Archives for February 14, 2012

Shakespeare & Company has announced performance dates for the New England premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-man-two-character play about Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, which stars John Douglas Thompson and will be directed by Gordon Edelstein. Opening night is August 22, 2012, and the show will run through September 2 at the Founders’ Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Tickets go on sale today. We expect them to sell briskly, so if you’re interested in coming, don’t dally.
For more information, or to purchase tickets on line, go here. You can also call the box office at 413-637-3353.
UPDATE: I just received this e-mail from a Playwright Who Must Remain Nameless:

a critic who’s a working playwright!!!!!! outrageous!!!!! outlandish!!!!!! impossible!!!!!!! hoorah!

And yes, I’m smiling. Broadly.

I put this Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back of my business card around the time that it started looking like Satchmo at the Waldorf was going to get produced.
No, I’m not having second thoughts:

One good list deserves another, so here are the ten American plays I most wish I’d written. The second “play” is actually an evening-long bill of one-act plays by the same author, but it’s my list, so I decided to count it as a single work.

As with my previous list of American novels, the word best was nowhere in my mind when I drew up this roster. Since I’ve lately become a playwright myself, I suppose you could say that I have more of a stake in this list than its predecessor, but the standards for inclusion are identical: these are the ten American plays that mean the most to me personally. I love them and identify with them, and though I will never live long enough to write anything remotely as good, they collectively define the kind of play I’d like to be able to write:

• Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful

• William Inge, Come Back, Little Sheba

• David Ives, All in the Timing

• Warren Leight, Side Man

• Kenneth Lonergan, The Starry Messenger

• David Mamet, American Buffalo

• Lynn Nottage, Crumbs from the Table of Joy

• Thornton Wilder, Our Town

• Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

• August Wilson, Fences

“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Willa Cather, One of Ours