Charles L. Mee | |
---|---|
Born | Charles Louis Mee Jr. September 15, 1938 Evanston, Illinois, U.S. |
Education | Harvard University (BA) |
Spouse | Claire Lu Thomas; Michi Barall |
Children | 5, including Erin B. Mee |
Relatives | Charles Louis Mee Sr. (father); Sarah Elizabeth (Lowe) Mee (mother) |
Charles Louis Mee Jr. (born September 15, 1938) is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a Special Lecturer of theater at Columbia University.
Charles L. Mee was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Charles Louis Mee Sr. and his wife Sarah Elizabeth (Lowe) Mee. [1] He grew up in Barrington, Illinois, after the family moved there from Evanston. Mee contracted polio at the age of fourteen. His memoir A Nearly Normal Life (1999) tells how that event informed the rest of his life.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Mee moved to Greenwich Village and became a part of the Off-Off-Broadway scene. Between 1962 and 1964, his plays were presented at venues that included La MaMa E.T.C., Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
In 1961 Mee began work at American Heritage publishing company and eventually became the editor of the hardback bi-monthly Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts . He was also the Advising Editor and then Contributing Editor of Tulane Drama Review– now called TDR and published from New York University – until 1964 and its Associate Editor from 1964 to 1965.
To support himself and his family, Mee turned from writing plays to writing books in 1965. Lorenzo De'Medici and the Renaissance, the first of his many nonfiction books, was published in 1969 by HarperCollins Juvenile Books. At the same time, he increasingly became caught up in anti-Vietnam War politics, campaigning for anti-war congressional candidates and writing anti-war polemics. He did not return to writing for the theater for 20 years.
In the 1970s, he became the co-founder and chairman of The National Committee on the Presidency, a grassroots organization which called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. His political activism led to his writing of political histories for the general public.
His Meeting at Potsdam (1975), about the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was chosen as a main selection of the Literary Guild, and was adapted for both film and television by David Susskind. He wrote other books on summit diplomacy, international power sharing, and American history, including The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (1980); The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (1987), and The Genius of the People (1987), about the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993) was Mee's final published work of history.
A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind (1976) was described as "part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics" in a review by Time . [2] Greil Marcus, in 2002, said that it was one of the best books he had read about American patriotism. [3] In 2017, Dwight Garner in his New York Times "American Beauties" column, about "undersung American books of the past 75 years," described the work as "[o]ne of the finest and least-known books about Richard M. Nixon's presidency and the shrinking American soul". [4]
Mee returned to playwriting in 1985. His libretto for choreographer Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus was his first produced script since his Off-Off Broadway days. In 2002 Mee revised about a third of his Vienna: Lusthaus script. It was reprised as Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited). Clarke and Mee collaborated again in Belle Époque (2004). For years he continued working his day job as the editor-in-chief at consumer health publisher Rebus, Inc. and writing books.
Mee's daughter, Erin B. Mee, also became involved in theater. In 1988 she was invited to direct a production at HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art in SoHo. She chose to premiere her father's play, The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem (1988), which received positive reviews from The Village Voice [5] and The New York Times . [6] The play was picked up by Joseph Papp for a run at The Public Theater. [7] In 2000 Erin B. Mee staged another production of The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem at The Market Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, [8] which she updated with the dramaturg for this production. [9]
Another Person is a Foreign Country (1991) was the first of Mee's many collaborations with the director Anne Bogart. The En Garde Arts site-specific performance took place in the courtyard of the decrepit Towers Nursing Home in New York City.
In 1992 his Orestes was directed by Robert Woodruff at the University of California, San Diego and by Anne Bogart at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI). In the summer of 1992, Tina Landau directed an En Garde Arts production as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in Manhattan.
This play was the first of ten plays for which Mee used the Greek texts as a base and added new fragments of text; he then would "throw the scaffolding away and call whatever remained the script." [10] In 1996, his The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel, was produced by Clubbed Thumb. [11]
In 2001 Erin B. Mee staged the premiere of her father's First Love at New York Theatre Workshop. He had written it specifically for her to direct, and it starred Ruth Maleczech and Fred Neumann of Mabou Mines. [12] [13] [14] [15] Erin Mee staged a second production in 2002 at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco with Joan Mankin and Robert Parnell. [16]
In other plays, Mee explores twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists in: bobrauschenbergamerica (Robert Rauschenberg), Hotel Cassiopeia (Joseph Cornell), soot and spit (the musical) (James Castle), and Under Construction (Jason Rhoades and Norman Rockwell).
