Don Nigro
Encyclopedia
Don Nigro is an American playwright; his plays Anima Mundi and The Dark Sonnets of the Lady have both been nominated for the National Repertory Theatre Foundation's National Play Award. He has won a Playwright's Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment For The Arts, grants from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, and twice been James Thurber Writer In Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio.
. He grew up in Ohio and Arizona.
He received a B.A.
in English from the Ohio State University and an M.F.A. in dramatic arts from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. At various times he has taught at the Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Indiana State University, the University of Iowa, and Kent State University.
Nigro has listed some of his major dramatic influences as Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, Samuel Beckett
, Harold Pinter
, Peter Barnes
, Tom Stoppard
, and the early work of John Arden and Edward Bond
. He lists his major non-dramatic influences as the work of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot
, William Faulkner
, Ford Madox Ford
, Marcel Proust
and Jorge Luis Borges
. He also lists the King James Bible, Buster Keaton
and the Marx Brothers.
in 48 volumes. One of these, Ravenscroft, was adapted into the film The Manor, with Peter O'Toole
.
His long cycle of Pendragon County plays, now numbering well over two dozen and still growing, traces American history from the eighteenth century to the present through the lives of several generations of interconnected families from an east Ohio town. These include Glamorgan, Horrid Massacre In Boston, Armitage, Fisher King, Green Man, Sorceress, Tristan, Pendragon, Chronicles, Anima Mundi, Beast With Two Backs, Laestrygonians, The Circus Animals' Desertion, Dramatis Personae, The Reeves Tale and November.
His cycle of Russian plays includes Pushkin, Gogol, An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness (about Leo Tolstoy
), Emotion Memory (about Anton Chekhov
), A Russian Play, Rasputin, and Mandelstam.
His plays about art and artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch Interiors (about Vermeer), Blood Red Roses (about the Pre-Raphaelites), The Daughters of Edward D. Boit (based on the painting by John Singer Sargent
), Netherlands (about Van Gogh), Sphinx (about Franz Von Stuck), Madonna (about Edvard Munch
), Europe After The Rain (about Max Ernst
), Picasso (about the invisible squirrel in a painting by Braque), and City of Dreadful Night, (inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper
).
His Inspector Ruffing plays include Mephisto, Demonology, The Rooky Wood, Creatures Lurking In The Churchyard, Ravenscroft, Widdershins, and Phantoms.
Other plays include Ardy Fafirsin, A Lecture By Monsieur Artaud (about Antonin Artaud
), Grotesque Lovesongs (originally commissioned by producer Saint Subber
), Mariner (about Christopher Columbus
), Jules Verne Eats A Rhinoceros (about reporter Nellie Bly
), Punch and Judy, Boar's Head (about the lives of the supporting characters at the Boar's Head Inn in Shakespeare's mentioned but unwritten scenes from his Henry IV plays), Loves Labours Wonne (about Shakespeare), Paganini, Lucia Mad (about the daughter of James Joyce
), Cinderella Waltz, Specter, Monkey Soup, Don Giovanni, The Count of Monte Cristo In The Chateau D'If, Quint And Miss Jessel At Bly, The Girlhood Of Shakespeare's Heroines, Terre Haute, The Transylvanian Clockworks, Seascape With Sharks and Dancer, Henry And Ellen (about Henry Irving
and Ellen Terry
), The Dark Sonnets Of The Lady (about Sigmund Freud
and his patient Dora), Seduction (inspired by Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer), Rainy Night At Lindy's (about the last night of gangster Arnold Rothstein
), What Shall I Do For Pretty Girls? (about the tangled relationship of William Butler Yeats
to Maud Gonne
, her daughter Iseult Gonne
, and Yeats' automatic writing wife Georgie Hyde-Lees
), Maelstrom (about Edgar Allan Poe
), Traitors (about the Alger Hiss
case) and My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon (about Evelyn Nesbit
and Stanford White
).
He is also known for his cult work The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, subtitled Being the record of one company's attempt to perform the play by William Shakespeare
.
