Proof is a 2000 play by the American playwright David Auburn. Proof was developed at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, during the 1999 Next Stage Series of new plays. The play premiered Off-Broadway in May 2000 and transferred to Broadway in October 2000. The play won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play.
Community theatre refers to theatrical performance made in relation to particular communities—its usage includes theatre made by, with, and for a community. It may refer to theatre that is made entirely by a community with no outside help, or to a collaboration between community members and professional theatre artists, or to performance made entirely by professionals that is addressed to a particular community. Community theatres range in size from small groups led by single individuals that perform in borrowed spaces to large permanent companies with well-equipped facilities of their own. Many community theatres are successful, non-profit businesses with a large active membership and, often, a full-time professional staff. Community theatre is often devised and may draw on popular theatrical forms, such as carnival, circus, and parades, as well as performance modes from commercial theatre.
Claire Catherine Danes is an American actress. She is the recipient of three Primetime Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2012, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.
The William Esper Studio was founded in 1965 as a school for the performing arts in Manhattan, New York. The school is dedicated to the acting technique of Sanford Meisner. Its founder, William "Bill" Esper, is often referred to as the best-known of Meisner's first generation teachers, and his most "authentic protege".
Lili Anne Taylor is an Emmy-nominated American actress who has numerous credits across television and film, both independent and commercial. She is known for her appearances in such indie films as Mystic Pizza (1988), Say Anything... (1989), Dogfight (1991), Short Cuts (1993), The Addiction (1995) and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), as well as for her roles in big-budget films including Ransom (1996), The Haunting (1999), Public Enemies (2009), The Conjuring (2013), and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015). In television, Taylor has starred in Six Feet Under, Hemlock Grove, Almost Human, and all three seasons of the anthology series American Crime. For the latter, she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie nomination, her third.
Off-off-Broadway theaters are smaller New York City theaters than Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, and usually have fewer than 100 seats. The off-off-Broadway movement began in 1958 as part of an anti-commercial and experimental or avant-garde movement of drama and theatre. Over time, some off-off-Broadway productions have moved away from the movement's early experimental spirit.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl runaway from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced it had acquired Shange's archive. Shange lived in Brooklyn, New York. Shange had one daughter, Savannah Shange. She was married twice: to the saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah’s father, with both marriages ending in divorce.
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.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020 she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name.
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of marginalized people. She is a professor of Playwriting at Columbia University.
Lyle Kessler is an American playwright, screenwriter and actor, best known internationally for Orphans, the play he wrote in 1983.
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the basement boutique where Stewart sold her fashion designs. Stewart turned the space into a theatre at night, focusing on the work of young playwrights. La MaMa has evolved during its fifty-year history into a world-renowned cultural institution.
The Theatre Development Fund (TDF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to assisting the theatre industry in New York City. Created in 1968 to help an ailing New York theatre industry, TDF has grown into the nation's largest performing arts nonprofit, providing support to more than 900 plays and musicals and returning upwards of $1.5 billion in revenue to thousands of Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway music and dance productions.
Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright.
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.
Once is a musical based on the 2007 film of the same name by John Carney. Like the film, music and lyrics were by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, including the Academy Award-winning "Falling Slowly". The book for the musical was written by Enda Walsh. The musical premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2011, before transferring to Broadway in 2012. The production received eleven 2012 Tony Award nominations, and won eight including Best Musical, Best Actor and Best Book. The musical also won the 2012 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical and the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It has since spawned a London production, with a North American Tour which started on 1 October 2013. In the musical, the cast also serves as the orchestra. A minimalist set is used, including a bar in center stage with chairs lining stage left and right. Exiting cast members simply step to the side of the stage and sit down. They serve as the orchestra from these chairs. The bar is used before the show and at intermission as a working bar for theater patrons.
Sulabha Deshpande was an Indian actress and theatre director. Apart from Marathi theatre and Hindi theatre in Mumbai, she acted in over 73 mainstream Bollywood films. She also performed in art house cinema such as Bhumika (1977), Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978), and Gaman (1978) as a character actor, along with numerous TV series and plays. A leading figure in experimental theatre movement of the 1960s, she was associated with Rangayan, and personalities like Vijay Tendulkar, Vijaya Mehta, and Satyadev Dubey. In 1971, she co-founded the theatre group Awishkar with her husband Arvind Deshpande, and also started its children's wing, Chandrashala, which continues to perform professional children theatre. In later years, she acted in serials such as Jee Ley Zara, Ek Packet Umeed, Asmita and in films such as English Vinglish.
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has authored over nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Projects. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for 2018.
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is a play by British playwright Caryl Churchill written in 1976.
Vera Cudjoe is a Trinidadian-Canadian actress, producer, and educator. She founded Black Theatre Canada, a youth and community-oriented institution which helped train and launch the career of numerous Black performers and artists in North America. Among the Theatre's legacies are Delroy Lindo, Arlene Duncan, Leon Bibb, Jackie Richardson, Joe Sealy, Tom Butler, Philip Akin, and ahdri zhina mandiela.
