Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, theatre director, film producer and screenwriter. With a career spanning seven decades he received numerous accolades including two Tony Awards, and a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award.
August Wilson was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 113 is an hour-long work for bass soloist, men's chorus, and large orchestra in five movements, each a setting of a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that describes aspects of Soviet history and life. The work has been variously described as a choral symphony, song cycle, and cantata. Although the symphony is commonly referred to by the nickname Babi Yar, no such subtitle is designated in Shostakovich’s manuscript score.
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.
John David Logan is an American playwright and filmmaker. He is known for his work as a screenwriter for such films as Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011), Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Sam Mendes's James Bond films Skyfall (2012), and Spectre (2015). He has been nominated three times for Academy Awards, and has won a Tony Award and a Golden Globe Award.
Craig Lucas is an American playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, musical actor, and film director.
Daniel John Sullivan is an American theatre and film director and playwright.
David Eldridge is a British dramatist and screenwriter, born in Romford, Greater London, United Kingdom. His plays have been produced in the West End and on Broadway. He has written for stage, screen and radio.
Tom Donaghy is an American playwright. He also works in television and film.
Frank Daniel Gilroy was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film producer and director. He received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play The Subject Was Roses in 1965.
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.
Tim Kelly was an American playwright who wrote over three hundred plays.
Aurin Squire is an African-American playwright, screenwriter, and reporter. He has written numerous plays, while his reporting has appeared in The New Republic, Talking Points Memo, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, and ESPN, among other outlets.
Aurand Harris (1915–1996) is the most produced playwright for young audiences in the United States. Over six decades he wrote more than 50 plays, many of which became classics in the children's play repertory. His play, "Androcles and the Lion", is said to be the single most-produced play in the field, surpassing even "Peter Pan" and "The Wind in the Willows." First staged Off-Broadway in 1963, the play remains Anchorage Press' top seller and it was estimated at the time of his death in 1996 to have been performed on over 30,000 occasions. The plays of Aurand Harris have been produced and applauded in thousands of productions around the world for nearly a half-century. Harris was a prodigious dramatist, writing a newly published play each season. He was a tireless experimenter of forms, themes, and subjects. This modest man of irrepressible imagination and energy carried a vast array of honors and accolades. He was the first recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Children's Theatre. He received an honorary doctorate from Indiana University and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He was the first playwright to receive the Medallion of the Children's Theatre Foundation of America. Aurand Harris died on May 6, 1996, in Manhattan, New York. He is buried in the family plot in Jamesport, Missouri.
Richard Dresser is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist and teacher whose work has been performed in New York, leading regional theaters, and all over Europe. His first dystopian fiction novel, It Happened Here, an oral history of an American family from the years 2019 to 2035, dealing with life in a totalitarian state when you still have Netflix and two-day free shipping and all you've lost is your freedom, was released in October 2020. He is co-producing a documentary about Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, antiwar priests and lifelong activists.
Edward Bartlett Cormack was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and producer best known for his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, and for working with Howard Hughes and Cecil B. DeMille on several films.
Rollin Jarrett is an American actor, screenwriter, author, playwright and singer-songwriter.
Ward Morehouse III was an American author, playwright and newspaperman. He was known particularly for his books on the grand hotels of New York City and London.
Irvin Colloden Miller was an American actor, playwright, and vaudeville show writer and producer. He was responsible for successful theater shows including Broadway Rastus (1921), Liza (1922), Dinah (1923), which introduced the wildly popular black bottom dance, and Desires of 1927 starring Adelaide Hall. For thirty years he directed the popular review, Brown Skin Models, influenced by the Ziegfeld Follies but exclusively using black performers. "In the 1920s and 1930s, he was arguably the most well-established and successful producer of black musical comedy."
Arnold Olaf Sundgaard was an American playwright, librettist, and lyricist. He was also a writer of short stories and children's books as well as a college professor specializing in drama and theatrics. Sundgaard was best known for his role in the production of six Broadway plays.