Martian Gothic was commissioned by The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York as part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project and developed earlier at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
Nigro's plays have been produced at the McCarter Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the WPA Theatre, the Hudson Guild Theatre, Capital Repertory Company, the New York Fringe Festival, the Berkeley Stage Company, Manhattan Class Company, the People's Light And Theatre Company, Theatre X, the Secret Rose Theatre, Inertia Productions, the Hypothetical Theatre, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Oldcastle Theatre, the Porthouse Theatre, the Old Creamery Theatre, the Sacramento Theatre Company, the Strain Theatre Company, the Apothecary Theatre Company, Gravity and Glass, Theatre NXS, at Teatr Syrena in Warsaw, Teatr Julius Slowakie in Krakow, toured in Germany by the Munich based company SpielArt, at the First International Mystery Festival, toured in India, in London, Munich, Mexico City, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Beijing. John Clancy's production of Cincinnati, with Nancy Walsh, won Fringe First and Spirit of the Fringe awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Best of Fringe at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia, and later toured in England and Wales. His plays are frequently done by many Off Off Broadway companies in New York.
Nigro's plays have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish and Russian.
The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus has archived a large collection of Nigro's scripts and related materials.
See also McGhee, Jim: Labyrinth: The Plays Of Don Nigro (University Press Of America, 2004).
Personal life
Don Nigro was born and currently lives near Malvern, OhioMalvern, Ohio
Malvern is a village in Carroll County, Ohio, United States. The population was 1,218 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Canton–Massillon Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Malvern is located at , along Sandy Creek....
. He grew up in Ohio and Arizona.
He received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in English from the Ohio State University and an M.F.A. in dramatic arts from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. At various times he has taught at the Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Indiana State University, the University of Iowa, and Kent State University.
Nigro has listed some of his major dramatic influences as Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, Peter Barnes
Peter Barnes
Peter Barnes was an English Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His most famous work is the play The Ruling Class, which was made into a 1972 film for which Peter O'Toole received an Oscar nomination....
, Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
, and the early work of John Arden and Edward Bond
Edward Bond
Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved , the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK...
. He lists his major non-dramatic influences as the work of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
, Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
and Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
. He also lists the King James Bible, Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...
and the Marx Brothers.
Career
Nigro has written more than 300 plays, 135 of which have been published by Samuel FrenchSamuel French
Samuel French was a U.S. entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays....
in 48 volumes. One of these, Ravenscroft, was adapted into the film The Manor, with Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most...
.
His long cycle of Pendragon County plays, now numbering well over two dozen and still growing, traces American history from the eighteenth century to the present through the lives of several generations of interconnected families from an east Ohio town. These include Glamorgan, Horrid Massacre In Boston, Armitage, Fisher King, Green Man, Sorceress, Tristan, Pendragon, Chronicles, Anima Mundi, Beast With Two Backs, Laestrygonians, The Circus Animals' Desertion, Dramatis Personae, The Reeves Tale and November.
His cycle of Russian plays includes Pushkin, Gogol, An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness (about Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
), Emotion Memory (about Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
), A Russian Play, Rasputin, and Mandelstam.
His plays about art and artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch Interiors (about Vermeer), Blood Red Roses (about the Pre-Raphaelites), The Daughters of Edward D. Boit (based on the painting by John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
), Netherlands (about Van Gogh), Sphinx (about Franz Von Stuck), Madonna (about Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
), Europe After The Rain (about Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
), Picasso (about the invisible squirrel in a painting by Braque), and City of Dreadful Night, (inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
).
His Inspector Ruffing plays include Mephisto, Demonology, The Rooky Wood, Creatures Lurking In The Churchyard, Ravenscroft, Widdershins, and Phantoms.
Other plays include Ardy Fafirsin, A Lecture By Monsieur Artaud (about Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
), Grotesque Lovesongs (originally commissioned by producer Saint Subber
Saint Subber
Arnold Saint-Subber , usually known as Saint Subber, was an American theatrical producer.-Early life:...
