The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella written by American author John Steinbeck. It describes the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, as they move from place to place in California, searching for jobs during the Great Depression.
Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends.
Stephen Flaherty is an American composer of musical theatre and film. He works most often in collaboration with the lyricist/book writer Lynn Ahrens. They are best known for writing the Broadway musicals Ragtime, which was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and won the Tony for Best Original Score; Once on This Island, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, the Olivier Award for London's Best Musical, and was nominated for a Grammy Award and eight Tony Awards; and Seussical, which was nominated for the Grammy Award. Flaherty was also nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for his songs and song score for the animated film musical Anastasia.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Chicago theater company founded in 1974 by Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, and Gary Sinise in the Immaculate Conception grade school in Highland Park, Illinois and is now located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood on Halsted Street. The theatre's name comes from Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, which original member Rick Argosh was reading during the company's inaugural production of Paul Zindel's play, And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, in 1974. After occupying several theatres in Chicago, in 1991, it moved into its own purpose-built complex with three performing spaces, the largest seating 550.
Alfred Fox Uhry is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has received an Academy Award, two Tony Awards and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing for Driving Miss Daisy. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Jeffrey Perry is an American actor of stage, television, and film. He is known for his role as Richard Katimski on the teen drama My So-Called Life, Terrance Steadman on Prison Break, Thatcher Grey on the medical drama series Grey's Anatomy, Cyrus Beene on the political drama series Scandal, all for ABC, and as Inspector Harvey Leek on the CBS crime drama Nash Bridges. He most recently starred on the ABC drama Alaska Daily, alongside Hilary Swank.
Austin Campbell Pendleton is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor.
Michael Korie is an American librettist and lyricist whose writing for musical theater and opera includes the musicals Grey Gardens and Far From Heaven, and the operas Harvey Milk and The Grapes of Wrath. His works have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and internationally. His lyrics have been nominated for the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Korie was awarded the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Twentieth Century is a 1932 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur based on the unproduced play Napoleon of Broadway by Charles B. Millholland, inspired by his experience working for the eccentric Broadway impresario David Belasco.
José Benjamín Quintero was a Panamanian theatre director, producer and pedagogue best known for his interpretations of the works of Eugene O'Neill.
Lois Arlene Smith is an American actress whose career spans eight decades. She made her film debut in the 1955 drama film East of Eden, and later played supporting roles in a number of movies, including Five Easy Pieces (1970), Resurrection (1980), Fatal Attraction (1987), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Falling Down (1993), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), Dead Man Walking (1995), Twister (1996), Minority Report (2002), The Nice Guys (2016), Lady Bird (2017), and The French Dispatch (2021).
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.
Chamber theater is a method of adapting literary works to the stage using a maximal amount of the work's original text and often minimal and suggestive settings.
Frank Joseph Galati was an American director, writer, and actor. He was a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and an associate director at Goodman Theatre. He taught at Northwestern University for many years.
Sean Gerard Mathias is a Welsh actor, director, and writer. He is known for directing the film Bent and for directing highly acclaimed theatre productions in London, New York City, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Sydney.
Rondi Anne Reed is an American actress of stage and screen. A longtime member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, she has appeared in more than 50 productions at that theater. Also active on Broadway, she won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Mattie Fae Aiken in August: Osage County. She is also known for the role of Peggy on the television sitcom Mike & Molly which she played from 2010-2016.
Of Mice and Men is a play adapted from John Steinbeck's 1937 novel of the same name. The play, which predates the Tony Awards and the Drama Desk Awards, earned the 1938 New York Drama Critics' Circle Best Play.
The Bad Man is a 1920 three-act comedy play by American playwright Porter Emerson Browne. The Broadway production at the Comedy Theatre ran for 342 performances beginning August 30, 1920. It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1920–1921.
Keith Byron Kirk is an American theater actor, singer and playwright. He is a director of graduate studies for the Theatre Department at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
