Cheryl West

Last updated

Cheryl L. West (born October 23, 1965, Chicago) is an American playwright.

Contents

Life

West holds a degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She worked as a social worker and taught before turning to playwriting.

In 1990, she came to Seattle for The Group Theatre's Multicultural Playwrights Festival, where she won the opportunity to workshop her play, Before It Hits Home. That play went on to be produced at Arena Stage. On June 12, 1991, her play Jar the Floor had its world premiere at Seattle's The Empty Space Theater. [1] In 1999, she relocated to Seattle.

She won a National Endowment for the Arts Playwrighting Award for 1995–96. Also making a successful foray into film, her play Before It Hits Home has been optioned by Spike Lee; and she has been asked to pen a film adaptation for Home Box Office and write an original screenplay for Paramount Studios. She had been commissioned to write a dramatic adaptation of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son .

A film version of her play Holiday Heart premiered on Showtime in 2000, starring Ving Rhames and Alfre Woodard.

In 2012, the Seattle Repertory Theatre premiered her play Pullman Porter Blues. In 2017, the Pasadena Playhouse premiered her play Shout Sister Shout!

Awards

Works

Plays

Teleplays

Related Research Articles

<i>The Heidi Chronicles</i> 1988 play by Wendy Wasserstein

The Heidi Chronicles is a 1988 play by Wendy Wasserstein. The play won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Robert Lee "Rob" Penny was an American playwright, poet, social activist, and professor. Penny wrote more than 30 plays and 300 poems.

Tazewell Thompson is an American theatre director, the former artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse (2006–07) in Westport, Connecticut and the Syracuse Stage (1992–95) in New York state. Prior to that he was an assistant director at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He is the Director of Opera Studies at Manhattan School of Music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa</span> American writer (born 1973)

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.

The Death of Bessie Smith is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee, written in 1959 and premiered in West Berlin the following year. The play consists of a series of conversations between Bernie and his friend Jack, Jack and an off-stage Bessie, and black and white staff of a whites-only hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on the death date of the famous blues singer, Bessie Smith, who died in a car wreck.

Lillian Groag is an Argentine-American playwright, theater director, and actress. Her plays include The Ladies of the Camellias, The Magic Fire, and The White Rose.

Charlaine "Charlayne" Woodard is an American playwright and actress. She is a two-time Obie Award winner as well as a Tony Award and Drama Desk nominee. She was a series regular on the hit FX TV series Pose. She played the title role in the Showtime movie Run For The Dream: The Gail Devers’ Story. Starring as Cindy in the ABC Movie of the Week, Woodard was the first black Cinderella portrayed on TV or film. She is in Marvel Studios' miniseries Secret Invasion as Priscilla Fury, which premiered on June 21, 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tanya Barfield</span> American playwright

Tanya Barfield is an American playwright whose works have been presented both nationally and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Gallagher</span> American writer

Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. She is a member of Actors & Writers, a theater company in the Hudson Valley, and the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, where she developed many of her plays and created and moderated the series, "You Can Make a Life: Conversations with Playwrights" from 1994 to 2001.

An American Daughter is a play written by Wendy Wasserstein. The play takes place in a living room in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Jessica Goldberg is an American playwright, screenwriter, and television writer. In 1999, she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play, Refuge. Goldberg is the creator of the Hulu series The Path and served as the showrunner for the Netflix series Away.

Kenneth Lin is an American playwright and screenwriter. Lin's plays have been performed throughout the world and his TV shows have been distributed via Netflix, HBO, Cinemax, Hulu and more. In theatre, he is best known for his plays Po Boy Tango, Farewell My Concubine, and Kleptocracy. In Television, he is best known for his work on the Netflix series House of Cards, the Hulu Series, The First, and the Cinemax series, The Warrior. He is a member of the theater/music/film collective New Neighborhood.

Catherine Butterfield is an American playwright, screenwriter and actress. She lives in Santa Monica with her partner, Ron West. She has one daughter, the actress Audrey Corsa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracey Scott Wilson</span> American dramatist

Tracey Scott Wilson is an American playwright, television writer, television producer, and screenwriter. She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and from Temple University with an MA in English Literature.

Norman L. Berman is an American theater composer and playwright.

Anna Ziegler is an American playwright.

Karen Hartman is a Senior Artist in Residence at University of Washington School of Drama in Seattle. She completed her bachelor's degree in Literature at Yale University and received Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama. Hartman held the Playwright Center's McKnight Residency and Commission for a nationally recognized playwright in 2014 and 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Lauro</span> American writer

Shirley Shapiro Mezvinsky Lauro is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Her plays include A Piece of my Heart, Open Admissions, The Radiant, All Through the Night and others. Her novel is The Edge and she edited an anthology, Political Plays by American Women, with Alexis Greene.

Pullman Porter Blues is a 2012 play written by Cheryl West. Set in 1937, during the Great Depression, the play shows the story of the Pullman porters on a train ride aboard the Panama Limited from Chicago to New Orleans.

Before It Hits Home is a 1991 American play written by Cheryl West.

References

  1. "Jar the Floor" at Seattle Repertory Theatre.
  2. Douglas Singleton, "THEATER REVIEWS: Birdie Blue by Cheryl L. West", The L Magazine, July 6, 2005.
  3. Review, Seattle Times
  4. Lawless, Katherine (March 24, 2022). "'Something Happened in Our Town' Wonders How to Talk to Kids About Racism". Minnesota Monthly. Greenspring Media . Retrieved 2022-04-09.