Lanford Wilson, the playwright, who has died aged 73, was a singularly gritty voice in American theatre with work that championed outsiders, low-lifes, the forgotten, downtrodden and marginalised in such plays as The Hot l Baltimore (1973), Fifth of July (1980) and Burn This (1987).
Wilson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1980 for Talley's Folly, the second in a trilogy of plays that follows the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri, (Wilson's home town), over several generations. A two-handed tale of middle-aged romance between a Jewish man and a Protestant woman in 1944, it ran for 286 performances on Broadway.
The Talley trilogy also consisted of Talley and Son and Fifth of July, which closed the cycle with an update of the family story set in 1977 against the background of the Vietnam War. It opened on Broadway in November 1980 with Christopher Reeve starring as a homosexual paraplegic US Army veteran, and ran for 511 performances. The London critic Michael Billington called it "a rich example of poetic theatre in full bloom".
Wilson, who was himself gay, was one of the first mainstream American playwrights to people his works with homosexual men and women; and as an experimental playwright he was among the first to achieve both commercial and critical success in the off-Broadway as well as the, even riskier, off-off-Broadway milieus. Spiritual and physical decay, often explored through the eyes of prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and tramps, were themes that ran through Wilson's gently lyrical works.
His settings were both rural and urban: his first full-length play, Balm in Gilead, looked at a galère of New York City hookers, hustlers and junkies whose lives intersect in an all-night café. Burn This – which was staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London with John Malkovich and Juliet Stevenson in 1991 – focused on a group of grieving friends, while The Hot l Baltimore featured the inhabitants of a seedy residential hotel.
In his 17 full-length plays and more than 30 one-acts, Wilson used multilayered dialogue and action, which on stage could create a sense of real life unfolding in real time. In Serenading Louise, for example, premiered in 1970, he employed simultaneous dialogue and action between all four characters caught up in the collapse of two marriages, shifting between past and present to rack up the tension.
Lanford Eugene Wilson was born on April 13 1937 at Lebanon, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was five, and his mother remarried and moved to nearby Ozark. Graduating from Ozark High School, Lanford briefly attended college in Springfield before moving to San Diego to join his father, an aircraft worker.
The reunion was unhappy, and later figured in what he considered to be his first "real" play, Lemon Sky; father and son were eventually reconciled, and the play was staged in the 1970s with the father 's approval.
After a spell working at an aircraft factory himself, Lanford Wilson enrolled on a writing course at San Diego State College, discovering his talent for creating natural-sounding dialogue. This ability became the hallmark of his work: earthy and authentic verbal interchange which he mastered by setting himself exercises in overheard speech. In one, he eavesdropped on five people talking at once and managed to write down everything they said.
After completing his studies Wilson moved to Chicago, where he worked as a commercial artist while writing short stories for magazines in the evenings – all were rejected. At the same time he began to take a serious interest in theatre, acting and experimenting in playwriting, and in 1962 he moved to New York.
Having seen – and disliked – every show on Broadway, Wilson gravitated to the off-off-Broadway world of plays staged in the back rooms of coffee shops and the naves of disused churches.
His first off-off Broadway production, So Long At The Fair, was well-received in August 1963, and Wilson followed up a year later with The Madness Of Lady Bright, written while he was working as a desk clerk at the Hotel Americana; his protagonist was a lonely middle-aged homosexual. Wilson reprised his theme of sexual angst in his third play, Home Free!, which dealt with the incestuous relationship between a brother and sister.
In 1969 Wilson's debut Broadway play, The Gingham Dog, was critically mauled and closed after only six nights. When Lemon Sky also attracted poor reviews, he succumbed to writer's block, which he fully overcame only with The Hot l Baltimore. After one critic acclaimed it as "the most indelible play of the year", it transferred to an off-Broadway theatre and ran for more than 1,100 performances.
Lanford Wilson died on March 23 on the eve of a revival of his Hot l Baltimore in Chicago.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/theatre-obituaries/8424965/Lanford-Wilson.html
The reunion was unhappy, and later figured in what he considered to be his first "real" play, Lemon Sky; father and son were eventually reconciled, and the play was staged in the 1970s with the father 's approval.
After a spell working at an aircraft factory himself, Lanford Wilson enrolled on a writing course at San Diego State College, discovering his talent for creating natural-sounding dialogue. This ability became the hallmark of his work: earthy and authentic verbal interchange which he mastered by setting himself exercises in overheard speech. In one, he eavesdropped on five people talking at once and managed to write down everything they said.
After completing his studies Wilson moved to Chicago, where he worked as a commercial artist while writing short stories for magazines in the evenings – all were rejected. At the same time he began to take a serious interest in theatre, acting and experimenting in playwriting, and in 1962 he moved to New York.
Having seen – and disliked – every show on Broadway, Wilson gravitated to the off-off-Broadway world of plays staged in the back rooms of coffee shops and the naves of disused churches.
His first off-off Broadway production, So Long At The Fair, was well-received in August 1963, and Wilson followed up a year later with The Madness Of Lady Bright, written while he was working as a desk clerk at the Hotel Americana; his protagonist was a lonely middle-aged homosexual. Wilson reprised his theme of sexual angst in his third play, Home Free!, which dealt with the incestuous relationship between a brother and sister.
In 1969 Wilson's debut Broadway play, The Gingham Dog, was critically mauled and closed after only six nights. When Lemon Sky also attracted poor reviews, he succumbed to writer's block, which he fully overcame only with The Hot l Baltimore. After one critic acclaimed it as "the most indelible play of the year", it transferred to an off-Broadway theatre and ran for more than 1,100 performances.
Lanford Wilson died on March 23 on the eve of a revival of his Hot l Baltimore in Chicago.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/theatre-obituaries/8424965/Lanford-Wilson.html
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