 |
About Edward Albee – CLICK HERE
Charles Mee
"I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world." - Charles Mee
Signature Theatre Company is thrilled to announce Charles Mee as our 2007-2008 Playwright-in-Residence. Mee is known for his radical reconstructions of existing texts and his inimitable collage-like style of playwriting. His plays incorporate music, dance, and video and have explored themes as wide ranging as history, politics, gender dynamics, and love.
Charles Mee was raised in Barrington, Illinois and educated at Harvard University. Following his graduation from university in 1960, Mee moved to New York City where he wrote plays for Off-Off-Broadway and supported himself as an editor and writer for the hardcover arts magazine Horizon. Between 1972 and 1993 he wrote eleven books on world history and American international relations, including Meeting at Potsdam (1975); The End of Order: Versailles, 1919 (1980); The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana (1984); Rembrandt's Portrait: A Biography (1988); and Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993); and a memoir, A Nearly Normal Life (1999).
In 1986 Mee wrote the libretto for choreographer and director Martha Clarke's dance-theatre piece Vienna: Lusthaus, a meditation on turn-of-the-century Vienna. He used his skills and impulses as an historian to create a collage-like text by directly lifting material from historical sources and combining it alongside personal descriptions of his own dreams. This patchwork combination of found texts and his own imagination became the template in which he would compose all of his future plays, a technique inspired by the collage painting of surrealist painter Max Ernst and contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg.
Mee's plays have been inspired by classical and modern texts, including ancient Greek drama, drama from the Yuan dynasty of China, Indian dance drama, and the works of William Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, and Maxim Gorky. His Greek play adaptations include Orestes 2.0; The Bacchae 2.1.; Agamemnon 2.0; Trojan Women 2.0; Big Love; True Love; and Iphigenia 2.0. Mee is the resident playwright of the SITI Company with whom he has written bobrauschenbergamerica; Hotel Cassiopeia; Soot and Spit (the musical); and Under Construction, which explore the work of contemporary artists Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, James Castle, Jason Rhoades, and Norman Rockwell. Other plays include The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador; Time to Burn; Full Circle; Summertime; First Love;
Wintertime; Vienna Lusthaus (Revisited); Limonade Tous Les Jours; Salome; A Perfect Wedding; Belle Epoque; Fetes de la Nuit; Mail Order Bride; and Gone.
Charles Mee's plays have been produced in New York at New York Theatre Workshop, The Joseph Papp Public Theater, Second Stage Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Lincoln Center Theater. His work has premiered at the Mark Taper Forum, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse, the Humana Festival for New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, and Istanbul.
Mee is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two OBIE Awards for Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Big Love (2002), a Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and a TCG grant. His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard Fisher and his plays can be found at http://www.charlesmee.org.
Signature's 2007-2008 Charles Mee Series presents three new works that span the range of Mee's eclectic and ever-expanding body of work. Mee's frequent collaborator Tina Landau directs the New York premiere of Iphigenia 2.0, Mee's re-interpretation of the classic Greek drama Iphigenia at Aulis. Davis McCallum directs Queens Boulevard (the musical), a romantic celebration of the diversity and vitality of the titular New York City borough. McCallum's other work with Mee includes Big Love and A Perfect Wedding. The series closes with Paradise Park, directed by Daniel Fish. When a young man buys a ticket to an amusement park he boards a thrilling and chaotic roller coaster ride through all of America. Fish reunites with Mee after having directed the American premiere of Mee's True Love at New York's Zipper Theatre in 2001.
Signature is thrilled to welcome Charles Mee and his collaborators to the theatre, for what will surely be an exciting and spectacular adventure. Please look for future updates on the Charles Mee Series online and at the theatre.
Recommended Reading:
GENERAL
A Nearly Normal Life by Charles Mee
Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee,
Anne Bogart and the SITI Company by Scott T. Cummings
CLICK HERE to visit www.charlesmee.org and see the full listing of plays
CLICK HERE to
read about collage
CLICK HERE for Boole’s Resources on copyright and public domain
IPHIGENIA
Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
Bride Magazine
CLICK HERE to read about Wedding Traditions and Customs
CLICK HERE to read a blog by soldiers and civilians in Iraq
CLICK HERE to read another blog by soldiers and civilians in Iraq
CLICK HERE to read a blog by soldiers and civilians in Iraq
QUEENS BOULEVARD
the Katha-Kali play The Flower of Good Fortune by Kottayam Tampuran
Shakuntala retold in comic book form by Dolat H. Doongaji & A. K. Lavangia
Homer's Odyssey
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu
Yell-oh Girls! edited by Vickie Nam
CLICK HERE to read blogs by subway stop in Queens
CLICK HERE to read about LuakaBop records world music
Cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens
in a New America, by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan.
Kalidasa: The Recognition of Sakuntala,
a new translation by W.J. Johnson, published by Oxford World's Classics.
PARADISE PARK
CLICK HERE to read about Disney Land
CLICK HERE to read about Coney Island
CLICK HERE to see videos of Coney Island
John Wayne's America by Garry Wills
[back to top]
|
|
