Davi Napoleon
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Davi Napoleon, born Davida Skurnick (born 1946) is an American theater historian and critic. She was educated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she earned a BA and an MA in psychology while studying playwriting with Kenneth Thorpe Rowe. She went on to New York University, where she earned an MA in drama and a Ph.D. in performance studies.
She was a columnist for TheaterWeek magazine and has been a contributing editor for Theater Crafts, which became Theatre Crafts International, then Entertainment Design, then Live Design. She has also written for American Theatre, American Film, InTheatre, Playbill, ScriptWriter News, Stages and assorted general interest magazines. She was a stringer for the Detroit Free Press and for the Ann Arbor News in the 1980's.
She has written extensively about the history and issues surrounding the not-for-profit theater in America. Her book about Robert Kalfin and the Chelsea Theater Center is an in-depth history of the life of a theater in the 1960s and 70s. Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater (1991) describes on and off stage dramas, detailing internal conflicts when a theater that was the darling of critics and audiences was forced to downsize because of changes in funding to the arts. Hal Prince wrote the foreword to the book that found a readership among working artists both because it is one of the first complex studies of regional theater and because of its dramatic structure and narrative.
She has also written many articles about producer/critic Robert Brustein and interviewed critic John Simon for The Paris Review.
Napoleon has written several plays, including Four's Company, produced at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City in 1974. She was awarded two University of Michigan Hopwood Awards in 1965 and 1966 for plays she wrote when a student. These cash awards paid her college tuition.
She is the mother of two sons, the internationally acclaimed jazz guitarist, Randy Napoleon and Brian Napoleon. She is the daughter of the painter Fay Kleinman and the violinist Jack Skurnick. She is the wife of Greg Napoleon, a software engineer.
[edit] External Links
- website for Davi Napoleon
- partial list of articles by Davi Napoleon for Live Design
- partial list of articles by Davi Napoleon for University of Michigan publications
- partial list of features for TheaterWeek by Davi Napoleon
- partial list of Schoolbiz columns for TheaterWeek by Davi Napoleon
[edit] References
- Burns Mantle Theater Yearbook: The Best Plays of 1973-1974, edited by Otis L. Guernsey Jr. (Dodd, Mead).
