Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl was born in Chicago in 1974. She studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University and did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is among the most acclaimed and accomplished young playwrights on the contemporary scene. "A recent winner of MacArthur "genius" grant, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for the comedy " The Clean House," which has been seen at many regional theaters. Some of her other plays have a particular style that blends a vibrant emotionalism with quirky comedy in theatrically adventurous ways." As of today, Ruhl lives in New York City and is married to a physician at New York University. Sarah wrote her first play in forth grade but it was never produced.

     Ruhl and Mother

Description by Paula Vogel

"Sarah Ruhl came into my intensive advanced playwriting seminar some 15 years ago. A sophomore, but i thought at first she was a senior: she was quiet and serious, but so obviously possessed a mind that came at aesthetics from a unique angle. I assigned an exercise: to write a short play with a dog as protagonist. Sarah Ruhl wrote of her father's death from that unique angle: a dog is waiting by the door, waiting for the family to come home, unaware that the family is at his master's funeral, unaware of the concept of death."
"I have worked with many stunning young voices, but i have been blessed with a continuing conversation with Ruhl over the years. I think of discussions in booths over tea that became talks in bistros in New york and Las Angeles over wine- a hungry exchange of viewpoint and experience, rushed for lack of time, between two playwrights in the field, and now i turn to Sarah as a trusted and beloved colleague who 

still has one of the most unique minds in theater I've encountered."

Discussion with Paula Vogel and these are some interesting words by Sarah Ruhl:

"The longer I do theater, the more shocked I am that you can get the play’s punctuation, the story, the casting, even the director right. Still, you have to deal with variables like: Is this the right audience? Do I have the right month of the year, the right city? Is the right reviewer coming? So much of it is chance in terms of how the aesthetic object is received. Sometimes it makes you just want to write a slim volume of poetry."

"Every production prepares you for the next production, and in that sense it’s cumulative. We think: Oh, New York is definitive. In a way, it’s just another production of one of my plays in another city. I’ve worked so much regionally that it gives me less of a sense of living or dying by one interpretation."

"I come into the theater wanting to feel and think at the same time, to have the thought affect the emotion and the emotion affect the thought. That is the pinnacle of a great night at the theater."

" I felt that theater was actually a place where the voice could be attached to emotion. Theater is still a living tradition of speech and emotion. It’s something that deeply attracts me."

"I’ve worked with so many actors with different methods and vocabularies. In almost all the productions I’ve had, it’s been the usual mode: You cast the play out of L.A. and New York, and the actors meet each other on the first day of rehearsal. I’ve been very pleased and honored and moved by the integrity of all the productions. But I’d like to discover what would happen if I worked with the same actors and designers over and over in a concentrated way. If the actor and I were able to know exactly what we meant if I said, “Give this line a little more space.” As opposed to one actor who thinks space is a subtext and another who thinks space is a technical pause."

"I had a remarkable time going to the Goodman production of The Clean House, directed by Jessica Thebus. It was exactly the play and yet more so, because there were elements I would never have thought of that were so sublime. For instance, there’s a scene where Lane, a doctor married to a doctor, imagines her husband kissing the breast of his new lover, who is one of his patients. The stage direction says, “Ana wears a gown. Is it a hospital gown or a ballroom gown?” Well, Marilyn Dodds Frank, who plays Ana, walked out in a renaissance ball gown made of lavender hospital-gown material. It had a train that was about 20 yards long. So she begins walking out in this purple gown, and it just keeps coming and coming and coming. I would never have thought of that. That was a high point of my life really, watching that production and thinking: They really read my mind. Also, the living room was very architectural, spare and abstract. There had been a beautiful skylight in Act One and in the second act it cantilevered down and became the balcony. It was so shocking—you wouldn’t think that it could just come out of the air like that. The designer completely understood abstraction and transformation of space."

"This is why I love having a baby. Anna laughs at things, even though she doesn’t understand language. I think that at the most primal level, the intention to be funny, to share wit, is beyond language. When I wrote The Clean House and began it with the joke in Portuguese that probably no one would understand, that was part of the impulse. But people do laugh. Some nights they don’t; that’s a night when we’re in trouble."

Sources: 

http://www.bombsite.com/issues/99/articles/2902

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Ruhl

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sarah_ruhl/index.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967202

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=sarah%20ruhl&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufddr9k6rbE

Conor McPherson

Conor McPherson was born in Dublin in 1971 and is an Irish playwright and director.  He was educated at the University College Dublin, however, "he hated school and didn't impress his teachers."

"McPherson did well on his exams and went on to do a Masters in Philosophy and ended up teaching ethics for two years.  During his time there he began acting, writing, and directing for the theatre."  McPherson began writing his first plays at University College of Dublin, but they never received a professional production outside UCS.  A little later, however, he found Fly By Night Theatre Company whom produced many of his plays.  He is considered by many to be one of the best contemporary Irish playwrights.  He has gotten great reviews and has performed his plays internationally.  

In 2006, McPherson made his National Theatre debut as both an actor and director with The Seafarer at the Cottesloe getting nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play.  In 2007, McPherson came to Broadway as director, receiving rare reviews including statements like "McPherson is quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation."

Honors/Awards:

The Weir won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play for 1999.

Shinning City in 2006 and was nominated for two Tony Awards, including Best Play.

The Seafarer- nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standards Awards for Best Play.

The Seafarer was also recognized for a Tony Award in 2008 for Best Featured Actor. 

