Great Contemporary American Playwrights
Noteworthy and Award-Winning Playwrights 20th and 21st Century
Oct 19, 2009
Live theater now competes with television and films for audiences, and is no longer the lone means for expressing ideas and entertaining. For this reason, contemporary playwrights do not often attain the cultural importance they once claimed in the past. However, there are still playwrights of recent history who use their talents and works to inspire the human race. Here is just a fraction of the noteworthy and award-winning playwrights that have challenged audiences to dream, think, and feel through the decades.
For more information, read also Contemporary American Playwrights and Top Contemporary American Playwrights
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard (born 1943) is an American television and film director, actor, and playwright. Shepard briefly attended college but discontinued in order to join a traveling theater group. He became highly involved with New York's Off-Off Broadway scene starting around age nineteen. In 1964 Sam began his playwriting career with Theater Genesis's productions of his one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden.
During the 1970s Shepard focused his attention on writing instead of his acting career. His plays tend to demonstrate a dissident view of American life, containing themes of solitude and troubled families. By 1980, Shepard was the most produced American playwright after Tennessee Williams. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1994.
Edith Oliver of The New Yorker says, "Mr. Shepard is the most deeply serious humorist of the American theatre, and a poet with no use whatsoever for the 'poetic.' He brings fresh news of love, here and now, in all its potency and deviousness and foolishness, and of many other matters as well."
Representative Works:
- Buried Child (1979) Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- Fool For Love (1983)
- The War in Heaven (1987)
- True West (1980) Tony Nomination
- The Late Henry Moss (2000)
- Kicking a Dead Horse (2007)
- Ages of the Moon (2009)
Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson (born 1937) began writing after enrolling in a playwriting class at the University of Chicago in 1959. His first play that was put into production at Cafe Cino in New York was So Long at the Fair in 1963. Wilson, along with longtime associate, Marshall W. Mason, founded the Circle Theater in New York City. Throughout his career as a playwright, Wilson has explored many themes including loneliness, alienation, and dissolving illusions. His plays often include simultaneous dialogue, delayed character exposition, and experimental staging.
Representative Works:
- Rimers of Eldrich (1965) Vernon Rice Award
- The Hot I Baltimore (1973) Obie Award, New York Critics' Circle Award, Outer Critics' Circle Award
- The Mound Builders (1975) Obie Award
- Talley's Folly (1979) Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- Burn This (1987)
Doug Wright
Doug Wright (born 1962) received his bachelor's from Yale University and his Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from New York University. He has been most known for his multiple award-winning plays Quills and I Am My Own Wife. In addition to his straight play writings, Doug has written books for popular Broadway musicals.
Wright discusses his style saying that "no one who writes for the American theater can claim they haven’t been profoundly influenced by Tennessee Williams." Themes from his works include: reality versus perception, sexual identity, and censorship.
- Quills (2000) Obie Award, Kesselring Award for Best New American Play
- Unwrap Your Candy(2001)
- I Am My Own Wife (2004) Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award for Best Play
- Grey Gardens (2006) Tony Award Best Book of a Musical, Drama Desk Award Outstanding Book of a Musical
- The Little Mermaid (2008) musical
Sources
- Contemporary American Playwrights by Christopher Bigsby
- American Playwrights Since 1945 edited by Philip C. Kolin
- A Companion to Twentieth-century American Drama by David Krasner.
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