Kristine Thatcher (born 1950) is a playwright, director and actress.
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Thatcher, born Margaret Schneider, began acting at 16 with a small professional company in her hometown, Lansing, Michigan. She went on to work at regional theaters across the country. Her first husband was actor Tim Thatcher. In 1985, while married to her second husband, actor Tom Blair, she met her future and third husband when she was cast opposite him in a production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, at the Northlight Theatre in Chicago.
In the late '70s and early '80s, she acted and directed with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. She volunteered to write a show based on the poet Lorine Niedecker's life and work. The result was her first full-length play, Niedecker.[1]
She has taught at Columbia College, Lake Forest College. Although long associated with theatre in Chicago, she was been the artistic director of the Boarshead Theatre in Lansing, Michigan 2005 until 2009.[2] She has since started her own professional theater company called Stormfield Theatre, which focuses on new works and works by living playwrights.
Among Friends (winner of the 1997 Scott McPherson Memorial Award), Emma’s Child (winner of the 1995 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a 1997 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the 1997 RESOLVE “Award for Excellence in the Arts,” the 1997 Cunningham Prize for Playwriting from DePaul University, and the 1997 After Dark Award for Outstanding New Work), Voice of Good Hope (nominated for 2000 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work).[3]
Niedecker, Kristine Thatcher's earnest low-key drama celebrating the life and work of the late poet Lorine Niedecker, contemplates the artist with such intense reverence that its subject emerges an almost saintly symbol of integrity, simplicity and devotion.[5]