CJ Hopkins
C. J. Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. Among his works are the plays "Horse Country", "screwmachine/eyecandy" and "The Extremists". Career. Early works. Hopkins was a 1994 Drama League of New York Developing Artist Fellow and a 1995 Resident Artist/Jerome Foundation Fellow at Mabou Mines/Suite. Section::::"Horse Country". His 1992 play, "Horse Country", had its UK premiere at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Lyn Gardner in "The Guardian" wrote: "Hopkins's two-hander brings the spirit of Godot to America's bars and puts the bourbon in Beckett. It feels like a serious  piece of theatre rather than fringe fluff." It won a "Scotsman" Fringe First for New Writing and the 2002 "Scotsman" Best of the Fringe Firsts Award, and later won the 2004 Best of The Adelaide Fringe Award. Following its London premiere at Riverside Studios, "Horse Country" toured the UK, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. Later works. Hopkins' play "screwmachine/eyecandy" was copyrighted in 1994, but updated when it was performed a decade later. A production ran during the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe at the Assembly Rooms when "The Scotsman" described it as a "dark and twisted comedy" about the American  game show in which "the excesses of American culture are held up to the light, roundly lampooned and shown to be the poisonous, culturally carcinogenic threats that they really are." It received a "Scotsman" Fringe First Award for New Writing. The US production was presented at 59E59 Theaters in New York in 2006. Mark Blankenship wrote in his review for "Variety": "Although he apes the themes of everything from "1984" to "Series 7," a film about a murderous reality show, Hopkins delivers his dogmatism with heavy-handed arrogance." A production was presented at the PushPush theater in Decatur, Georgia in  2008, and it was performed at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2017. Also in 2006, Hopkins' commission by the Free University of Berlin to write and direct a site-specific work, "The Insurgency", was staged in German at the university's Philological Library. His 2009 play "The Extremists", commissioned by 7 Stages and directed by Walter D. Asmus, premiered in Berlin and Atlanta in 2010.