Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, author of 17 plays, has passed beyond the final curtain. Wilson, a longtime resident of Sag Harbor, Long Island, died yesterday due to complications from pneumonia at a long term acute care facility in Wayne, New Jersey; according to the Steppenwolf Theatre he passed on the eve of the Chicago company's first preview production of a new staging of his Hot l Baltimore, which was a hit Off Broadway in the '70s and later a short-lived TV sitcom. His Broadway plays include Angels Fall (1983), Redwood Curtain (1993), and Burn This (1987), which starred performer John Malkovich. more ›

In the tradition of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, Melissa James Gibson's plays incisively isolate the idiosyncrasies of colloquial speech, reveling in their often overlooked weirdness, and marveling at what these words reveal about the speaker. Her play Suitcase—Or, Those That Resemble Flies From A Distance, staged at Soho Rep in 2004, concerns two female grad students agonizing over their thesis in cluttered rooms high above the stage, while their neglected boyfriends plead desperately through the ground floor intercom. For a play in which "nothing much happens" in the conventional sense, it was a mesmerizing journey into the minds of four unstable urbanites. more ›

Christopher Durang's loopy new satire, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, is a bright and colorful examination of your average American family's relationship with torture. When Felicity—played by Laura Benanti, fresh off her Tony award-winning turn in Gypsy—wakes up in bed next to the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking Zamir (Amir Arison, who you may remember from Queens Boulevard), she discovers that her long night of partying has had some undesirable consequences. And her only hope of shaking her louche new spouse is to take him home to meet her eccentric, neo-con father (Richard Poe), who takes a very special interest in this mysterious newcomer. more ›

Horton Foote, the author of over sixty plays and considered by many to be "the American Chekhov," died yesterday in Hartford, CT. He was 92. The courteous, industrious playwright was living in Hartford while adapting his nine-play Orphans’ Home Cycle for a forthcoming production at the Signature Theater here in New York, according to the Times obit. In addition to his plays, many of which chronicled the lives of residents in a small, fictitious Texas town, Foote also wrote the screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. Nine of his plays were produced on Broadway, most recently the mordant comedy Dividing the Estate. Speaking to the Times in 1986, Foote shared his personal philosophy: "I believe very deeply in the human spirit and I have a sense of awe about it because I don’t know how people carry on. I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don’t ask quarters." Foote's lifelong friend Harper Lee once said the playwright "looked like God, only cleanshaven." more ›

Playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) has been named the first recipient of the "Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award," which is to be awarded biennially to an American playwright whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theater. The prize comes with a cool $200,000, which Kushner says will "buy me time to work on plays," after he finishes up a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln for Steven Spielberg and another film script about Eugene O'Neill. The Distinguished Playwright Award will be given out in alternate years with another award of $50,000 for early-career playwrights "whose professional work shows great promise." In accepting the prize, Kushner noted that "playwriting is in a lot of trouble now,” because even successful writers have to split their time with Hollywood to support their lifestyles. more ›

That Broadway revival of Equus that's packing them in at the Broadhurst (93% attendance, giddyup!) has been getting a lot of press, much of it focused on Daniel Radcliffe's frenzied nude scene, in which [spoiler?] he runs amok and blinds some horses. Michael Riedel at the Post has dubbed the show's big attraction "Harry Potter's other wand" ha ha, but at least one person is not amused by the quip: Equus's author Peter Shaffer, who tells the columnist, "How very naughty of you. There is a great deal more going on in the play, you know. I'm not writing porn, for God's sake! I was irritated that people talked on and on about it. It was so infantile." He's absolutely right! So let's have no immature comments about these NSFW cell phone photos of Radcliffe's penis taken by an Equus audience member the other night. more ›

Since first appearing on film in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Wallace Shawn has become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors, familiar to audiences for his striking performances in everything from The Princess Bride to The L Word. But theatergoers also know another side of Wallace Shawn; the relentlessly daring playwright whose work challenges conventional ideas about theater, power, sex, class, and, most unsparingly, liberal complacency. more ›