Meet the Playwright

Lanford Wilson 1937-2011

Lanford Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1937 before moving to Springfield, Missouri, at the age of five with his mother. By 1962, Wilson had moved to New York City and begun a career that would result in him being known as a pioneer of Off-Off-Broadway and regional theatre. His one act play Home Free! was produced Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe Cino in 1964, and his first full-length play, Balm in Gilead, then premiered the next year. Wilson was also one of the founders of the New York City regional theatre Circle Theatre (later Circle Repertory Company) in 1969, a company he remained involved with until it closed in 1996.

Wilson’s first major hit at Circle Theatre was his 1973 play The Hot l Baltimore, which ran for over 1,000 performances. Wilson’s Broadway plays include The Gingham Dog, Talley’s Folly, Fifth of July, Angels Fall, Burn This, Redwood Curtain, and Wilson’s translation of The Three Sisters. He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play three times during his career, including for Talley’s Folly. While Wilson didn’t win any Tony Awards during his career, he was awarded with the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Talley’s Folly.

Wilson wrote Talley’s Folly as part of a trilogy of plays about the Talley family. Talley’s Folly was actually the second play in the trilogy, but the first to appear on Broadway. The first play in the trilogy is Fifth of July, Wilson’s play about the Talley family in the wake of the Vietnam war, premiered Off-Broadway in 1978 before making its way to Broadway in November 1980. Talley’s Folly, which depicts a conversation between Sally Talley and her suitor, and Talley & Son both take place on the same day, July 4, 1944. This is 33 years before the events of Fifth of July. Talley’s Folly premiered Off-Broadway in 1979 before opening on Broadway nine months before Fifth of July.

Wilson’s career, and penchant for opening his works in smaller venues before moving them Off-Broadway and then to Broadway, led to him being credited as a leading figure in the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement. Wilson died in 2011 from complications of pneumonia.

Photograph provided by www.nytimes.com

“It’s very strange. You never know where a play comes from. You may have had the idea for five years; you still don’t know where it came from or where it’s going to hit you; or when you’re going to actually sit down and write the darned thing. And when you do sit down to write, you may write something completely different.” -Lanford Wilson in a 1991 interview with John C. Tibbetts

“One day in Chicago I was working in an ad agency and started a new story. I said, you know what?--this doesn’t sound like a story, this sounds like a play! I got halfway down the page, no more than that, and said--I’m a playwright. It was just as clear as day. I had an actual talent for writing dialogue and no talent at all for writing narrative. Writing down the way people spoke in a room was suddenly incredibly exciting. It was one of those life decisions where you know immediately--you’re never going to get to the bottom of this thing. And what more could you want than something that you’re never going to--that’s never going to satisfy you completely? And I just saw this as an enormous, great challenge that was going to be worth banging away at for the rest of my life.” - Lanford Wilson (same interview)