Brown University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Southwestern Louisiana. She has lectured and read widely in the United States and Europe.

Robert Patrick has written most plays, including Kennedy's Children. His many Caffe Cino Picture Pages begin at http://hometown.aol.com/rbrtptrck/Dailypage1.html.

Marianne De Pury studied composition and piano at the Geneva Music Conservatory and apprenticed directing with Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater. She was composer in residence at the Yale Drama School, working with Robert Brustein and Gordon Rogoff. She has taken classes with Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and Alain Resnais. Her directing credits include operas in Bonn, Germany and Greek dramas at Yale. Ms. de Pury was administrative director of the Theatre de Carouge, a three-stage performing space in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2003-04, Ms. de Pury was a Fulbright scholar in residence at San Juan College in Farmington. She founded the Santa Fe Ensemble Theatre and has been a free-lance director in Basel, Bern, Bonn, Dublin, Sarajevo, Melbourne, New York, Cameroon and, most recently, in Germany, El Salvador, C.A. and Lima, Peru.

James Rado is an American actor, writer and composer, best known as the co-author, along with Gerome Ragni, of the groundbreaking 1960s rock musical Hair. He and Ragni were nominated for the 1969 Tony Award for best musical with songs like Aquarius, Good Morning Sunshine, I Got Life. They won best musical at the Grammy Awards the same year. Rado began as an actor, moving to New York in the early 1960s, where he appeared in roles on Broadway (including his own Hair) as well as doing tours and Off Off Broadway where he met his friend and co-writer Ragni. They began their writing during the tour of The Knack. He re-teamed with Ragni and composer McDermot on two subsequent shows, Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom, and Sun (also known as YMCA). Since then, he has been involved in the interchanging worlds of theatre and films, founding his own music label, and writing or updating his work for use in films like The 40 Year old Virgin and Forrest Gump.

Gerome Ragni appeared in the New York production of the hit play War at the Village South Theatre, for which he won the Barter Theatre Award for Outstanding Actor. Next he played a bit part in the Broadway production of Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, starring Richard Burton, moving into the film version released by Warner Brothers. That same year, he made his first Off-Broadway appearance in Hang Down Your Head and Die with friend James Rado. Ragni had been involved with the Open Theatre since its split from the Living Theatre. Appearing in Megan Terry's Viet Rock, he was inspired to work with Rado on a hippie musical. Their time touring the smash-hit The Knack provided them time to write Hair. The pair met composer Galt McDermot for the music, then Joseph Papp called to direct and they were off. Ragni starred as Berger at the Open Theatre, the Broadway debut and touring versions. After his final bow, Ragni wrote the short-lived Dude, and re-teamed with Rado and McDermot on Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom, and Sun (also known as YMCA).

Galt McDermot studied at Upper Canada College and Bishop's University in Quebec; then in South Africa to make African music his specialty. He wrote scores for minor products such as Woman is Sweeter and Rhinoceros and is now sampled by hip hop musicians such as Busta Rhymes. McDermot met the team of Rado and Ragni through producer Nat Shapiro to work on Hair. During the original presentation he portrayed one of the bogus cops who bust the show at end of the first act. Circumstances benefited him as he became the musical director for Joseph Papp's Broadway debut of the show. He left to work on Two Gentlemen of Verona and re-joined Rado and Ragni on the short-lived musical Dude, The Highway Life in 1973, then again in 1990 on Sun (also known as YMCA).

Sam Shepard won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play, Buried Child. He is also author of the Obie-award-winning plays Chicago, Icarus Mother, Red Cross, Forsenic and the Navigators, Melodrama Play, The Tooth of Crime, Action, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind (NY Drama Critics Circle Award), States of Shock, Simpatico, and God of Hell. In 1986 Mr. Shepard was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1992, he was awarded its Gold Medal for Drama.

Megan Terry's plays include, Breakfast Serial, Calm Down Mother, Keep Tightly Closed In A Cool Dry Place, Hothouse, Ex-Miss Copper Queen On A Set Of Pills, The People Vs Ranchman, Goona Goona, Mollie Bailey's Traveling Family Circus: Featuring Scenes From The Life Of Mother Jones, Pro Game, Body Leaks, Sound Fields, and Objective Love. She has published over 45 plays, and most have been translated and produced worldwide. She has won all the major writing awards, including a Guggenheim and received an Obie award for Approaching Simone. She was elected to lifetime membership by the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, installation at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, in recognition of: "Distinguished service to the profession by an individual of acknowledged national stature." In l992, she was named Nebraska Artist of the Year. Terry is photographer and co-editor of Right Brain Vacation Photos, New Plays and Production Photographs 1972-1992. Ms Terry has a Degree from the University of Washington, certificates in acting, directing and design from the Banff School of Fine Arts, Alberta, Canada, and was awarded the Yale A B C Fellowship: Writing for the Camera at Yale University. Currently, Megan Terry has edited the Omaha Magic Theatre archives along with hundreds of her videotapes and photographs; they now reside at the University of California at Berkeley in the Bancroft Library. Terry is at work on a new play, I Forgot How Much I like You, and is preparing final versions of her work, Star Path Moon Stop. She was playwright in residence, photographer, performer and musician at the Omaha Magic Theatre, Omaha, NE.

Jeff Weiss I was born the day I met Carlos Ricardo Martinez and he tossed me onto the stage to sink or swim. Forty-odd—very odd—years later, we are as ever together. We worked with many actors, singers, musicians, upbeats and downbeats for decades. We both miss all of them, living or dead. We do not miss the theater, per se. In all venues, from our own 10 Feet Dinner Theatre, the good Medicine Company on East 10th Street, and in spaces large and small we labored to entertain. Anything more portentous or significant we fled from as we would a plague. Goodbye to all that, hello antiquity. I won't mind singing show tunes to worms; the big difference for us, when dead, will be not making dinner for our guests: we will be dinner.

Phoebe Wray has an extensive background as an actress, director, and writer, beginning with the Off-Off-Broadway Movement in New York and extending to resident and stock theatres around the country, including television and film work. Her directing credits run the gamut from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice to Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, including the Boston premiere of Sondheim's Assassins. Her awards include the Weathervane (Ohio) Best Actress, Artist-in-Residence at Colby College, Richard King Mellon Fellow at Yale University, and an Honorable Mention in the Sony Video Awards (as writer/director). She has taught at the University of Southern California and Bradford College and is currently a full-time Professor at The Boston Conservatory.