), Mariner (about Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
), Jules Verne Eats A Rhinoceros (about reporter Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly was the pen name of American pioneer female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She remains notable for two feats: a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from...
), Punch and Judy, Boar's Head (about the lives of the supporting characters at the Boar's Head Inn in Shakespeare's mentioned but unwritten scenes from his Henry IV plays), Loves Labours Wonne (about Shakespeare), Paganini, Lucia Mad (about the daughter of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
), Cinderella Waltz, Specter, Monkey Soup, Don Giovanni, The Count of Monte Cristo In The Chateau D'If, Quint And Miss Jessel At Bly, The Girlhood Of Shakespeare's Heroines, Terre Haute, The Transylvanian Clockworks, Seascape With Sharks and Dancer, Henry And Ellen (about Henry Irving
Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...
and Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
), The Dark Sonnets Of The Lady (about Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and his patient Dora), Seduction (inspired by Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer), Rainy Night At Lindy's (about the last night of gangster Arnold Rothstein
Arnold Rothstein
Arnold Rothstein , nicknamed "The Brain", was a New York businessman and gambler who became a famous kingpin of the Jewish mafia. Rothstein was also widely reputed to have been behind baseball's Black Sox Scandal, in which the 1919 World Series was fixed...
), What Shall I Do For Pretty Girls? (about the tangled relationship of William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
to Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne MacBride was an English-born Irish revolutionary, feminist and actress, best remembered for her turbulent relationship with William Butler Yeats. Of Anglo-Irish stock and birth, she was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of evicted people in the Land Wars...
, her daughter Iseult Gonne
Iseult Gonne
Iseult Gonne , was the daughter of Maud Gonne and Lucien Millevoye, and the wife of the novelist Francis Stuart....
, and Yeats' automatic writing wife Georgie Hyde-Lees
Georgie Hyde-Lees
Georgie Hyde-Lees was the daughter of Edith Ellen and Gilbert Hyde-Lees, and the wife of the poet William Butler Yeats....
), Maelstrom (about Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
), Traitors (about the Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
case) and My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon (about Evelyn Nesbit
Evelyn Nesbit
Evelyn Nesbit was an American artists' model and chorus girl, noted for her entanglement in the murder of her ex-lover, architect Stanford White, by her first husband, Harry Kendall Thaw.-Early life:...
and Stanford White
Stanford White
Stanford White was an American architect and partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, the frontrunner among Beaux-Arts firms. He designed a long series of houses for the rich and the very rich, and various public, institutional, and religious buildings, some of which can be found...
).
He is also known for his cult work The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, subtitled Being the record of one company's attempt to perform the play by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
.
Martian Gothic was commissioned by The Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York as part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project and developed earlier at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
Nigro's plays have been produced at the McCarter Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the WPA Theatre, the Hudson Guild Theatre, Capital Repertory Company, the New York Fringe Festival, the Berkeley Stage Company, Manhattan Class Company, the People's Light And Theatre Company, Theatre X, the Secret Rose Theatre, Inertia Productions, the Hypothetical Theatre, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Oldcastle Theatre, the Porthouse Theatre, the Old Creamery Theatre, the Sacramento Theatre Company, the Strain Theatre Company, the Apothecary Theatre Company, Gravity and Glass, Theatre NXS, at Teatr Syrena in Warsaw, Teatr Julius Slowakie in Krakow, toured in Germany by the Munich based company SpielArt, at the First International Mystery Festival, toured in India, in London, Munich, Mexico City, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Beijing. John Clancy's production of Cincinnati, with Nancy Walsh, won Fringe First and Spirit of the Fringe awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Best of Fringe at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia, and later toured in England and Wales. His plays are frequently done by many Off Off Broadway companies in New York.
Nigro's plays have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish and Russian.
The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus has archived a large collection of Nigro's scripts and related materials.
See also McGhee, Jim: Labyrinth: The Plays Of Don Nigro (University Press Of America, 2004).