Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Balm in Gilead is a 1965 American play written by American playwright Lanford Wilson.
Terry Kinney is an American actor and theater director, and a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, with Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry. Kinney is best known for his role as Tim McManus on HBO's prison drama Oz.
Austin Campbell Pendleton is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor.
Conchata Galen Ferrell was an American actress. She played Berta the housekeeper on the sitcom Two and a Half Men from 2003 to 2015, and received two nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the role. Ferrell had previously been nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her performance in L.A. Law.
The Circle Repertory Company, originally named the Circle Theater Company, was a theatre company in New York City that ran from 1969 to 1996. It was founded on July 14, 1969, in Manhattan, in a second floor loft at Broadway and 83rd Street by director Marshall W. Mason, playwright Lanford Wilson, director Rob Thirkield, and actress Tanya Berezin, all of whom were veterans of the Caffe Cino. The plan was to establish a pool of artists — actors, directors, playwrights and designers — who would work together in the creation of plays. In 1974, The New York Times critic Mel Gussow acclaimed Circle Rep as the "chief provider of new American plays."
The Acting Company is a professional theater company that tours the United States annually, staging and performing one or two plays in as many as fifty cities, often with runs of only one or two nights. Drama critic Mel Gussow has called it "the major touring classical theater of the United States." Based in New York City, The Acting Company also sponsors several educational programs for middle school and high school students.
A. J. Antoon was an American theatre director. He attended the Yale School of Drama. Beginning in 1971, Antoon directed numerous plays at the New York Shakespeare Festival over a period of nearly 20 years. In 1973, Antoon became one of the few directors to have been nominated for two Tony Awards in the same category in the same year. In addition to winning the Tony Award with one of his nominations, Antoon was also the winner of a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and an Obie Award. His career lasted until 1991; he died less than a year later from AIDS-related lymphoma.
Marshall W. Mason is an American theater director, educator, and writer. Mason founded the Circle Repertory Company in New York City and was artistic director of the company for 18 years (1969–1987). He received an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in 1983. In 2016, he received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater.
The Gospel at Colonus is an African-American musical version of Sophocles's tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus. The show was created in 1983 by the experimental-theatre director Lee Breuer, one of the founders of the seminal American avant-garde theatre company Mabou Mines, and composer Bob Telson. The musical was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show had a brief run on Broadway in 1988.
Lois Arlene Smith is an American character 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).
Caroline Eugenie Lagerfelt is a French-born American actress, long based in the United States, recognized for her roles on Sweet Magnolias, Gossip Girl, Six Degrees, Dirty Sexy Money, Nash Bridges and Beverly Hills, 90210.
Mari Gorman is an American actress perhaps best known for her work in television, particularly as a frequent guest star on the 1970s and 1980s sitcom Barney Miller, but she is also known for her theater acting. She has won several acting awards, including two Obie Awards. She is the author of Strokes of Existence: The Connection of All Things, which is about a long-term, formal investigation of acting that realizes Shakespeare's words, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
Hot l Baltimore is a 1975 American sitcom created by Norman Lear, adapted from the 1973 off-Broadway play The Hot l Baltimore by Lanford Wilson.
The Rimers of Eldritch is a play by Lanford Wilson. The play is set in the mid-20th century in Eldritch, Missouri, a decaying Bible Belt town that once was a prosperous coal mining community. The plot focuses on the murder of the aging local hermit, Skelly Mannor, by a woman, Nelly Windrod, who mistakenly thought he was committing rape when he was actually trying to prevent a rape from occurring.
Joyce Ebert was an American actress. She was particularly known for her work as a dramatic actress at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut where she portrayed both leading and supporting roles in more than 80 productions. She also appeared on television and in films, and had a brief career as an opera singer.
Norman L. Berman is an American theater composer and playwright.
Sheila Dabney is an American actress, best known for her co-starring role in the 1987 lesbian feminist film She Must Be Seeing Things alongside Lois Weaver and directed by Sheila McLaughlin.
Ludlow Fair is a one-act play by American playwright Lanford Wilson. It was first produced at Caffe Cino in 1965, a coffeehouse and theatre founded by Joe Cino, a pioneer of the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement.
