In 1978 Obie-award winning New York playwright Murray Mednick brought his friends Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes together with a group of actors and younger playwrights to Claremont outside Los Angeles to stage the first Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival. On an annual basis the Festival continued for the next eighteen years, extending the experimental ferment of the Off-Off Broadway movement into new and unique forms of theatrical expression. Featuring formal essays and reminiscences by a collection of participants—including David Henry Hwang and Migdalia Cruz, as well as Festival luminaries John O’Keefe, John Steppling, and Mednick himself—Outlaw Theatre is the first authoritative look back at this exciting legacy. The book will be a valued source of inspiration and craft notes for a new generation of young playwrights and theatre artists looking to shake things up as they craft the new.
Author Biography:
An award-winning writer, director and producer, Guy Zimmerman has served as artistic director of Padua Playwrights since 2001. Under his direction this LA-based company has staged over twenty-eight productions of new plays, including three in New York City and three abroad, that have garnered a host of LA Weekly, Ovation, Garland, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards and nominations. Zimmerman has edited a six-volume anthology series for Padua Press, distributed nationally by TCG. He has also produced and directed a series of digital media productions of original plays including Pronghorn, Girl on a Bed, Gary’s Walk (both based on plays by Murray Mednick), Snout, Long Gone Now and Djinn. Previously, Zimmerman wrote for network television, including the shows Cracker, The Pretender and Wonderland. His own plays include La Clarita, The Inside Job, Vagrant and The Black Glass. His articles and essays about film, theater, art, science and politics have been published in LA Weekly, LA Theater Magazine, Backstage West, LA Citizen, Cyrano’s Journal, Bedlam Magazine and, most recently, the arts and culture website Times Quotidian. Zimmerman received a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in Theater and Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles with his wife, Jenny Bright and their daughter, Eliza, aged 11.
