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Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Three Tall Women (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.
Christopher Ferdinand Durang is an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. His work was especially popular in the 1980s, though his career seemed to get a second wind in the late 1990s.
Thomas Southerne was an Irish dramatist.
David Ives is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays; The New York Times in 1997 referred to him as the "maestro of the short form". Ives has also written dramatic plays, narrative stories, and screenplays, has adapted French 17th and 18th-century classical comedies, and adapted 33 musicals for New York City's Encores! series.
Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was a Russian playwright, generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period. The author of 47 original plays, Ostrovsky "almost single-handedly created a Russian national repertoire." His dramas are among the most widely read and frequently performed stage pieces in Russia.
Theater in the United States is part of the old European theatrical tradition and has been heavily influenced by the British theater. The central hub of the American theater scene is Manhattan, with its divisions of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway. Many movie and television stars have gotten their big break working in New York productions. Outside New York, many cities have professional regional or resident theater companies that produce their own seasons, with some works being produced regionally with hopes of eventually moving to New York. U.S. theater also has an active community theater culture, which relies mainly on local volunteers who may not be actively pursuing a theatrical career.
Hanoch Levin was an Israeli dramatist, theater director, author and poet, best known for his plays. His absurdist style is often compared to the work of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Sure Thing is a short comic play by David Ives featuring a chance meeting of two characters, Betty and Bill, whose conversation is continually reset by the use of a ringing bell, starting over when one of them responds negatively to the other. The play was first produced in 1988, and was published in 1994.
Donald Ogden Stewart was an American writer and screenwriter best known for his sophisticated golden age comedies and melodramas such as The Philadelphia Story, Tarnished Lady and Love Affair. Stewart worked with a number of the directors of his time, including George Cukor, Michael Curtiz and Ernst Lubitsch. Stewart was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and, with Ernest Hemingway's friend Bill Smith, the model for Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises. His 1922 parody on etiquette, Perfect Behavior, published by George H. Doran and Co., was a favourite book of P. G. Wodehouse.
Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread is a one-act play by David Ives, published as part of his 1994 All In The Timing collection.
Words, Words, Words is a one-act play written by David Ives for his collection of six one-act plays, All in the Timing. The play is about Kafka, Milton, and Swift, three intelligent chimpanzees who are put in a cage together under the experimenting eye of a never seen Dr. Rosenbaum, a scientist testing the hypothesis that three apes hitting keys at random on typewriters for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The show's title is a phrase quoted from Hamlet. The performance comprises the ape characters humorously confronting and conversing with each other in order to understand the purpose of the exercise put upon them.
Variations on the Death of Trotsky is a short one-act comedy-drama written by David Ives for the series of one-act plays titled All in the Timing. The play fictionalizes the death of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky through a number of distinct variations, though all from the same, historically accurate cause: a wound to the head by an ice axe—referred to in the play as a "mountain-climber's axe", for comic effect, to distinguish it from an icepick.
Augustan drama can refer to the dramas of Ancient Rome during the reign of Caesar Augustus, but it most commonly refers to the plays of Great Britain in the early 18th century, a subset of 18th-century Augustan literature. King George I referred to himself as "Augustus," and the poets of the era took this reference as apropos, as the literature of Rome during Augustus moved from historical and didactic poetry to the poetry of highly finished and sophisticated epics and satire.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is an American playwright, screenwriter, and comic book writer best known for his work for Marvel Comics and for the television series Glee, Big Love, Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin. He is Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics.
Richard John Nelson is an American playwright and librettist. He wrote the book for the 2000 Broadway musical James Joyce's The Dead, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, as well as the book for the 1988 Broadway production of Chess. He is also the writer of the critically acclaimed play cycle The Rhinebeck Panorama.
John Edward Cariani is an American actor and playwright. Cariani is best known as the forensic expert Julian Beck in Law & Order. On stage, he earned a Tony Award nomination for his role as Motel the Tailor in the 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. He is also known for his roles in Broadway shows Something Rotten! and The Band's Visit, and for writing Almost, Maine, one of the most produced plays in American high schools.
