Mac Wellman

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Mac Wellman (born 1945) is an American playwright, author, and poet. Wellman is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. His plays frequently resemble a moving collage of events which has more in common with an avant-garde dance production than Broadway-style theater. Wellman has stated, “More and more I think all theater is site-specific. When plays work, they work in the space.”[1] Helen Shaw writes, “Since a 1984 essay, ‘The Theatre of Good Intentions,’ [Wellman] has been the cynosure in a heaven full of experimental playwrights who rail against what Jonathan Lear, in his book Open Minded, called a ‘tyranny’ of ‘the already known’” (vii).[2]

Discussing his style with BOMB Magazine, Wellman said that he uses words as objects in his writing. "I found if you try to write totally in cliches and things that don't sound right," Wellman clarified, "you deal with a language that frankly is 98% of what people speak, think, and hear. So it's enormously enjoyable."[3] This type of language has been positively characterized as "an untrammeled flow of logorrhea: plain words, fancy words, space-age words, Victorian words and words that defy the dictionary" by New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley.[4] In terms of production, Wellman experiments with stage direction. Some directions are spoken and others are not, blurring the line between action and direction. Wellman notes, “That’s something I’m really interested in. I like it when people talk about what’s going on in a play. Sometimes it’s more interesting than trying to enact everything.”[5]

Professional Credits

Wellman is the Donald I. Fine Professor of Play Writing at Brooklyn College, New York City, and in 2010 he became a CUNY Distinguished Professor. Wellman is author to more than forty plays, including Harm's Way (1978), The Self-Begotten (1982), The Bad Infinity (1983), Dracula (1987), Whirligig (1988), Crowbar (1989), 7 Blowjobs (1991), Terminal Hip (1984), Murder of Crows (1992) and Description Beggared or the Allegory of WHITENESS (2000). In addition to several collaborations with composer/percussionist David Van Tieghem in the 1990s, he collaborated with Bang on a Can composer David Lang in 2006 on the opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, adapted from a very short story by Ambrose Bierce.[6] He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990 he received an Obie award for Best New American Play (for Bad Penny, Terminal Hip, and Crowbar). In 1991 he received another Obie award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Writers Award, and most recently the 2003 Obie award for Lifetime Achievement as well as a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts that same year. He is a co-founder of The Flea Theater in New York City.

Works cited

  1. ↑ Harnetiaux, Trish. "Mac Wellman Explains, Or Doesn’t Explain, What Is Near And What Is Far". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 08/1/2012. 
  2. ↑ Helen Shaw. “Mac Wellman and Things of the Devil.” The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. vii-xii.
  3. ↑ Yablonsky, Linda. "Mac Wellman". BOMB Magazine. Fall 1995. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
  4. ↑ Brantley, Ben. "Review/Theater; Family Life Colored by Meance". The New York Times. 20 May 1994. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
  5. ↑ Harnetiaux, Trish. "Mac Wellman Explains, Or Doesn’t Explain, What Is Near And What Is Far". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 08/1/2012. 
  6. ↑ Walat, Kathryn (September 2006). "In Dialogue: Mac Makes an Opera". The Brooklyn Rail. 

Bibliography

  • Appler, Keith. "Mac Wellman and the Language Poets: Chaos Writing and the General Economy of Language." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism　24.4 (Spring 2010):　69–90.
  • Erickson, Jon. “The Mise en Scène of the Non-Euclidean Character: Wellman, Jenkin and Strindberg.” Modern Drama 41.3 (Fall 1998).
  • Masterman, Glynn. Perpendicular to the Aristotelian: The Speculations of Mac Wellman. Los Angeles: Three Pigeons Publishing, 2009.
  • Munk, Erika. “The Difficulty of Defending a Form: David Lang and Mac Wellman, Interviewed by Erika Munk.” Theater 32.2 (Summer 2002), 56-61.
  • Shaw, Helen. “Mac Wellman and Things of the Devil.” The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. vii-xii.
  • Simpson, Jim, artistic dir. Mac Wellman, co-founder. The Flea Theater. <www.theflea.org>.
  • Wellman, Mac. “A Chrestomathy of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater.” Cellophane: Plays by Mac Wellman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 1-16.
  • --- Speculations: An Essay on the Theater. Jan. 20, 2009, <www.macwellman.com/images/speculations13.pdf>.
  • --- “Speculations: An Essay on the Theater” (abridged version). The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 293-342.
  • --- The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
  • --- The Difficulty of Crossing a Field: Nine New Plays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
  • --- “The Theatre of Good Intentions.” Performing Arts Journal 8.3 (1984), 59-70.

See also

External links

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