Ron Simonian (Playwright Thanatos) - Ron is a native of Los Angeles, now living in Kansas City and was the winner of the Unicorn Theatre's National Playwright Award for this play, Thanatos in 1993. After a favorable review in Variety, it had an off-Broadway run in March 95, where the New York Times called it "an impressive debut". In October 95 Simonian Premiered his play Arms and Legs in Kansas City that Variety claimed -Thrust Simonian into the legit arena. Two months later the script was optioned for an off-Broadway production under the direction off Jeff Calhoun (Broadway's Grease). Simonian has developed many of his plays at The Missouri Repertory Theatre and he is currently in rehearsal for his play, At The Feet Of Doves at the Pacific Residents Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles.
Robert Alexander, Resident Playwright (Servant of the People, Will He Bop Will He Drop) is the author of 19 plays including the widely seen I Ain't Yo' Uncle; the New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin and Secret in the Sands, the latter two originally written for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He is also the author of the very popular and much produced The Hourglass.
As the playwright-in-residence at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, he has staged several world premieres for that company including Air Guitar (a rock opera) and We Almost Made It to the Super Bowl (a tragicomedy about racism in the NFL). His works have been produced or workshopped by some of the top regional theatres in the country including the Negro Ensemble Company, The Kennedy Center, The GROUP Theatre, Inner City Cultural Center, Los Angeles Theatre Center, The Hartford Stage Company, Jomandi Productions, St. Louis Black Repertory Company, Crossroads Theatre Company, and San Diego Repertory Theatre.
His most recent play, A Preface to the Alien Garden was read at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and was presented last fall in the New Works Festival at the Mark Taper Forum. Many of Alexander's early plays have been printed in various anthologies and I Ain't Yo' Uncle is now available through Dramatic Publishing Company.
Alexander is the recipient of numerous writing awards, grants, and fellowships and is currently compiling and co-editing an anthology called -Colored Contradictions; Postmodern African American Drama with Harry Elam, a drama professor at Stanford University. Colored Contradictions...- will be published by Penguin Press USA this summer and will include works by Alexander, Susan-Lori Parks, Cheryl West, Rhodessa Jones, Keith Antar Mason, Pomo Afro Homos, Shay Youngblood and many others.
A 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Alexander is currently enrolled in the MFA program for playwriting at the University of Iowa; however, he still maintains a permanent residence in Oakland, California.
Michael Sokoloff, Resident Playwright (Yuba City, Red Dog Moon, Kirkos) started writing plays after two decades of working in the theater in virtually every other capacity, and in venues that have included the Broadway stage, major regional theatres, Chicago store-fronts, and beyond. Currently, he has scripts at Actor's Theater of Louisville, The Arena Stage, and The Joseph Papp Public Theater. In Chicago, he conceived and directed the controversial physical theater piece, Judas Goat, at the Organic Theater, and shocked the 1990 off-off Loop Theater Festival with his bawdy script, Old Wives Tales. He premiered his play, Red Dog Moon, at National Pastime Theater in 1994, and followed with Kirkos in 1995.
Franz Kafka (Author The Trial) was born on July 3, 1883 and died June 3, 1924 in Prague. Kafka came from a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in the shadow of a domineering father. The feeling of impotence, even in his rebellion, was a syndrome that became a pervasive theme in his fiction. Kafka did well in school and went on to earn a law degree, which enabled him to secure a job with the Worker's Accident Insurance institution, a position he held until tuberculosis - from which he eventually died - forced him to retire in 1922. Kafka lived his life in emotional dependance on his parents, whom he both loved and resented. None of his largely unhappy love affairs could wean him from this inner dependence; though he longed to marry, he never did. Sexually he oscillated between an ascetic aversion to intercourse, which he called -the punishment for being together,- and an attraction to prostitutes. Sex in Kafka's writing is frequently associated with dirt or guilt and treated as an attractive abomination. None of Kafka's novels were published in his life time and some of his shorter fiction was only published with great reluctance. Contrary to Kafka's halfhearted instruction that his unpainted manuscripts be destroyed after his death, his friend Max Brod set about structuring the fragmented texts and publishing them.
Steven Berkoff (Adaptor The Trial) was born in the East-end of London in 1937. As well as his adaptations of Kafka- The Penal Colony (1968), Metamorphosis (1969) and The Trial (1970)- he has adapted work by Aeschylus and Edgar Allen Poe. He formed The London Theatre Group in 1968 as a vehicle for his work both as a writer, director and performer. Trained in France in mime, Berkoff's work combines verbal and non-verbal elements of theatre. Original works include East, Greek, Decadence and West. His typically idiosyncratic production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, has become a cult-classic in England and has been revived a number of times.