Casey Childs is the Founder of Primary Stages (www.primarystages.org)],[1] a New York State non-profit, Off-Broadway theater company in New York City. Since 1984, they have produced over 175 productions of new plays, many of them world premieres and all of them New York City premieres, by such writers as Sharon Washington, David Ives, Horton Foote, Charlayne Woodard, Melissa Manchester, Jeffrey Sweet, Donald Margulies, Terrence McNally, A.R. Gurney, John Patrick Shanley, Ike Holter, Tina Howe, Charles Busch, John Henry Redwood, Romulus Linney, Lee Blessing, Michael Cristofer, Mac Wellman, Lynne Alvarez, Willie Holtzman, Athol Fugard, Theresa Rebeck, Michael Hollinger and Julia Jordan. He produced the commercial moves of David Ives’ All in the Timing and Mere Mortals and oversaw the commercial moves of Charles Busch's You Should Be So Lucky and Colin Martin's Virgins and Other Myths. He also oversaw the transfer of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, which moved to the Booth Theatre on Broadway in association with Lincoln Center Theater. In 2013, in partnership with the New York Yankees, Primary Stages developed Bronx Bombers which played on Broadway at Circle in the Square. Primary Stages was the first theater to produce Conor McPherson work in the United States with St. Nicholas starring Brian Cox. He conceived, commissioned and directed the commercial Off-Broadway show Woman Before a Glass by Lanie Robertson about Peggy Guggenheim with Mercedes Ruehl which ran for seven months at the Promenade Theatre. Other plays he directed for Primary Stages include The Morini Strad by Willie Holtzman, Barefoot Boy With Shoes On by Edwin Sanchez, Bargains by Jack Heifner, Brutality of Fact by Keith Reddin, The Preservation Society by William S. Leavengood, Elsa/Edgar by Bob Kingdom, The Dolphin Position by Percy Granger, Lusting After Pipino's Wife by Sam Henry Kass, The Secret Sits in the Middle by Lisa-Maria Radano, Algerian Romance by Kres Mersky, Madam Zelena Finally Comes Clean by Ron Carlsen, Stopping the Desert by Glen Merzer, In September Woods by David Hill and Nasty Little Secrets by Lanie Robertson. Plays produced by Primary Stages have received many nominations and awards from the Obies, the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle and the Audelco Awards for Excellence in Afro-American Theatre. Plays that began at Primary Stages have received multiple nominations for Tony Awards. In 2008, Primary Stages was honored for its Outstanding Body of Work by the Lucille Lortel Awards. Carnegie-Mellon University awarded Casey their Commitment to Playwrights Award in 1995. From 1982 until 1985, Casey was the Artistic Programs Director for the New Dramatists, America's oldest playwrights’ organization, where he conducted the workshops for over 75 new playwrights in developing over 300 new works. He oversaw the development of new plays by many new playwrights including August Wilson, Wendy Kesselman, John Ford Noonan, Thomas Keneally, Emily Mann, John Pielmeier, Steve Carter, Oyamo, James Yoshimora and Pedro Juan Pietre. Works developed during that time have received productions on and off Broadway and in many American regional theatres garnering Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards and other honors.
Artists' Repertory Theatre (ART) is community theatre group based in Fresno, California. Founded in 2005, the group's maiden performance took place in 2006, with the critically acclaimed Love's Fire. In 2009, ART produced the Fresno premier of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire, and caused a local stir with the Fresno premier Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show.
Ancient History is a two-act play written by American playwright David Ives.
Childe Byron is a 1977 play by Romulus Linney about the strained relationship between the poet, Lord Byron, and his daughter, Ada Lovelace. Of Linney's more than sixty plays, Childe Byron is one he identified as holding a "deeply personal" connection. In his own words, he approached it through "the pain of a divorced father who can't reach his own daughter." In his narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron wrote of the female infant he left behind when he went into exile: "I see thee not. I hear thee not. But none can be so rapt in thee.” When Linney re-read these words in preparation for the play, he recalled "My daughter Laura, the actress... her mother and I were separated and divorced when she was a baby, so these lines just laid me out."