Photo Flash: Wright, Ives, et al. at 'The Play That Changed My Life' Book Signing

The Play That Changed My Life contributing playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife), David Ives (Venus in Fur), Diana Son (Stop Kiss) book editor Ben Hodges and Howard Sherman, Executive Director of the American Theatre Wing were at a book signing at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes and Noble Wednesday, February 24th.  The event was moderated by Howard Sherman, about the American Theatre Wing's new book, The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them.

The Play That Changed My Life was released to great acclaim in December 2009. The 200-page paperback, published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books and edited by Ben Hodges (Theatre World), features an Introduction by Paula Vogel and essays and interviews 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. It is available for purchase wherever books are sold.