Authors

Joe Masteroff was a book-writer for the Broadway musicals CABARET and SHE LOVES ME. He also wrote book and lyrics for PARAMOUR (Globe San Diego), SIX WIVES (Work Playhouse) and GEORGIA AVENUE (Goodspeed at Chester) as well as the libretto for an operatic version of DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS (City…

John Kingsley Orton was born on January 1, 1933 in Leicester, England to a working class family that valued neither affection nor emotion. Largely self-educated (he failed at school but avidly pursued reading and classical music) the adolescent Orton was drawn to the fantasies and possibilities of theatre, and developed…

Joe Penhall (b. 1967) is a British playwright and screenwriter. Born in London, his first major play was Some Voices for the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1994. It has twice been revived off Broadway. Penhall won the Laurence Olivier Award, the Evening Standard Award and the Critics’ Circle Theatre…

Johan Bargum (born 1943) is a Finnish-Swedish author known for his early realistic and ironic novels about the Finnish-Swedish high society and the later, more psychological orientated novels about man’s alienation in the western world. He has written several plays for the stage, radio and television.

Johan Borgen (1902 – 1979) was a Norwegian author, journalist and critic. Under the pseudonym of Mumle Gåsegg (Mumble Goose-egg) he wrote shorter articles in the newspaper Dagbladet, particularly during World War II. His articles were ironic and derogatory of the Nazi government, and he kept this up for a…

John Brendan Keane (1928 –2002) was an Irish playwright, novelist and essayist from Listowel, County Kerry. Keane was an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Dublin Society from 1991, served as president of Irish PEN and was a founder member of the Society of Irish Playwrights and a member of…

John Bowen; born Nov. 5, 1924, Calcutta, India British playwright and novelist noted for exploding popular assumptions by his examination of the complexity and ambivalence of human motives and behaviour.

John Newport Caird (b. 1948) is an English stage director and writer of plays, musicals and operas. He is a Honary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Principal Guest Director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, (Dramaten), Stockholm. Caird’s carrier began with him working as an actor and…

John Cameron Mitchell was born 21 April, 1963 in El Paso, Texas. After a transient childhood moving every two years with his career army dad and family, Mitchell graduated from North-western University and headed for California where he developed a steady career playing bit roles in TV sitcoms (MCGUYVER, THE…

John Chapman initially trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After three years on stage, he decided to turn his skills away from the spoken word and towards the text itself. His first play DRY ROT opened at the Whitehall Theatre, London in 1954. It proved…

John William Cheever (1912 –1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called “the Chekhov of the suburbs.” His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts,…

John Dowie (b. 1950) is a British comedian, musician, and writer. He began performing stand-up comedy in 1969. Dowie was among the inaugural acts on Tony Wilson’s legendary Factory Records label. In 1978 he contributed three comedic songs to the very first Factory music release, A Factory Sample, along with…

John Drinkwater (1882-1937) was an English author. He was a founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and was associated with it as actor, director, and general manager for many years. He is best known for his chronicle plays, including Abraham Lincoln (1918), Mary Stuart (1921), and Robert E. Lee (1923).…

JOHN DU PREZ (Music) a Trevelyan Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, and Associate of the Royal College of Music, he entered the film industry in 1978 composing additional music for MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN. This began a long association with Eric Idle, leading eventually to their current writing partnership.…

John Ford Noonan (b. 1943) is a prolific America actor, and writer for theater, film and television. He wrote his first play, Lazarus was a Lady in 1970 followed by Concerning the Effects of Trimethylchoride in 1971 and other plays such as The Club Champion’s Widow in 1978, Some Men…

John Gay (1685 – 1732) was an English poet and dramatist. He is best remembered for The Beggar’s Opera (1728), set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.

John MacLachlan Gray (b. 1946) is a Canadian writer-composer-performer for stage, TV, film, radio and print. He is best-known for his stage musicals and for his two seasons as a satirist on CBC TV’s The Journal, as well as an author, speaker and social critic on cultural-political issues.

John Guare was born in New York, NY on February 5, 1938. He wrote his first play at the age of eleven and very early became dissatisfied with traditional kitchen-sink dramas in which everything was “real” right down to the kitchen-sink. He yearned for a theatre that would proclaim inner…

John Herbert Brundage (1926-2001) was a Canadian playwright, born in Toronto, Ontario. Bill Glassco , who directed Herbert’s best-known play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes in 1969, has called John Herbert “the single most important figure of the decade” in the creation of Toronto’s alternate theatre of the 1960s. Herbert also…

JOHN KANDER (Music, Additional Lyrics) collaborated with lyricist Fred Ebb for four decades, creating what many would consider Broadway standards and contemporary classics. One of their first collaborations became a hit song for Barbra Streisand, “My Coloring Book,” earning John and Fred a Grammy nomination. In 1965 the pair worked…

An associate actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played Puck in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside Ben Kingsley, Alan Howard and Frances de la Tour, before turning to comedy script writing. He began writing for Terry Scott’s sketch show Scott On, before taking over…

Sir John Clifford Mortimer (1923 –2009) was an English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. Mortimer is best remembered for creating a barrister named Horace Rumpole, whose speciality is defending those accused of crime in London’s Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for Rumpole of the Bailey, based on a chance Court…

John Neville-Andrews has more than 40 years of professional experience in acting, directing, and producing. He has taught at Penn State University, Yale School of Drama, the University of Maryland, the University of Rhode Island, and California Institute of the Arts. As the artistic producer of The Shakespeare Theatre in…

John Olive is the author of plays, screenplays, teleplays and works of fiction. His plays which includes STANDING ON MY KNEES, MINNESOTA MOON, THE VOICE OF THE PRAIRIE, EVELYN AND THE POLKA KING, KILLERS AND OTHERS have been widely produced, at such theatres as Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Hartford Stage…

Born on December 12, 1929, in London, John Osborne would eventually change the face of British theatre. His father, an advertising copywriter, died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a boarding school education at Belmont College in Devon. Still heartbroken, however, over his father’s…

John Pielmeier (b.1949) is an American playwright and screenwriter. Pielmeier earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Catholic University of America in 1970 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1978. He began his career as an actor, working with such repertory companies as…

Born in Kisumu, Kenya, July 17th 1936. Freelance writer since 1966. He has written 15 stage plays, 4 television plays, 11 radio plays, 2 novels and reviews for national newspapers.

(1901–57). The English-born U.S. playwright John Van Druten is known especially for his well-crafted light comedies. His drama I AM A CAMERA was the basis for the popular musical CABARET.

JOHN WIMBS (Book and Lyrics) has written several plays, including MOLLY WOOD, a historical tragic-comedy, which won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Best New Play and Best Production after its world premiere in Toronto. He also won top honours at the Quebec Drama Festival for his first play, THE…

Jon Atli Jonasson was born in Reykjavik in 1972. He dropped out of high school and worked as a fisherman, pizza baker, heavy metal DJ and a roadworker. In 2001 he made his debut as a writer with A BROKEN BEAT – a collection of short stories about a group…

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN (Co-bookwriter) has directing credits that include work at Naked Angels, Williamstown Theater Festival, New York Stage and Film, Ensemble Studio Theater, Juilliard Drama Division, The Signature Theater (Washington D.C.), and many others. Mr. Bernstein has worked in various capacities at New York’s City Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second…