Lanford Wilson

Lanford Wilson
Wilson presenting at the 2006 New York Innovative Theatre Awards
Born	April 13, 1937(1937-04-13) Lebanon, Missouri
Died	March 24, 2011(2011-03-24) (aged 73) Wayne, New Jersey
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	San Diego State University University of Chicago
Information
Period	1964–2006
Debut works	Home Free! (1964) Balm in Gilead (1965)
Notable work(s)	The Hot l Baltimore (1973)
Magnum opus	Talley's Folly (1979) Fifth of July (1978)
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1980), Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards (2010)

Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) was an American playwright who helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. 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. He was nominated for three Tony Awards.

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, Missouri, where they lived until she remarried. He had two half-brothers, John and Jim, and one stepsister, Judy. When he was 11, they moved to Ozark, Missouri.^{[citation needed]} There, he attended high school and developed a love for film and art and began going to the local movie theatre regularly.^{[citation needed]} He developed an interest in acting and eventually became involved in his high school plays. His most notable performance was as Tom in "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams.

Wilson attended Southwest Missouri State University. During his time there he was torn between art and story writing.^{[citation needed]} He left the school without obtaining a degree.^{[citation needed]} Deciding to spend more time with his father, he moved to San Diego, California, where he worked as a riveter in the Ryan Aircraft Plant. While in San Diego, he took art and art history classes at the State College.^{[citation needed]} His time with his father proved to be difficult, leaving Wilson feeling unwanted and unaccepted as a homosexual.^{[citation needed]} He relocated to Chicago, where he began to explore playwriting at the University of Chicago. There, he became a part of the counterculture of the city, even acting as a male prostitute for some time.^{[citation needed]} He worked as a graphic artist for a short period of time before he realized through his hobby of short story writing that he wanted to be a playwright. He enrolled in a playwriting class at the University of Chicago where he created several one-act plays.^{[citation needed]}

In 1962, Wilson moved to Greenwich Village in New York City to find a place in the theatre scene there. He worked several odd jobs before finding a job in the subscriptions office of the New York Shakespeare Festival.^{[citation needed]} After seeing Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson at the Caffe Cino, Wilson met the producer, Joseph Cino, along with Ellen Stewart, a pioneer in the Off-off-Broadway movement, who helped him get started in his career.

Career

Wilson began his professional career as a playwright in the early 1960s at Caffe Cino, writing one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free! and The Madness of Lady Bright. He worked odd jobs to support himself during this Off-off-Broadway apprenticeship. The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at 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. It is considered a landmark play in the representation of homosexuality. It lasted for over 200 performances, setting a record as the longest-running play at Caffe Cino.

Joanna (Lee Taylor-Allan) and Lawrence (Kenneth Boys) in a scene from the 1986 New York revival of Wilson's Home Free!

After this success, he wrote plays for Ellen Stewart's Cafe La Mama from 1965 to 1972. Here he wrote his first full-length plays, including Balm in Gilead, which depicted 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, co-produced by Circle Repertory Company and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The Rimers of Eldritch (1967), a play set in the Midwest, won the 1966–1967 Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award for contribution of Off-Broadway theatre. This was followed by The Gingham Dog (1968) about the breakup of an interracial couple. Lemon Sky (1970), fictionalized Wilson's reconciliation with his father. It is his most autobiographical play, telling the story of a young man's struggle with his crude, uneducated father, when he tries to come out of the closet.

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, along with Rob Thirkield and Tanya Berezin. There he wrote some of his most significant works, most of which were directed by Mason. His first plays for the Company in 1972 were a one-act, The Great Nebula in Orion, and an improvisational round, The Family Continues. 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. It ran for 1,166 performances and was adapted into a short-lived television comedy by TV producer Norman Lear in 1975. Also during this time, he wrote The Mound Builders (1976), a play set in the Midwest, and Brontosaurus (1977), a one-act play about a Manhattan antique dealer. Wilson was also a founding member of the New York State Summer School of the Arts, of which Circle Rep was the theatre contingent.

Gay identity is a major theme in Wilson's work. The Madness of Lady Bright, Lemon Sky, Fifth of July (1978) and Burn This (1986) all deal with sexual identity crises. 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. Wilson was nominated for Tony Awards for Fifth of July and two other plays of this period, Talley's Folly (1979) and Angels Fall (1983). In Burn This, a central character is a gay man who writes advertising for a living and is involved with both gay and straight friends, one of whom has died in a boating accident before the play begins. The group struggles together to deal with their collective grief. John Malkovich starred in the original production. Wilson and Mason encouraged so-called "method" acting and often used the classic techniques of Anton Chekhov, updated with modernist and post-modernist touches.

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). 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."

Personal life

After Wilson moved to New York City in the early 1960s, he settled in a small apartment in West Greenwich Village on Sheridan Square, where he lived for many years. In the 1970s, he bought a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island. He lived 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.^{[citation needed]}

When living in Manhattan, he worked with Playwrights Laboratory at the Circle Repertory Company, often attending readings, rehearsals, and productions. Around 1998, he finally gave up his apartment in New York and lived full-time in Sag Harbor. Wilson was openly homosexual and never had children. In 2004, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Death

On March 24, 2011, Wilson died, aged 73, from complications of pneumonia.

Bibliography

The following is a list of selected major works. Wilson wrote dozens of short plays, including those collected in the volume "Twenty-one short plays of Lanford Wilson."

• Home Free! (1964)
• The Madness of Lady Bright (1964)
• Balm in Gilead (1965)
• Ludlow Fair (1965)
• Wandering (1966)
• The Rimers of Eldritch (1967)
• The Gingham Dog (1968)
• Lemon Sky (1970)
• Serenading Louie (1970)
• The Hot l Baltimore (1973)

• The Mound Builders (1975)
• Fifth of July (1978)
• Talley's Folly (1979)
• A Tale Told (1981, later revised and renamed Talley & Son)
• Angels Fall (1983)
• Burn This (1986)
• Redwood Curtain (play)|Redwood Curtain (1992)
• A Sense of Place (1996)
• Sympathetic Magic (1998)
• Book of Days (2000)
• Rain Dance (2002)

References

• Barnett, Gene A. (1987). Lanford Wilson. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 080577498X. 
• Busby, Mark (1987). Lanford Wilson. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University. ISBN 0884300803. 
• Bryer, Jackson (ed) (1994). Lanford Wilson: a Casebook. New York: Garland Pub.. ISBN 0824006488. 

External links

• Lanford Wilson at the Internet Broadway Database
• Lanford Wilson at the Internet Movie Database
• Lanford Wilson at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Don S. Lawson (17 October 2007). "Wilson, Lanford (b. 1937)". glbtq Encyclopedia. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/wilson_l.html. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
• "Biography of American dramatist Lanford Wilson". Moonstruck Drama Bookstore. 2008. http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc65.html. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
• Robert Patrick's Lanford Wilson page
• Links to interviews with and about Lanford Wilson and some other Off-Off personalities