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| Kaufman, Moises | Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde |
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In April 1895 Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury, the father of his youthful lover, who had publicly maligned him as a sodomite. In doing so, England’s reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his ruin and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of “gross indecency” and—implicitly—for a vision of art that outraged the Victorian propriety. In this stunning work of the theatre—a smash hit off Broadway—Moisés Kaufman turns the trials of Oscar Wilde into a riveting human and intellectual drama. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts of Wilde’s writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression. The result is a play that will be read and performed for decades to come. |
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| Kaufman, Moises | The Laramie Project |
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For a year and a half following the murder of Matthew Shepard, Moises
Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project-whose previous play, Gross
Indecency, was hailed as a work of unsurpassed originality-conducted
hundreds of interviews with the citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, to create this
portrait of a town struggling with a horrific event. The savage killing of Shepard, a young gay man, has become a national symbol of the struggle against intolerance. But for the people of Laramie-both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him-the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation. |
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| McNally, Terrance | Corpus Christi |
| In Corpus Christi McNally gives us his own unique view of the story of Christ, and in doing so provides us with one of the most vivid and moving passion plays written. McNally's play is an affirmation of faith and a drama of such power and scope that it has been hailed by audiences and critics alike as one of his best and most poignant works to date. | |
| Sherman, Martin | Bent |
| Martin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners. But very little had come out about their treatment of homosexuals." Gays were arrested and interned at work camps prior to the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and handicapped, and continued to be imprisoned even after the fall of the Third Reich and liberation of the camps. The play Bent highlights the reason why - a largely ignored German law, Paragraph 175, making homosexuality a criminal offense, which Hitler reactivated and strengthened during his rise to power. | |