page_title: Lanford Wilson
section_title: Circle Repertory Company and later work (1969-2011)
hierarchical_section_title: Lanford Wilson / Circle Repertory Company and later work (1969-2011)
caption_attribution_description: English: Production photo from a 1986 revival Off-Broadway of Lanford Wilson's play Home Free! with Lee Taylor-Allan as Joanna and Kenneth Boys as Lawrence
context_page_description: Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
  He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 and was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame. In 2004, Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. He was nominated for three Tony Awards and has won a Drama Desk Award and five Obie Awards.
  Wilson's 1964 short play The Madness of Lady Bright was his first major success and led to further works throughout the 1960s that expressed a variety of social and romantic themes. In 1969, he co-founded the Circle Repertory Company with theatre director Marshall W. Mason. He wrote many plays for the Circle Repertory in the 1970s.
context_section_description: In 1969, Wilson co-founded the Circle Repertory Company with Marshall W. Mason, Tanya Berezin, and Rob Thirkield. Many of Wilson's plays were first produced at the Circle Repertory and directed by Mason. Also in 1969, Wilson was hired for $5,000 to adapt Tennessee Williams' short story One Arm, about a male hustler, into a screenplay. The day after he finished the screenplay, he was invited to a preview of Midnight Cowboy, and after seeing the film thought "there went that idea down the drain".
  His first plays at Circle Repertory, The Great Nebula in Orion, Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye, and The Family Continues, premiered in 1972.  The Hot l Baltimore, about lowlifes who face eviction when the decaying hotel in which they live is to be demolished, opened in 1973 and was Circle Repertory's first commercial success. The play also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and an Obie Award. It then transferred Off-Broadway to the Circle in the Square Theatre and ran for 1,166 performances. The Hot l Baltimore was adapted into a short-lived television series by ABC in 1975, which Wilson pronounced "a disaster".
  In 1974, Wilson acted in Circle Repertory's production of E. E. Cummings' Him under the direction of Marshal Oglesby. In 1975, Wilson's The Mound Builders, which The New York Times described as Wilson's "most ambitious work", premiered at Circle Rep. The play concerned an ill-fated archeological dig in the Midwest, and, thematically, contemplated the futility of man's achievements. Circle Repertory then produced Wilson's Serenading Louie in 1976. The play had been unsuccessfully performed in 1970 by the Washington Theater Club, and Wilson revised it for Circle Repertory's production, which is generally regarded as its official premiere.
  Sexual identity is among the themes that Wilson explored in his plays. The theme appears in The Madness of Lady Bright, Lemon Sky, Fifth of July, and Burn This. In Fifth of July, a Broadway hit in 1980–1982, members of the Talley family decide whether to sell the family farmhouse in Missouri. The story centers on Ken Talley, a disabled Vietnam veteran, and his lover Jed, who are living in the house. Wilson was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play for Fifth of July. After Fifth of July, Wilson wrote Talley's Folly (1979), a two-person play depicting the Midwesterner Sally Talley and Jewish Matt Friedman falling in love and become engaged despite the objections of Sally's narrow-minded family. Talley & Son premiered as A Tale Told in 1981 but was rewritten and renamed when it opened in 1985. Both are prequels set 30 years prior to Fifth of July. Talley's Folly was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. Around this time, Norman Mailer asked Wilson to adapt The Executioner's Song for a television movie, but Wilson declined.
  Angels Fall opened on Broadway in 1983, earning Wilson his third nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. The New York Times review said, "Mr. Wilson is one of the few artists in our theater who can truly make America sing." In Burn This, a young gay dancer named Robbie and his lover Dom have died in a boating accident before the play begins. Robbie's roommates, his dance partner Anna and the gay, confident Larry, must come to terms with Robbie's death. Anna learns to be independent and self-confident, pursuing her interest in choreography, beginning a relationship with Robbie's grieving brother Pale, and ending her dispassionate relationship with her longtime boyfriend.
  In addition to writing plays, Wilson wrote the libretti for several operas. He collaborated with composer Lee Hoiby for Summer and Smoke (1971) and adapted his own play, This is the Rill Speaking, in 1992. Summer and Smoke is an adaptation of  Tennessee Williams' play of the same name. Williams gave Hoiby permission to compose an opera based on the play, and Hoiby asked Wilson to adapt the play into a libretto. This is the Rill Speaking is a one-act chamber opera that Wilson adapted from his own play of the same name. In 1984, W
caption: A scene from the 1986 New York revival of Home Free!
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "400", "Image YResolution": "400", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2010:07:03 17:42:06", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4985", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2533", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3733"}