Marcus Cook Connelly was an American playwright, director, producer, performer, and lyricist. He was a key member of the Algonquin Round Table, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930.
Spalding Gray was an American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He is best known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for his film adaptations of these works, beginning in 1987. He wrote and starred in several, working with different directors.
Harvey Forbes Fierstein is an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter, known for his distinctive gravelly voice. He is best known for his theater work in Torch Song Trilogy and Hairspray and film roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, and as the voice of Yao in Mulan and Mulan II. Fierstein won two Tony Awards, Best Actor in a Play and Best Play, for Torch Song Trilogy. He received his third Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical, for the musical La Cage aux Folles and his fourth, the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, a role he revived in its live television event, Hairspray Live! Fierstein also wrote the books for the Tony Award-winning musicals Kinky Boots, Newsies, and Tony Award-nominated, Drama League Award-winner A Catered Affair. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2007.
Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War published in 1883. It is also a travel book, recounting his trips on the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New Orleans and then from New Orleans to Saint Paul, many years after the war.
Barter Theatre, in Abingdon, Virginia, opened on June 10, 1933. It is the longest-running professional Equity theatre in the United States.
Craig Lucas is an American playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, musical actor, and film director.
Carolyn Gage is an American playwright, actor, theatrical director and author. She has written nine books on lesbian theater and sixty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows. A lesbian feminist, her work emphasizes non-traditional roles for women and lesbian characters.
Jeffrey Sweet is an American writer, journalist, songwriter and theatre historian.
The Cappies is an international program for recognizing, celebrating, and providing learning experiences for high school theater and journalism students and teenage playwrights.
Adam Rapp is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, musician and film director. His play Red Light Winter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006.
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman is a 1966 musical composed by Charles Strouse, with lyrics by Lee Adams and book by David Newman and Robert Benton. It is based on the comic book character Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and published by DC 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.
Duncan Pflaster is an American off-off-Broadway playwright, composer and actor. His first play Wilder and Wilder, was produced in 1995 at Florida Playwrights' Theatre in Hollywood, FL. He now lives in New York City, where many of his plays have been produced in theatre festivals, such as the Spotlight On festival and the Midtown International Theatre Festival. His first film Strapped for Danger was produced by Scorpio Film Releasing in 2017, and the sequel Undercover Vice: Strapped for Danger II followed in 2021. Scorpio Film Releasing also brought him in for additional material on their film Code Name: Dynastud.
Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program. Urban is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.
Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home was also awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015 and the 2014 Obie Award for writing for musical theater.
Ralph Pape was an American playwright best known for Say Goodnight, Gracie (1978), Soap Opera (1984) and Hearts Beating Faster (1997).
William Missouri Downs is an American comedy writer, playwright, screenwriter, stage director, and author.
James Still is an American writer and playwright. Still grew up in a small town in Kansas, and graduated from the University of Kansas. His award-winning plays have been produced throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, China, Australia and South Africa. He is a two-time TCG-Pew Charitable Trusts' National Theatre Artist with the Indiana Repertory Theatre where he is the IRT's first-ever playwright in residence (1998–present). He currently lives in Los Angeles.
David Cale is an English-American playwright, actor, and songwriter, best known for his solo performance works.
Dan Sullivan was a widely-read American theater critic with columns in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Tribune, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He was the director of the Eugene O'Neill National Critics Institute, and co-founded the American Theater Critics Association. He was a founding member of Brave New Workshop, which for more than half a century continues to be a theater venue for satiric comedy in Minneapolis.
