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Who Writes This Stuff, Anyway?

The playwrights behind our 2021-22 season:

Bernard Slade (Same Time, Next Year was born in May 1930 in St. Catharines, Ont., as Bernard Slade Newbound. A stage actor and producer before turning to writing, he had considerable success in Canada, then signed a contract with Screen Gems to write three television pilots a year. The results of those pilots included The Flying Nun and The Partridge Family. Slade wrote a number of episodes of the latter series, but grew tired of television and returned to writing for the stage, and in 1975 he had his biggest stage success with Same Time, Next Year. He had another Broadway success with Romantic Comedy a few years later. He died in October 2019 in Beverly Hills.

Sam and Bella Spewack (My Three Angels) were a husband-and-wife writing team whose careers began in the 1920s. Samuel Spewack was born in Ukraine and raised in New York. Bella Cohen was born in Romania and emigrated to New York with her family as a child. Both working as journalists in New York, they met and married in 1922. My Three Angels was the best-known of their straight plays, but they were also notable for writing the script for the musical Kiss Me Kate, with music by Cole Porter, and they wrote a number of other plays and screenplays from the 1920s to the 1960s. Bella was also a publicist for the Girl Scouts of the USA, and claimed to have originated the idea of selling cookies as a method of fundraising.

Nicholas Hope, Jessie Jones and Jamie Wooten (The Savannah Sipping Society) have been a comedy-writing team for many years, turning out Dearly Beloved, Christmas Belles, The Red Velvet Cake War, Always a Bridesmaid, The Sweet Delilah Swim Club and others. Hope won the Southwest Regional Playwrights Competition for his first play, A Friend of the Family. Jones co-authored the feature film Kingdom Come and has published a number of short stories and appeared as an actor onstage and in films. Wooten won the Writers' Guild of America Award and was a long-time writer for the TV series The Golden Girls.

Jeffrey Hatcher (Holmes and Watson) grew up in Steubenville, Ohio. His many plays have been performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and across the U.S. and elsewhere. They include Three Viewings, Scotland Road, A Picasso, Neddy, Korczak's Children, Mercy of a Storm, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright (with Eric Simonson), and Lucky Duck (with Bill Russell and Henry Kreiger). Hatcher wrote the book for the Broadway musical Never Gonna Dance and the musical ELLA, and co-wrote the stage adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie with author Mitch Albom. He wrote the screenplays Casanova and The Duchess, and has written for the TV series Columbo and E! Entertainment Television.

Norm Foster (Hilda's Yard) was born in Newmarket, Ont., and raised in Toronto. He studied radio and television arts at Centennial College in Toronto and Confederation College in Thunder Bay, and had a 25-year career in radio - some of it in Kingston - before a friend persuaded him to go to a community theatre audition in Fredericton. Foster, who says he had never seen a play until then, got the lead role (Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey), fell in love with theatre, and two years later wrote Sinners, which Theatre New Brunswick produced. He went on to become Canada's most produced playwright and has written more than 45 plays. They include The Motor Trade, Ethan Claymore, The Melville Boys and Wrong for Each Other.

Jack Neary (Kong's Night Out) has had his plays produced all over the United States, Canada and Europe. His most recent play, Trick or Treat, was produced off-Broadway in 2019. Previous plays include Auld Lang Syne, The Porch, First Night, and Jerry Finnegan's Sister. He has also adapted Frankenstein, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Turn of the Screw for the stage. He has also written a number of produced plays for young audiences. He is cofounder of New Century Theatre at Smith College and the Greater Lowell Music Theatre in Lowell, Mass., and resident playwright at Acting Out Productions in Newburyport, Mass.