Annie Baker
Baker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.
Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award f
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Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenberg was an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He had more than 25 plays premiere on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last. Greenberg is perhaps best known for his 2002 play Take Me Out.
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Stephen Adly Guirgis
Stephen Adly Guirgis is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He is a member and a former co-artistic director of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays have been produced both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, as well as in the UK. His play Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Sarah Daniels
Sarah Daniels (born November 1956 in London [1]) is a British dramatist. She has been a prolific writer since her first professionally performed play, Ripen Our Darkness, was given a production at the Royal Court in 1981.
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Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute is an American film director, screenwriter and playwright.
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Born in Detroit, Michigan, LaBute was raised in Spokane, Washington. He studied theater at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At BYU he also met actor Aaron Eckhart, who would later play leading roles in several of his films. He produced a number of plays that pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the conservative religious university, some of which were shut down after their premieres. LaBute also did graduate work at the University of Kansas, New York University, and the Royal Academy of London.
In 1993 he returned to Brigham Young University to premier his play In the Company of Men, for which he rece -
Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright. She also works as a television writer. Her input went into popular shows such as Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, American Dreamer, Maximum Bob, First Wave, and Third Watch.
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She also wrote and produced Canterbury’s Law, Smith, Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue.
Ms. Rebeck has an MFA in Playwrighting and a PhD. in Victorian Melodrama, from Brandeis University. She is a board member of the Dramatists Guild and has taught at Brandeis and Columbia Universities.
She currently resides in Brooklyn with her husband Jess Lynn and two children, Cooper and Cleo. -
Amy Herzog
Amy Herzog is an American playwright. Her play 4000 Miles, which ran Off-Broadway in 2011, was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Her play Mary Jane, which ran Off-Broadway in 2017, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.
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Jen Silverman
Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer. Born in the U.S., she was raised across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her theatre work includes The Moors (Yale Repertory Theatre premiere, off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); The Roommate (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville Humana world premiere, multiple regional productions including South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse and Williamstown Theatre Festival, upcoming at Steppenwolf); Phoebe In Winter (Off-off Broadway with Clubbed Thumb); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth premiere); and All the Roads Home, a play with songs (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park premiere).
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Jen is a member of New Dramatists, a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an -
Bekah Brunstetter
Bekah Brunstetter plays include CUTIE AND BEAR (Upcoming, The Roundabout) A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE (Upcoming, Naked Angels) BE A GOOD LITTLE WIDOW (ARS NOVA, Spring 2011; Collaboraction – Chicago) HOUSE OF HOME (Williamstown Theater Festival), OOHRAH! (Atlantic Theater, 2009; Steppenwolf Garage – 2012), and MISS LILLY GETS BONED (Finborough Theater 2010, Lark Playwrights Week 2009, Finborough Theater, June 2010).
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She is a a New York New Voices Fellow through the Lark Play Development Center, member of The Primary Stages Writer's Group, the Naked Radio writing team. She is an alumni of the Women's Project writer's Lab, the Ars Nova Play Group, and the Playwright's Realm. She was the Playwright in Residence at the Finborough Theater, London, 201 -
Jon Robin Baitz
Robbie Baitz was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Edward Baitz, an executive of the Carnation Company. Baitz was raised in Brazil and South Africa before the family returned to California, where he attended Beverly Hills High School.[1] After graduation, he worked as a bookstore clerk and assistant to two producers, and the experiences became the basis for his first play, a one-acter entitled Mizlansky/Zilinsky. He drew on his own background for his first two-act play, The Film Society, about the staff of a prep school in South Africa. Its 1987 success in L.A. led to an off-Broadway production with Nathan Lane the following year, which earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding New Play. This was followed by The End
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Jackie Sibblies Drury
Jackie Sibblies Drury is an American playwright. A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, she is a graduate of Yale and Brown University MFA playwriting program, receiving the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting.
