Frank Gagliano

I was part of the 1960’s group of Off-Broadway playwrights that revitalized American drama. Edward Albee produced my "Night Of The Dunce" and "Conerico Was Here To Stay" at New York’s legendary Cherry Lane Theatre. "Father Uxbridge Wants to Marry" was produced at NY’s American Place Theatre. Other plays and musicals include "The Prince of Peasantmania," "The Hide And Seek Odyssey of Madeleine Gimple" (Children’s Play), "The Resurrection of Jackie Cramer" (Rock musical with composer Raymond Benson)," "From The Bodoni County Songbook Anthology" (with composer Claibe Richardson). I was founder and, for twelve years, Artistic Director of Carnegie Mellon’s "Showcase of New Plays;" then Artistic Director of the Festival of New Works at the University of Michigan, where I established the Arthur Miller Award for Playwriting, with Arthur Miller present. My awards and honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Grants in Playwriting, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Eugene O’Neill Foundation-Wesleyan University Fellowship in Playwriting, a Pennsylvania Playwriting Fellowship—and The Ernest Hemingway International First Prize Award for my play," The Total Immersion Of Madeleine Favorini." In 2007 I taught a semester of playwriting at Peking University. There, the Beijing Institute of Theatre and Film produced my play "Big Sur." My first novel, "Anton’s Leap," was published in 2008 and has just been released on Kindle for Amazon.com. Applause Books selected my play "My Chekhov Light" for its 2008 edition of "One on One: The Best Men’s Monologues for the Twenty-First Century." I have given reading/performances of "My Chekhov Light" all over the US, and in Germany, Beijing, Amsterdam and Ukraine. All three plays in "The Voodoo Trilogy" ("In The Voodoo Parlour of Marie Laveau," "The Commedia World of Lafcadio B," and "Congo Square"--The Musical, with composer Claibe Richardson), were produced at The Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company (Feb-Mar, 2011) and were presented in one five-hour marathon evening on Fat Tuesday (8 March 2011).