Saltwater won the CICAE award for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

List of Films:

I Went Down (1997) Writer

Endgame (2000) Director

The Actors (2003) Writer and Director

The Eclipse (2009) Writer and Director

List of Plays:

Rum and Vodka (1992)

The Good Thief (1994)

This Lime Tree Bower (1995)

St. Nicholas (1997)

The Weir (1997)

Dublin Carol (2000)

Port Authority (2001)

Come on Over (2001)

Shining City (2004)

The Seafarer (2006)

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3afa9gqKzo

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/theater/reviews/10shin.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_McPherson

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=conor%20mcpherson&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wihttp://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5501

Paula Vogel

"Paula Vogel was born November of 1951.  She was born in Washington, D.C. and is a graduate of The Catholic University of America, Cornell University and also attended Bryn Mawr College.  Vogel is an American playwright as well as a university professor.  She was married to Brown University professor and author, Anne Fausto-Sterling in 2004."

"Paula Vogel is a productive playwright and has been since the 1970s. She often examines traditionally controversial issues such as sexual abuse and prostitution in her work, but has no particular theme that dominates her work.  She only writes about things that directly impact her life.  Vogel's family is known to serve as an influence to her writings.  She writes her plays for emotional circumstances and character to craft narrative structure.  She tends to select sensitive and difficult issues to write about.  Her works embrace theatrical devices such as puppetry, omniscient narration, and fantasy sequences."

How I Learned to Drive:

"Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive opened in New York in 1997.  The play concerns an affair between its protagonist, names Li'l Bit, and her uncle Peck.  The affair takes place over the course of years, with the characters of Li'l Bit maturing from age eleven to eighteen before she puts an end to it.  In spite of the serious situation, there are many comical elements of the play, which avoids the expected condemnation of this situation to look at the basic humanity that binds these two characters.  It uses innovative staging techniques to fade from one time frame to another and one place to the next.  It also uses just three actors, in addition to those playing Li'l Bit and Peck, to represent all of the other characters who affect their lives, especially their quirky, intimidating rural Maryland family.  The addition of popular music from the early-and-late-1960s, such as "Dream Baby" and "Little Surfer Girl," helps audiences understand the prevailing mood of the era that Vogel covers in this play: it is romantic and sexist, emphasizing youth and fun, the sort of social message that would make a girl like Li'l Bit, who has many feelings of insecurity, turn to a flawed relationship where she can bask in the reverence of an older man." 

http://www.topic/how-i-learned-to-drive#Notes_on_DramaAwards:

Awards:

Paula Vogel received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.

Obie Award for Best Play (1992)

Pulitzer Prize in Drama (1998)

The American Academy of Arts and Letter in (2004)

Sources:

http://www.enotes.com/drama-criticism/vogel-paula

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vogel

http://www.http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsV/vogel-paula.html.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=16679

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=4dDbZ47txvU&feature=PlayList&p=C1BDCE81D25C13FE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

http://www.topic/how-i-learned-to-drive#Notes_on_Drama

Tony Kushner

"Tony Kushner was born in 1956 and is an American playwright and screenwriter."  Kushner spent his childhood in Louisiana and moved to New York in 1974 to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University.  There he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval Studies.  He studied directing at New York's Graduate School and graduated from there in 1984.  

Kushner's style:

"Kushner's plays and screenplays are often a departure from typical Realism.  These plays and screenplays experime

nted with conventional storytelling b

y using shorter episodes.  For example, the Angels in America plays together contain almost 50 scenes.  Like Henrik Ibsen, Kushner creates stories which give rise to social discussion, instead being simply "issue plays."

Awards:

1993 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play- Angels in America.

1993 Kushner received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992 for his play, Angels in America.

1993 Tony Award for Best Play- Angel in America.

1994 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Play- Angels in America.

1994 Tony Award for Best Play- Angels in America.

2004 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special.

2005 Golden Flobe Award for best Screenplay.

2007 Laurence Oliver Award for Best New Musical- Caroline, or Change. 

2008 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. 

Angels in America has been filmed several times.  

Kushner' Current Works:

Kushner is currently working with Steve Spielberg, writing the screenplay for a new movie about the complex icon Abraham Lincoln.  

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Kushner

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc51.html

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1065785/

http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=8918

http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=4569

Sam Shepard

"Sam Shepard was born in 1943.  He is an American playwright, actor, and director of stage and screen.  He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs.  Sam Shepard was born in Illinois and worked on a farm as a teenager.  After high school Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a traveling theater group.  One thing that was extremely interesting was that he avoided the draft during the Vietnam era by claiming to be a heroin addict; however,  Shepard  was using illicit drugs during the time. "

"At the age of nineteen, Shepard became very involved in NY's off-off-Broadway theater scene.  Shepard acted prior to the 1970s but then his interests were almost strictly confined to writing.  Lots of his writing was for the stage but after three years, he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and was known as playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre where many of his works received their premier productions.  Shepard's play's that were known as notable works include Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, and A Lie of the Mind."

"At the start of his playwrighting career, Shepard did not direct his own plays.  His earliest plays were directed by a number of different directors but most often by Ralph Cook.  However, later Shepard formed a playwright relationship with Robert Woodrudd, and he had him direct the premiere of Buried Child."

Awards:

"Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play, Buried Child."

"He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1983 for the film The Right Stuff."

"He was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1984 for the film Paris."

"Shepard w

as elected to the American Aca

demy of Arts and Letters.  He received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992."

"In 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame."

"He was nominated for two Tony Awards for Buried Child in 1996, and for True West in 2000."

"He received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for "Best Actor in a Miniseries or Movie."

"He won a Dram Desk Award for his play A Lie of the Mind."

"In 2008 he was a SAG nomination for "Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a TV Movie or Miniseries" for his performance as Frank Whiteley in Ruffian."

References:

http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=8584 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001731/ 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Shepardhttp://www.

departments.bucknell.edu/theatre_dance/shepard/shepard.html