"The soul of a society may be mirrored most by those who live on its fringes. My plays tend to focus on loners, eccentrics, petty crooks, and other small-time rebels. They are the canaries in the coal mine who measure fate for all of us. As a playwright, I love to find out who they really are and how they're doing – and to accomplish this in a way that is both funny and serious at the same time."
WILL DUNNE is an internationally honored playwright now living in the Chicago area. Since 2005, his plays The Ascension of Carlotta, Deep Gardens, and The Interpreter have received staged readings at Chicago Dramatists where he is a Resident Playwright. Deep Gardens was later produced at Chicago's Second City (2006). Good Morning, Romeo (which inspired Carlotta) is a 2007 finalist for the Heideman Award at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Moonrise was a 2000 Heideman finalist.
Mr. Dunne's plays were selected three times for the U.S. National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center under the Artistic Direction of Lloyd Richards. How I Became an Interesting Person (1998), Love and Drowning (1997), and Hotel Desperado (1996) were each one of ten plays chosen annually from 1,500 submissions nationwide.
Interesting Person went on to receive the 1998 Charles MacArthur Fellowship founded by Helen Hayes for outstanding comedy and was later presented at the Australian National Playwrights Conference in New South Wales (1999) and the National Theatre of Istria in Croatia (2000). Hotel Desperado was presented by the Moscow Theatre Union at the Russian National Playwrights Conference (1997). West coast productions of his work – Eleventh Hour, I Married a Werewolf, Between Quakes, and The Bridge – have earned four Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, two DramaLogue Playwriting Awards, and a Best-of-Year mention from the San Francisco Examiner.
His book The Dramatic Writer's Companion: Tools to Develop Characters, Cause Scenes, and Build Stories will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009. |
