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Who Writes This Stuff?

The playwrights behind Domino's 66th season:

Ken Ludwig (A Comedy of Tenors) has had six shows on Broadway and six in the West End, and he has won two Laurence Olivier Awards, three Tony Award nominations, two Helen Hayes Awards and the Edgar Award. His work has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and performed in thirty countries in over twenty languages. Broadway and West End shows include Crazy For You, Lend Me A Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, Twentieth Century, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. Other major plays include Shakespeare in Hollywood, Leading Ladies, Be My Baby, The Beaux' Stratagem (an adaptation with Thornton Wilder), The Three Musketeers, ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, Midsummer/Jersey, The Game's Afoot, and Baskerville.

Playwright, director and actor Robert Ainsworth (The Mouse House) was born in Birmingham, England, and moved to Peterborough, Ontario in 1980, where he has been an active member of St. James Players and the Peterborough Theatre Guild while working as a real estate agent. Ainsworth first got involved in theatre as an actor. Later he turned to writing, first for children, then moving to drama for adults. He is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. He has written and directed several plays for the Peterborough Theatre Guild and Trinity Players, including Frozen Dreams, Labour Pains, A Life Before, Slainte the musical (music by Paul Crough), and Pip, a musical based on Dickens’ Great Expectations, first produced in 1995.

Andrew J. Fenady (Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus) was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928 and appeared in many plays while studying literature and economics at the University of Toledo. He then acted in summer stock theatre and toured with a Shakespearian company, before going to Hollywood to write for films and television. His output included several westerns and he worked with John Wayne on films such as Chisum. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus, which became the basis for the stage version. He also wrote novels, including The Man With Bogart's Face, winner of the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar award. He also won the Western Writers of America's Wister Award in 2006 for lifetime achievement.

Tennessee Williams (Cat On a Hot Tin Roof) was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. Williams had his first plays (Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind) produced in St. Louis. His greatest success came in the 1940s and 1950s. The Glass Menagerie had a successful premiere in Chicago in 1944, then moved to New York where it was a hit and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play of the Season. In 1947 he had another great success with A Streetcar Named Desire. Between 1948 and 1959 seven more of his plays, including Cat On a Hot Tin Roof were performed on Broadway. By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. He died in 1983 in New York.

Born in New York in 1950, John Patrick Shanley (Outside Mullingar) graduated from New York University. He had a number of jobs, among them house painter, bartender, furniture mover and U.S. Marine, before becoming a full-time playwright and screenwriter. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for the 1987 film Moonstruck. His other plays include Doubt: A Parable, Defiance, Joe Vs. the Volcano, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Welcome to the Moon, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Women of Manhattan, Savage in Limbo, Defiance and Romantic Poetry (co-written with Henry Krieger), and his latest, Prodigal Son.

Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband) was born in Dublin in 1854. He studied in Dublin and at Oxford and became known as an advocate of the philosophy of aestheticism. He published poems and journalism before turning to writing for the stage. He wrote his first play, Salome in French in Paris but it was not at first allowed to be produced in England. Four other plays—Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were popular in England in the early 1890s. He also published a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and a number of stories and essays. Wilde was jailed on charges of gross indecency from 1895 to 1897 because of his homosexuality. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46.

Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Christopher Durang (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) graduated from Harvard and Yale, the latter with a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting. His first play, Titanic, appeared in 1974, and he has produced more than a dozen more since, including Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, 'Dentity Crisis, Miss Witherspoon, and the one-act comedy An Actor's Nightmare. He has also appeared as an actor on stage and in film. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Miss Witherspoon, won the Tony Award for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and won Obie Awards for Sister Mary Ignatius, The Marriage of Betty and Boo and Betty's Summer Vacation.