Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts". In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted as the "most significant English-language play of the 20th century".
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
The Arsonists, previously also known in English as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers, was written by the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch in 1953, first as a radio play, then adapted for television and the stage (1958) as a play in six scenes. It was revised in 1960 to include an epilogue.
John Joseph MacGowran was an Irish actor, known for being one of the foremost stage interpreters of the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as his film roles as Professor Abronsius in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Juniper in How I Won the War (1967), and Burke Dennings in The Exorcist (1973), in which MacGowran died during production.
Roger Blin was a French actor and director. He staged world premieres of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1953 and Endgame in 1957.
Stanley Russell "Spoon" Jackson is an American prisoner and poet serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence. Currently incarcerated at California State Prison, Solano. Jackson was convicted of the stabbing homicide of Denise Holzman, 23, in Barstow, California. Holzman, the first female switch operator for the Santa Fe Railroad, moved to Barstow five weeks prior to the murder. Jackson was incarcerated in 1977 and has served time in more than six California state prisons.
Herbert Blau was an American director and theoretician of performance. He was named the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington.
Weeds is a 1987 American drama film directed by John D. Hancock, and starring Nick Nolte, Ernie Hudson, Lane Smith, Mark Rolston, William Forsythe, Joe Mantegna, J.J. Johnston and Rita Taggart. The screenplay concerns a prison inmate who writes a play that catches the attention of a visiting reporter.
Haris Pašović is a Bosnian theatre director. Over the course of his career, he has also worked as a playwright, producer, choreographer, performer, and designer. He is best known for his productions of Wedekind's “Spring Awakening”. He is the artistic leader of the East West Theatre Company in Sarajevo and tenured Professor of Directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo.
Gábor Tompa is an internationally renowned Romanian theater and film director, poet, essayist and teacher. Between 2007 and 2016 he was the Head of Directing at the Theatre and Dance Department of the University of California, San Diego. He is the general and artistic director of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj since 1990, the theatre is member of the Union of the Theatres of Europe (UTE) since 2008. Founder and artistic director of the Interferences International Theatre Festival in Cluj, Romania. President of the Union of the Theatres of Europe since 2018.
Ali Akbar Alizad is an Iranian theater director, known mostly for his performance of Waiting for Godot (2006). Alizad has been a member of the Aein Theater Group and the Leev Theater Group for 10 years, and in 2006 he founded his theatrical group named 84theater.
The Actor's Workshop was a theatre company founded in San Francisco in 1952. It was the first professional theatre on the west coast to premiere many of the modern American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and the world dramas of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. For the 1953–1954 season, the Workshop offered six plays: Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; Venus Observed, by Christopher Fry; Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller; a revival of Playboy; The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov; and Tonight at 8.30, by Noël Coward. On April 15, 1955, the Actor's Workshop signed the first Off-Broadway Equity contract to be awarded outside New York City.
Walter D. Asmus is a German theatre director.
Ruby Cohn was an American theater scholar and a leading authority on playwright Samuel Beckett. She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis for thirty years.
Jules Irving was an American actor, director, educator, and producer, who in the 1950s co-founded the San Francisco Actor's Workshop. When the Actor's Workshop closed in 1966, Irving moved to New York City and became the first Producing Director of the Repertory Company of the Vivian Beaumont Theater of Lincoln Center.
Don McLennan is an Australian film director, scriptwriter and producer.
Douglas Charles Cluchey was an American actor. He was friends with Samuel Beckett.
Alan Mandell is a Canadian-American actor known for playing Rabbi Marshak in the Coen Brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man. With several decades of experience as a stage actor, he is especially acclaimed as an interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett.
Global Village Video was a pioneering Manhattan-based media center that operated from the late 1960s to the 1980s. It produced and showcased "Guerrilla TV" style video documentaries that featured subject matter and stylistic qualities not seen on mainstream television of the period. Using the battery-operated Sony CV video portapak introduced in 1968, Global Village also trained numerous artists and activists in the new technology, launched the first major video and film festival devoted solely to documentaries, as well as spearheaded a movement to get the work of independent producers on public television.
