Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) was a Pulitzer Prize winning, American playwright, whose work, as described by the New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired widely performed". Wilson also helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced in New York at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to ascend from Off-Off-Broadway, to Off-Broadway, then Broadway, and beyond. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980 and was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame. In 2004, Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. He was nominated for three Tony Awards and has won a Drama Desk Award and five Obie Awards. His 1964 short play, The Madness of Lady Bright, was his first significant success and led to further works throughout the 1960s that expressed a variety of social and romantic themes. In 1969, he was a co-founder of Circle Repertory Company, for whom he wrote many plays in the 1970s. His 1973 play, The Hot L Baltimore, was the company's first major hit with both audiences and critics; its Off-Broadway run exceeded 1,000 performances. Wilson's Fifth of July was first produced at Circle Rep in 1978; for its Broadway production opening in 1980, he received a Tony Award nomination. A prequel, Talley's Folly (1979 at Circle Rep.), opened on Broadway before Fifth of July and won him the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and his first Tony nomination. Burn This (1987) was another Broadway success. Wilson also wrote the libretti for several 20th-century operas. In later years, he lived mostly in Sag Harbor on Long Island and continued to write plays into the 21st century.