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N. Richard Nash
Nathan Richard Nusbaum , known as N. Richard Nash, was an American writer and dramatist best known for writing Broadway shows, including "The Rainmaker".
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Through the course of his lifetime, he wrote four plays, twelve screenplays, eight novels, two books on philosophy ("The Athenian Spirit" and "The Wounds of Sparta") and a book of poetry ("Absalom").
"The Rainmaker" was adapted into the 1956 film "The Rainmaker" starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn. His 1975 novel "Cry Macho" was adapted to film in 2021 and starred Clint Eastwood and Dwight Yoakam.
He passed away on December 11, 2000 at the age of 87. -
Frederick Knott
Knott was the son of English missionaries who sent him to be educated in England. A graduate of Cambridge, his promising tennis career was cut short by WWII. He served in the British Army Artillery as a signals instructor. He eventually moved to New York, and found success with three stories he wrote for the British and American stage.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Penelope Skinner
Penelope Skinner is a British playwright who came to prominence after her play Fucked was first produced in 2008 at the Old Red Lion Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival to huge critical acclaim and has had successive plays staged in London including at the Bush Theatre, National Theatre and Royal Court Theatre, where she is a member of the Young Writers Programme.
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Her play Eigengrau staged at the Bush Theatre in 2010 was a critical and box office hit and Skinner was nominated for the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2010. Eigengrau was revived at the Fitzpatrick Hall theatre in Cambridge in March 2012.
Skinner's play The Village Bike was her first play to be staged at the Royal Court Theatre where it had a sell out, twic -
Florian Zeller
Florian Zeller is a French novelist and playwright. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, including English. He won the Prix Interallié in 2004 for his novel "Fascination of Evil" ("La Fascination du Pire").
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Roy Williams
Born and brought up in Notting Hill, London, Roy Samuel Williams became a full time writer in his 20s after he took a theatre-writing degree at Rose Bruford College. His first full-length play was The No Boys Cricket Club, which premiered in 1996 at Theatre Royal Stratford East, since when he has had plays produced at the Royal Court, The Bush Theatre, The Hampstead Theatre and the National Theatre.
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Williams has done work in television, including adapting his own play Fallout and also co-wrote the script for the 2014 British film Fast Girls. He has also written a police procedural series for BBC Radio The Interrogation.
In 2011, Williams received the best play award for Sucker Punch at the Writers Guild Awards. In 2020, he received an RTS nom -
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is a San Francisco-based playwright whose works include boom, Hunter Gatherers, Colorado, Meaningless, and The Amorphous Blob.
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Alan Ball
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Alan Ball is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, director, producer and occasional actor, who is best known for writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, and for creating the HBO original drama series Six Feet Under. -
Margaret Edson
Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961. She earned degrees in history and literature, and she has been a public school teacher since 1992. Her play Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. The play has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages, and the HBO version won the Emmy Award for best film in 2001. She lives with her family in Atlanta and teaches sixth-grade social studies at Inman Middle School.
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Beth Steel
Beth Steel’s first play Ditch premiered at the HighTide Festival before transferring to the Old Vic Tunnels. Ditch was shortlisted for the John Whiting Award. Wonderland, her second play, was performed at Hampstead Theatre and won her the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Her third play, Labyrinth opened at the Hampstead Theatre in 2016.
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Steven Dietz
Steven Dietz is an American playwright whose work is largely performed regionally, i.e. outside of New York City. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, Dietz graduated in 1980 with a Theater degree from the University of Northern Colorado. He is the recipient of the PEN U.S.A. Award in Drama (for Lonely Planet); the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award (Fiction and Still Life With Iris); and the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award (The Rememberer). Halcyon Days is one of his other successful plays. Many of his plays are very political. He lives in Seattle.
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Hazel Edwards
Hazel is a readaholic, author and Reading Ambassador. Her unconventional memoir is 'Not Just a Piece of Cake-Being an Author' (now on AUDIBLE and available from www.ligatu _re as part of UnTapped project of historical Australian literature. ) .'