His comedies and romances include Summertime, First Love, True Love, Big Love, Wintertime, Fetes de la Nuit, A Perfect Wedding, and Fire Island. As source material, Mee would use Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing.
He is the only resident playwright of the theatre ensemble SITI Company, for whom he wrote Orestes, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and soot and spit (the musical). Mee was the Signature Theatre Playwright-in-Residence for the 2007–2008 season.
In 2008, Shakespeare and Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt collaborated with Mee to write Cardenio. It premiered at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in 2008. [17]
In 2014 Mee co-wrote This Is Not A Theatre Company's Pool Play. [18] Audiences sat at the edge of the pool with their feet in the water for an exploration of America's long, joyful, and complicated relationship with the swimming pool. The production included synchronized swimming, an existential boatman, musical numbers, and a snarky fish, along with stories about segregated pools, and a meditation on pollution.
Sarah Lucie of Show Business Weekly said:
The entirety of the play is well executed, featuring a strong ensemble that has absolutely no fear of diving into whatever quirky material is presented to them. Their playfulness is contagious, ultimately creating an uplifting theatrical experience that leaves the audience joyous and refreshed—and maybe a little wet. Pool Play, while undeniably light-hearted, manages to communicate some profound and political themes to those who choose to pay attention. [19]
Theatre is Easy wrote:
Pool Play ... is definitely worth the trip ... The entire ensemble showed moments of skill, wit, and brevity far beyond their years. Erin B. Mee does a superb job directing this young group of artists to create a cohesive look at our fascination with the water, entertaining and engaging the audience along the way. [20]
In fall 2015 Mee co-wrote Versailles 2015, a site-specific play for a New York City apartment, conceived and directed by Erin B. Mee. New York Theatre Review noted that "Versailles 2015 is over far too quickly. It is an hors d'oeuvre plate of scenes that collectively ... have a message about elitism and the vanity of apathy ... Brief and poignant, Versailles 2015 will linger in your mind long after you see it." [21] Courtney Escoyne of Thoughts from a Ballet Nerd wrote: "Versailles 2015 is a meditation upon privilege…It blurred the lines between audience and performer, ignored entirely the idea of a fourth wall, and managed to fit in some wonderfully crafted dialogue." [22] Finally, Stephen Kaplan of Theatre Is Easy said: "Delightful and provocative ... Amidst the countless atrocities that confront us every day, at our core we are all struggling to find the naked honesty in our own lives ... Versailles 2015 allows us the time to contemplate this in its characters and in ourselves." [23]
Mee's play The Glory of The World (2015), about Thomas Merton, a noted Trappist monk and activist, was directed by Les Waters. It opened at The Actor's Theatre of Louisville in the spring of that year. It transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 2016.
Mee teaches playwriting at the Columbia University School of the Arts. [24]
On Mee's website, the (re)making project, he says "There is no such thing as an original play." and that his plays are "composed in the way that Max Ernst made his Fatagaga pieces toward the end of World War I: texts have often been taken from, or inspired by, other texts." [25] An interview with Mee about his work by Erin B. Mee, along with a manifesto and other material, was published in TDR 46:3 (T175). [26]
Mee began using the internet as a textual source for composing his pieces in the early 1990s. He first began making his own work freely available by posting three of his plays on Carnegie Mellon's humanities gopher/ftp/telnet English Server in the mid-1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to "do freely whatever they want with them." [25] He is the first and only playwright to make such a large body of theatre work available on the internet.
This was not viewed by Mee as a challenge to the current copyright law or a vehicle to raise issues of intellectual property. It was done as a populist gesture towards his utopian vision of a free and democratic internet. In 1996 he said "I'm attracted to the idea of things being owned in common." It also represented "Mee's Golden Rule: of do unto my writing as I have done unto the writing of others." [27]
National Public Radio called Mee the "Public-Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available. [28]
Writer Jonathan Lethem credited Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece. [29]
In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current website, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are "essentially or substantially performed" as he has composed them. He continues, however, to invite others to freely pillage his texts to make their own work, without any attribution to him. [25]
In 1998, Mee's friend, former chairman of Morgan Stanley and philanthropist Richard B. Fisher and his wife, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, offered to provide Mee with enough money to support himself. The rare arrangement imposed no stipulations or conditions upon Mee or his writing nor did it specify how long the relationship would last. Although Richard B. Fisher died in 2004, Jeanne Donovan Fisher continues to support Mee and his work. The Fishers patronage has been hailed as one "without parallel or precedent in American theatrical philanthropy." [30]
Sometime in 2013, concurrent with the launch of a redesigned website, the language regarding patronage changed to the past tense: "Charles Mee's work has been made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher." [31] It is now possible to directly support the project. [32]
Among other awards, Charles Mee is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obie Awards, for Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Big Love (2002), PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
|
|
(Note: Charles Mee's complete scripts are freely available on his web site, the (re)making project. Dates listed are provided by Scott T. Cummings. They do not reflect when the work was actually written. Mee often writes the plays a year or more before they are produced. [33] The play categories are Mee's own. He also makes his unproduced (undated) plays available on the (re)making project. [34] )
|
|
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Will Eno is an American playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. His play, Thom Pain was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2005. His play The Realistic Joneses appeared on Broadway in 2014, where it received a Drama Desk Special Award and was named Best Play on Broadway by USA Today, and best American play of 2014 by The Guardian. His play The Open House was presented Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in 2014 and won the Obie Award for Playwriting as well as other awards, and was on both TIME Magazine and Time Out New York 's Top Ten Plays of 2014.
