Lanford Wilson was an American playwright,[1] considered one of the founders of the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement died he was , 73.. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.(April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) |
Biography
Early years
Wilson was born to Ralph Eugene and Violetta Tate Wilson in Lebanon, Missouri. After his parents' divorce, he moved with his mother to Springfield, where they lived until she remarried; when he was 11, they moved again to Ozark. There he attended high school, and after graduation, he moved to San Diego, California, where he briefly attended San Diego State University, and lived with his father. Thereafter, he relocated for six years to Chicago, where he began to explore playwriting at the University of Chicago.[2]Career
Wilson began his active career as a playwright in the early 1960s at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village,[3] writing one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free!, and The Madness of Lady Bright. The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at the Caffe Cino in May 1964 and was the venue's first significant success. The play featured actor Neil Flanagan in the title role as Leslie Bright, a neurotic aging queen. The Madness of Lady Bright is considered a landmark play in the representation of homosexuality. It lasted for over 200 performances, making it the longest running play ever seen at the Caffe Cino. Wilson was subsequently invited to present his work Off-Broadway, including his plays Balm in Gilead and The Rimers of Eldritch produced at Cafe La MaMa.
Joanna (Lee Taylor-Allan) and Lawrence (Kenneth Boys) in a scene from the 1986 New York revival of Lanford Wilson's Home Free!
Wilson was a co-founder of the Circle Repertory Company in 1969 and many of his plays were first presented there, directed by his long-standing collaborator, Marshall W. Mason.[4] The Circle Rep's production of Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore won the 1973 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Obie Award, and in 1980 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Talley's Folly.Wilson's first full-length play, Balm in Gilead, depicts a doomed romance in a greasy spoon diner inhabited by junkies, prostitutes and thieves. It premiered at LaMaMa in 1965 directed by Marshall W. Mason, and had a memorable Off-Broadway revival in the 1984, directed by John Malkovich. The latter production was a co-production of Circle Repertory Company and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
As the above description of The Madness of Lady Bright indicates, gay identity is a major theme in Wilson's work,[5] although some of his plays, such as Talley's Folly (1979), which won him the Pulitzer Prize, don't explore it at all. Lemon Sky (1970), Fifth of July (1978), and Burn This (1986) also deal with gay issues. Lemon Sky, his most autobiographical play, tells the story of a young man's struggle with his crude, uneducated father, when he tries to come out of the closet. In Fifth of July, a hit on Broadway in 1980-82, two of the central characters are a gay couple living in a Midwestern town, one of whom is a disabled Vietnam veteran. In Burn This a central character is a gay man who writes advertising for a living and is involved with both gay identity and straight friends, one of whom has died in a boating accident before the play begins. The entire group struggles together to deal with their collective grief.
Wilson's plays which have run nine months or more on Broadway include Fifth of July, Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley's Folly, and Burn This. Hot l Baltimore, one of his most successful plays, ran for 1,166 performances in a venue seating 299 people. It was also adapted into a short-lived television comedy by TV producer Norman Lear.Wilson was also a founding member of the New York State Summer School of the Arts, of which Circle Rep was the theater contingent.
Wilson and his directing collaborator Marshall W. Mason encouraged so-called "method" acting and often hark back to the classic techniques of Anton Chekhov, updated with some distinctly modernist and post-modernist touches.[citation needed] They have also been close to and have been fervent admirers of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. Many of Wilson's plays feature strong, sympathetic central characters, truly repulsive villains, agonizing plot twists, and tragic or semi-tragic endings.
In addition to writing plays, Wilson wrote the texts for several 20th-century operas, including at least two collaborations with composer Lee Hoiby: Summer and Smoke (1971) and This is the Rill Speaking (1992) (based on his own play). With composer Kenneth Fuchs, he created three chamber musicals, The Great Nebula in Orion, A Betrothal, and Brontosaurus, which were originally presented by Circle Repertory Company in New York City.
In 2010, Debra Monk presented Wilson with the Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. This honor was bestowed on Wilson on behalf of his peers and fellow artists of the Off-Off-Broadway community "in recognition of his brave and unique works that helped established the Off-Off-Broadway community, and propel the independent theatre voice as an important contributor to the American stage."[6][7]
A Personal Note
After Wilson moved to New York City in the early 1960's, he settled in a small apartment in West Greenwich Village on Sheridan Square, where he lived for many years. Later, after Hot L Baltimore became a hit, he was able to buy a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island. He then began living in both places, using the West Village apartment mainly when he had a play in production in New York. He also became active in a community theatre company in Sag Harbor and produced some of his shorter plays there. Around 1998 he finally gave up his apartment and lived full-time in Sag Harbor, where he was living when he died.Bibliography
The following list is not complete and includes only some major works. Wilson has written dozens of short plays, they are collected in a volume entitled "Twenty-one short plays of Lanford Wilson."
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