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'Wasted?' a YA/adult cross over #Clific novel is her latest, set around the Garbage Patches, mid ocean where Asylum Seekers trade bio fuel to form a new State.
Adult murder mystery 'Celebrant Sleuth: I do...or die' with asexual sleuth Quinn is currently on AUDIBLE ,read as an audio book by the author from print & e versions. 'Wed,Then Dead on The Ghan' is a mini-sequel available on Kindle and currently being adapted as a screenplay.
Although Hazel mentors her 'Hazelnuts' and helps people craft their a -
Lucy Prebble
Lucy Prebble is a British playwright. She is the author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome, The Effect and ENRON, and adaptation writer of the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
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Lynn Nottage
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. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice; the first in 2009 for Ruined, and the second in 2017 for Sweat.
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Jason Miller
There is more than one author with this name
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Jason Miller was an Oscar-nominated actor and Pulitzer-winning playwright, known for his role as Father Karras in The Exorcist and for his popular play That Championship Season (which he also directed for film.) -
Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The
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Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.
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Vogel was born in Washington, D.C. to Donald Stephen Vogel, an advertising executive, and Phyllis Rita Bremerman, a secretary for United States Postal Service Training and Development Center. She is a graduate of The Catholic University of America (1974, B.A.) and Cornell University (1976, M.A.). Vogel also attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972.
A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-w -
Stephen Karam
Stephen Karam is the author of Sons of the Prophet, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner Awards for Best Play. His other play is Speech & Debate, the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground; columbinus (New York Theatre Workshop). He wrote the libretto for Dark Sisters, an original chamber opera with composer Nico Muhly (co-produced by Gotham Chamber Opera, MTG and Opera Company of Philadelphia).
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John Patrick Shanley
John Patrick Shanley was born in The Bronx, New York City, to a telephone operator mother and a meat-packer father. He is a graduate of New York University, and is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre.
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For his script for the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Shanley won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
In 1990, Shanley directed his script of Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley also wrote two songs for the movie: "Marooned Without You" and "The Cowboy Song."
In 2004 Shanley was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame.
In 2005, Shanley's play Doubt: A Parable was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play. Dou -
David Auburn
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also co-author, along with Eric Roth, of the screenplay of the 2005 film Munich, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and earned Kushner (along with Roth) an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Nella Larsen
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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Quiara Alegría Hudes
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a writer, barrio feminist, and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include a Pulitzer-winning drama, Water By the Spoonful, and a Tony-winning Broadway musical, In the Heights (co-authored with Lin-Manuel Miranda). Her screenplay adaptation of In the Heights opens in movie theaters nationwide this June.
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Along with her cousin and a dedicated circle of volunteers, Hudes founded and runs Emancipated Stories, a collection of pages written by people who have been or remain incarcerated. -
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are four-time Academy Award winning American filmmakers. For more than twenty years, the pair have written and directed numerous successful films, ranging from screwball comedies (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy) to film noir (Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men), to movies where genres blur together (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink). The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under
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Christopher Shinn
Christopher Shinn is the author of Dying City (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live (Obie in Playwriting), Now or Later (Evening Standard Theater Award for Best Play shortlist), and Four. Most recently, his play Against premiered at the Almeida Theatre and his adaptation of Ödön von Horváth's Judgment Day premiered at Park Avenue Armory. Of his thirteen original plays, over half had their world premiere in England, with five at the Royal Court. Fellowships include the Guggenheim (2005), the Radcliffe (2019), and the Cullman (2020). His plays are published by Methuen and he teaches playwriting at the New School.
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Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.
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Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the ag -
Missouri Williams
Missouri Williams is a writer and editor who lives in Prague. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Astra, Granta, and Five Dials. Her first book, The Doloriad, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Dead Ink Books in the UK.
