The American Theatre Wing has announced that Applause Theatre & Cinema Books will publish its original book, The American Theatre Wing presents The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them. The 224-page paperback, edited by Ben Hodges (Theatre World), will be released in October 2009 and features an Introduction by Paula Vogel and essays from nineteen of America's most distinguished playwrights on the plays that transformed their lives. Contributors, who have a combined total of some 40 Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and Obies, include Jon Robin Baitz, Nilo Cruz, Christopher Durang, Horton Foote, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Patrick Shanley and more.
From Edward Albee's 1935 visit to New York's Hippodrome Theatre to see Jimmy Durante (and an elephant) in Rodgers and Hart's Jumbo, to Diana Son's twelfth-grade field trip in 1983 to see Diane Venora play Hamlet at The Public Theater, from David Henry Hwang's seminal San Francisco encounter with Equus to a young Beth Henley's epiphany after seeing her mother in a "Green Bean Man costume," The Play That Changed My Life offers readers a unique peek into the theatrical influences of some of the nation's most important dramatists on stages both professional and amateur, in New York, across the country and overseas.
The 224-page book is filled with tributes, memories, anecdotes and other insights that connect past to present and altogether make this volume an instant "must have" for anyone who adores the theatre. Other contributors include David Auburn, Charles Fuller, A.R. Gurney, Tina Howe, David Ives, Donald Margulies, Sarah Ruhl, ReGina Taylor and Doug Wright.
American Theatre Wing Executive Director Howard Sherman commented: "Eighteen years ago, I read a film book with a similar title to ours and was disappointed because the essays weren't by filmmakers, but rather by essayists recalling their youth through films. I decided back then that if I ever had the opportunity, I would see to it that theatre got its own book with this theme -- but one that would tell us about playwrights' formative influences in their own words. I held on to that for a long time, and thanks to the mission of the American Theatre Wing, the enthusiasm of the playwriting community, the efforts of Ben Hodges and the support of Applause Books, my long-ago vision will finally be in the hands of theatre students and fans this fall."
Ben Hodges is editor-in-chief of Theatre World, the oldest annual pictorial and statistical record of the American theatre and the recipient of a 2001 Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre. His other publications include The Commercial Theater Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals (with FrEd Vogel), Forbidden Acts: Pioneering Gay and Lesbian Plays of the Twentieth Century and Out Plays: Landmark Gay and Lesbian Plays of the Twentieth Century.
