Tom Smith (born in 1969 in Rochelle, Illinois) is an American playwright, theatre director, and professor of theatre arts. Originally trained as an improvisational comedian, Smith founded Walla Walla TheatreSports in 1988.
Smith's published plays include Drinking Habits , Drinking Habits 2: Caught in the Act , The Odyssey , The Pathmaker, A Christmas Carol , Dangerous (a contemporary gay treatment of Les Liaisons Dangereuses), [1] Gray , and Marguerita's Secret Diary in addition to edited versions of Much Ado About Nothing , The Comedy of Errors , The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labours Lost . Additionally, he has many plays published by YouthPLAYS, including Johnny and Sally Ann: the true-life tall-tales of Johnny Appleseed and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind , which ran for 2 years with LA's traveling company Enrichment Works; ESL , The Wild and Wacky Rhyming Stories of Miss Henrietta Humpledowning and 'What Comes Around... . [2] Unpublished plays receiving productions include Aunt Raini, which received a reading at Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton and its professional premiere at Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company; Anna's Mother; [3] Love's Memory: Eurydice and Orpheus; [4] Small Things, Every Day; [5] and various 10-minute plays. [6] In January, 2009, Kendall Hunt Publishing published his book on long and short form improvisation, The Other Blocking: Teaching and Performing Improvisation.
His plays have won national and regional awards, including the Robert J. Pickering Award for Excellence in Playwriting, the ATHE Playworks Award, the Orlin R. Corey Outstanding Regional Playwright Award, and the Richard Odlin Award.
Smith has directed plays staged in Kansas City, Missouri; Seattle, Washington; Creede, Colorado; Forestburgh, NY; and Las Cruces, New Mexico. [7]
Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, director and screenwriter whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described Shepard as "the greatest American playwright of his generation."
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
Laura Leggett Linney is an American actress. She is the recipient of several awards, including two Golden Globe Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards and five Tony Awards.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister. In writing the play, Williams drew on an earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman Caller.
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
The Evening Standard Theatre Awards, established in 1955, are the oldest theatrical awards ceremony in the United Kingdom. They are presented annually for outstanding achievements in London Theatre, and are organised by the Evening Standard newspaper. They are the West End's equivalent to Broadway's Drama Desk Awards.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Chicago theater company founded in 1974 by Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, and Gary Sinise in the Unitarian church on Half Day Road in Deerfield, 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.
d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian feminist dub poet, activist, and singer for the band D’bi and the 333. Their work includes theatrical performances, four published collections of poetry, twelve plays, and seven albums.
The AWGIE Awards are annual awards given by the Australian Writers' Guild (AWG), for excellence in screen, television, stage, and radio writing. The 56th Annual AWGIE Awards ceremony is being held in Sydney on 15 February 2024.
Joseph Cino, was an Italian-American theatre producer. The Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement is generally credited to have begun at Cino's Caffe Cino in the West Village of Manhattan.
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
Bernard Slade Newbound was a Canadian playwright and screenwriter. As a screenwriter, he created the sitcoms The Flying Nun and The Partridge Family. As a playwright, he wrote Same Time, Next Year, Tribute, and Romantic Comedy and their film adaptations.
Ann Marie Di Mambro is a Scottish playwright and television screenwriter of Italian extraction. Her theatre plays have been performed widely; they are also published individually and in collections and are studied in schools for the Scottish curriculum's Higher Drama and English.
Wendy Kesselman is an American playwright.
Arthur M. Jolly is an American playwright and screenwriter. In 2006, he was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his comedy The Free Republic of Bobistan.
American Idiot is a sung-through rock musical based on the concept album of the same name by rock band Green Day. After a run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009, the show moved to the St. James Theatre on Broadway. Previews began on March 24, 2010, and the musical officially opened on April 20, 2010. The show closed on April 24, 2011, after 422 performances. While Green Day did not appear in the production, vocalist/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong performed the role of "St. Jimmy" occasionally throughout the run.
Carson Kreitzer is an American playwright currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1991 with a B.A. in theatre and literature and an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin.
Sam Gold is an American theater director and actor. Having studied at Cornell University and Juilliard School he became known for directing both musicals and plays, on Broadway and Off-Broadway. He has received Tony Award and nominations for three Drama Desk Awards.
Charlene James is a British playwright and screenwriter. She won substantial acclaim for her play Cuttin' It, which addresses the issue of female genital mutilation in Britain, for which she won numerous awards.
Rajdweep is an Indian screenwriter, playwright, lyricist and journalist hails from Dhing, Nagaon, Assam. He has been awarded by Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan for his script 'Ishqlogy' at Cinestaan India's Storyteller's Script Contest in 2018. He is the first lyricist from Assam who writes Assamese songs in Bollywood film. He wrote the songs 'Jiri Jiri' for the film A Death In The Gunj and the bihu song for the film Jagga Jasoos. Again, he becomes the first screenwriter from Assam who signed a Bollywood film. He signed the film on 21 October 2019.