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Bryony Lavery
Bryony Lavery is a British dramatist, known for her successful and award-winning 1998 play Frozen. In addition to her work in theatre, she has also written for television and radio.
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Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She was co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School until stepping down in 2020.
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Dennis Kelly
THEATRE INCLUDES: Debris (Theatre503/BAC); Osama the Hero (Hampstead); After the End (Paines Plough/Traverse/The Bush/UK and international tour); Love and Money (Young Vic/Royal Exchange); Taking Care of Baby (Hampstead/Birmingham Rep); Orphans (Paines Plough/Traverse/Birmingham Rep/Soho). Plays for young people include: DNA (National Theatre) and Our Teacher is a Troll (National Theatre of Scotland). He also co-wrote the comedy series Pulling (BBC3) and wrote and created Utopia (Channel 4).
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His plays have been performed in over thirty countries worldwide and translated into twenty languages. -
David Lindsay-Abaire
David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright and lyricist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play, Rabbit Hole.
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Naomi Iizuka
Naomi Iizuka's most recent play, 17 Reasons (Why), was produced at Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts and published by Stage and Screen in the anthology Breaking Ground: Adventurous Plays By Adventurous Theatres, edited by Kent Nicholson. Her other plays include 36 Views; Polaroid Stories; Language of Angels; War of the Worlds (written in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company); Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls; Tattoo Girl; and Skin. Ms. Iizuka's plays have been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville; Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco; the Dallas Theatre Center and Undermain Theatre in Dallas; Frontera@Hyde Park in Austin; Printer's Devil and Annex in Seattle; NYSF/Joseph Papp P
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Patrick Marber
Patrick Albert Crispin Marber is an English comedian, playwright, director, puppeteer, actor and screenwriter. After working for a few years as a stand-up comedian, Marber was a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge. Amongst other roles, Marber portrayed the hapless reporter Peter O'Hanrahahanrahan in both On the Hour and The Day Today.
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His first play was Dealer's Choice, which he also directed. Set in a restaurant and based around a game of poker (and partly inspired by his own experiences with gambling addiction), it opened at the National Theatre in February 1995, and won the 1995 Evening Standard Awa -
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl (born 1974) is an American playwright. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.
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Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright -
Elaine May
Elaine May is an American film director, screenwriter and actress. She achieved her greatest fame in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols.
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David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang (Chinese: 黃哲倫; pinyin: Huáng Zhélún; born August 11, 1957) is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.
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He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory at Stanford and he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.
He is the author of M. Butterfly (1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Awards, Pulitzer finalist), Golden Child (1998 Tony nomination, 1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad (Drama Desk nomination), Family Devotions (Drama Desk Nomination), Sound and Beauty, and Bondage. His newest -
Eugene O'Neill
American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.
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He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.
His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes -
Charles Ludlam
Charles Braun Ludlam was an American actor, director, and playwright.
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Ludlam joined John Vaccaro's Play-House of the Ridiculous, and after a falling out, became founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York City in 1967. His first plays were inchoate exercises: however, starting with Bluebeard he began to write more structured works, which, though they were pastiches of gothic novels, Lorca, Shakespeare, Wagner, popular culture, old movies, and anything else that might get a laugh, had more serious import.
Theater critic Brendan Gill after seeing one of Ludlam's plays famously remarked, "This isn't farce. This isn't absurd. This is absolutely ridiculous!".
Yet on his own work Ludlam had commented: "I would say that my work falls i -
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
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Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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David Lindsay-Abaire
David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright and lyricist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play, Rabbit Hole.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.
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Vogel was born in Washington, D.C. to Donald Stephen Vogel, an advertising executive, and Phyllis Rita Bremerman, a secretary for United States Postal Service Training and Development Center. She is a graduate of The Catholic University of America (1974, B.A.) and Cornell University (1976, M.A.). Vogel also attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972.
A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-w -
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl (born 1974) is an American playwright. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.
