Mac Wellman

Mac Wellman (born 1945) is an American playwright, author, and poet. Wellman is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. His plays frequently resemble a moving collage of events which has more in common with an avant-garde dance production than Broadway-style theater. Helen Shaw writes, “Since a 1984 essay, ‘The Theatre of Good Intentions,’ [Wellman] has been the cynosure in a heaven full of experimental playwrights who rail against what Jonathan Lear, in his book Open Minded, called a ‘tyranny’ of ‘the already known’” (vii).

Discussing his style with BOMB Magazine, Wellman said that he uses words as objects in his writing. "I found if you try to write totally in cliches and things that don't sound right," Wellman clarified, "you deal with a language that frankly is 98% of what people speak, think, and hear. So it's enormously enjoyable." This type of language has been positively characterized as "an untrammeled flow of logorrhea: plain words, fancy words, space-age words, Victorian words and words that defy the dictionary" by New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley.

Professional Credits

Wellman is the Donald I. Fine Professor of Play Writing at Brooklyn College, New York City, and in 2010 he became a CUNY Distinguished Professor. Wellman is author to more than forty plays, including Harm's Way (1978), The Self-Begotten (1982), The Bad Infinity (1983), Dracula (1987), Whirligig (1988), Crowbar (1989), 7 Blowjobs (1991), Terminal Hip (1984), Murder of Crows and Description Beggared or the Allegory of WHITENESS (2000). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990 he received an Obie award for Best New American Play (for Bad Penny, Terminal Hip, and Crowbar). In 1991 he received another Obie award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Writers Award, and most recently the 2003 Obie award for Lifetime Achievement as well as a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts that same year. He is a co-founder of The Flea Theater in New York City.

Bibliography

• Appler, Keith. "Mac Wellman and the Language Poets: Chaos Writing and the General Economy of Language." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism　24.4 (Spring 2010):　69–90.
• Castagno, Paul. "Varieties of Monologic Strategy: the Dramaturgy of Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman," New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 34 (May 1993) pp. 134-146. Cambridge University Press.
• Castagno, Paul. "Informing the New Dramaturgy: Critical Theory to Creative Process," Theatre Topics Vol 3: no. 1 (March 1993) pp. 29-42. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Castagno, Paul. New Playwriting Strategies: A Language Based Approach to Playwriting. New York, London: Routledge (2001).
• Erickson, Jon. “The Mise en Scène of the Non-Euclidean Character: Wellman, Jenkin and Strindberg.” Modern Drama 41.3 (Fall 1998).
• Masterman, Glynn. Perpendicular to the Aristotelian: The Speculations of Mac Wellman. Los Angeles: Three Pigeons Publishing, 2009.
• Munk, Erika. “The Difficulty of Defending a Form: David Lang and Mac Wellman, Interviewed by Erika Munk.” Theater 32.2 (Summer 2002), 56-61.
• Shaw, Helen. “Mac Wellman and Things of the Devil.” The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. vii-xii.
• Simpson, Jim, artistic dir. Mac Wellman, co-founder. The Flea Theater. <www.theflea.org>.
• Wellman, Mac. “A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater.” Cellophane: Plays by Mac Wellman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 1-16.
• --- Speculations: An Essay on the Theater. Jan. 20, 2009, <www.macwellman.com/images/speculations13.pdf>.
• --- “Speculations: An Essay on the Theater” (abridged version). The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 293-342.
• --- The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
• --- The Difficulty of Crossing a Field: Nine New Plays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
• --- “The Theatre of Good Intentions.” Performing Arts Journal 8.3 (1984), 59-70.

See also

• Speculations: An Essay on the Theater
• The Flea Theater
• Performance art
• Performing Garage
• Elizabeth LeCompte
• The Wooster Group
• Ontological-Hysteric Theater
• Richard Foreman
• Richard Schechner
• Happenings
• Allan Kaprow
• Fluxus
• Intermedia
• Dick Higgins
• Marina Abramović
• Experimental theatre
• Avant-garde

External links

• MacWellman.com official site
• The Flea Theater [1]