The Play That Changed My Life
The American Theatre Wing’s highly praised new book, The Play That Changed My Life: America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them, instantly became one of the most talked-about theater books of all time when it was released in December, 2009. With an Introduction by Paula Vogel and essays and interviews from nineteen of America’s most distinguished playwrights on the plays that transformed their lives, the book is a “must have” for anyone who adores the theatre. Contributors, who have a combined total of some 40 Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and Obies, include Jon Robin Baitz, Nilo Cruz, Christopher Durang, Horton Foote, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Patrick Shanley and more. From Edward Albee’s 1935 visit to New York’s Hippodrome Theatre to see Jimmy Durante (and an elephant) in Rodgers and Hart’s Jumbo, to Diana Son’s twelfth-grade field trip in 1983 to see Diane Venora play Hamlet at The Public Theater, from David Henry Hwang’s seminal San Francisco encounter with Equus to a young Beth Henley’s epiphany after seeing her mother in a “Green Bean Man costume,” The Play That Changed My Life offers readers a unique peek into the theatrical influences of some of the nation’s most important dramatists on stages both professional and amateur, in New York, across the country and overseas.