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Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright -
David Auburn
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Lynn Nottage
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. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice; the first in 2009 for Ruined, and the second in 2017 for Sweat.
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Anton Chekhov
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
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Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 -
Clare Barron
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. She won the 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting for You Got Older. She was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dance Nation.
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Source: Wikipedia
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Jackie Sibblies Drury
Jackie Sibblies Drury is an American playwright. A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, she is a graduate of Yale and Brown University MFA playwriting program, receiving the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting.
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Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatisation of the abuses of power, and exploration of sexual politics.[1] She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and one of world theatre's most influential writers.
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Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards i -
Athol Fugard
Athol Fugard was a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright. Acclaimed in 1985 as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time, he published more than thirty plays. He was best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a film of the same name, which won an Academy Award in 2005. It was directed by Gavin Hood.
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Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.
Fugard received many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including t -
Clare Barron
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. She won the 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting for You Got Older. She was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dance Nation.
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Source: Wikipedia
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Nilo Cruz
Cruz'z interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where Cruz studied under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University where he would later receive his M.F.A. in 1994.
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In 2001, Cruz served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics. Rafael de Acha, produced and directed the world premier performance of Anna in the Tropics, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smits in the lead role.
Some of the theatres -
Matthew López
American playwright, known for The Whipping Man and The Inheritance.
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Dominique Morisseau
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.
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Bruce Wagner
Bruce Wagner is the author of The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN Faulkner fiction award finalist); Still Holding; I'll Let You Go (a PEN USA fiction award finalist); I'm Losing You; and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Lynn Riggs
Rollie Lynn Riggs (August 31, 1899 – June 30, 1954) wrote 21 full-length plays, several short stories, poems, and a television script.
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The Theatre Guild produced his most well-known play, Green Grow The Lilacs, on Broadway in 1931, where it ran for 64 performances. The musical Oklahoma!, based on Riggs' play, opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943, and ran until May 29, 1948 for 2,212 performances. -
David Benson French
David Benson French, OC was a Canadian playwright, most noted for his "Mercer Plays" series.
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David Harrower
David Harrower is a Scottish playwright, who, as of of 2005, lives in Glasgow. His first play, Knives in Hens, which premiered at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1995, was considered a critical and popular success.
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Deborah Chancellor
Deborah Chancellor is a writer of fiction and non-fiction books for children. To date she has written nearly 100 books and worked with many leading publishers. Deborah is a versatile author who has written biographies for teenagers, adapted Bible stories for pre-school children, and teenage fiction for older children with reading difficulties. She is a prolific writer of children's non-fiction on a wide range of subjects.
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She has been translated into many languages and is sold all over the world. Her books have been shortlisted for awards, such as the Little Rebels Award (Harriet Tubman, 2014) and Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (Being a Vegetarian, 2010).
Deborah is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, and was RFL Fellow at Newnham -
Harold Clurman
Harold Edgar Clurman was an American theatre director and drama critic, "one of the most influential in the United States". He was most notable as one of the three founders of New York City's Group Theatre.
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Lisa Loomer
Lisa Loomer is an acclaimed American playwright and screenwriter whose work often explores family life, cultural identity, and pressing social issues. She is best known for The Waiting Room, a widely produced play examining body image and societal beauty standards across different cultures and eras. Her powerful storytelling also shaped the screenplay for the film Girl, Interrupted.
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Born in New York, Loomer later moved to Mexico, an experience that deepened her connection to Latina and immigrant narratives, which often appear in her work. She studied theatre at Brandeis University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, beginning her career as an actress and stand-up comic before turning to playwriting.
Loomer's plays, including Roe, Living Out, -
Horton Foote
Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta.
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Robert E. Sherwood
Robert Emmet Sherwood was an American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.
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Owen Gould Davis
Owen Gould Davis, Sr., who published variously under the names Owen Davis and Ike Swift, was an American dramatist who received the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Icebound . He was the father of actor Owen Davis Jr., and screenwriter Donald Davis.
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