Edward Artie Bullins, sometimes publishing as Kingsley B. Bass Jr, was an American playwright. He won awards including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards. Bullins was associated with the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party, for which he was the minister of culture in the 1960s.
Big Love is a play by American playwright Charles L. Mee. Based on Aeschylus's The Suppliants, it is about fifty brides who flee to a manor in Italy to avoid marrying their fifty cousins. The play takes the plot of the original Greek play into modern times, including such details as having the grooms ambush the brides by helicopter. While the brides and grooms wait for their wedding day, the characters raise issues of gender politics, love, and domestic violence. The first production of the play was directed by Les Waters at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville in 2000. This play has been produced many times and is very popular.
Tarell Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights (2007), and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, her second play in that trilogy.
Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
Rajiv Joseph is an American playwright. He was named a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and he won an Obie Award for Best New American Play for his play Describe the Night.
Tanya Barfield is an American playwright whose works have been presented both nationally and internationally.
Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter and theater director whose work tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war. He is best known for the plays Tennis in Nablus (2010) and Truth Serum Blues (2005) and the critically-acclaimedReturning to Haifa, which premiered in London in 2018. Tennis in Nablus received two graduate student Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 while he was still at NYU, the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award and the Quest for Peace Playwriting Award. Since then his plays have been produced and presented internationally and published in half a dozen anthologies.
Katori Hall is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, actress, and director from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Bathsheba Sarah Lee "Bash" Doran is a British-born playwright and TV scriptwriter living in New York City.
Erin B. Mee is an American theater director.
Jennifer Haley is an American playwright. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas and studied acting at the University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate degree. Haley also received a MFA in playwriting at Brown University in 2005, where she worked under American playwright and professor, Paula Vogel. Now living in Los Angeles, Haley is pursuing a career in theatre, film and television.
Martha Boesing is an American theater director and playwright. She was the founding artistic director of the Minneapolis experimental feminist theater collective At the Foot of the Mountain.
Martyna Majok is a Polish-born American playwright who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living. She emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. Majok studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School. Her plays are often politically engaged, feature dark humor, and experiment with structure and time.
C. Quintana is a Cuban-American playwright, poet, and writer. Her works have been published in literary journals and produced across the United States. The Heart Wants, her chapbook of poetry, was published in 2016 by Finishing Line Press.
Jeremy O. Harris is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist. Harris gained prominence for his 2018 Slave Play, which received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. Harris is also known for his work in film and television. He produced and co-wrote the A24 film Zola (2021), for which he received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. He acted in the HBO Max series Gossip Girl (2021), the Netflix series Emily in Paris (2022), and in the film The Sweet East (2023).
Michael E. Feingold was an American critic, translator, lyricist, playwright and dramaturg. He was the lead theater critic of The Village Voice from 1982 to 2013, for which he was twice named a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism finalist, and was a two-time recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He was a judge for the Obie Awards for 31 years, and the chairman for nine years. For his work as the translator and adapter of the book and lyrics of the Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht musical Happy End, he was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1977.
Mark Bly is an American dramaturge, educator, and author. After graduating from Yale's Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Program in 1980, Bly worked as a resident dramaturge – then a relatively new position in the United States. He held this position for several of the country's major regional theaters: the Guthrie, Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, Arena Stage, and the Alley. He was the first dramaturge to receive a Broadway dramaturgy credit for his collaboration with director Emily Mann on her play Execution of Justice (1986), During his career, Bly worked as a production dramaturge with a series of major theater artists including Doug Hughes, Garland Wright, Emily Mann and Moisés Kaufman, as well as on the world premieres of works by playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl and Rajiv Joseph.
Notes
{{cite book}}
: |first=
has generic name (help)Bibliography